Mohawk Walk

One of the Adventure Camp activities for some of the kids yesterday was the "Mohawk Walk", a rope challenge that requires the group to work together in order to get everyone across the rope which, in this case, spanned three trees.









(I thought blog reader Nicole Viele would appreciate her daughter Cara's classic expression in the last photo)
The name of the activity piqued my interest so I researched a bit to find out why it might be named Mohawk Walk and found that there is a tradition of Mohawks working on high-rise buildings and bridges dating back to the late 1800's when Mohawks from
near Montreal were hired as laborers in exchange for the use of their land while building a bridge across the St. Lawrence River. Joseph Mitchell, who wrote "Mohawks In High Steel" said..

"The Indians were given jobs as common laborers, which didn't interest them. What they liked to do was to climb out on the bridge. "It was quite impossible to keep them off," a bridge executive wrote years later. They walked the narrow beams high above the river as calmly as they walked the streets of their village.

At the time, most bridge workers were veterans of great sailing ships, comfortable with working aloft. But the Mohawks pestered the bridge foreman until they were given some training in riveting and put to work. They immediately proved themselves to be what a company executive called "natural born bridgemen."

Soon, the Mohawks were working on high bridges and buildings across Canada, and then in the United States. Even the collapse of the massive Quebec Bridge in 1907 that killed some three dozen of the Indians didn't dissuade them. To the contrary, the thrill of the danger of the work drew more Mohawks than before."

I'm glad I wondered about the origin of the name. It was an interesting bit of reading.

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