John, I hope you don't find my comments absurdly ill-informed. If they are, I apologize in advance. My statistical background is limited.

A 14% likelihood of pure coincidence in naming the day of the week is actually substantial. One would not care to bet on it happening, but it certainly could have. We don't know. Are there any other days of the week named in connection about JH's death? If so, the more there are, the greater the chance of coincidence operating somewhere.

Even if, as occurs to me, Spencer wrote a "7" that was misread (or misprinted) as a "2," the possibility of coincidence would remain at 14%.

The seemingly independent references to Dabner/Dabney and Say/Shea indicate that the witnesses were indeed involved in the C&W construction, as they claimed. You know from your own research that there was in fact a "John Henry" working on that tunnel. Their testimony, then, doesn't add to that. Yet their claim that John Henry fought a steam drill seems to me to require further testimony. In other words, if *all* the survivors of the tunnel job had testified, we'd expect overwhelming recollection of the "John Henry event," had it happened there. A mere three testimonies, however, self-selected from hundreds, could be explained by a rival hypothesis that a John Henry's presence at the tunnel led to the hasty conclusion - in a mere three persons - that therefore he *must be* the one in the song and the "event" *must have* taken place on the C & W. My own experience is that people can try to be helpful even to the point of autosuggestion: three witnesses could easily convince themselves that "their" John Henry was "obviously" the hero of the familiar song and then, forty years later, believe they saw the contest with their own eyes. This would be a case of independent reconstructive memory.
Unlikely? Perhaps. But far from impossible, and with maybe more than a 14% likelihood. I don't know.

Nevertheless, John, none of these skeptical, even cynical, observations refute the evidence-based suspicion that John Henry fought a steam-drill on Sept. 20, 1887, on the C&W. And a carping critic can always demand "more evidence." The case for the C&W tunnel is, I think, stronger than the case for the C&O. But it seems to me that proof is still just beyond reach. The results of your research, though, are worthy of more notice than they've gotten in the media so far. Interested newspeople have heard about the "Big Bend tunnel on the C&O road" all their lives and may assume that everyone "knows" that's where a contest occurred and that research focused on West Va. is "finally filling in the blanks."

That's show biz.