Working for Hill was the turning point. In 1889 he had started as one of Hill’s locating engineers, assigned to explore a route west from Havre, Montana. Hill had decided to build a railroad to the Pacific; the Great Northern was to be his own personal path of empire; and in the dead of winter, 1889, Stevens found the Marias Pass, Hill’s passage over the Continental Divide. The Marias Pass saved more than a hundred miles and, at an elevation of 5,215 feet, gave the Great Northern the lowest grade of any railroad to the Pacific. Stevens became something of a legend in the Northwest, “The Hero of Marias Pass.” He had made the discovery on foot and alone, his Indian guide having given up. At night, with no wood for a fire, and the temperature at 40° below zero, he had kept from freezing to death by tramping back and forth in the snow until dawn.
In the Cascades, on the western slope, he found another key pass (later named Stevens Pass). Hill made him his chief engineer in 1895 and ultimately his general manager. Stevens built bridges, tunnels (including the two-and-a-half-mile Cascade Tunnel), and more than a thousand miles of railroad, as much as had been built by any one man in the world. He built exceedingly well and Hill never intervened.
Hill was fiercely independent (the Great Northern was the only western road built without government subsidy); he was blunt, tough, a pioneer and a fighter. He had the common touch; with his physical bearing alone he exuded power. And much of what Hill was had rubbed off on Stevens, who for the rest of his life would talk of Hill as the finest man he had ever known. Of Stevens, Hill once remarked, “He is always in the right place at the right time and does the right thing without asking about it.”
But Stevens was also restless, often temperamental, and in 1903 he had left Hill to become chief engineer (and eventually vice-president) of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific. His reason, he later explained, was that Hill had had a still higher position in mind for him, one that called for “a diplomacy which I was temperamentally unfit to exercise.” Then in 1905 he turned around and accepted the Philippines assignment, because, he said, he needed a change.
In the course of conversation during the lunch at Oyster Bay, Roosevelt told Stevens to take charge and report to him directly if need be. Things at Panama were in a “devil of a mess,” Roosevelt conceded. He was reminded, he continued, of the man who engaged a butler and set him to work by saying, “I don’t know in the least what you are to do, but . . . you get busy and buttle like hell!”
Afterward, when Shonts and Stevens met with reporters at the Oyster Bay railroad station, it was Shonts who did the talking. Stevens would have “no one to blame if the work is not done right,” Shonts said, “for he will be supreme in the engineering department.” Stevens, sitting on a stone post off to one side, merely nodded in agreement.
Shonts and Stevens landed at Colón without ceremony on July 26, 1905. Neither man had ever been to Panama before.
“Shonts and Stevens will soon be with you, and the mountains will move,” Taft had cabled Magoon. But whether dirt would fly or mountains move was no longer the question. The question was whether the entire American venture in Panama could be rescued from humiliating defeat. The unavoidable fact was that it had been a wretched beginning and already $128,000,000 had been spent, as The New York Times emphasized. For all the deprecating talk of French inefficiency, French failure, for all the proud claims of American know-how and resolve, the United States had performed with less efficiency, less purpose, and markedly less courage than had the French at any time during their ordeal. A whole year had been lost and the situation on the Isthmus was an utter shambles.
Recalling his own first impressions, Stevens wrote, “I believe I faced about as discouraging a proposition as was ever presented to a construction engineer.” Accommodations on returning ships were still at a premium. Upwards of five hundred white technicians and skilled workers had evacuated. Those left behind were frightened–“scared out of their boots,” Stevens said–and had every reason to despair. Some of the freight piled up at Colón had been there for more than a year. “I found no organization . . . no answerable head who could delegate authority . . . no cooperation existing between what might charitably be called the departments. . . .”
The review board appointed by Roosevelt to decide whether it should be a canal at sea level, as urged by Wallace, had not even convened as yet. So there was still no final plan to go by and everyone was waiting to be told what to do. Most of the Americans Stevens encountered seemed to believe that Shonts and he had come to order them to abandon everything and sail for home.
Theodore Shonts, with his pince-nez, mustache, and bulldog expression, looked like an older, more sedate version of Theodore Roosevelt. He was also very much the man in charge so long as he remained on the Isthmus, which was not long; with his abrupt, authoritative manner he rubbed nearly everybody the wrong way.
“Governor, what’s the matter down here?” Shonts demanded over cigars the first night, as he, Magoon, Gorgas, and Stevens sat on Ma goon’s veranda at Ancon. Magoon was easy in manner, but very proper and highly polished–a friend likened him to a Roman cardinal–and he believed that keeping peace with the Panamanians was chief among his duties. The most pressing problem, he explained to Shonts, was food for the work force. The local merchants kept pushing prices higher and higher, until it had become nearly impossible for the men to survive on what they earned. Some workers, verging on starvation, had taken to foraging like buccaneers.
Shonts said commissaries must be established immediately, and when Magoon explained that this would be in violation of an agreement with Panama whereby all foodstuffs were to be bought from local merchants, Shonts responded, “. . . it’s evident that you haven’t heard the news. . . . I’ve come down here to build the Canal . . .” The Isthmian Canal Commission would feed the men at cost beginning immediately.
It was also Magoon’s ambition to establish a model government Within the American Zone, as an “edifying” example for Panama and the rest of Central America. Shonts told him to forget that. There would be no more government than was necessary to preserve order. “Our sole purpose . . . is to build the Canal, so ‘keep your eye on the ball.’ ”
Turning to Gorgas he remarked, “We are not here to demonstrate any theories in medicine, either.” He was wholly unimpressed by what Gorgas had accomplished and put him on notice that he had four months to rid Panama of yellow fever.
Stevens, as at Oyster Bay, said very little, and when Shonts departed a few weeks later, Stevens continued to say very little. Yet in manner, appearance, in the way he treated people, he was plainly a different sort than his predecessor. He was seen out on the line daily, whatever the weather, hiking about in rubber boots and overalls, wearing a battered old hat and puffing steadily on a black cigar. “He was [seen] climbing about in the mud of the ditch, catching a switch engine, pausing among machinery,” wrote a magazine correspondent. “. . . He had very little to say except to ask questions. He was very quiet, very business-like. The men were not certain at first, mostly because they could detect no pose.”
Anybody could talk to him, it was discovered, and with a few terse observations he began putting spirit into the work for the first time.
“There are three diseases in Panama,” he told the men. “They are yellow fever, malaria, and cold feet; and the greatest of these is cold feet.” There was lost time to be made up for; there was much to learn. When it was pointed out to him that no collisions had occurred on the Panama Railroad in more than a year, he remarked, “A collision has its good points as well as its bad ones–it indicates there is something moving on the railroad.”
He wanted the engineering offices moved from the Administration Building in Panama City to Culebra Cut as quickly as possible. Shown plans for an elaborate new residence for the chief engineer scheduled to be built at Ancon, he cancelled the plans. He would live at Culebra and specified an inexpensive one-story bungalow with a corrugatediron roof. Until the house was ready he would be content with a small
place on the hospital grounds.
Privately he was appalled by what he saw of Wallace’s work and by the antiquated equipment in use. Once, standing on a point overlooking Culebra Cut, he counted seven trains off their tracks. Every steam shovel in view was standing idle because the crews, along with the entire labor force, were struggling to get the trains back on the tracks– “an unwise proceeding,” he noted acidly, “for they [the trains] were of more value where they were.”
While the public and the press at home speculated on what progress the new chief might effect, Stevens, on August 1, ordered a complete stop of all work in Culebra Cut. Excavation would not be resumed, he informed his staff, until he had everything ready. Steam-shovel engineers and cranemen were sent back to the United States. They would hear from him later.
“The digging is the least thing of all,” he declared. Starting at once, Dr. Gorgas was to have whatever men and supplies he needed. Panama City and Colón were to be cleaned up and paved. Warehouses, machine shops, and piers were to be built. Entire communities were to be planned and built from scratch–houses, mess halls, barracks, more hospitals, a visitors’ hotel, schools, churches, clubhouses, cold-storage facilities, laundries, sewage systems, reservoirs. He was determined, as he said in a letter to Taft, to prepare well before beginning construction, “regardless of clamor of criticism . . . as long as I am in charge of the work . . . and I am confident that if this policy is adhered to, the future will show its absolute wisdom.”
Working twelve, sometimes eighteen hours a day, he saw no reason why others should not too. In the first few months, as he made his daily rounds, he walked the line from Colón to Panama. The melting heat, the rain, the terrible mud, appeared neither to discomfort nor distress him. His own health remained perfect.
He and Gorgas got on extremely well from the start. With his backing, Gorgas’ real work began in earnest. Through the summer, disease of all kinds continued to cut through the ranks of the labor force. Yellow fever had abated somewhat, but only somewhat–forty-two cases in July, thirteen deaths; twenty-seven cases in August, nine deaths. But malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and intestinal diseases were still rampant and taking many more lives than yellow fever, while at the same time debilitating two or three times as many as were killed, facts the public at home would never quite comprehend. Between May 1 and August 31, 1905, the time of the so-called yellow-fever epidemic, yellow fever took forty-seven lives. In this same period nearly twice as many people died of malaria, forty-nine of pneumonia, fifty-seven of chronic diarrhea, forty-six of dysentery. Black workers were hardest hit by malaria and pneumonia. When bubonic plague struck a second time at La Boca, the victim again was a Barbadian.
But while a drastic reduction of all disease was considered essential in the long run, yellow fever had to be the immediate objective. To rid the Isthmus of yellow fever, Gorgas remarked, would be to rid it of fear.
He now found himself leading the most costly, concentrated health campaign the world had yet seen. Stevens, as he later boasted, “threw all the weight of the engineering department” to his aid. Gorgas henceforth had first call for labor. His requisitions had priority over all others. By November there were four thousand men working solely on Gorgas’ projects. Until then, for all expenses and supplies, Gorgas had been limited to an annual budget of $50,000. Stevens would sign requisitions for $90,000 for wire screening alone. Gorgas now got all the supplies he needed and with a minimum of red tape–120 tons of pyrethrum powder (instead of 8 tons), 300 tons of sulphur, 50,000 gallons of kerosene oil per month. Orders were put through for 3,000 garbage cans, 4,000 buckets, 1,000 brooms, 500 scrub brushes; for carbolic acid and sulphur powder, wood alcohol, mercurial chloride; for 5,000 pounds of “common soap”; for padlocks, lanterns, machetes, lawn mowers, 1,200 fumigation pots; for 240 rat traps for the hospital grounds alone.
The city of Panama was fumigated house by house, some sections several times over. The same was done at Colon. Fumigation brigades –hundreds of men carrying ladders, paste pots, buckets, rolls of brown paper, old newspaper–trailed through the streets in the early morning like some strange ragtag army of occupation. And by nightfall, when they had gone, strips of paper fluttered from windows and doorways on hundreds of houses.
The persistency with which New yellow-fever cases were tracked down is shown in this example taken from an official report:
. . . a man was reported ill at a hotel. . . . When search was made for him he had disappeared. The next day he was found drunk on the street and sent to the hospital, where, after his case had been diagnosed as yellow fever, he became delirious and died. He had stated that he had been at the hotel all the time, but since this house was full of non-immunes and no other cases appeared there it became evident that he had contracted the fever elsewhere. The man was dead, nobody knew him, and apparently no information was obtainable. It was known, however, that other men of the same nationality as the deceased were in the habit of visiting a certain cafe. Every one of his countrymen in this establishment was questioned. At last a man was found who stated that he had seen him with an Italian. Then every Italian who could be found in town was interviewed, and finally one was discovered who said he had seen the deceased with the bartender of the theater on two occasions. The bartender was looked for and could not be found. After a hard search he was located the following day. He was in bed and had yellow fever. He stated that the man who died of yellow fever, although registered at the hotel, had been sleeping all the time in the same room as himself in the theater. It appeared probable that the theater had been the center of infection, and it was accordingly fumigated. A few days later a third case was discovered, that of a little girl, who had been in the theater every evening with her mother, thus confirming the indications which had already been acted upon.
Cisterns and cesspools were oiled once a week. Most critically, Panama City, Colón, Cristobal, Ancon, La Boca, Empire, Culebra, were all provided with running water, thus dispensing–after centuries– with the need for domestic water containers.
Stevens made no public declaration of faith in Gorgas or the mos-quito theory. “Like probably many others I had gained some little idea of the mosquito theory,” he would recall, “. . . but, like most laymen, I had little faith in its effectiveness, nor even dreamed of its tremendous importance.” Still, Gorgas’ presence seemed “Simply an act of Providence” and Stevens’ own instinct was that the only way to back Gorgas was to back him to the fullest. When a movement began in Washington to have Gorgas removed, a movement initiated by Shonts and supported by Taft, Stevens fought back. Taft thought Gorgas had “no executive ability at all.” Shonts, who seems to have liked Gorgas well enough, had little confidence in the mosquito theory and was no less insistent than his predecessor, Admiral Walker, that “cleaning up” Panama must be made the priority task. Shonts had found a replacement for Gorgas, moreover, a Johns Hopkins man named Hamilton Wright, and went to Oyster Bay to tell Roosevelt what he intended to do. But Stevens in correspondence from Panama insisted that Gorgas be kept on, and so it became a test issue, the decision being left ultimately to Roosevelt, who again consulted Dr. Welch as well as a friend and hunting companion, Dr. Alexander Lambert.
Welch was actually asked for a recommendation for his Hopkins colleague, Wright, rather than for a comment on Gorgas and his relative progress at Panama. But while testifying to Wright’s ability, Welch insisted that no one was better equipped for the work than Gorgas. The best man was already on the job, that was the implicit message. “Would to God,” wrote Roosevelt to Welch in reply, “there were more men in America who had the moral courage to write honest letters of recommendation such as yours . . .”
Dr. Lambert expressed his views in private conversation in the study of Sagamore Hill. “Smells and filth, Mr. President, have nothing to do with either the malaria or the yellow fever,” Lambert said. “You are facing one of the greatest decisions of your career. you must choose between Shonts and Gorgas. If you fall
back upon the old methods of sanitation, you will fail, just as the French failed. If you back up Gorgas and his ideas and let him pursue his campaign against the mosquitoes, you will get your canal.”
Roosevelt, according to Lambert’s version of the conversation, decided then and there that Gorgas would stay. Shonts was called to the White House soon afterward and was told to “get back of Gorgas.” And to his great credit, Shonts accepted the decision and saw to it that the Sanitary Department became what it should have been from the start, an independent bureau reporting directly to the chairman. Shonts, as Gorgas later wrote, was a man “who thought and acted in millions [of dollars] where we army and navy officers did in thousands . . . I would never have dared even to make an application for the immense amounts of money he authorized me to spend . . .”
But the real hero, in Gorgas’ view, was Stevens. “The moral effect of so high an official taking such a stand at this period . . . was very great,” Gorgas wrote, “and it is hard to estimate how much sanitation on the Isthmus owes to this gentleman for its subsequent success.” To Stevens, years later, he wrote privately, “The fact is that you are the only one of the higher officials on the Isthmus who always supported the Sanitary Department . . . both before and after your time. So you can understand that our relations, yours and mine, stand out in my memory . . . as a green and pleasant oasis.”
The eradication of yellow fever at Havana had taken eight months. At Panama it took nearly a year and a half. But had it not been for Stevens it would have taken considerably longer. Had Stevens been chief engineer from the beginning, doubtless many lives would have been spared; there would have been far less grief and no panic. Once Gorgas’ program was under way, incidence of yellow fever fell off with the same dramatic suddenness as at Havana. The epidemic was over by September, when there were only seven cases and four deaths. On an afternoon some weeks later, Gorgas and several of his staff gathered in the dissecting room at Ancon to perform an autopsy. Gorgas told them to “take a good look at this man,” for he was the last yellow-fever cadaver they would see. By December the disease had disappeared from the Isthmus.
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