Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  Finally, in November, Aspinwall agreed to hire Catherwood, arranging a one-year, $1,500 contract along with payment for his travel expenses to Panama and back. Catherwood was to leave immediately for New York, Aspinwall wrote Stephens, where he was to meet the company directors before traveling to Panama with Stephens.37 But Stephens appears not to have received Aspinwall’s letter in time and left alone for Panama, where he arrived on December 10.

  “I am in an iron house belonging to the railroad company with dozens inside and cannot step outside without stumbling over a body,” he wrote to his father, describing the primitive settlement that had materialized at the mouth of the Chagres River as steamship after steamship arrived with gold seekers. “There is great confusion and distress. This afternoon between 500 and 600 were planted on the bank with luggage of all kinds, anxious, bargaining for canoes in mud and rain.”38

  Catherwood arrived the next month and joined Stephens in Panama City. The two old comrades were together again—only this time amid the chaos of a city overrun by thousands in the grip of gold fever. And on this occasion, their time together would be over almost before it started.

  25

  Crossing the Isthmus

  The master plan for construction of the railroad was a simple one. It was designed to both accommodate and take advantage of the multitudes now descending on Panama. Based on the engineering survey performed earlier in the year, the project called for the railroad work to start in the middle of the isthmus at Gorgona, with the tracks to be laid from there over the Sierra de Veraguas to Panama City. It was expected this section would take no more than a year and that the railroad could then start transporting fare-paying passengers and freight coming up the Chagres River. Then, fortified with this infusion of additional cash, the company would pivot and begin the much more formidable task of laying tracks through the dense jungle on the Caribbean side. Meanwhile, a temporary plank road, if it could be built quickly enough along the route, would also bring in extra cash. The company was also in the process of building small, shallow-draft steamers to be sent to Panama and put into commercial service on the Chagres to transport passengers up the river to Gorgona. The steamboats would also ferry materials and labor crews up to the railroad work in the middle of the country. When the first half of rail line was finished, according to the plan, the company would then be able to provide comfortable transport by boat, covered wagon, and train across the isthmus in a day or two, and then on Pacific Mail steamships between Panama City and San Francisco, a voyage of no more than three weeks. Then entire journey between New York and San Francisco could be made in relative comfort and safety and reduced to little more than a month.1 The scheme was perfect—on paper.

  In October the company hired two veteran American engineers with experience working in the tropics along New Granada’s Caribbean coast. When they arrived on the isthmus at the beginning of 1850, they realized almost immediately they had a serious problem. The first of the shallow-draft steamboats had arrived for duty and it was clear that during the dry season, when most of the construction was to take place, even with their minimal drafts they could not make it up the Chagres in the low water.2 The company would have to alter its plan immediately as pressure mounted from competing enterprises already planning Pacific crossings farther north through Mexico and Nicaragua. If those ventures gained a foothold, they could siphon off enough traffic from the isthmus to bankrupt the railroad before it was completed.3

  Down the coast from the mouth of the Chagres lay the Bay of Limon, also known as Navy Bay, the name originally given to it by Columbus on his third voyage to America. It lay alongside a coral-rimmed island named Manzanillo, located a short distance from the mainland. The company’s survey called for the railroad’s Caribbean terminus to be built on Manzanillo because Limon Bay provided a well-sheltered deepwater harbor capable of accommodating oceangoing steamships. The contractors now realized that, like it or not, they would have to start construction from that point.

  Stephens, meanwhile, had crossed to Panama City, where the company had set up its office. He wrote his father at the end of December that he had been detained five days on the river by late season rains. It had been a year and a half since he and Baldwin surveyed the isthmus and he marveled at the changes. Almost every day, he wrote, steamships emptied hundreds at the mouth of the Chagres. “All of which indicates the necessity of our road but at the same time increases the difficulties in making it.” He called the changes in Panama City the most extraordinary. Where he had paid eight dollars a month for lodging earlier, he said, he now had to pay more than a hundred dollars for the same place. The city was a madhouse, jammed with people waiting for ships to California. He added that he was anxiously awaiting Catherwood as there was an enormous amount of railroad business to take care of before he left for Bogotá, the capital of New Granada. The concession between the railroad and the republic had not yet been ratified and the national congress was scheduled to vote on it in early spring. It was essential, Stephens wrote, that he be there. “I leave for Bogotá by steamer of the 27th of January and am afraid I shall not see Catherwood until my return.”4

  Map of Central America in 1850 with Panama (New Granada) at lower right.

  His old friend, however, showed up a short time later, bringing with him a bundle of company documents and letters. “I received your letter by Catherwood and am glad to learn you are well,” he wrote his father. “I am at all times full with business.” He had found decent lodgings with fresh ocean breezes, he explained, but was sick again. As bad as his old nemesis malaria was, the strain of work was also taking its toll and the irritation showed. “By the way,” he grumbled in a rare rebuke aimed at his apparently tight-fisted father, “I wish you would not write on such little scraps of paper but on letter sheets and under an envelope. It makes no difference if the sheet is not filled.”

  He also told his father that he should have asked the company directors for a bonus if his trip to Bogotá was successful.

  But I do not mean to complain for they did all that I asked and have sent me a power of attorney so absolute in its terms as I should hardly be willing to give to any living man, in fact putting the whole company absolutely and without any qualifications into my hands. Engineers, captains and everybody and thing under my control, showing a degree of confidence in my capacities and integrity which imposes on me a heavy responsibility, having to consider and decide alone matters of more importance than which in New York required two or three sittings of the board.5

  Before leaving for Bogotá, he handed over a large part of the company’s pressing administrative work and correspondence to Catherwood. They had not had much time together but looked forward to catching up when Stephens returned from Bogotá.

  The city of Bogotá lay more than eight hundred miles inland from the Caribbean, perched on a table of land nearly nine thousand feet high in the Andes Mountains. It has been described by one historian who has written about the period as “one of the most inaccessible cities on the face of the earth.”6 The trek from Panama by boat and mule in the nineteenth century was a torturous trip of three or four weeks. In the final ascent to the city up a steep mountain track, Stephens fell from his mule and severely injured his back. He arrived in the capital in terrible pain and was immediately confined to his bed. Only with great difficulty was he able to continue railroad negotiations with the government. In mid-March, he wrote his father that despite the “severe journey” he was slowly recovering. “The cholera is all around us, and yesterday is said to have entered the city. But this does not disturb me, except so far as it may have an effect upon my business.”7

  In the middle of April, the congress ratified the railroad contract. Stephens was nonetheless unable to leave the capital for another five weeks, delayed by a serious illness. Whether it was related to his back injury, cholera, or his old malarial fevers is not clear. But a friend later remarked that after his accident near Bogotá he never fully recovered his health.8 Man
y months later he reported still using a crutch. In the meantime, word of his injury and illness had spread to the newspapers in New York, causing great concern among his friends and family. Aspinwall expressed much uneasiness when he heard the news, writing Stephens in May: “I am glad that Catherwood has been on the isthmus and the fact must have also been a relief to your mind whilst forced to be absent. One thing keep in view—you must come home.”9 The seriousness of his condition was also evident in a letter Stephens’s sister, Amelia Ann, wrote at the end of May mentioning “poor pa’s anxiety” and urging him to come home immediately. She knew from the past that her brother rarely complained, especially of illness. “From your own account,” she wrote, “you must have suffered dreadfully, and we know you must have been ill indeed when you speak of having suffered. You have been often absent, my dearest brother, but I never experienced so much uneasiness on your account before.”10

  Stephens was finally well enough to leave Bogotá in May, more than three months after he had been carried into the city. In spite of his debilities, his mission had been an unqualified success. Besides the ratification, extra modifications expanded the concession’s land grants and added Aspinwall’s wagon road.11 And despite his injury and illness—he was confined to bed in one position for some period of time—he apparently had lost none of his charm. He won a number of friends among the government officials, whose later letters were filled with deep affection and respect for him. And while still convalescing he received a personal invitation from the president of the republic to dine with him at the government palace.12 At the end, he still had to be carried down the mountains in a specially designed and cushioned chair to the Magdalena River for the journey back to Panama—no doubt reminding him of his brief but terrifying ride on the back of an Indian over the Sierra Madre mountains to Palenque.13 In the coastal city of Cartagena, he met George Totten, one of the railroad’s two contractors, who was recruiting workers, and the two men traveled together by steamer with forty laborers to Panama.14

  Catherwood, who had been anxiously awaiting Stephens’s return, was now also seriously ill in Panama City. He wrote Stephens that he had contracted his illness from “exposure” as he traveled by foot across the isthmus surveying the route for the plank road.15 Neither man was in any condition now to make the trip across the isthmus to meet, especially with the rainy season upon them. “I am greatly disappointed at your not being able to reach Panama [City],” Catherwood wrote. “The last Fourth of July we passed together in New York . . . and I looked forward with peculiar pleasure to our passing another fourth together, though under very different circumstances. Capt. Liot tells me you did perfectly right not to attempt it as the road in some places is very bad.” As for his own health, he said, “I don’t remember where I had a more severe attack than my last.”16

  First shanty constructed in a Panama swamp for railroad workers. (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1859)

  Before he boarded a steamship for New York, Stephens went to Navy Bay for the first time to observe the initial stages of construction. What he saw was utterly dispiriting. Manzanillo Island was nothing like the idyllic tropical paradise portrayed by the company’s surveyors in the sunny stock prospectus. Ringed by coral, the square mile of its interior was mostly at or below sea level, a slimy patch of blue-black mud, swamp, and mangroves crawling with crocodiles, snakes, sand flies, and mosquitoes—and with no fresh water anywhere to be found. It was uninhabited and uninhabitable. But there was no choice. The bay itself was ideal and the railroad had to start from there.

  Totten’s contracting partner, along with James Baldwin, who now served as their chief assistant, had gone ashore the month before with a small force of workers and began cutting through the mangrove trees to clear enough space to construct a storehouse on piles.17 When Stephens arrived, the men were still housed in a small brig anchored just offshore. It was impossible to sleep on the island at night because of the incessant attacks of the insects. Even aboard the brig, the crowded conditions belowdecks, the intense humidity and heat, and mosquitoes drove most of the men onto the deck even if it meant sleeping in the pouring rain. Most of the workers were sick with fever, and many who possessed enough energy were packing up to cross the isthmus and head to California. Stephens arranged for an abandoned steamship to be towed from Chagres to Navy Bay to provide the remaining workmen with better quarters.18 When he left for New York at the end of June, the clearing of Manzanillo continued under sweltering, torrential rains with a minimal crew.

  As depressing as conditions in Panama were, the railroad continued to move forward in New York on sheer momentum. When he arrived home, Stephens was elected the company’s new president, a development that must have felt as much a burden as a distinction. After his visit to Navy Bay, and his many trips across the isthmus, he knew intimately the enormous obstacles that lay ahead.

  With the full weight of the company now officially upon him, he would not be able to return to the isthmus for another six months. During the interval, his life was consumed by work: arranging contracts for locomotives, ordering rails, creating strategies to attract workers (they were offered contracts for six months, three months, even six weeks or less—with guaranteed passage home or to California). Everything had to be bought or built in the United States—with the exception of iron rails, most of which came from England—and then transported to Panama aboard steamers. Even the housing for the hundreds of workers now converging on the isthmus was prefabricated and sent down for assembly, along with thousands of pounds of food and medical supplies. Doctors were hired and a hospital was under construction on-site. Steam pile drivers, wooden pilings, railroad ties, tools—in short, everything necessary for the construction of a railroad—all had to be bought and transported to Panama at great expense.19

  Stephens had now become, in effect, king of one of the greatest construction projects of his day, a monumental undertaking equivalent in its way to the great works of the Maya. He had to retake the jungle and remake its landscape, and if he had even a moment to see the parallels, he would certainly have appreciated the challenges and natural forces the Maya—lords and laborers alike—had to overcome with far fewer tools and resources than were at his disposal. It’s doubtful such a thought would have been of any comfort, however. His health still compromised, the work never-ending, he had no choice now but to somehow summon up the energy to keep the dream of the first intercontinental railroad in the Western Hemisphere alive and moving forward.

  After his experience in Guyana, Catherwood’s goal was to get in and out of Panama as fast as possible, especially now that Stephens was no longer with him on the isthmus. Like the thousands of others who were thronging across Panama to the Pacific, his head was filled with dreams of California. He had made no secret of his plan in his negotiations with Aspinwall. And he told Stephens the year before that he had no desire to dig for riches but instead saw California as a gold mine of another sort—an opportunity to use his architectural and engineering skills in the rapidly developing American west coast. Under a new arrangement with Aspinwall, it was agreed that he would spend only six months on the isthmus because of his ill health, and the remainder of his contract year working for Aspinwall at the maintenance depot of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in the town of Benicia, near San Francisco. Extra responsibilities in Stephens’s absence and illness, however, delayed his departure for California until August. Before he left Panama City, he sent a request to Stephens:

  . . . as my salary has been very small, that I have been delayed two months on the isthmus beyond my time, and that my services have been approved by Mr. L[udlow] and Mr. Aspinwall, that the board should grant me such a sum beyond my salary as they may think proper. I hope it will be $1000, which might be of great service when at San Francisco. I pay now $625 a year insurance on my life for the benefit of my children in case of my death and this alone is a heavy item . . . $1500 a year and three children to support at school. In fact, this year without some aid, I
shall have to encroach on my capital which is small enough.20

  When he finally landed in San Francisco in late August, his antiquarian yearnings caught up with him again. In a letter after his arrival, he informed Stephens he had learned about new “Indian ruins” in California during his passage north and that he hoped to track them down and investigate. “The source is very reliable,” he added. He had also hoped, he said, that San Francisco would help him restore his health but complained about the city’s “horrible,” notoriously cold summer weather.21 In October, two months later, he was singing the city’s praises as “delightful, warm in the day but the evenings deliciously cool and invigorating, nor has any rain fallen for six or seven months,” which must have been a shocking relief after Panama.22

  Stephens, meanwhile, arranged for his friend’s additional salary. Catherwood thanked him for making him “$1,000 richer,” adding he was forever indebted to him for his “kindness and friendship.” Unfortunately, Stephens’s letters to Catherwood have never turned up, and we have only Catherwood’s half of their correspondence. So it is difficult to know why Stephens did not reply to Catherwood’s next several letters. Catherwood complained repeatedly that he received nothing personal, nothing about Stephens’s family in New York, nothing about their mutual friends. Finally, exasperated, he wrote in January 1851: “I have no doubt the duties of your office occupy so much of your time as to leave small space for mere chit chat correspondence, but still I trust you will in your next and soon make some amends for your long silence.”23