Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Read Online Free PDF Page B

discover that Chagres was a miserable place. He managed to hire natives to get 260 people to Panama City. It took three days to get the passengers and baggage to Gorgona, the headwaters of the river—a miserable trip. The passengers had to sleep for a few hours each night on a mud bank orslumped in the canoes. The natives had only poles to push the canoes along, and they had to be on the way at dawn in order to utilize every moment of daylight.
    At Gorgona the Americans faced a twenty-mile trail over the low mountains, a trail full of potholes and fallen trees. By the end of March, the rainy season had begun and mud was everywhere. It took two days to cover the twenty miles. At the end of the trip, all were appalled by Panama City. It rained continually. Mud, mildew, and fungus oozed everywhere. Sanitation in the tent city was lacking or completely absent. Unwashed raw fruit caused epidemics of dysentery. Malaria and cholera were common, as were threats of smallpox. Vice, depravity, and selfishness thrived. 16
    Huntington and his companions had hoped to catch the
Oregon
as it steamed north on its maiden voyage, but they missed it and had to wait for another ship. The argonauts settled down to wait, meanwhile fighting with each other. Not Huntington. He went into business, selling his medicines (badly needed) and getting other stuff to sell. On his way from Gorgona, he had noticed ranches with food and other provisions—such as primitive cloth, rush mats, and the like—for sale. The business thrived. His buying and selling required frequent trips through the fever-laden jungle. Huntington estimated that he made the crossing at least twenty times. “It was only twenty-four miles,” he recalled. “I walked it.” What was for other men sheer agony was for Collis Huntington a challenge.
    Once he varied his routine. There was a decrepit schooner on a little river. “I went down and bought her,” he recalled, “and filled her up with jerked beef, potatoes, rice, sugar and syrup in great bags and brought everything up to Panama and sold them.” Stuck on the beach at Panama City for nearly two months, Huntington managed to make $3,000. 17
    May 18, Huntington and his companions escaped via the Dutch bark
Alexander von Humboldt,
with 365 passengers plus crew. Once away from the coast, the
Humboldt
was becalmed. Day after day the bored passengers went through beans, weevily biscuits, tough beef, and vile-tasting water. After a week, all provisions had to be rationed. Finally, on June 26, five weeks since setting off, wind finally stirred the sails. Still, not until August 30, after 104 days at sea, did the
Humboldt
enter San Francisco Bay. Huntington gazed at one of the world’s most magnificent harbors, but what he most noticed was the deserted ships. On inquiry, he discovered that, when ships tied up at the wharves, all the crew—from wherever—immediately deserted and headed for the gold.
    He had made it, and in the process he earned more money in Panama than he had had with him when he started. And he had avoided tropical fever. But it had been a trip of nearly half a year, dangerous and arduous beyond description, something he never wanted to do again.
    O
NLY those who were young, physically fit, and full of ambition would dare try to cross Panama, or go overland, from the eastern United States to the Pacific. There was a third way, by boat around Cape Horn, but that took at least six months and was eighteen thousand miles long, not to mention dangerous and expensive.
    Lieutenant William T. Sherman went via that route in the first year of the Mexican War, 1846. A West Point graduate in 1840, he had been on recruiting duty in Zanesville, Ohio, when the war began. For Sherman it was “intolerable” that he was missing the hostilities. He left his sergeant in charge and made his way east, traveling by stagecoach (there were no trains west of the mountains). At Pittsburgh he