sure enough it was. Just at first there was a notable lack of excitement about this find, the public being ill informed as to its importance and weary of false alarms, but late in that same year of 1848, as though at a signal, the gold rush suddenly began. Everybody wanted, by hook or by crook, to get to those hills back of San Francisco. They dropped what they were doing, they dug up their life savings, and with a pick or two, sometimes a shovel, occasionally a pan, they made for California. The whole feeling of the movement, a mass feeling, a mania, was that those who got there first would become millionaires overnight, so that the argonauts were surcharged with impatience and the need for haste. They would put up with anything if only they thought that they could get there fast.
There were various routes. The railroad did not go west of, roughly, St. Louis, and the overland routes from there to California were dusty and dangerous and took a long time. For middle westerners this was all right, but a great majority of the argonauts, especially in the beginning, were from the eastern states, particularly New England. They could go by ship to Vera Cruz, Mexico, and by land the rest of the way—which some of them, veterans of the Mexican War, reckoned would save money even if it did not save much time. They could sail to Greytown in Nicaragua and get across the country somehow to the Pacific, where they might at least hope to pick up a northbound steamer or schooner. They could go around Cape Horn, a trip that took, or certainly seemed to take, forever. Or they could go across Panama.
At the end of the Mexican War the government in Washington found itself called upon to deal with the faraway territory of California, where it maintained various army posts and naval stations, besides its federal offices. There was also the matter of the mails, for the Pony Express, an experiment, had proved a costly failure. So the federal government subsidized two steamship lines, one from New York to Chagres, a village at the mouth of the Panamanian river of that name; the other, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, from San Francisco to the city of Panama. Chaucey and Aspinwall were directors of the Atlantic Company.
This had been done, or at least started, before James Marshall noted that gleam in the tailrace of the mill and set the world on fire.
Neither Company provided any transportation across the isthmus. That was up to the travelers themselves, to make whatever deal they could with the natives.
The Panama Railroad Company men at first found the gold rush interesting enough but no real affair of theirs. They could not hope to get any passengers by rail across the isthmus until their job was finished, and they believed that by that time the rush would be over. They were to be proved wrong on both counts.
The engineers made a survey, and they found a pass through the mountains only 337 feet above sea level, the lowest yet, and soon after that they found another pass of only 275 feet.14 None of the previous would-be canal or road builders had noticed these gaps in the wall of mountain.
The Isthmus of Panama, usually thought of as a north-south strip, in fact is east-west, for it twists at this point. Panama City is located south and a little east of Limon Bay, so that the sun there rises over the Pacific, much as the sun in New Orleans, because of a great curve in the river (which is why it is called the Crescent City), rises over the west bank of the Mississippi.
The original plan had been to build a railroad from Panama City over or near the old mule track, the Camino Real, as far as Venta de Cruces, and from there, downhill now, to Limón Bay, which had been picked as the Atlantic terminal of the line. This was soon reversed. The Company bought Manzanillo Island on the east side of Limón Bay, 650 acres in size or about one square mile, and that was to be headquarters; but because of the mosquitoes and other insects the men did not sleep there but used instead an old brig anchored in the bay.
The plan was to cut through the jungle, laying track, from Limón Bay to the Chagres at Barbacoas, about half-way across the isthmus, then to the south bank of the Trinidad River, and from there directly down to Panama City.
Labor troubles started early. The engineers had meant to enlist local labor—every village had scads of men lying around doing nothing, men who presumably would jump at the chance to earn a few good hard American dollars— but they reckoned without the gold rush. Every vessel that dropped the hook at Chagres—there was no dock—was crammed to the gunnels with men who wanted to get across to the Pacific as soon as possible, not matter what the inconvenience, no matter what the cost. The residents of Chagres learned that their bongos—clumsy, canoelike craft—would, like their mules, command fancy prices. Moderate at first, they soon learned to ride the market, charging whatever they thought they could get. Naturally such men were not going to break their backs toiling in the jungle for pennies. The engineers quickly found that they had to go all the way to Cartagena to enlist cheap labor, and often enough even these men, once they had learned of the riches to be made propelling a bongo or leading a mule, deserted.
The gold rush, so far from abating, seemed to increase.
Often there was no ship waiting at Panama, where the argonauts were stranded for days at a time, for weeks, and where many of them died. The little fishing village of Henry Morgan s day had become a flourishing metropolis with all the trappings of civilization—bars, bordellos, crime in the streets. This condition, too, tended to drain off the cheap labor from the nearby countryside.
Cholera, dysentery, smallpox, malaria, and yellow fever raged in the little labor camp in Limon Bay, where at a given time, at least in the rainy season, half of the men or more would be on the sick list. There was no physician and not even a pretense of a hospital.
Chinese were brought in, about a thousand of them, and special barracks were built, special food ordered, and tea and even opium were supplied, the engineers having been told that all Chinese smoked opium and indeed couldn’t live without it. The coolies did not respond to this kindness. The work was too hard for them, the climate too hot, and they were homesick. They began to hang themselves or otherwise commit suicide, and this in large numbers. Soon there were fewer than two hundred left.
Irishmen were tried, and Frenchmen, and Negroes from Jamaica, who seemed the hardiest, though they were incurably lazy.
There was a story at the time, and it has persisted to this day, that the building of the Panama Railroad cost a laborer’s life for every tie. This is demonstrably false, and not just because it is too pat. There were 74,000 ties laid for this single-track, narrow-gauge railroad, and there were never, altogether, that many persons employed. It will never be known how many laborers died in the building of the railroad, because no records were kept of the Chinese deaths or those of the Negroes later brought in. It was recorded that 293 white men died, in five years; but the whole score must have been much bigger. It could have been 20,000. It could not have been anything like 74,000. But they still tell the story.
The ties themselves seemed to be in a conspiracy to defeat the project. Because of the sponginess of the soil—in the beginning, in the lowlands, it had been sheer swamp and the difficulty was in finding any bottom at all, much less bedrock—many more ties than would be customary had to be laid. The first ones were of native wood, locally cut, but these soon rotted away. Spruce and pine then were imported from the States, but the wetness and the heat demolished these in a short time. The only wood that would give good service, it was learned, was a lignum vitae from the province of Cartagena, Colombia, and this was so heavy that it was expensive to move, and so tough that it was expensive to cut, while holes had to be hored into it for the admission of the spikes that would hold down the rails.
All this cost money, and the shortage of labor made things that much worse. With only a few miles of track actually laid and ready for use the engineers already had spent the foundational $1,000,000, and their representatives in Wall Street tried in vain to raise more. The stock was selling at next to nothing, when there were any buyers at all. The outlook was glum.
Then on a stormy day in November of 1851 two steamships, finding the open
