The story is that the original rate card was drawn up purely for fun in Colon and sent on to New York for the further entertainment of the head office. But the head office took it seriously. A one-way ticket was twenty-five dollars in gold (about three hundred dollars in today’s money), which came to fifty cents a mile and made it easily the most costly ride on earth. Anyone who objected was of course free to cross in the old manner—up the Chagres, over the Cruces Trail—or, if preferred, to walk across along the path of the railroad. But the old way generally wound up costing fifty dollars or more (for canoes, mules, guides), and just for the privilege of walking on its right of way the railroad charged ten dollars. Since few people ever wished to spend a moment more than necessary en route—because of the terror of disease—almost everyone gladly paid the twenty-five dollars, and the rate stood for years.
“And it must be recorded,” wrote Tracy Robinson, “that while there was not the least extravagance in the conduct of affairs, but on the contrary, great simplicity, the officers, clerks, and employees generally were paid generously for their services and the lives of themselves and families made as comfortable as possible under the circumstances.”
Food and housing were provided by the railroad. Headquarters was at the railroad’s hotel at Colon, the Washington House, a long, galleried frame ark facing the Caribbean. “There the officers gathered for their meals, with the chief [Totten] at the head, in true family style,” Robinson recalled. Medical and hospital care were provided free of charge. (Dr. Manuel Amador, chief surgeon for the railroad for many years, a native of Cartagena, would become the first president of Panama in 1904.) There was a library of sorts, a billiard room, and a stone church, built mostly with railroad money, that still stands.
Many Irish, French, and Italian workers stayed on, as did Jamaicans and other black West Indians, and their descendants are to be found at every level of present-day Panamanian society. A blue-eyed Panamanian with an Irish surname is not uncommon.
The beginning of the end came in 1880, with the arrival on the isthmus of Ferdinand de Lesseps. Totten, by then retired, came down from New York to join the tour. Both men were now in their seventies—two white-haired figures whose respective efforts on two strategic isthmuses had so greatly reduced the size of the world.
As early as 1849 the pioneer oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury had declared that the true value of a Panama railroad would be the precedent it would establish: “…by showing to the world how immense this business is, men will come from the four quarters to urge with purse and tongue the construction of a ship canal.” And such had been the case, except that de Lesseps was the first to arrive with anything approaching a purse (he was then in the process of organizing his Paris-based Compagnie Universelle du Canal Inter-océanique).
Like de Lesseps, Totten thought a through-cut canal along the route of the railroad—that is, a sea-level passage without locks, such as the Suez Canal—was a thoroughly practicable proposition, and, like de Lesseps, Totten was gravely mistaken. The American canal builders, when their turn came, would not only know how to rid the isthmus of malaria and yellow fever, but they would wisely decide not to try a sea-level trench.
Control over the little railroad would be essential to his project, de Lesseps realized, but this was no less apparent to the Wall Street operator who had been busily buying up virtually all of the stock—Trenor W. Park, a tiny sparrow of a man who was practiced in driving extremely hard bargains. Park too readily declared de Lesseps’s plan sound and set his price at twice the market value. For about five months after construction got under way de Lesseps continued to hold out, refusing to pay Park’s price. His engineers on the isthmus tried to get by as best they could. Meanwhile, the railroad was being run as usual as a separate and very independent American enterprise. The arrangement was impossible. On June 11, 1881, the road was purchased outright by the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Inter-oceanique for $20 million. Park himself cleared about $7 million on the transaction.
Years later, in 1904, when the United States purchased all the holdings of the long-since bankrupt French canal company—its equipment, properties, the unfinished excavations—the railroad was part of the $40 million package. By then the line was in sad shape. Equipment was long out of date and in bad repair; the road itself had to be completely overhauled from end to end and double-tracked. Tonnage carried on the line during excavation of the canal was phenomenal (300 million tons in 1909-1910, for instance) as the endless dirt trains rolled across the isthmus. But it was not really the same Panama Railroad any longer. Track, rolling stock, everything was different. Then, because the roadbed lay in what was to be the canal channel, this line too was taken up—in 1912 after completion of the new Panama Railroad (strictly an adjunct to the canal), or two years before the canal was opened.
Today, in the middle of the Panama Canal—on Lake Gatun—there is an abrupt, lush little island called Barro Colorado, once the summit of a small mountain. For the past fifty years the island has been used by the Smithsonian Institution as a tropical research station. There is a small compound of laboratories and living quarters, and from the screened porch of the main building you can look out over a fair-sized sweep of lake and miles of jungle farther beyond. It is easy to forget that what you are seeing is one of the world’s great shipping lanes, for only when a huge tanker appears, its prow emerging suddenly around the distant break in the trees, is there any sign of civilization.
The Panama Railroad passed directly by here. (Traces of it can still be found some sixty or seventy feet beneath the calm, blue lake.) The surrounding wilderness could well be the same as the railroad builders faced, and especially when a rain squall sweeps over the distant jungle, blotting out the view, you try to imagine what manner of men they were, what quality of purpose spurred them on. “Here the bravest might well have faltered and even turned back from so dark a prospect as presented itself to the leaders…. but they were men whom personal perils and privations could not daunt, whose energy and determination, toil and suffering could not vanquish.” Such is the explanation offered in the old history by Dr. Otis; and, as out of fashion as that may sound, it could just be the answer.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Builders
THEY ARE all gone now—the Roeblings and the assistant engineers Collingwood, Paine, Probasco, Hildenbrand, McNulty, C. C. Martin; and the Brooklyn contractor, plain, blunt William Kingsley, who started things rolling and lined his pockets nowhere near so well as he might have; and “Boss” Tweed and “Brains” Sweeny, who had an “understanding” with Kingsley and might have made a fortune had the ring not collapsed in 1871, only two years after the work was under way; and state Senator Henry Cruse Murphy, the very essence of “Old Brooklyn,” and Abram Hewitt and Teddy Roosevelt’s black-sheep uncle, Robert Roosevelt, and the bright, scrubbed “Boy Mayor” of Brooklyn, Seth Low, all of whom served on the board; and Thomas Kinsella of the Eagle, who stood behind the work from beginning to end; and J. Lloyd Haigh, the shadowy wire manufacturer from South Brooklyn who wound up in Sing Sing.
Some are known more for what they did in later years, like Hewitt, who became mayor of New York; or Dr. Walter Reed, who was then an intern at Brooklyn City Hospital looking after the men brought in with the bends; or an English laborer named Frank Harris, who wrote a famous pornographic book, My Life and Loves. But so memorable a figure as E. F. Farrington, the “master mechanic,” the one who blew kisses to the crowds as he sailed over the East River the summer of 1876, riding the first wire strung between the towers, fades from the record from the time the work ended. We don’t know what became of him. Or of so many others: the stonemasons, carpenters, riggers, machinists, blacksmiths, riveters, and all the ordinary day laborers who went into the terrifying caissons beneath the river for the bonanza wages of two dollars a day.
Only a relative handful even have names now. Mike Lynch remains a known quantity because he is said to have been “the first Irishman” to go into t
he Brooklyn caisson and the last to come out; and we know of a watchman named Al Smith, because his son and namesake became governor. The other names, the few scraps of personal information available, are mainly from reports on those who were killed.
In all, several thousand people took part over fourteen years, many who were American born, including some blacks, many Germans, some Italians, some English, at least one Chinese, and a great many Irish. They worked a ten-hour day, six days a week, and they were all men—with the sole exception of Emily Roebling.
The last of them died in January 1980, in a home for the elderly in Harlem, at the age of one hundred six. He was Henry Jones; he had been a waterboy during the final part of the work in 1882 or 1883, which would have made him eight or nine at the time.
Even the spectators are gone now. Governor Al Smith, who grew up on South Street, “in the shadow of the New York tower,” loved to describe the spectacle of workers scrambling high up among the cables. When he was eight or nine, his father took him across the temporary catwalk, while his mother stayed home, sitting in her chair, saying her rosary over and over the whole time they were gone. It was his mother who told him of the horrifying work in the caissons. “Perhaps had they known,” she would say, “they never would have built it.”
But build it they did, calling it a variety of names—the East River Bridge, the New York Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Roebling Bridge, the Great Bridge, or merely the Bridge—and to anyone who knows what they went through, it can never be thought of as just an engineering marvel, or an architectural masterpiece, or the perfect expression of nineteenth-century industrialism, or a turning point in urban American history, or a nice way to go over the river. It is, besides all that, their story.
It was conceived in winter, in the mind of John Augustus Roebling, the illustrious pioneer builder of suspension bridges and wealthy wire manufacturer of Trenton, New Jersey. According to the accepted account, he was caught in the ice on a Brooklyn ferry and-“then and there,” scanning the distance between shores, envisioned his crowning work. His oldest son, Washington, age fifteen, happened to be with him at the time.
This was in 1852, thirty years before the fact. It was not until after the Civil War and after the opening of the celebrated Roebling Bridge at Cincinnati that William Kingsley went to Trenton to talk about building one at Brooklyn. Kingsley had no specific kind of bridge in mind. No one in Brooklyn did, apparently. It was the man they wanted, not a particular plan—which is fascinating, since the man was exactly what they were not to have.
John A. Roebling’s brilliance was well established. His abiding confidence in science, as all of science and technology were known, was in perfect harmony with the very Jules Verne outlook of the times. “It will no longer suit the spirit of the present age to pronounce an undertaking impracticable,” Roebling had written. A German by birth, he had been trained at the Polytechnic Institute in Berlin. He was the first to manufacture wire rope, or cable, in America; the first to perfect a suspension, or wire-hung, bridge that could carry a railroad (at Niagara Falls); the first to dare anything even approaching the size and weight of the bridge at Cincinnati. He was a technical virtuoso, designer, mathematician, inventor, industrial entrepreneur, a success at everything he put his mind to.
Further, his bridges were thrilling to see, as his Brooklyn clients found for themselves on the tour he led cross-country to Cincinnati and Niagara Falls in the spring of 1869. They could count on a triumph of art no less than advanced engineering, he assured them, and to judge by his photograph, the look in the pale, intense eyes must have been something.
In appearance, in manner, he was above the crowd and all business. Once, on a call to Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, he scrawled a note on the back of his card and sent it in to General John Charles Frémont: “Sir. You are keeping me waiting. John Roebling has not the leisure to wait on any man.”
There is more, however, and it, too, bears on the story. We don’t know everything, which is a shame, since we can never know enough about genius, but in unpublished family correspondence and his own journals, he emerges as a figure of strange, sometimes violent, lights and shadows. He was cold, vain, and suspicious, a man tormented by insomnia, bad digestion, and spells of terrible self-recrimination. He plunged into spiritualism, became a fanatic—there is no other word for it—on hydropathy, the water cure. His children, for whom he had little time, were terrified of him. Brutal is a word Washington Roebling used to describe him.
An unforgettable vignette has come down through the family. John A. Roebling stands outside the Trenton mill where a number of donkeys are used to drag heavy strands of wire through long beds of sand, as part of the finishing process. One of the animals dallies or strays from the prescribed path, and John A. Roebling walks up, takes it by the head, and breaks its neck.
When the youngest of his children, Edmund, misbehaved in some unknown fashion, Roebling nearly beat him to death. The boy ran off, disappeared, and was later found in a Philadelphia jail where, according to his brother Washington, he had had himself entered as a common vagrant “and…was enjoying life for the first time.”
“The hero is admired and proclaimed a public benefaction,” Roebling himself wrote in private. “…But nobody knows…. Who can hide me from myself?”
The heaviest blow he inflicted on Washington was his own untimely, hideous death just as the real work at Brooklyn was about to commence. There was a foolish accident. Roebling was standing beside the ferry slip, helping with the surveys with such concentration that when the boat docked he neglected to get out of the way. The boat jammed against a stringpiece, which caught and crushed his foot. Washington was with him when it happened, and later, when he had several of his toes amputated, without anesthetic at his wish, and later still through the final, gruesome, agonies of lockjaw. Roebling had dismissed the doctors, insisting that water, poured steadily on the open wound, was the only cure.
The bridge he had projected on paper was to surpass any on earth in size and “audacity.” Two stupendous gothic towers, larger than anything on either skyline, were to reach 270 feet in the air, while four great cables would carry the roadway, or deck, more than a hundred feet above the river, high enough so all but the largest of the clipper ships could pass below without trimming their top gallants. An unprecedented $7 million was at stake, Roebling had estimated, not to mention the reputations of his clients. But as of the morning of July 22, 1869, he was dead, and, Washington being the only one around who knew enough to carry on, the others—Kingsley and Murphy—saw no choice but to put him in charge at once.
The Colonel, as they called him, was then all of thirty-two years old. He had only the most preliminary plans at hand, as he later acknowledged, no working drawings, “nothing fixed or decided.” All he really had to go by were his wits, experience, and “vitality,” a favorite Roebling word. He was married and the father of one child, little John A. Roebling II. His salary was handsome, $10,000 a year, but his expenses would run beyond that, so financially the bridge was to mean no profit for him, not a dollar in fourteen years.
It was the understanding since boyhood that he must follow in his father’s path, he being the oldest son. He had been sent to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, New York, in 1854, then, four years later, to Pittsburgh to begin his apprenticeship working on a bridge of his father’s over the Allegheny River. After the war, he was dispatched to Cincinnati to become his father’s first assistant. With the Cincinnati Bridge completed, he was off to Europe with his bride for nearly a year to study the use of pneumatic caissons in advance of the work at Brooklyn. Other, younger sons were kept at home, meantime, consigned to the prospering family wire business.
Washington never reported to anyone but his father; he was forever being judged by his father. The war was the single interruption, but even then it was his father who, one highly unpleasant evening at the dinner table, ordered him out of the house and into the army. The father despise
d slavery, so the son must march with Mr. Lincoln’s army.
In some ways they were alike. The elder man played the flute and piano, the younger man the violin. Washington could “make a violin talk,” we read in a letter from a friend. He had his father’s extraordinary physical stamina, his father’s steadfastness in the face of adversity. He had been raised on an unyielding Germanic pride in one’s work, on duty and cold baths in the morning. But Washington also had a lovely, wry sense of humor. He was soft-spoken, informal, modest to a fault, some thought. He deplored vanity as the most costly of human follies. History, he had decided, favored the vain, and he had little faith in history. He was drawn to astronomy and botany, was particularly strong in geology, and had begun what would become one of the finest mineral collections in the country, if not the world. He adored Goethe (in the original German), chess, opera, roses, a good cigar, the absolute dark of night out of doors, and architecture, which, he came to believe, was the “noblest” art. He drew beautifully. His mind was not the creative engine his father’s had been, still he was exceptionally observant and retentive, and could improvise with amazing speed and ingenuity, a gift prized among American engineers of his generation.
The biggest experience of his life until Brooklyn was the war—and in many ways it is the key to the man and what he did at Brooklyn. He had been through “any quantity of hard fighting,” from Manassas Junction to Antietam to Gettysburg to the Wilderness to the siege of Petersburg. Miraculously he survived—at Antietam a cannonball came so close it sucked the air out of his lungs—and he came out a brevet colonel, having enlisted as a private the day after his father ordered him from the house. Also during the war, he built several successful bridges of his own, not his father’s, design; fell very much in love; and, from watching some of the Union Army’s most celebrated figures at close range—Hooker, Meade, Grant—formed decided views on what qualities counted most in a leader. Courage was essential. So was a level head and a reserve of strength for emergencies. So was “the intuitive faculty of being at the vital spot at the right time.”
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