John Henry was remembered in ballad and local testimony as a steel-driving man associated with the Great Bend Tunnel, a mighty worker said to be better than six feet high and nearly two and a half feet across the chest, who drove steel with great endurance in dangerous mountain work where falling rock killed workers. In the story, he demanded double pay because he worked a double day, then faced a contest against a steam drill after the captain warned that if the drill could not be beaten, a hundred men would lose their jobs. John Henry declared that before he let the steam drill beat him down, he would die with his hammers in his hands, and in the contest he drove his steel fourteen feet while the steam drill made only nine. Afterward he said he had beaten the steam drill but had busted his insides, and that he would be dead the next day; he then bade farewell to Pollie Ann before dying. According to testimony related by John Maxey from his uncle about Preston and Russell Meadows, who worked hewing timbers at the eastern portal before, during, and after the contest and were coworkers and friends of John Henry, John Henry did race the steam drill, won the contest, died shortly afterward, and was buried near the site. One account placed his grave about 1,000 feet east of the tunnel and ten or twelve feet on the south side of the original railroad tracks, while ballad references to burial in the sand were linked to the nearby north arm of the Greenbrier River, and several other local burial places were also later proposed.