The conquest of the Isthmus : the men who are building the Panama canal--their daily lives, perils, and adventures

Front matter

Smithsonian Institution

Alexander Wetmore

i c> 4 6 Sixth Secretary 1955

Preface

THE Panama Canal never will be dug by machinery alone. Beyond the steam shovels and the dirt trains, beyond the air-drillers and the dredges, the union of the Atlantic and the Pacific depends upon the men who are giving health, wealth, and life in the battle with the tropical jungle. It is of these men, the khaki heroes of the wilderness, of whom I would tell, the men who have rubbed elbows with death from almost every angle and in almost every guise, in order that the American nation might win the greatest industrial victory in the history of the world.

We have heard much of the industrial, political, mechanical, and financial sides of the Panama Canal. In fact the mass of material of this kind we have digested has smothered the human aspect of the great waterway. In the discussion of locks and dams, the romance of the Isthmus has been overlooked. In the search for graft and failure, the muck-raker has ignored the deeds of daring and danger which dot the vi Preface

canal from Colon to Panama. We have been given the red-inked reports of the engineers, and have missed the red-blooded stories of heroism behind them. It is these that I would present in the pages which follow.

The steam shovels at Panama are tearing three million cubic yards of dirt from mountain and jungle every thirty days. This is a big record, the biggest in the engineering history of the world. But it was not to study the steam shovels that I visited the Isthmus. On the contrary, it was to give my attention to the shirt-sleeved, sun-tanned men who are operating the steam shovels.

Uncle Sam is maintaining an army forty thousand strong in the heart of the Panama jungle, over two thousand miles from the base of supplies. In some respects it is the most unique army of peace or war that has ever flown the American flag. What is the daily life of this army? How does it work? How does it play? How and where does it spend its evenings in the tropical wilderness? Hundreds of the men have their wives and children with them. What type of frontier civilization do they find? These are some of the questions I have tried to answer, and in the effort I have left the mechanical side of the Panama Canal for the engineer and the muck-

Preface vii

raker, and have dealt mainly with the human side.

Also, as the history of the Canal is not confined to the present, I have endeavored to gather something of the romance of its past and to add to the daring deeds of the twentieth century the achievements of other centuries that have contributed their part to the progress of to-day and the victory of to-morrow.

Portions of this book first appeared in periodicals— Putnam's Magazine, The Railroad Man's Magazine, and The American Boy — and thanks are offered to these publications for permission to use the material in this volume.

H. C. W.

New York City, May i, 1909

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Khaki Heroes of Panama . i

II. The Men op the "Dirt" Trains —

Chapter I

T N the darkness of the Panama night, a row of * ghost lights blinked at me, as I lounged on the second-floor veranda of the Cristobal Y. M. C. A. building. They were the electric bulbs of the half-circle of Government quarters at my left, blurred and shadowed by the haze of the mosquito netting stretched before them.

Over in the distance I could see the moonsilvered Atlantic. The jangle of a cab-driver's bell sounded sharply at my elbow. A khaki-clad policeman paused in a stray beam of light, and fanned himself with his broad Stetson hat. A Jamaican negress, bedecked with red ribbons, flaunted past him. It was my first night in the Canal Zone, and I was curious.

A sudden burst of shouts behind me brought me around abruptly, again conscious of the sweltering November heat of the Isthmus.

Through a long open window of the gymnasium, I could see the climax of a vigorously waged basket-ball game, the perspiring contestants apparently oblivious of the humidity which had wilted two collars for me during the day. Dodging, leaping, squirming, the lithe figures were massed now around one goal, now around the other, — the bouncing leather ball a thing of life in their surging midst. I was watching Uncle Sam's Canal-builders at play.

A few hours before, the darting men in the "gym. togs" might have been seen among the "steam shovel" or "dirt train" gangs of the Isthmus, in the Panama Railroad shops, or bent over a desk in any of the score of Government offices within a two-mile radius. These are the men — the young men — who are digging the biggest canal in the world's history, against odds which the American nation, of the three that have tried, alone has conquered. These are the men whom the average resident of "the States" pictures as lying on the red Panama mud, half dead with malaria or yellow fever, dodging snakes and eating decayed rations!

I was seeking the real life of the Canal, not that darkened by the sombre hues of the pessimist, nor yet that brightened by the rose tints of the optimist, but the e very-day conditions of work and play of the every-day man — yes, and woman and child — associated with the digging of the "Big Ditch." Was this a typical sample?

A youth, seated at a corner piano, was drumming through the strains of a late Broadway hit when I stepped back into the building. The basket-ball contestants had dispersed to the shower-baths. Across the corridor, a long row of men were turning the files of recent magazines. It was the conventional Y. M. C. A. scene at any of the compass points at home. And this was — the Panama jungle!

Downstairs we stopped at a modernly equipped soda fountain for an iced drink, and the secretary, M. J. Stickel, stepped across to a well-filled cigar case.

"We have all brands here, for all tastes," he said, smiling. "Which will you have?"

"Is this your wilderness?" I queried. The secretary laughed grimly, as he flashed the prompt reply :

"You '11 find that easily enough, perhaps more than you care to see of it ! The jungle is vividly real to us down here — blacker even than it is painted — possibly to emphasize the more "

"This?" I finished, nodding toward the inviting reception-room behind me.

"Oh, this is but a small fraction of the civilization we are building — in order to build the Canal. The 46,000 persons on the Government pay-roll cannot live in a wilderness, therefore, we must civilize the wilderness. We can't move the jungle but we can move home comforts — and we are trying to dovetail the two. The Y. M. C. A. club-house is only a link in the chain. Yes, the jungle is here — we never forget it! — and the story of its taming is quite as wonderful as that of the digging of the Canal, only the public has not heard it."

The red-underscored emphasis merited by this statement I was soon to discover. As yet I was only on the rim of the true Panama — the pulsating details of the twentieth-century battle with the wilderness and the type of homes, schools, churches, stores, amusements which it has built. As we pause, let me give you a budget of items from my Panama note-book, which came to me in a rapid-fire fusillade in the night-and-day itinerary that followed.

Through a belt of land ten miles in width and fifty miles in length, spanning the Isthmus of

Panama from ocean to ocean, the American flag is dominant with the exception of two points. In the records of the War Department, this territory is entered as the ''Canal Zone" — the course of the proposed waterway subdividing it almost evenly. At one extremity squats the colorless town of Colon — at the other, the historic streets of Panama rear their picturesque buildings, the only points of the Canal territory which do not owe allegiance to the Federal Government. Between the two, the thin line of the Panama Railroad wends its winding jungle-course, through a color-splash of cannas, orchids, and coleus plants — in three hours carrying passengers in its grimy, dusty cars from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a distance requiring three months to traverse by the present water route.

Dotted through the narrow land-ribbon are twenty-seven mushroom villages and wayside stations, some nearing the dignity of a thriving American county seat, others little more than a cluster of houses perched about a telegraph office. And on both sides, stretching away for hundreds of miles, is the deep, dark, dismal underbrush of the jungle.

Under American jurisdiction is a population of 54,325 people, depending on the Government for food, shelter, clothing, to whose necessities, comfort, and recreation Uncle Sam caters in the heart of a wilderness two thousand miles from the base of supplies.

In this population are included forty nationalities, ranging from Austrians to Canadians, from Chilians to Chinese, from Jamaicans to Scandinavians.

Of the total number of residents, nearly 20,000 are fed at Government mess tents and hotels, making a monthly average of one million meals which Uncle Sam must serve ! To meet the diversified tastes of the patrons, literally a worldrestaurant must be maintained — in the tropical underbrush.

From the ten-cent rations of the West Indian negro and the twelve-and-a-half -cent meal of the European laborer, the scale ranges upward to the thirty-cent menu of the Government hotel — and not one pound of the tons of provisions consumed is obtained from the Isthmus itself. A transportation problem of nearly twenty-five hundred miles must enter into the preparation of every meal.

Further, the Government must supply provisions to those residents who do not board at Federal quarters. The commissary department carries a pay-roll of 524 employees and its monthly expenses total $350,000. Entries such as the distribution of fifteen tons of rice and three tons of sugar a week are common in this wilderness department-store.

In the shadow of the jungle, have likewise been established a Federal cold-storage plant, with a capacity of 620 tons, from which 435,000 pounds of beef alone are distributed each month, — an artificial ice factory, producing sixty tons daily, seven days in the week, — and a Government bakery turning out 18,000 loaves every twenty-four hours, with no Sunday rest !

In the same list follow a Federal laundry and a printing office, with plans under way for macaroni, coffee-roasting, pie-and-cake-baking plants, and even a tailoring establishment! A jungle police force with 208 members has been formed, eleven fire-engine stations have been erected, twenty-four schools have been organized on this Central American frontier with one thousand enrolment, and the Canal Commission has lately added to its pay-roll eleven chaplains. American energy has even installed eight hundred telephones in the wilderness!

Staggered, are you? And yet these facts do not include one mention of the Canal, the central feature of Panama. This summary belongs essentially to the civilization-builders — the work of the Canal-builders is another story.

The great jaws of the jungle swallowed a village a few years ago — during my Isthmus-roamings it was forced to disgorge. Buried under a mass of tropical vegetation, with outreaching talons like a devil-fish, the settlement was unearthed by the Government engineers after days of backcramping labors, where even the blade of the machete seldom found room to strike. Thirtytwo solidly constructed buildings — nine married quarters, twenty-two barracks, and a machine shop dating from the glory of De Lesseps — were uncovered beneath the tangled tons of foliage, which had hidden them so completely that their existence was entirely unsuspected. As dusty pigeon-holes unfolded the history of the settlement, it developed that it had disappeared from the records of men when the French had been routed from the Canal Zone a generation ago — with millions of francs in useless equipment behind them and millions of francs in useless debt before them. It had needed but twenty-five years for the talons of the jungle to bury a village large enough to shelter a thousand men!

This is the wilderness that for hundreds of miles has not known the foot of a white man, through which Uncle Sam's civilization-builders are stretching a twentieth-century wonder-chain.

A slow-speaking, bent-shouldered young man, who has an unobtrusive habit of talking little and listening much, smiled at me across a big paperlittered desk when I sought the leader in this jungle-battle. Had it not been for that smile, I would have been disappointed in my first view of the man, who had been described to me as the "Backbone of the Canal."

Jackson Smith, chief of the Isthmian Department of Labor and Quarters and seventh member of the Canal Commission, has worked too hard at Panama to be prominent in the public eye in its roster of celebrities. With the silence of the man who does big things, he has laid the foundation upon which others have built. Feeding, clothing, sheltering the army of peace that is worming the Canal-course from ocean to ocean is the giant task he has faced and conquered — in cold figures, a greater problem than the maintaining of the entire United States regular army!

With a curiously growing enthusiasm I probed for details. "How have you done it?" I io The Conquest of the Isthmus

queried without preamble, to which he made characteristic answer thus:

"By organizing a small army of experts for taking care of human beings!"

Silence stretched over the next sixty watchticks. Outside, the mid-morning Panama sun splashed a yellow radiance down onto the rainwashed red clay.

"And every one of these experts was made in the thick of action," continued Mr. Smith as easily as though he had not paused. "They are men who have been taught what to do and how to do in the shoulder-to-shoulder school of experience.

"Somebody has said that the Panama Canal is the dumping-ground for other countries' cast-off citizens . This is true and not true. The good in our consignments of men outweighs the bad : a halfman could not do the man's work the Isthmus is showing. Our experts must know men, know them as they would know a text-book. The man from Italy cannot be handled like the man from the West Indies or the man from Milwaukee. The Italian has been raised on macaroni. The juiciest beefsteak would not appeal to him if you banished his macaroni. The West Indian thrives on rice — and nothing will take its place. The man from

The Khaki Heroes of Panama n

the States is the only resident on the Isthmus who will eat anything and everything — except Panama cooking!

"We must have the menus of Spain and Italy and France and China and the West Indies — and the other thirty-four countries from which Uncle Sam's Canal-builders are gathered. It is an international menu we must serve down here, for we are really feeding the globe !

"Last year," Mr. Smith smiled as he circled around another bend of his subject, "3570 men were employed in our building department. During the twelve months, 588 houses were finished — in the heart of the jungle, if you please! — with the supply always below the demand. In addition, eighteen new mess halls, four Y. M. C. A. club-houses, two lodge halls, four school buildings, one church, and four post-offices were erected — by the men whom the public never hears anything about !

"Nearly 2500 electric lights were installed in Culebra alone during the year. In the twelve months, over 1,000,000 pounds of lead were used by our house painters. Paint is a central detail of house-building in the tropics. We do not use plaster or wall paper in Panama owing to the climatic effects, and the interior as well as the exterior of the dwelling consequently must be thoroughly painted. The temporary nature of most of our buildings makes it necessary to paint the floor joints also, so that a four-room structure on the Isthmus will require as much paint as would be used on a fourteen-room building at home.

"Our work is not completed, however, even when the last nail of the dwelling has been driven, and the last plumbing fixture installed. We must furnish as well as build the house. It is clearly impossible for the Canal employees to bring their household furnishings with them. Therefore, the Government finds itself confronted with another civilization-problem, and answers it by supplying furnished houses.

"Uncle Sam is the most generous landlord that ever delighted a tenant's heart. Not only does he give quarters rent-free, with a liberal furniture allowance absolutely gratis, but he donates the electric-light service as well! With the items of rent and light eliminated from a family's expense account "

"Perhaps the increased cost of living in other respects is not so heavy," I finished cynically.

Mr. Smith silently fumbled about his desk. He was studying a typewritten table of figures when he looked up.

"I have here New York market prices for October," he said quietly, "and those of the Government commissaries in the Canal Zone. In thirty-seven items in a list of sixty-four, the shopper could buy cheaper at Panama than in the stores at home! In eight cases, the market prices here and in the States were equal, in nineteen instances the American stores offered slightly better bargains. Digesting the list, we find that there is an actual net saving of $1.50 in favor of the Panamanian markets in the sixty-four articles, an average saving of 2 J cents per item! And this in spite of the fact that the New York merchant sells at home, while we must consider a transportation of more than two thousand miles in the cost of every item, with the exception of our fruits. "

As Mr. Smith paused to explain that the commissary department is now under the control of the Panama Railroad — like the Canal, a Government-owned institution, — I jotted down sundry items of those vividly emphasized market quotations. In battle array they follow:

New York. Panama,

cts. cts.

Beef, stew per lb. 14 10

Steaks, porterhouse 25 22 i4 The Conquest of the Isthmus

Steaks, tenderloin per. lb.

Veal, loin " "

Veal for stewing " "

Mutton, short cut chops " "

Lamb, entire fore

quarters " "

Sausage, pork " "

Turkeys " "

Eggs, fresh, dozen Bacon, strips, lb.

Lard, 5 lb. tins, each Butter prints, prime quality, lb Cheese, cream, lb.

Dovetailing neatly into the exhibit, is the column of figures given me by S. M. White, the Government storekeeper at Colon, as sharpteethed illustrations of the volume of business surging through the channels of Uncle Sam's giant department-store, with its output of eighty tons of supplies daily.

What the Isthmus Eats in a Single Month 435,000 lbs. beef

New York.

Panama.

cts.

cts.

>• 39

*5

15,000 "

mutton

12,000 "

veal

14,000 "

ribs

2,000

turkeys

20,000 "

butter milk

5,000

fowls

2,000

chickens liver

30,000 lbs. pork

20,000 " beef loins

20,000 " macaroni

468,000 loaves bread

Fifteen freight cars are needed every twenty-four hours to deliver the orders of the jungle commissary department. Five cars of ice and cold-storage supplies leave Colon every morning — their wares coming as a godsend in the tropical wilderness. Two more cars are loaded to their greatest capacity with the daily output of the American bakery. One car is filled with fresh vegetables, and seven cars with staple groceries from the mammoth warehouse every evening ready to begin their journey across the Isthmus soon after midnight.

This is how the Americans are winning at Panama — in the blackened trail of other nations' failures.

At the wayside stations, bordering the Panama Railroad, modernly equipped commissary wagons are waiting, ready to carry to the purchaser the list of goods, large or small, ordered the day before. A twentieth-century delivery system in the recesses of the wilderness!

Through ten branch stores the commissary department is extended through the jungle — and in not one station can a purchase be made for cash! A system of coupon-books has been established, whose checks range from one cent upwards in value. These only are accepted for Government purchases. One book may be used at any or all stores, and is listed at a cash basis of $15.00, individual accounts being kept with employees in good standing, when their books are exhausted before the monthly pay day. To prevent a possible conflict in prices at the various commissary branches, a general price book is issued every thirty days, and oftener in the case of the grocery department, which enables the purchaser to know in advance what his week's or month's provisions will cost him, whether they are bought on the Pacific or the Atlantic coast.

In vivid comparison with these strides of progress, is the story that only a little more than three years ago it was necessary to knock the old French machinery of the Canal apart to obtain nails for the erection of bunks!

Those were the "early days " as reckoned by the old-timers — 1904! — when mirrors were at a premium and men were forced to shave by the aid of the window panes, when the deadly black scorpion was an all-night bedfellow, and a man was allowed only one hand to eat, using the other the while in a frantic effort to keep the mosquitos at bay!

Like a fantastic nightmare these conditions appear to-day to the man who, for thirty cents, may order a menu like the following at any of the fifteen Government hotels:

Can you surpass these meals — served in the Panamanian jungle — for the same figure at an American restaurant ?

As a business proposition, does it pay? During the month of September, 1907, there was a loss of roughly $3000 in the $150,000 receipts of the subsistence department. The month of October, on the other hand, furnished a profit of practically the same figures. As the balance sheets of the two months were spread before me, Superintendent J. M. McGuire, of Ancon, explained that the additional one day in October was responsible for the difference — so close is the margin of the department that a month of thirty-one days will show a gain, while a month of only thirty days will indicate a corresponding loss. Uncle Sam does n't make any profit, but he gives his men good meals!

In the city of New York, the death-rate is estimated at the ratio of eighteen persons to the thousand. Among the white employees of the Panama Canal, the death-rate during the month of August, 1907, — the worst season on the Isthmus, ■ — was only 8.57 to the thousand, less than half of the New York figures !

And yet this is the plague spot, which at various times during the early eighties wiped out forty per cent, of the Canal employees of the old French regime!

Negro residents at Panama furnish the bulk of the mortality, although here again the amazing work of Colonel W. C. Gorgas and his superb sanitary department is conspicuous. Five years ago, the death-rate among the blacks was 120 per 1000. To-day it has been reduced to one quarter of that figure.

In New Orleans, Venice, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, the rate of mortality ranges from 22 to 28 per 1000, in all cases higher than the average at Panama; in Alexandria, Cairo, Calcutta, and Bombay, it ascends to from 30 to 48 per 1000. In Madras, it even reaches the height of 58 per 1000. It is apparent that the Canal Zone has become the most healthful spot which the tourist can find throughout the length and breadth of the tropical belt of the globe — a triumph of American sanitary methods, which only the Panamanian of yesterday fully appreciates.

Last year, the postal service of the Canal Zone transmitted $2,318,965 in money-orders. The bulk of this amount, $1,724,383, represented the savings of the 5000 American employees, forwarded to their families or to banks at home!

The civilization-builders at Panama believe, as a fundamental principle, in working with the right kind of material — and men.

The women at Panama?

They are there, in quantity and quality. The Labor and Quarters Department has over 500 applications for married quarters on its waiting list at the present time, and the last census of the Canal Zone showed 982 white women and 758 children already established under Panamanian roof -trees.

It is related that an overworked justice of the peace at Colon married eight American couples in less than eleven minutes! The brides were newly arrived from "the States" and the wedding ceremonies were performed on the dock, the young women ready to follow the flag in its wilderness path from ocean to ocean — fit helpmates for the heroes who are not soldiers, the khaki-clad men of the Panama jungle.

Chapter II The Men Of The "dirt" Trains And Others

THE section boss thrust his head beyond his tent-flap and instantly drew back with a hoarse gasp of terror. Half -dressed and halfstunned, he took a cautious step outside the door, and then another, and another, until he came into full view of the half -moon of twisted, bloated horrors, swung on the palm trees before him.

One hundred and twenty-five coolies from the Chinese camp were suspended by their cues from the swaying branches! Driven mad by the gloom of the jungle they had sought wholesale suicide in the night.

For years the section boss had rubbed elbows with death. He had come to look upon grim things with a grin. But as he digested the scene before him, his knees gave way and he toppled forward in a sprawling faint.

The incident was but one link in the chain of horrors of the Panama Railroad. Those were red years for the construction gang of the first line of rails to span the American continent.

On a road-bed of blood the ties were laid which were to mark an industrial epoch. If it was the narrowest point of the continent, it was also the wildest. Forty-seven miles linked the Atlantic and the Pacific at this land-ribbon of the Caribbean but they were forty-seven miles of tragedies.

With the exception of a wandering adventurer, the engineers were the first white men to force a way through the jungle since the dare-devil days of the Spanish Main. And it was the Devil's Own Cauldron, in very truth, into which they plunged.

There are those who say the road cost a life for every tie. Exaggerated ? Possibly — but grim facts show that more than six thousand men went to their deaths in the tangled underbrush before the last rail was laid! Every mile of progress cost over one hundred and twenty-seven lives.

The history of those forty-seven miles of track is one of the most tingling, red-blooded chapters in all the records of American railroad building. It is more. It is a monument to the undaunted, unrivalled heroism of American engineers, which no section of the globe can surpass.

It is something over half a century ago — to be exact, in the autumn of 1849 — that the first construction gang, bunking at night on board a cramped sailing vessel in the Colon harbor, plunged into the red mud of the Panama swamps. Waist-deep in the slimy depths, forced to chop every foot of the way through the heavy, interlacing foliage, the men entered resolutely into the task which was to stretch over a period of more than six years.

In that first year over one hundred died from snake bites alone. The victims of the tarantula and the scorpion numbered as many more.

Buzzing swarms of mosquitoes from the pestilent pools and streams inland settled like a heavy gray cloud over their shoulders, bringing typhoid, malaria, yellow fever. Men died by scores and hundreds, and their comrades, with the sickly yellow of disease stamping their brows, gave them a hasty grave and a hastier prayer, and plunged again into the conquest of the wilderness.

Nature conspired to make the picture yet blacker. Sudden stretches of quicksands were found, whose boundaries were marked by the despairing shrieks of stumbling victims. The swamp grew thicker and blacker and marshier. Engineering statistics report that often bottom was not found at a distance of 180 feet!

Thousands of cords of wood and stone were dumped into the mysterious morasses in a desperate effort to construct causeways for the road-bed.

Even to this day, in the gloomy shadows of the Black Swamp — a scant five miles from the Atlantic terminal of Colon — the slimy earth sinks into a yawning cavern, and rails, ties, and men drop forever from sight. Once a freight car was dumped into the hungry morass in an effort to make a solid surface. Within six hours the car had disappeared from view, and the black slime seemed to clamor for more !

It was at Bas Obispo that the wholesale suicide pact of the coolies climaxed the terrors of the road-builders. In the early fifties, a consignment of one thousand Chinese had been imported to recruit the shattered ranks of laborers. For six depressing weeks, the coolies struggled under the lash of the jungle.

When the swaying burden of the palm trees, in the soft light of the early morning, showed the ghastly fate their companions had sought, it was as a spark of gunpowder. The Americans endeavored in vain to check the mill-race of the panic.