in a single night. About this time Mr. John L. Stephens died, and his successor tried the experiment of having the great bridge and the remainder of the line built by contract. But after a valuable year had been wasted, not a tenth had been completed, and the contractors were bankrupt. Releasing them, the company, under a third and stronger president, set out to finish the work itself.
Every effort was made to assemble a strong working force, and recruits were brought from the four corners of the earth. But northern whitemen are not made for pick and shovel labor in the tropics, and the hundreds of sturdy Irish and European peasants did little but die of heat and malaria. Much was expected from a thousand Chinese coolies, but they became so demoralized by the death of some of their number from fever, in this strange and terrible land, that they were seized with a passion for suicide, and scarcely two hundred left the Isthmus alive. Some work was done by coolies from India, but the best workmen were found to be negroes from Jamaica and other islands in the West Indies.
There is a popular fable, that will be told and believed as long as the Chagres runs to the sea, that the building of the Panama Railroad cost a life for every tie. But there were about a hundred and fifty thousand ties in the fifty miles of single track, and there have never been that many inhabitants on the Isthmus since Pedrarias the Cruel killed off the Indians. As a matter of fact and record, the total number employed, from the beginning of the work to the end, was about six thousand; and the number of deaths eight hundred and thirty-five. Doubtless many others sickened on the Isthmus, and died soon
