The construction of the Medicine River Bridge began in 1933 and was
  completed in 1934 during the depth of the disastrous Depression. The
  timing of the construction of this bridge could not have been better
  both for the government and for the local people. Wages were very low,
  and men needed work. They were anxious and eager to work. Some had 
  been jobless for some time, and others who were working were receiving
  ridiculously low wages of 50 cents or $1 per day. And some of these
  working days were considerably longer than 8 hours! One man told me
  that "it was so bad that you couldn't even buy a job!" This construction
  project gave some of these men an opportunity to go to work for a 
  satisfactory wage.
     My dad owned the farm on which this bridge was built, and we lived
  there while my sisters and I went to high school. Dad was fortunate to
  have a 1929 model Dodge Brothers truck with dual rear wheels, one of the
  first of its kind; and he took a job of hauling cement and steel from
  railroad cars to the bridge site.
     The building of this new bridge and travel route was a great
  convenience for those folks living in the western part of the county, 
  and a convenience for anyone traveling between Medicine Lodge and
  Coldwater because it reduced the miles traveled on the old highway
  through Lake City, Sun City, and Belvidere from 60 to 41 miles.
     Men came to work with horse and mule teams, four head abreast, with
  which they pulled earth-moving scrapers, called fresnoes. They were paid
  $2.40 per day for their teams. The drivers of these teams received 40 cents
  per hour. During the first part of this mule-team episode, the owners of
  the teams could work six days per week. After WPA was organized, they
  reduced this to three days per week. After the third day of work, the
  owner of the team had to step aside and let a WPA worker take over his
  team for the remaining three days of the week, allowing him the
  opportunity to make some money also. All of the grade and fill work from
  the south end of Main Street to a point three miles west was done with 
  these horse and mule teams.
     The building of a bridge of this magnitude - 24 feet wide, 665 feet
  long, so strong and so magnificent - and a U.S. highway cutting through
  the rugged Gyp Hills of Barber County seemed to some beyond the realm of
  possibility. All of this skepticism faded away when the Monarch Construction
  Company moved its equipment in to the building site southwest of Medicine
  Lodge and started driving the piling down to solid footing of the red bed
  below the sands of the Medicine River to set this gigantic bridge on.
     People came to watch and were particularly facinated by the hugh steel
  beams being hoisted into place and riveted together by red hot rivets. The
  forge operator heated the rivets red hot, siezed them with tongs from the
  roaring fire of his forge, threw them to the riveter, who in turn caught
  them in a funnel-shaped apparatus, sized them with his tongs, poked them
  through the hole, and applied the air operated riveting hammer with the
  rhythmic tap of ringing steel.
     This bridge actually bears two names, as it was dubbed the Carry Nation
  Bridge several years after its construction. To most folks, however, the
  bridge is known simply as the Medicine River Bridge.
     Although horses and mules were used in the construction of this bridge,
  it so adequately carries the very heavy traffic of today on U.S. Highway
  160 and U.S. Highway 281.
                  
     Source:Chosen Land - Barber County, Kansas,  pg. 30 
     Submitted by: Elmer Angell, Jr.