The first signs of trouble were huge cracks in the ground running along the rim of the Cut, anywhere from a few feet to a hundred yards back from the edge. The next stage might come weeks or months later, or it might take years. A settling or outward tilt of big blocks, whole sections of the slope, would commence. Then the whole slope would give way, sometimes in an hour or two, sometimes over several days.
The worst of such slides occurred in front of the town of Culebra, on the west bank of the Cut, where huge cracks in the ground began appearing in 1911. By the summer of 1912, “the large and annoying Cucaracha” had put an additional 3,000,000 cubic yards in the path of the canal, but the slide on the west bank at Culebra had deposited more than twice that amount. Thirty buildings in the town of Culebra had to be moved back from the brow of the Cut.
“Now suddenly the people living nearest the Cut were being compelled to move,” wrote Rose van Hardeveld, the young wife and mother from Wyoming. “The bank was sliding into the Cut! One after another, the houses were being vacated.
“The neighbors three doors east of us were warned time and again that it was not safe to stay. . . . One morning they awakened to find their back steps well on the way to the bottom of the Cut.”
Before long some seventy-five acres of the town broke away and fully half of all the buildings had to be dismantled and removed to save them from being carried over the edge. Ultimately these breaks, all occurring in the dry season, dumped 10,000,000 cubic yards into the Cut, while on the opposite side another 7,000,000 cubic yards fell away, with the result that the top width of the Cut at that point was increased by a quarter of a mile.
The slides “seem to be maneuvered by the hand of some great marshal and sent forth to the fray in every way calculated to put the canal engineers to discomfiture,” declared the National Geographic Magazine. “Now they are quiescent, attempting to lull the engineers into a false security . . . now they come in the dead of night, spreading chaos and disrupting everything in whatever direction they move . . .” To many of the workers it seemed the task would go on forever. “I personally would say to my fellow men,” recalled one Barbadian, “that . . . my children would come and have children, and their children would come and do the same, before you would see water in the Cut, and most all of us agree on the same.”
Often wisps of smoke would trail from the moving embankments. Once cracks in the surface below Culebra issued boiling water. When Gaillard arrived to investigate the matter, he took a Manila envelope from his pocket and held it over one of the vents in the earth. In seconds the paper was reduced to ashes. The explanation, according to the geologist who was summoned, was “oxidation of pyrite,” but the terrified workers were convinced that they were cutting into the side of a volcano.
The most uncanny of all effects, however, was the rising of the floor of the Cut. Not merely would the walls of the canal come crashing down, but the bottom would rise ten, fifteen, even thirty feet in the air, often quite dramatically. Gaillard on one occasion grew concerned as a steam shovel appeared to be sinking before his eyes, but looking again he realized it was not that the shovel was descending, but that the ground where he stood was steadily rising–about six feet in five minutes, “and so smoothly and with so little jar as to make the movement scarcely appreciable.”
This phenomenon, diabolical as it seemed, had a simple explanation. It was caused by the weight of the slipping walls of the Cut acting upon the comparatively soft strata of the exposed canal floor. The effect was exactly that of a hand pressed into a pan of soft dough–the hand being the downward pressure of the slides, the rising dough at the side of the hand being the bottom of the canal.
The slides attracted worldwide attention and inspired all kinds of suggestions as to how the problem might be solved, very few of which were practical. The most popular remedy was to plaster the sides of the Cut with concrete, and this was actually tried in one particularly troublesome area, but without success. The concrete crumpled and fell along with everything else as soon as the slide resumed its downward progress.
To check the deformation slides considerable excavation was also done along the uppermost portions of the slopes in an effort to decrease the pressure on the underlying strata. But by and large there was still only one way to cope with the problem and that was the same as it had been since the time of the French–to work for an angle of repose, to keep cutting back at the slopes, to keep removing whatever came down, until the slides stopped. And no one honestly knew how long that might take. By late 1912 at Cucaracha and at Culebra, the chief trouble spots, the angle of inclination was about one on five (one foot vertical to five horizontal). Still the ground kept moving.
Fifteen thousand tourists came to watch the show in 1911 and in 1912 there were nearly twenty thousand. “You are now overlooking the world-famous Culebra Cut,” exclaimed the tour guides at the start of their standard spiel. There was more tonnage per mile moving on the tracks below, the visitors were informed, than on any railroad in the world. But meanwhile a big clubhouse at the town of Culebra was being dismantled and removed (“in order to lighten the weight upon the west bank of the canal at this point”), and on January 19 Cucaracha broke loose once again. It was one of the worst slides on record. It spilled the whole way across the Cut and up the other side. All traffic was blocked at that end; for the sixth or seventh time, the slide had wiped out months of work.
Gaillard was practically in shock, according to one account, and Goethals was hurriedly called to the scene. “What are we to do now?” Gaillard asked. Goethals lit a cigarette. “Hell,” he said, “dig it out again.”
* The drills themselves were of two types, a well drill that could bore a hole five inches in diameter to a depth of one hundred feet and a smaller tripod drill that could bore a three-inch hole to a depth of thirty feet. These drills were all powered by compressed air fed into the Cut through some thirty miles of pipe from big compressors at Rio Grande, Empire, and Las Cascadas. The elaborate compressed-air system was another of those advances that distinguished the American effort from that of the French.
20
Life and Times
For a while we tramped on in silence, till Umbopa, who was marching in front, broke into a Zulu chant about how brave men, tired of life and the tameness of things, started off into a great wilderness to find new things or die, and how, lo, and behold! when they had got far into the wilderness, they found it was not a wilderness at all, but a beautiful place full of young wives and fat cattle.
–H. RIDER HAGGARD
King Solomon’s Mines
And this on the slope of the death-dealing Chagres!
–CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
I There were six passenger trains daily on the Panama Railroad, three in each direction, and since the railroad was still the one way to get back and forth, the trains were always crowded and the crowds were always interesting to look at. Especially in the cool of the evening every little station platform would be thronged with people, and to anyone newly arrived on the Isthmus it was astonishing to see American women and children in such numbers and all looking so very healthy, clean, and perfectly at home. They were not merely surviving in such alien–and once deadly–soil, but plainly thriving, and this to many visitors was as impressive, as great a source of patriotic pride, as anything to be seen.
One grew tired of hearing of “the largest dam, the highest locks, the greatest artificial lake, the deepest cut,” wrote a correspondent for The Outlook, in an effort to explain the thrill he experienced watching a simple, unimportant scene on the platform at Empire. A man returning from work, grimy and wringing with perspiration, was being met by his wife, a woman of perhaps thirty dressed all in white, who held a baby, and by a still younger woman, apparently her sister, who stood “like a Gibson summer girl,” holding the hand of a blond little boy with bare legs and wearing an immaculate white Russian tunic. To the correspondent, watching from the train window, there was something quite miraculous about t
his “New Jersey group,” as he called them, and the way the father, holding his greasy hands stiffly behind, bent forward and kissed his wife and children.
Old Charles Francis Adams–brother of Henry Adams, railroad expert, historian–had a similar experience. In 1911, in his seventy-sixth year, Adams had come to Panama for no other purpose than to see the construction in progress. One evening while waiting for the train at Culebra, his eyes fell on a group of American girls, about ten in number and anywhere from ten to fifteen years of age. Each was nicely dressed in a thin white frock and the sight of them in such a setting affected him profoundly. “A more healthy, well-to-do and companionable group of children could not under similar conditions have been met at any station within twenty miles of Boston,” he would report to his fellow members of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Several of the girls had come to take the train, the others to see them off. They were chatting and laughing under the glare of the station lights, oblivious of everything but themselves, without chaperons and wholly without fear–of yellow fever, of malaria, of anything whatever as near as he could surmise. “The material, social and meteorological conditions would in every respect have compared favorably with those to which we are accustomed to during the midsummer season; the single noticeable difference was the more complete absence of insect life. . . . And this on the slope of the death-dealing Chagres!”
Gatun Dam, the locks, Culebra Cut, were all tremendously impressive, he affirmed, but dams and waterways had been built before; the majesty of these was largely a question of degree. But this “vanquishing of pestilence,” this clean, prosperous, flourishing Anglo-Saxon civilization in the very heart of the jungle, was, he insisted, unlike anything before in history.
Those resident bystanders who remembered the Isthmus from times past were no less incredulous over the transformation. To any of Adams’ own generation, those old enough to remember the hell-roaring days of the gold rush, the change was almost inconceivable. Even the French era seemed part of another time, another world. Tracy Robinson, who had been the sole resident American present at the arrival of Le Grand Français in 1880, and who was still a familiar figure in Colón, had lived, he said, to see the confirmation of his lifelong conviction concerning the tropics. The tropics had been “set apart for great things,” he had said to de Lesseps. And he said it again now with greater faith in his memoirs, an inscribed copy of which he presented to George Goethals: “It seems to me that Design May be clearly traced in this tendency. The evolution of mankind toward a higher destiny is involved.”
The enormous discrepancy between white and black society along this same jungle corridor, the point that the Canal Zone was in actuality a rigid caste society, was barely even implied by such observers (which, of course, was in itself another facet of the life and times). And neither did any but a very few question the kind of white community that had evolved, other than to point out, somewhat apologetically, that it was indeed “a sort of socialism.” The statement that the Canal Zone was “a narrow ribbon of standardized buildings and standardized men working at standardized jobs” stands almost alone in all to be found in published or private accounts. To William Franklin Sands, an American diplomat, this New civilization created by his countrymen was simply awful, “a drearily efficient state,” “a mechanization of human society.” “Every American looked and behaved exactly like every other–to the vast bewilderment of the natives, who had previously thought of us as a race of extreme individualists. . . .” To Sands the view from the train window was cause for despair, as he wrote years later:
From a railway car one could tell by the type of mission furniture and the color of the hammock swings on the back porches the salaries and social standings of the occupants of all the houses that one passed. In some ways the Canal Zone of the early 1900’s was a foretaste of those New Jersey and long Island suburbs of the 1920’s where social ratings were according to the number and cost of one’s automobiles. . ..
To those who lived in such houses, however, to the individual men and women like those seen By The Outlook correspondent, Panama seems to have been the experience of a lifetime, almost without exception. The work, the way of life, the sense of being part of a creative undertaking so much larger and so much more important than oneself, were like nothing they had known, as they openly and cheerfully expressed then and for the rest of their lives. “It is as if each were individually proud of being one of the chosen people and builders of the greatest work of the modern age,” noted a thoughtful young rookie on the Zone police force, an aspiring writer named Harry Franck who had been assigned to take a census. Families returning by ship from home leave invariably spoke of their eagerness to get back. “Not one but was ready and even glad to go back,” Charles Francis Adams observed of the group he met during the voyage to Colon; “all looked forward to remaining there for the end–till, as the expression went, they ‘saw the thing through.’ ”
“We felt like pioneers,” numbers of them would recall a lifetime afterward. Far from home, they were rolling back the wilderness, serving the cause of progress, serving their country in one of its grandest moments. They were building large and building to last. It was to be a “monument for the world.” Every day was a story for the grandchildren.
No one could quite see himself as a soldier under fire any longer, far too much was being provided in the way of creature comforts. There were scarcely even inconveniences any more, let alone real hardships to face. There were never “hard times” in the Zone, as Harry Franck observed, “no hurried, worried faces.” Morale was amazing.
Very little if any time was spent worrying over the possible detrimental effects of so structured and paternalistic an order. Their days were too busy, for one thing. Furthermore, there was never any question as to the finite nature of their circumstances. If this was an entirely novel social experiment, it was also to be a brief one, they knew. Vestiges of their way of life would survive–some to the present day– but their own particular era would end abruptly just as soon as the canal was built. The houses they lived in, their schools, offices, whole communities, would disappear with the advance of Gatun Lake. Other towns on higher ground would also be struck like stage sets and carried away, leaving not a trace.
They themselves would depart by the thousands, and for the relative few who would decide to stay on, life would become something quite different. Another era would begin once “Big Job” was no longer the common, galvanizing cause.
The work was everything. “Pride and joy in the work,” wrote Bishop, “constituted the magic bond which held the canal colony together . . .” There was no one who was not associated with the work. No one could live within the Zone unless he or she was a worker on the canal or a member of a worker’s family. The entire social order existed solely for the work and it rewarded its members according to their importance to the work. Indeed, on a small and limited scale, there existed within the American Zone in Panama between, roughly, 1907 and 1914 something very like what Claude de Rouvroy, the Comte de Saint-Simon, had envisioned for the world a century before. All were caught up in a noble effort that was to benefit humanity: the canal he had also envisioned. Society was controlled by a gifted technician, as he had espoused. His famous maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work,” could well have been the motto of the Isthmian Canal Commission.
Joseph Pennell, an artist who came to do a series of lithographs showing the final heroic stages of construction, called the canal “The Wonder of Work” and said the devotion it inspired, the spirit it engendered among the Americans, were of a quality he had never encountered.
Even the animosity or ill-concealed disdain felt by many Americans toward the Panamanians seems to have stemmed in large measure, if not chiefly, from what the Americans took to be a disgraceful lack of regard for “honest work” on the part of the Panamanians. It was not so much that the Panamanian was lazy, that he had done nothing for centuries, or even that he refused now
to take a hand with the canal, but that he appeared to sneer at the fundamental belief that hard work could be good in itself, an ennobling act of faith. To large numbers of young American technicians such contempt was little short of blasphemous.
The fundamental problem with the Panamanian, noted census-taker Harry Franck, was that he could not “rid himself of his racial conviction that a man in an old khaki jacket who is building a canal must be inferior clay to a hotel loafer in a frock coat. . . . Even with seven years of American example about him the Panamanian had not yet grasped the divinity of labor. Perhaps he will eons hence when he has grown nearer true civilization.”
The full work force in the last years of construction numbered about 45,000 to 50,000, which was nearly equal to the combined populations of Colón and Panama City. But the total number of white North Americans was only about 6,000, of whom roughly 2,500 were women and children. In 1913 there were 5,362 gold-roll employees and dependents, practically all of whom were Americans. Their average pay was $150 a month. A nurse or teacher received $60 to start; clerks and bookkeepers, $100; a doctor, $150; steam-shovel engineers were by now getting $310. The number of women employed was never more than about 300 and the top salary for a woman was $125 (for a railroad telegraph operator).
A young graduate engineer with two or three years’ experience could expect to make $250 to start, which was about $25 more than he could make in the United States. And added to his salary was the host of free benefits and services (housing, hospital care) to which all employees were entitled. His annual vacation was forty-two days with pay (this in a day when two weeks was still the standard) and he was entitled to thirty days’ sick leave with pay.
If he was single he generally shared a room with another man in one of the bachelor hotels, as they were called, where the phonograph blared “seven kinds of ragtime” through the night and poker games, strictly forbidden by I.C.C. regulations, were carried on “in much the same spirit as Comanche warfare.” The buildings were seldom quiet until 4:30 A.M., when the first alarm clocks began going off.
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