Senator John Tyler Morgan, a long-time Nicaragua supporter, championed that route. On the other hand was the “Panama Lobby,” led by William Nelson Cromwell and, yes, he was back again, Philippe Bunau-Varilla. As Bunau-Varilla personally held shares in the French company, his interest in seeing them bought out was clearly not unselfish. Nor were Cromwell’s motives. A lawyer who at the same time was a shareholder, a company director and represented the Panama Railroad Company, he hoped to make big money out of the deal and, as a matter of fact, did, with a fee of $800,000 for services rendered.
Senator Mark Hanna was also in favor of the Panama route for technical reasons, reasons already provided in engineering reports. The Panama waterway would be shorter, straighter, take less time to transit, would require fewer locks, had better harbors, already had a railroad and would cost less to run.
Hanna’s speech and support before the Senate were impressive, but not enough so to change the number of votes required. But it was Bunau-Varilla who turned the tide. To each senator he mailed a letter enclosing a one-centavo stamp showing a Nicaraguan landscape. In the background, the famous Momotombo volcano was depicted in full eruption. The stamp clearly pointed out the differences between the two countries — one with active volcanoes, the other comparatively stable. On June 19, 1902, the Senate vote favored a Panama canal route by just eight votes.
That it was the technical, engineering viewpoint that prevailed was significant. The most vociferous and articulate of the engineers favoring Panama was George Shattuck Morison. Morison is credited with changing many important minds about the canal route, including Walker, Hanna and even President Roosevelt, to whom he wrote a letter on December 10, 1901, detailing the technical reasons and his own person convictions for building the Canal through Panama. Roosevelt would later credit “engineers” for helping make up his mind.
With the route decided, it was now time to begin negotiations with Colombia for a concession to build a canal through the Colombian province of Panama. The resulting Hay-Herran Treaty, developed by Colombian charge d’affaires Dr. Tomas Herran and U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, was rejected by Colombia. Roosevelt, reportedly furious, was not inclined to continue negotiations.
Impatient to build the canal, Roosevelt supported Panama’s independence movement. And he was willing to put forth a show of military force, dispatching warships to both sides of the Isthmus – the Atlanta, Maine, Mayflower and Prairie at Colon and the Boston, Marblehead, Concord and Wyoming at Panama City – thus effectively blocking the sea approaches. Troops not only protected the railroad, but were also sent into the interior to block access from those areas. A land approach by a Colombian force of 2,000 was defeated by the Darien jungle and forced to turn back.
Roosevelt would later boast that “…I took the isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me.” Without the U.S. military presence it is doubtful that the Panama independence movement would have succeeded.
Panama declared independence from Colombia on November 3, 1903. The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty was negotiated by the new republic’s “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary” Philippe Bunau-Varilla with John Hay. The new treaty was sent to Panama for ratification. The treaty granted to the United States as if sovereign a canal concession in perpetuity to a canal zone 10 miles wide, 5 miles on either side of the Canal prism line. Whether they liked it or not, the founders of Panama had little choice but to accede, as to refuse would have withdrawn all U.S. support from the fledgling republic and further dealings with Colombia. It was this arrangement, however, that gave the United States the control it needed in this vastly underdeveloped country to get the monumental job of canal construction done.
The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty was ratified in Panama on December 2, 1903, and in the United States on February 23, 1904. Roosevelt’s audacious move had succeeded for the United States, but not without political repercussions in U.S./Latin American relations for years to come. Upon the treaty’s ratification in the United States on February 23, 1904, Panama received a payment of $10 million. Three days later, Bunau-Varilla resigned and returned to France.
The beginning of the U.S. canal construction effort dates from May 4, 1904, when, in a brief ceremony, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officer Lieutenant Mark Brooke received the keys to the storehouses and Ancon Hospital. Chief Sanitary Officer Dr .William Crawford Gorgas and his staff were among the first to arrive and set up operations.
Medical researchers at around this time were becoming more receptive to the idea of a relationship between mosquitoes and malaria and yellow fever. Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay, as early as 1881, had become convinced that yellow fever was transmitted by a specific mosquito vector, the Stegomyia fasciata (later to be named the Aedes aegypti). The only problem was that he couldn’t prove what appeared to most at the time to be a totally far-fetched theory. However, others would take their lead from Finlay. Dr. Henry Rose Carter doing research in Mississippi discovered “extrinsic incubation,” the fact that a specific period of time was involved in the person to person transmittal of the disease. However, the great yellow fever discoveries in Cuba in 1900 were the work of Dr. Walter Reed, who happened at the time to be Gorgas’ commanding officer, who proved that Stegomyia fasciata was the carrier, debunking all previous theories, including the belief that “fomites,” the term used for the soiled clothes or bedding of yellow fever victims, could spread the disease. Gorgas, himself a yellow fever survivor and thus immune to the disease, was a particularly valuable member of the medical team. Still skeptical, however, he suggested to Reed that, to prove the theory once and for all, Havana needed to be rid of the Stegomyia fasciata and the results observed. Gorgas, with Reed’s approval, began the work in February of 1901. Results showed a dramatic reduction in yellow fever cases – from 1,400 known cases in 1900, to only 37 cases in 1901; none of them after October. The eradication procedures didn’t just kill off the Stegomyia fasciata, but reduced the Anopheles population as well, thus decreasing malaria cases by more than half. These same techniques were what Gorgas brought with him to Panama in 1904.
The breeding habits of the Stegomyia, which leads them to flourish in and around human habitations, made them much easier to kill than the malaria-carrying Anopheles, which are found everywhere – jungles as well as back yards, making them very difficult to control. Besides, as Gorgas continually stressed, malaria was far more dangerous than yellow fever, accounting for the largest loss of life during the French years.
For Gorgas, it was urgent to get a jump on mosquito eradication before new, non-immune workers arrived and became infected. Unfortunately, Gorgas’s superiors in the first Isthmian Canal Commission didn’t take seriously the new scientific discoveries and thus did not support Gorgas’s efforts. Even after a 1903 scientific congress in Paris reviewed Reeds yellow fever work and proclaimed it “scientifically determined fact,” Commission officials continued to believe Gorgas’s efforts to be a waste of time and money.
The Isthmian Canal Commission’s first chief Engineer, John F. Wallace, numbered among the nonbelievers. However, John F. Stevens, Wallace’s successor in 1905, provided Gorgas full support and funding. Gorgas would later write, “The moral effect of so high an official taking such a stand at this period…was very great, and it is hard to estimate how much sanitation on the Isthmus owes to this gentleman for its subsequent success.” Stevens’s actions appear even more admirable, as he would later state, “Like probably many others I had gained some little idea of the mosquito theory, but, like most laymen, I had little faith in its effectiveness, or even dreamed of its tremendous importance.”
The work to combat yellow fever included screening windows and doors, house-by-house fumigation of Panama City and Colon and weekly oiling of cisterns and cesspools. A most important advance was providing running water to Panama City, Colon and other townsites to do away with the need for the domestic water containers that served as perfect breeding sites for the yellow fever vector mosquito
As a result of Gorgas’s crusade, yellow fever was completely and permanently wiped out on the Isthmus, with the last case reported in Panama City on November 11, 1905.
Malaria, unlike yellow fever, does not confer immunity. With the disease endemic on the Isthmus, there were repeated opportunities to lay its victims low by debilitation or death. It actually was the cause of more deaths during the French and U.S. construction periods than was yellow fever. During the first year of the American effort, 1905, nearly all of the American force, including Gorgas, had contracted malaria after only a month on the Isthmus. Gorgas was to say, “If we can control malaria, I feel very little anxiety about other diseases. If we do not control malaria our mortality is going to be heavy.” A comparison between eradicating the two kinds of mosquitoes likened getting rid of the yellow fever carrier to “making war on the family cat,” while a campaign against the malaria-carrying mosquito was “like fighting all the beasts of the jungle.”
Reducing and eradicating the swarms of malarial mosquitoes was a huge task. Research, however, revealed valuable information. Knowing that the Anopheles mosquito cannot fly far without lighting on some sort of vegetation, 200-yard-wide areas were cleared around where people lived and worked. Sanitation teams drained more than 100 square miles of swamp, built nearly a thousand miles of earthen ditching, some 300 miles of concrete ditch, 200 miles of rock-filled trench, almost 200 miles of tile drain, cut hundreds of acres of wild vegetation, sprayed standing water with thousands of gallons of oil, hatched and released thousands of minnows to eat the Anopheles larvae and bred spiders, ants, lizards to feed on adult insects. To keep vegetation such as grass and algae from preventing the free spread of the larvae-smothering oil, some 200 barrels of poison (a mixture of carbolic acid, resin and caustic soda) were applied monthly around the edges of water pools and streams. While these efforts covered only a small fraction of the Zone area, they efficiently reduced malaria incidence in populated areas. Two hundred and eleven employees died of malaria during fiscal year 1906-1907, declining significantly from a peak of 7.45 per 1,000 in 1906 to .30 per 1,000 in 1913. This achievement greatly increased American chances of canal-building success. A 1941 report stated that, during the past 20 years, there were only 7 deaths from malaria among employees.
Native villages and towns in the Canal Zone, in accordance with Articles VI and XV of the 1903 treaty, were required to move. Legal owners thus required to vacate were compensated for their property. Many inhabitants were required to relocate with the filling of Gatun Lake. Many of these sites dated from early days of Chagres River navigation, when the route was a much used commercial route across the Isthmus. Such settlements included Ahorca Lagarto, Barbacoas, Caimito, Matachin, Bailamonos, Santa Cruz, Cruz de Juan Gallego and Cruces. Following Canal completion, still other townsites were no longer needed and were abandoned. These towns, some built on the sites of existing French era towns, such as Emperador, called “Empire” by the Americans and the location of steam shovel repair shops and the Central Division engineering office in charge of Culebra Cut excavation. On the other hand, Culebra, the American headquarters, was newly built. Many of these were never intended to be permanent.
Many problems had to be confronted immediately and solved by John F. Stevens, chief engineer between July 1, 1905 and April 1, 1907. As Panama was, to say the least, insufficiently developed or equipped to support the additional population created by the growing Canal labor force, a great deal of planning went into providing proper housing and an adequate food supply. Virtually everything that was needed for Canal construction, from equipment and building supplies to a labor force and food, would have to be brought to the Isthmus and distributed efficiently along the line of the canal. The Panama Railroad, which Stevens saw at once to be the lifeline of Canal construction, was completely overhauled. The lightweight, inadequate and mismatched equipment of the French was replaced with the best and toughest available, for this railroad would not only distribute workers, materials and supplies, but also would haul away the dirt and rock excavated from the channel. Stevens was to say, “This is no reflection on the French, but I cannot conceive how they did the work they did with the plant they had.” Heavier track, engines, freight cars, dump cars and refrigerator cars were ordered, and bridges signals and sidings were upgraded and improved. Also required and recruited from the United States was a phalanx of trained engineers, switchmen, operators, mechanics, yard masters, train masters, dispatchers, superintendents and conductors to first put together the railroad, as all components were shipped “knocked down,” and then operate it.
All other kinds of equipment were rehabilitated or replaced as well. Communications were improved with new telegraph and telephone systems.
The size of the labor force was tripled in six months under Stevens and whole communities, including housing, mess halls, hospitals, hotels, schools churches, cold storage, clubhouses and laundries were built to accommodate them. Streets were paved in Colon and Panama City and water and sewage systems installed. At one time, nearly half of the 24 thousand-man work force was employed at constructing buildings.
Stevens also developed the ingenious system of Canal excavation and disposal of rock and soil, called “spoil.” He devised a complex but very workable and efficient system of railroad tracks at different levels within the Cut. Spoil train schedules were coordinated to the level where the excavation work was being done. Spoil train capacity kept pace with the excavation work, keeping both trains and steam shovels efficiently employed at all times.
Col. George Washington Goethals, who succeeded Stevens as chief engineer during the construction period and under whose leadership the Canal was completed, would say: “Stevens devised, designed, and made provision for practically every contingency connected with the construction and subsequent operation of the stupendous project… It is therefore to him, much more than to me, that justly belongs the honor of being the actual ‘Genius of the Panama Canal…’”
It was Stevens who convinced Roosevelt of the wisdom and necessity of building a lock rather than a sea level canal, and Stevens who lobbied the U.S. Congress and others on Capital Hill, just as had Frenchman Godin de L?pinay lobbied before the Congres International in Paris in 1879. The difference was that Stevens succeeded. Stevens, with firsthand knowledge of seeing the Chagres during flood, talked, insisted and explained the situation, using statistics and maps, repeating again and again that “the one great problem in the construction of any canal down there is the control of the Chagres River,” during intense questioning before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. He also helped draft the major Senate address by Philander Knox on June 19, 1906, on the subject of the Canal, the lock plan and Gatun Dam in particular. Two days after the Knox speech, the Senate voted for a lock canal 36 to 31; on June 27, the House followed suit. Just a narrow margin of votes stood between United States’ lock canal success and a sea level canal attempt that, in all likelihood, would have failed. Stevens would call the sea level plan “an entirely untenable proposition, an impracticable futility.” Proposed as only 150 feet wide for nearly half its length, it was seen by Stevens as “a narrow, tortuous ditch” fraught with the possibility of endless landslides. Goethals reportedly once remarked that there was not money enough in the world to construct a sea level canal across Panama. Time and construction costs aside, Stevens would still prefer a lock canal:
“It will provide a safer and quicker passage for ships… It will provide, beyond question, the best solution to the vital problem of how safely to care for the floodwater of the Chagres… Its cost of operation, maintenance and fixed charges will be much less than any sea-level canal.”
Stevens estimated completion time for a lock canal to be eight years, by January 1914; he estimated that a sea level canal couldn’t be completed in less than eighteen years, or around 1924.
With all immediate problems solved and the work going well, Stevens suddenly and inexplicably resigned, effective April 1, 1907. Amid much speculation about the reason, Stevens said nothing publicly except to say that it was “personal.” As a professional experienced in railroad engineering, the canal work, for Stevens, was a straightforward administrative and design proposition. He once noted “…the problem is one of magnitude and not miracles.” Roosevelt never had any reservations about Stevens’ technical executive ability, but Stevens’ obvious insensitivity to the fact that the canal was an undertaking of the United States government did not sit well with him.