When actual construction of the road began, progress inland from Manzanillo Island went very, very slowly. Miles of swamp had to be bridged or filled. The effect of the climate on men and materials was devastating. Tools turned bright orange with rust. Lumber rotted. Boots and books grew mold overnight. Men began to sicken and die, mainly of Chagres fever, the common name for a particular variety of malaria. “Having neither a physician nor any comfortable place of rest, their sufferings were severe,” wrote a doctor named Fessenden N. Otis, author of the first published history of the road.
While the Gold Rush provided powerful impetus to get the road built, it also greatly compounded the problem of holding on to a labor force, and like every other essential—rails, coal, rolling stock, food, clothing, whiskey, quinine—labor had to be shipped in from somewhere else and at an exorbitant cost. Hundreds of men deserted the work at first chance—thousands as time went on.
Actual construction began in August of 1850 and with high expectations. But by October of 1851, a year and two months after the work had commenced, the line had penetrated only as far as the Chagres, a scant seven miles. The engineers had grossly miscalculated the difficulty of the task, and the company’s resources were about gone. The market value of the stock was close to nothing. Things came to a standstill in Panama, and several key people, Trautwine among them, departed to find work elsewhere. Had it not been for an especially violent tropical storm, that might have been the end of the company and the railroad.
The storm struck in November, 1851, and at the height of it two New York steamers, the Georgia and the Philadelphia, put into Limón Bay for shelter. Until then, the whole time the railroad was being built, the New York boats had been landing as usual at the mouth of the Chagres—at a native village called Chagres—roughly five miles to the west of Limón Bay. There was no proper roadstead at Chagres; landings were by small boat through the surf and at considerable risk. But that was the place where the local boatmen congregated with their canoes, and so it had been Panama’s Caribbean port of entry since the Gold Rush began. For some strange reason, no one had considered that the railroad, even if it went a mere seven miles, could be put to use and begin paying its way.
The passengers from the two ships came clamoring ashore, some thousand strong, and demanded transportation up to the Chagres. So after a string of flatcars had been assembled, off everybody went in the driving wind and rain as far as the river, to a village called Gatun, now the site of the great Gatun Locks. From there they continued upstream by canoe.
The pattern was established. Chagres was abandoned as the Atlantic portal. A new town was slapped together on Manzanillo Island with about as much commotion and along much the same lines architecturally as a Western mining town. A tremendous iron lighthouse was built—docks, warehouses, a railroad office (“a respectable fireproof two-story brick building”), hotels, saloons, and a number of other business establishments, one of which, the Maison du Vieux Carré, specialized supposedly in French girls. As time went on the town became justly famous as one of the filthiest, most miserable holes on the Caribbean. Stephens named it Aspinwall, after his partner, but from Bogotá came word that it was to be called Colon—Spanish for Columbus—as a tribute to the fact that Columbus had once anchored in Limón Bay.
Any doubts or misgivings there had been on Wall Street concerning the enterprise or the mental stability of its founders now vanished as the money steadily rolled in. By summer of 1852 the tracks were halfway across the isthmus to Barbacoa—twenty-three and a quarter miles inland from Colon—to where the line would cross the Chagres. “Push was the order,” recalled one old-time employee, Tracy Robinson, in his little memoir, Fifty Years at Panama. “Yet do what they might, strain every nerve, exhaust every resource, the difficulties to be overcome proved almost insurmountable. The climate stood like a dragon in the way. To this day it seems astonishing that any soul survived to tell the tale…. The white men withered as cut plants in the sun.”
The work force came from all parts of the world—the West Indies, Colombia, Ireland, Wales, France, Italy, China, India, the United States. The best workers were those from Colombia, men who were accustomed both to hard labor and to the climate. The Irish, tough, experienced “navvies” who had built railroads and canals in England, were brought out by Totten specifically to speed things up, at about the time the line reached Barbacoa, but they suffered intensely from the heat and humidity and were highly susceptible to disease. A newly appointed bishop of California, William Ingraham Kip, wrote of the Irish laborers he saw on his way through Panama: “They looked pale and miserable. It is almost certain death to them to be employed here….” The mortality rate was truly appalling. Malaria, the only endemic disease of the isthmus, was the worst killer among all groups of workers, just as it would be later when the canal builders arrived. But men died too of dysentery, sunstroke, cholera, and the dreaded yellow jack.
How many died all told is impossible to say. Though the Panama Railroad Company provided figures later, records of accidents and deaths among white workers were kept haphazardly at best, and virtually never among blacks or other nonwhites. And in the year 1853, as an example, of some 1,590 men on the payroll, 1,200 were black. The consistent management position was that there had been nothing like the death toll commonly spoken of, and that anyone who lived a clean, temperate life on the isthmus was as safe there as he would be anywhere in the tropics or even southern sections of the United States, which was far from true.
The worst year was 1852, the year Stephens died. Cholera swept along the line shortly after the arrival of a boat from New Orleans. That summer alone fifty-one engineers, surveyors, and draftsmen—nearly all of Totteh’s staff—died of the disease. Among those making the crossing in July was Captain Ulysses S. Grant, who, with several hundred soldiers and their wives and children, was on his way to California for garrison duty. Grant saw more than 150 of his party die at Panama—men, women, and children—and all miserably. In later years he would talk more of the horrors he had seen in Panama than of any battles he had known.
According to the company’s records there were at least 6,000 whites employed during the years of construction, and the company put the death toll among these men at 835. But Tracy Robinson, who was no enemy of the railroad, said perhaps 40 percent died, or about 2,500. And no one then even reckoned the number of deaths among the blacks. Perhaps 6,000 men died in all.
Whatever the true figure was, it was an exceedingly high price to pay for forty-seven and a half miles of track, and it was a grim forewarning of the still greater tragedy to follow. When the French attempted their Panama canal thirty years later, under the great hero of Suez, Ferdinand de Lesseps, an estimated 20,000 people died of disease.
More immediately, the sheer number of bodies that had to be disposed of became something of a problem in itself and led to a macabre solution. Since a large percentage of the dead men had no known next of kin, no permanent address, often not even a known last name, it was decided to pickle their bodies in large barrels, then sell them in wholesale lots. The result was a thriving trade with medical schools around the world, the proceeds going to finance a small railroad hospital at Colon.
A huge timber bridge was completed over the Chagres at Barbacoa after enormous effort, then swept away by a flash flood. Heavy rains in the mountains, as the engineers learned, could cause the river to rise forty feet in as little as twenty-four hours. Elsewhere the landscape seemed mainly water, one creek or stream after another, swamps, foul slime-covered pools. In places the roadbed kept sinking steadily and had to be built up again and again, year after year. At the famous Black Swamp, Totten had to probe 185 feet down to find solid bottom.
Pine or spruce ties on earlier sections of the road rotted and had to be replaced with ties of lignum vitae from Cartagena—ties so hard that holes had to be bored before a spike could be driven into them. Then beyond Barbacoa, at Culebra, a substantial cut a mile long had to be dug through blue clay
that in the rains turned to a thick, stubborn gum. To get the clay from their shovels the workers had to use scrapers. And here, too, at Culebra, the engineers encountered the terrible slides that were to plague the canal builders.
With all the gold being brought across from California, with so much comparatively well-heeled humanity converging from all directions, gangs of outlaws appeared and began harassing the line. Several brutal murders occurred; workers were beaten and robbed. So when the local government declared itself incapable of policing the line, the company organized its own armed guard, a ragged, barefoot band under the leadership of one Ran Runnels, a Texas Ranger who did not look the part but who did the job with cold-blooded dispatch, inspired, it seems, by profound religious visions. He was subtle; at first he did very little to check the crime wave, but suddenly, early in 1852, he and his so-called Isthmus Guard rounded up thirty-seven suspects, including several well-known Panamanian businessmen, and hanged them all on the inner side of the old Spanish seawall at Panama City. All at once there they were one bright morning. “Silently the citizens survey the appalling spectacle and then go on about their business,” wrote one aghast traveler in a letter to his wife in Boston.
To Runnels, who believed himself divinely appointed to cleanse Eden of evil and corruption, it became a holy war, and some six months later, in the fall of 1852, he struck again. This time there were forty-one victims dangling from the seawall. The crime wave abruptly ended.
The terrifying epidemics, the loss of the bridge at Barbacoa, the mud slides at Culebra, and the Ran Runnels scourge were the memorable events, and they figure prominently in most surviving accounts. The smaller, day-to-day difficulties and torments were the less colorful, less picturesque side of the story, and they can be readily imagined: the punishing heat, the torrential Panama rains, the terrible fatigue of physical labor in such a climate, clothes that never got dry, scorpions in boots in the morning, the incessant mosquitoes, sand flies, ticks, the bad food, and nothing—not a blessed thing—to do but work and survive the jungle while throngs of others, thousands upon thousands of people, passed by heading for the new El Dorado.
Severe mental depression became one of the most debilitating of all problems. The Chinese laborers suffered especially. To ease their plight the company resorted to supplying them with daily rations of opium. Of a thousand Chinese laborers brought in probably six to seven hundred died of disease, but among the survivors melancholia became so acute that scores of them committed suicide, some hanging themselves by their own pigtails, others impaling themselves on carefully sharpened sticks or bamboo poles.
In a letter to one of the stockholders Colonel Totten would write: “I am ashamed that so much has been expended in overcoming so little, and take no credit for any engineering science displayed on the work. The difficulties have been of another nature, and do not show themselves on the line.”
On November 24, 1853, a locomotive rolled across a new bridge at Barbacoa, this one a bridge of iron, twice the length of the other (625 feet) and built some forty feet above the caramel-colored Chagres. “The Rubicon is passed,” announced the Panama Star. In another year the line was at Summit Station (Culebra). Five thousand men were at work, with the construction gangs laboring from both ends.
There was no special ceremony when the last rail was put in place. No gold spike was driven, though by all rights, for this railroad especially, there should have been. The last rail went down on the wet night of January 27, 1855. Totten drove the final spike with a nine-pound maul, and at eight-thirty the next morning, a Sunday, he climbed into the cab of a small wood-burning locomotive at Colon and took it and a string of nine cars on the world’s first transcontinental run.
Totten called it “as perfect a road as can be found in the United States.” A writer for the Aspinwall Daily Courier told how the train, “a chariot of fire,” came “thundering over the summit, and down the Pacific slope.” In truth there were only twenty-eight miles of straight track. The road was so full of curves, the roadbed so tender in places, that the train had to feel its way with extreme caution. The entire first run, ocean to ocean, included twenty-six station stops and took seven hours.
Some weeks later, with the return of the dry season and the arrival of a delegation of stockholders and newspaper people from New York, something like a formal opening was staged. Quantities of champagne were consumed, quantities of roast beef and pickled oysters devoured. The visitors—not an especially distinguished lot, as one of them later conceded—went breezing gaily along through the jungle, exclaiming over the orchids and passion flowers, the multicolored birds that burst into the air, or a chance alligator picked out of the shadows along a riverbank. The ride was so smooth, we are told, that it did not disturb the ash from a cigar.
There were numerous stops en route for water and wood or at little white-frame station houses with green shutters and picket fences that might have been transplanted directly from New England. For the passengers the journey was a surpassing spectacle—as it would be for the hundreds of thousands who were to follow in the coming years, as it would be for anyone who did not have to build a railroad through such a landscape.
On we go, dry shod [reads the account of one of the newspapermen] through the forest, which shuts out with its great walls of verdure on either side, the hot sun, and darkens the road with a perpetual shade. The luxuriance of the vegetation is beyond the powers of description. Now we pass impenetrable thickets of mangroves, rising out of deep marshes, and sending from each branch down into the earth, and from each root into the air, offshoots which gather together into a matted growth, where the observer seeks in vain to unravel the mysterious involution of trunk, root, branch, and foliage. Now we come upon gigantic espaves and coratos, with girths of thirty feet, and statures of a hundred and thirty feet, out of a single trunk….
Again we cross a stream…. Then, again, the train coiling its winding way about the base of a hill, and emerging from the forest, the view opens suddenly upon an expanded savanna, where the tropical sun shines down in a flood of light upon a river bending through an undulating park of green verdure, with clumps of trees here and there, with cattle feeding in their shade, and a settlement of native, palm-thatched, bamboo huts, half hid in groves of banana and orange. So we hurry from scene to scene, pushing on through the flood of tropical vegetation, with endless vistas of beauty that come and go like the dreams of a summer’s day.
At Summit Station everyone climbed out into the blazing heat to hear the United States plenipotentiary read a speech of which few, including those who were sober, would remember a word. The lasting impressions were of the local oranges on sale (they are green in color, extremely juicy, and delicious) and the gaunt, sallow look of fever in the faces of the railroad employees—like death heads under Panama hats, wrote one man. Such “unwholesomeness,” however, was thought to be as much a part of the landscape as the oranges. The revelation that malaria and yellow fever are carried by mosquitoes was not to come for another generation and would not be accepted by the medical profession until after the turn of the century. Swamp gas, emanations from the putrid soil of the jungle floor, “noxious effluvia” hanging in the wet, heavy air—these were thought to be the sources of all fevers and miasmas, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
The average time for crossing was reduced first to four, then to three hours. Steamship passengers arriving at the isthmus could disembark on one side in the morning and count on being aboard ship on the other side before dark. Business was booming. “My own private opinion is that no speculative investment I have ever known…. offers such returns,” William Aspinwall advised a kinsman. In the next ten years the railroad carried nearly four hundred thousand passengers. Annual receipts during that time, including the panic year of 1857, were never less than $600,000. For five of those years they were in excess of $1 million.
More than $500 million in gold went across the Panama Railroad in this same ten-year period; more than $1
40 million in silver, $5 million in jewelry, and $19 million in paper money. And the company collected a quarter of one percent of the value of all precious cargo. The variety of freight handled—besides the usual coal, baggage, and mail—was quite exceptional. One traveler who took time to examine the inside of the freight depot at Colon left this description:
Bales of quina bark from the interior were piled many tiers deep, and reached to the iron triangular-braced roof of the edifice. Ceroons of indigo and cochineal from San Salvador and Guatemala; coffee from Costa Rica, and cacao from Ecuador; sarsparilla from Nicaragua, and ivory-nuts from Porto Bello; copper ore from Bolivia; silver bars from Chili; boxes of hard dollars from Mexico, and gold ore from California; hides from the whole range of the North and South Pacific coast; hundreds of bushels of glistening pearl-oyster shells from the fisheries of Panama lay heaped along the floor, flanked by no end of North American beef, pork, flour, bread, and cheese, for the provisioning of the Pacific coast, and English and French goods for the same markets; while in a train of cattlecars that stood on one of the tracks were huddled about a hundred meek-looking lamas [sic] from Peru, on their way to the island of Cuba, among whose mountains they are used for beasts of burden as well as for their wool.
In less than six years after it was finished, having covered all costs (including five years of major improvements from one end of the line to the other—new bridges, improved embankments) the railroad cleared more than $7 million. Stock dividends for nearly twenty years averaged 15 percent and went as high as 44 percent in 1868. Once, with its price per share at $295, the Panama Railroad was the highest listed stock on the New York Exchange. There had never been a railroad to compare with it.
The explanation was obvious enough. The road had a total monopoly on the isthmian transit, and until the completion of the Union Pacific in 1869 it had no competition for the California traffic. Furthermore, the rates set for passengers and freight were, on a cost-per-mile basis, extremely high.
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