For other groups, the story was similar. Among African Americans anxious to escape the Black Codes, various vagrancy laws, economic exploitation and erosion of the rights of citizenship through legalized disenfranchisement, fraud and terrorism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some looked to Canada for possible relief. According to Elizabeth Beaton, among the migrants were 'several hundred African-American skilled furnace men' who were recruited to work in the steel enterprises in Cape Breton between 1901 and 1904. They soon found that their work and personal lives were affected by 'the realities of racial and paternalistic attitudes': they were routinely placed to work in the blast furnace ostensibly because 'black people could better stand the heat of the blast furnaces', and they were housed in company shacks, some of which were 'exceedingly filthy', had no sewerage or water connection, had poor ventilation and were poorly - if at all - heated. Attacked in the local newspapers and generally portrayed as undesirable, after a strike in 1904, the community drifted away to other provinces or back to the United States of America, 'penniless, destitute and disappointed' (Beaton, 1995, pp. 67-93).