comfortable.The testing part was the fifty miles in the middle. For the officers and men of the Fourth Regiment, the challenge fell peculiarly upon Quartermaster Grant. The regiment reached the town of Aspinwall, on the Caribbean side of the isthmus, amid the rainy season. “The streets of the town were eight or ten inches under water, and foot passengers passed from place to place on raised footpaths,” Grant recalled. “At intervals the rain would pour down in streams, followed in not many minutes by a blazing, tropical summer’s sun. These alternate changes, from rain to sunshine, were continuous in the afternoons. I wondered how any person could live many months in Aspinwall, and wondered still more why any one tried.” The town was named forWilliam Aspinwall, the principal of thePacific Mail Steamship Company, which was building a railroad across the isthmus to take travelers to its docks at Panama City. By the summer of 1852 the railroad had reached the Chagres River, about fifteen miles inland; there travelers boarded boats for Gorgona, near the continental divide.
“Boats on the Chagres River were propelled by natives not inconveniently burdened with clothing,” Grant recalled. The long, narrow boats carried three dozen or so passengers apiece. The crew of each boat, typically six men arrayed on planks mounted on the two sides of the boat, propelled the craft with long poles. “The men would start from the bow, place one end of their poles against the river bottom, brace their shoulders against the other end, and then walk to the stern as rapidly as they could,” Grant explained. The river current was strong, but the boats made a mile an hour against it.
At Gorgona most of the soldiers of Grant’s regiment reverted to infantry form and marched off, going over the divide and down to Panama City on the Pacific. Grant kept a company behind to help him with the baggage and with the families who accompanied some of the soldiers to their new posting. He hunted up the man who had won the contract to supply the mules for the baggage and the women and children. The man, an American, didn’t have the mules on hand but promised to produce them the next day. The next day he said they would arrive the day after that. Eventually Grant realized there would be no mules; the crush of traffic on the isthmus and the consequent demand for transport had prompted the man to ignore the contract he had with the army and rent his beasts to higher bidders.
The resulting delay might have been merely annoying but for the fact that the isthmus was one of the unhealthiest places on earth. Microbesflourished in the warm, damp climate, and the human flood swamped the rudimentary sanitary system.Cholera claimed one after another of the men in Grant’s company and an even larger portion of their family members. He sent most of the still-healthy ones off on foot to join the rest of the regiment at Panama City and scrambled to find other mules for the sick, the families and the baggage. After a week he paid a local the going rate—more than twice the contracted rate—to furnish the required transport. By then the cholera had spread, killing every third person with Grant. Nor did all those who had gone ahead escape; dozens succumbed, until more than a hundred—one-seventh of those who had set out with Grant from New York—had died.
Till now Grant had sometimes wished Julia and Fred had joined him on the journey west, but the epidemic erased such thoughts. “My dearest, you never could have crossed the isthmus,” he wrote her from the safety of the ship to San Francisco. “The horrors of the road, in the rainy season, are beyond description.” Realizing she might fear for his own safety, he assured her he was fine. “We are fast approaching a better climate. The Golden Gate takes us nearly 300 miles per day.”
8
C ALIFORNIA DURING THE GOLD RUSH ATTRACTED AMBITIOUS , acquisitive types from around the globe, and nearly all of them
“Boats on the Chagres River were propelled by natives not inconveniently burdened with clothing,” Grant recalled. The long, narrow boats carried three dozen or so passengers apiece. The crew of each boat, typically six men arrayed on planks mounted on the two sides of the boat, propelled the craft with long poles. “The men would start from the bow, place one end of their poles against the river bottom, brace their shoulders against the other end, and then walk to the stern as rapidly as they could,” Grant explained. The river current was strong, but the boats made a mile an hour against it.
At Gorgona most of the soldiers of Grant’s regiment reverted to infantry form and marched off, going over the divide and down to Panama City on the Pacific. Grant kept a company behind to help him with the baggage and with the families who accompanied some of the soldiers to their new posting. He hunted up the man who had won the contract to supply the mules for the baggage and the women and children. The man, an American, didn’t have the mules on hand but promised to produce them the next day. The next day he said they would arrive the day after that. Eventually Grant realized there would be no mules; the crush of traffic on the isthmus and the consequent demand for transport had prompted the man to ignore the contract he had with the army and rent his beasts to higher bidders.
The resulting delay might have been merely annoying but for the fact that the isthmus was one of the unhealthiest places on earth. Microbesflourished in the warm, damp climate, and the human flood swamped the rudimentary sanitary system.Cholera claimed one after another of the men in Grant’s company and an even larger portion of their family members. He sent most of the still-healthy ones off on foot to join the rest of the regiment at Panama City and scrambled to find other mules for the sick, the families and the baggage. After a week he paid a local the going rate—more than twice the contracted rate—to furnish the required transport. By then the cholera had spread, killing every third person with Grant. Nor did all those who had gone ahead escape; dozens succumbed, until more than a hundred—one-seventh of those who had set out with Grant from New York—had died.
Till now Grant had sometimes wished Julia and Fred had joined him on the journey west, but the epidemic erased such thoughts. “My dearest, you never could have crossed the isthmus,” he wrote her from the safety of the ship to San Francisco. “The horrors of the road, in the rainy season, are beyond description.” Realizing she might fear for his own safety, he assured her he was fine. “We are fast approaching a better climate. The Golden Gate takes us nearly 300 miles per day.”
8
C ALIFORNIA DURING THE GOLD RUSH ATTRACTED AMBITIOUS , acquisitive types from around the globe, and nearly all of them
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