David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  It was as if he wished to start all over. On Friday, February 8, 1907, he had carried seventy-five of his old Western scenes outside at New Rochelle and burned them. A year later, on January 25, 1908, “a fine winter day,” he did it again, building a big bonfire in the snow behind the house. This time he destroyed sixteen, including two of his best-known cowboy paintings, Bringing Home the New Cook and Drifting before the Storm. “They will never confront me in the future,” he noted with satisfaction. His father, too, had once stood and watched his work go up in flames.

  Remington at forty-six, the age his father had been when he died, thought about death a great deal. His father, dying of tuberculosis, had wasted away to almost nothing. Remington by 1908 weighed nearly three hundred pounds.

  His diary from Ingleneuk, however, is filled with exhilaration in the new work, his unabashed happiness with the life there.

  That fall he would write, “I have always wanted to be able to paint running horses so you would feel the details and not see them. I am getting so I can stagger at it.” He had arrived at an outlook not unlike that described by Delacroix in his journals: “What I require is accuracy for the sake of imagination.” Remington was then at work on his Cavalry Charge on the Southern Plains in 1860, a painting in concept not unlike A Dash for the Timber, but very different in execution. He was progressing with “quite good results,” Remington thought, “better tone—looser.”

  With the new work under way, he craved new surroundings. For years he and Eva talked of building a house of their own design in the country. They found land in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and began construction. Everything was to be bigger than at New Rochelle. In May 1909 they moved in, and for all there was to do, Remington managed to keep painting. “I am performing miracles,” he wrote at the end of a particularly good workday in June. He was bothered by stomach troubles—he thought may be potatoes were his problem—but in of the last of the diary entries, on October 9, he writes that he had not been so happy or felt so well in many years. One of his Western nocturnes, Fired On, had been purchased for the National Gallery in Washington.

  Remington died in the house at Ridgefield on the morning of December 26, 1909. He had complained of intense stomach pains a few days before when he and Eva were in New York. They made it home that night, but the following day a emergency appendectomy was performed on the kitchen table. It was to no avail. The doctors found that the appendix had ruptured and peritonitis had set in. For about forty-eight hours it seemed to others that the operation had been successful. Christmas Day there was snow-storm of the kind Remington loved. He seemed to be comfortable through the morning, even optimistic, as the family exchanged presents. But the doctors knew there was no hope, and in the afternoon Remington went into a coma from which he never recovered. He was forty-eight years old.

  On the first day of that year, New Year’s day, 1909, the man who in his lifetime had produced more than three thousand works of art wrote in his diary: “Here we go again…embarked on the uncertain career of a painter.”

  III

  PIONEERS

  CHAPTER SIX

  Steam Road to El Dorado

  IT WAS not long after the completion of the Panama Railroad in 1855 that Bedford Clapperton Pim declared with perfect composure that of all the world’s wonders none could surpass this one as a demonstration of man’s capacity to do great things against impossible odds.

  “I have seen the greatest engineering works of the day,” he wrote, “…but I must confess that when passing backwards and forwards on the Panama Railway, standing on the engine to obtain a good view, I have never been more struck than with the evidence, apparent on every side, of the wonderful skill, endurance, and perseverance, which must have been exercised in its construction.”

  Bedford Clapperton Pim was a British naval officer and of no particular historical significance. He had, however, seen a great deal of the world, he was a recognized authority on Central America, and his opinion was not lightly arrived at.

  It should be kept in mind that the first railroads, all very primitive, had been built in Europe and the United States only some twenty years before. France was still virtually without railroads; not a rail had been put down west of the Mississippi as yet. Moreover, such awesome technological strides as the Suez Canal, the Union Pacific, and the Brooklyn Bridge were still well in the future. And so the vision of locomotives highballing through the green half-light of some distant rain forest, of the world’s two greatest oceans joined by good English-made rails, could stir the blood to an exceptional degree.

  The Panama Railroad—the first steam road to El Dorado—was begun in 1850, at the height of the California gold craze. And by anyone’s standards it was a stunning demonstration of man’s “wonderful skill, endurance, and perseverance,” just as Pim said, even though its full length was only forty-seven and a half miles.

  It was, for example, and as almost no one ever acknowledges, the first ocean-to-ocean railroad, its completion predating that of the Union Pacific by fourteen years. Mile for mile it also appears to have cost more in dollars and in human life than any railroad ever built. For fourteen years it was the world’s best-paying railroad.

  The surveys made by its builders produced important geographic revelations that had a direct bearing on the decision to build a Panama canal along the same route. In addition, the diplomatic agreement upon which the whole venture rested, the so-called Bidlack Treaty of 1846, was the basis of all subsequent involvement of the United States in Panama.

  Still, the simple fact that it was built remains the overriding wonder, given the astonishing difficulties that had to be overcome and the means at hand in the 1850s. Present-day engineers who have had experience in jungle construction wonder how in the world it was ever managed. I think in particular of David S. Parker, an eminent army engineer whom I interviewed at the time he was governor of the Canal Zone. Through a great sweep of glass behind him, as we talked, were the distant hills of Panama, no different in appearance than they ever were. It is almost inconceivable, he said, that the railroad survey—just the survey—could have been made by a comparative handful of men who had no proper equipment for topographic reconnaissance (no helicopters, no recourse to aerial photography), no modern medicines, nor the least understanding of the causes of malaria or yellow fever. There was no such thing as an insect repellent, no bulldozers, no chain saws, no canned goods, not one reliable map.

  A Panama railroad still crosses from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Colón to Panama City. The trains run several times daily and on time, and much of the ride—especially if you are in one of the older cars (without air conditioning, windows open wide)—looks and feels as it must have originally. The jungle is still the jungle. The full trip takes one hour and thirty minutes. But except for a few miles at either end, the present line is altogether different from the original. It takes a different route on higher ground. The old road has vanished beneath Gatun Lake, the enormous body of fresh water that comprises most of the canal and that can be seen close by on the right much of the way as you head toward the Pacific.

  The original line was a five-foot, or broad, gauge, and it was built as hurriedly and cheaply as circumstances would allow, to take advantage of the bonanza in California traffic. A minimum of grading was bothered with; bridges were all of wood and built none too substantially. The route was always along the line of least resistance. Anything formidable in the way—a hill, a bend in the Chagres River—was bypassed if possible. No tunnels were attempted (there is one on the present line), and the winding right of way chopped through the jungle was just wide enough to let a train pass. Still, this one little stretch of track took nearly five years to build and cost $8 million, which averages out to a little less than ten miles a year and a then unheard-of $168,000 per mile.

  Part of the construction problem can be appreciated in a single statistic. In those forty-seven and a half miles it was necessary to build 170 bridges of more than twelve feet each in
length.

  Prior to the railroad there had been no regular thoroughfare across the Isthmus of Panama, and this despite the fact that Panama had been a crossroads between the Atlantic and Pacific since the time of the Spanish conquest. Except for a few isolated villages scattered along the Chagres River, the interior was an unbroken wilderness, little changed from the time Panama City was founded in the sixteenth century.

  To get from one side of the isthmus to the other, starting from the Atlantic or Caribbean, travelers went up the Chagres by canoe to a point roughly twelve miles from Panama City, then crossed overland on the old Cruces Trail, a narrow, treacherous mule path that in the wet season—nine months of the year—was virtually a river of mud. At best, a crossing from ocean to ocean took four to six days, and for all who survived, it remained one of life’s memorable experiences. Letters and diaries are replete with descriptions of insects swarming in great clouds over the river, of encampments swamped by blinding rains, of pack mules sinking to their haunches in putrid muck.

  The idea for a railroad to supplant all of that originated in New York in the late 1840s, shortly before the news of California gold reached the East. The founders were three unlikely, dissimilar individuals, none of whom knew anything about building a railroad, even under favorable conditions. Henry Chauncey was a Wall Street financier. William Henry Aspinwall was a well-known capitalist and member of one of New York’s leading mercantile families, long engaged in trading with Latin America. The third man, John Lloyd Stephens, might have been the creation of Jules Verne. A diplomat, lawyer, raconteur, and amateur archaeologist, he was best known as a traveler and travel writer. Indeed he was “The American Traveler,” one of the best-selling writers of the time, a red-bearded, good-natured somebody who had been everywhere and seen everything and who cut a great path in New York and Washington social circles.

  Aspinwall, with the help of a generous government franchise to carry the mail to California, had established steamship lines to and from Panama on both oceans. So except for the land barrier at Panama he could provide through steamer passage from New York to San Francisco. The railroad, then, was to be the vital land link in the system—in a grand, continent-embracing system that seemed altogether in step with the manifest destiny spirit of the day but to most practical men looked like an extremely speculative affair. On Wall Street the great question was why so “sound” a man as Aspinwall should have become involved.

  It was Stephens who, in the initial stages, made the difference, and in human terms his life counted for a heavy part of the price of success—for he was to die of malaria. Alone of the three partners Stephens stayed with the work in the jungle. He was the driving spirit the first two years, the most difficult and disheartening stage of the whole ordeal. He gave up every other interest to see the work succeed, and he had infinitely more to give up. Earlier, in 1841, Stephens and an English architect named Frederick Catherwood had gone into the wilds of the Mexican provinces of Chiapas and Yucatán and discovered, or rather rediscovered, the ancient cities of the Maya. His books on the Mayan ruins, with stunning illustrations by Catherwood, had caused a sensation. But his overriding interest thereafter had been Panama. He envisioned the tremendous, far-reaching impact of a railroad at that singular geographic location, and he threw himself into the task with all the determination and confidence he had shown in everything else he had ever put his hand to.

  Stephens was the president of the railroad, which was a wholly American-owned stock company with its main office in the old Tontine Building on Wall Street. The capitalization was a million dollars.

  From the legal-diplomatic standpoint the undertaking was made possible by a treaty signed in Bogotá. Panama was still part of Colombia (or New Granada, as it was then known), and for years the government at Bogotá had been urging Great Britain and France to guarantee New Granada’s sovereignty over the isthmus as well as the neutrality of any future isthmian transit, be it railroad or canal. In return the European power was to have the exclusive right to build and operate such a transit. But then all at once, in 1846, the United States chargé d’affaires in Bogotá, a new man named Benjamin Bidlack, acting without instructions, signed just such an agreement, which was eventually sanctioned by the United States Senate. So by binding treaty the United States was to watch over the isthmus, guarantee open transit from ocean to ocean, guarantee Colombian sovereignty over Panama, and build, if it so chose, a railroad or canal. In practice, once the railroad was in operation, it was to mean the more or less permanent stationing of American gunboats in Panamanian waters and the landing of American marines and sailors during a half dozen revolutions or “disturbances,” including the disturbance of 1903, the so-called Panama Revolution, which marked the final separation of Panama from Colombia. (The Panama Revolution is another story and a complicated one, but suffice it to say here that the maintenance of open, uninterrupted traffic on the railroad was the pretext by which American military force was used to prevent the transportation of Colombian troops, thereby guaranteeing a bloodless triumph by the local junta and the creation of the new Republic of Panama.)

  The first stake marking the Atlantic terminus of the line was driven into some soggy, extremely unpleasant ground in May 1850, at the onset of the rainy season. The site was little Manzanillo Island, less than a square mile in area, which stood at the opening of Limón Bay (the Atlantic entrance to the present canal) and which was separated from the mainland by only a narrow channel. Like all the low-lying shore of the bay, the island was without human habitation and just barely above tide level.

  The terrain was such that the work party, some fifty men, had to live on board an old brig anchored near shore. “In the black, slimy mud of its surface,” reads an old account, “alligators and other reptiles abounded; while the air was laden with pestilential vapors, and swarming with sandflies and mosquitoes.” All clearing of trees and vines had to be done by hand with machete or axe. Everything that had to be transported clear of the projected line had to be dragged by hand, too, since no draft animals were available. Much of the time the men worked in water up to their waists, their faces covered with gauze to fend off insects, their noon meals stowed inside their hats.

  The engineers in charge were Colonel George M. Totten and John Cresson Trautwine, two hard-bitten Americans in their early forties who had recently built the Canal del Dique, joining the Magdalena River to the harbor at Cartagena. Totten was to stay with the railroad through thick and thin, weathering every imaginable kind of hell, including an attack of yellow fever so nearly fatal that his companions built a coffin for him. Totten in fact would remain chief engineer of the line long after it was built, and his word would be close to law on the isthmus for twenty-five years. A small, dark-skinned, dark-haired man with spectacles who wore his whiskers like Abraham Lincoln, he was quiet, self-effacing, and exceedingly tough. Allegedly he also had a sense of humor, though a search through available sources has failed to produce a trace of it.

  Trautwine was the one mainly responsible for the surveys and as such probably deserves a good share of the credit. A better survey would be difficult to produce, according to present-day authorities. What Trautwine lacked in the way of equipment he made up for with ability. His Engineer’s Pocket Book (1871) would make his name famous among a whole generation of bridge builders, railroad men, and canal builders.

  Others among this advance guard were Colonel George Hughes, a West Point graduate who had charge of the overall reconnaissance; James L. Baldwin, his assistant; Edward J. Serrell, another assistant who was later to become a builder of important suspension bridges; and a young man known as J. J. Williams, who as an old man would declare that as God was his witness it was he, not Trautwine, who drove the first stake.

  From Manzanillo Island the line proceeded south, along the eastern shore of Limón Bay; farther inland it picked up the valley of the Chagres River and kept to the valley, crossing the river just once at about midpoint across the isthmus. Still farther,
where the landscape turned more mountainous, the route took the path of another river, the Rio Grande, which flows toward the Pacific.

  Because of the curious configuration of the isthmus at Panama—with the land barrier running east—west between the oceans—the general direction of the line was north–south, a fact that countless future travelers on the road would never quite comprehend.

  The major discovery produced by the survey was a gap in the mountains some thirteen miles from Panama City that was only 275 feet above sea level. This was a good two hundred feet lower than what heretofore had been the lowest known pass at Panama, and, as further explorations and further surveys would verify, it was, except for one at Nicaragua, the lowest pass anywhere along the entire Continental Divide. The gap, the summit of the railroad, was at Culebra, the place where the latter-day canal builders—first the French, then the Americans—would break through the spine of the Cordillera with the great Culebra Cut.

  Another important discovery was that sea level on both sides of the isthmus was the same. Until then it had been widely thought that for some mysterious reason the Pacific was as much as twenty feet higher than the Atlantic at Panama. It was a misunderstanding that had appeared frequently in print and still does. But as was found, the difference is in the size of the tides—those on the Atlantic side being barely discernible (little more than a foot), while those on the Pacific, less than fifty miles distant, are from eighteen to twenty feet, or even more. Mean sea level, nonetheless, is the same on both sides—a revelation of extreme value to anyone contemplating a ship canal through Panama.