I wanted to be a real boss puddler, and so, when I was eighteen
I went to Pittsburgh and got a furnace. But a new period of hard
times was setting in, jobs were getting scarce as they had been
in 1884. That was the year when we had no money in the house and
I was chasing every loose nickel in town. The mill at Sharon was
down, and father was hunting work in Pittsburgh and elsewhere.
Then after a period of prosperity the hard times had come again
in 1891 and '92. My furnace job in Pittsburgh was not steady. The
town was full of iron workers and many of them were in desperate
need. Those who had jobs divided their time with their needy
comrades. A man with hungry children would be given a furnace for
a few days to earn enough to ward off starvation. I had no
children and felt that I should not hold a furnace. I left
Pittsburgh and went to Niles, Ohio, where I found less
competition for the jobs. I worked a few weeks and the mill shut
down. I wandered all over the iron district and finally, deciding
that the North held no openings, I began working my way toward
the iron country in the South.

The Sharon mill did not shut down completely. The owner
operated it at a loss rather than throw all his old hands out on
the world. Twenty years later I met him on a train in the West
and we talked of old times when I worked in his mill. As long as
he lived he was loved and venerated by his former employees.

Father was putting in short time at Sharon and was badly
worried. He was thinking of setting out again to go from town to
town looking for work, but I had advised him against it. I had
told him that he would merely find crowds of idle men roaming
from mill to mill along with him. My brothers gave him similar