LITMIR.BIZ

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thought of as a north-south strip, in fact is east-west, for it twists at this point. Panama City is located south and a little east of Limon Bay, so that the sun there rises over the Pacific, much as the sun in New Orleans, because of a great curve in the river (which is why it is called the Crescent City), rises over the west bank of the Mississippi.

      The original plan had been to build a railroad from Panama City over or near the old mule track, the Camino Real, as far as Venta de Cruces, and from there, downhill now, to Limón Bay, which had been picked as the Atlantic terminal of the line. This was soon reversed. The Company bought Manzanillo Island on the east side of Limón Bay, 650 acres in size or about one square mile, and that was to be headquarters; but because of the mosquitoes and other insects the men did not sleep there but used instead an old brig anchored in the bay.

      The plan was to cut through the jungle, laying track, from Limón Bay to the Chagres at Barbacoas, about half-way across the isthmus, then to the south bank of the Trinidad River, and from there directly down to Panama City.

      Labor troubles started early. The engineers had meant to enlist local labor—every village had scads of men lying around doing nothing, men who presumably would jump at the chance to earn a few good hard American dollars— but they reckoned without the gold rush. Every vessel that dropped the hook at Chagres—there was no dock—was crammed to the gunnels with men who wanted to get across to the Pacific as soon as possible, not matter what the inconvenience, no matter what the cost. The residents of Chagres learned that their bongos—clumsy, canoelike craft—would, like their mules, command fancy prices. Moderate at first, they soon learned to ride the market, charging whatever they thought they could get. Naturally such men were not going to break their backs toiling in the jungle for pennies. The engineers quickly found that they had to go all the way to Cartagena to enlist cheap labor, and often enough even these men, once they had learned of the riches to be made propelling a bongo or leading a mule, deserted.

      The gold rush, so far from abating, seemed to increase.

      Often there was no ship waiting at Panama, where the argonauts were stranded for days at a time, for weeks, and where many of them died. The little fishing village of Henry Morgan s day had become a flourishing metropolis with all the trappings of civilization—bars, bordellos, crime in the streets. This condition, too, tended to drain off the cheap labor from the nearby countryside.

      Cholera, dysentery, smallpox, malaria, and yellow fever raged in the little labor camp in Limon Bay, where at a given time, at least in the rainy season, half of the men or more would be on the sick list. There was no physician and not even a pretense of a hospital.

      Chinese were brought in, about a thousand of them, and special barracks were built, special food ordered, and tea and even opium were supplied, the engineers having been told that all Chinese smoked opium and indeed couldn’t live without it. The coolies did not respond to this kindness. The work was too hard for them, the climate too hot, and they were homesick. They began to hang themselves or otherwise commit suicide, and this in large numbers. Soon there were fewer than two hundred left.

      Irishmen were tried, and Frenchmen, and Negroes from Jamaica, who seemed the hardiest, though they were incurably lazy.

      There was a story at the time, and it has persisted to this day, that the building of the Panama Railroad cost a laborer’s life for every tie. This is demonstrably false, and not just because it is too pat. There were 74,000 ties laid for this single-track, narrow-gauge railroad, and there were never, altogether, that many persons employed. It will never be known how many laborers died in the building of the railroad, because no records were kept of the Chinese deaths or those of the Negroes later brought in. It was recorded that 293 white men died, in five years; but the whole score must have been much bigger. It could have been 20,000. It could not have been anything like 74,000. But they still tell the story.

      The ties themselves seemed to be in a conspiracy to defeat the project. Because of the sponginess of the soil—in the beginning, in the lowlands, it had been sheer swamp and the difficulty was in finding any bottom at all, much less bedrock—many more ties than would be customary had to be laid. The first ones were of native wood, locally cut, but these soon rotted away. Spruce and pine then were imported from the States, but the wetness and the heat demolished these in a short time. The only wood that would give good service, it was learned, was a lignum vitae from the province of Cartagena, Colombia, and this was so heavy that it was expensive to move, and so tough that it was expensive to cut, while holes had to be hored into it for the admission of the spikes that would hold down the rails.

      All this cost money, and the shortage of labor made things that much worse. With only a few miles of track actually laid and ready for use the engineers already had spent the foundational $1,000,000, and their representatives in Wall Street tried in vain to raise more. The stock was selling at next to nothing, when there were any buyers at all. The outlook was glum.

      Then on a stormy day in November of 1851 two steamships, finding the open roads at Chagres too turbulent for them, took refuge in Limon Bay a few miles to the east; one thousand gold seekers with their picks and their pans tumbled ashore to demand transportation—any kind of transportation—right away. The railroad people, up to their knees in muck, protested that the line only went as far as Gatun, about seven miles away. The argonauts didn’t care. They drew money from their pockets. The railroad people said that they were not equipped yet to handle passengers; they had no coaches, only flatcars. So the miners-to-be scrambled aboard the flatcars, and in a teeming rain they were driven through the jungle as far as Gatun, where they could hire bongos and bongo paddlers. The line had made its first money.

      The word got out, and skippers, as a matter of course, took to putting in at Limón rather than the chancier Chagres. Even seven miles of that highly uncomfortable river trip were something to save—and worth paying for. Moreover, new miles were being added.

      In Wall Street—such a sensitive area!—it became much easier to move Panama Railroad Company stock.

      The engineers in the field learned that they could charge just about anything they pleased—and get it. So they did.

      The line was pushed on, mile after tortured mile, until it reached the Chagres River at Barbacoas, about halfway across the isthmus. Little bridges had been built before, but the Chagres at this point was about 300 feet wide, and the railroad called in a subcontractor.

      The Chagres is a wily river, a river no man should turn his back upon, if he can help it, for in the time it can take him to snooze, and with no warning whatsoever, the Chagres can cease to be an amiable, lazy stream, another Meander, and become a raging torrent. It did this at Barbacoas; but it waited until the bridge had been finished, and then dramatically it removed that bridge.

      The whole job had to be done over. The subcontractor quit. The railroad Company itself began to build the new bridge.

      At long last the line was finished. There were many shorings-up to be done, bridges to be strengthened, sidings to be enlarged, but at least the two steel bands met one another—at a point near Panama City. There had been no ceremony at the start of the work, and there was virtually none to mark its completion. Everybody involved stayed on the job, and it was midnight of January 7, 1855, when the last section of rail was laid—in a pouring rain.

      The Culebra Cut, for a time the terminus of the Panama Railroad

      Americans often are twitted about their fondness for superlatives, but the Panama Railroad undoubtedly could claim a record collections of “most’s.”

      It was the first railroad to unite two oceans.

      It was the shortest major railroad in history—47.57 miles.

      It charged the highest rates, both for freight and passengers. (The Standard regular fare—there were extras—was $25 one way. This came to more than 50^ a mile, another record.)

      It was the most expensive railroad ever to be built. It had cost almost $8,000,000, which came to $168,000 a mile; yet because of the impatience of the gold seekers and the exorbitant

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