a most expensive building was put up near La Boca (now Balboa). The preparation of the grounds, the building, and the roads thereto, cost upwards of $150,000."[1]
When the Americans came to the Isthmus, they found three of these private Pullmans, on a railroad scarcely fifty miles long; a stableful of carriages, and acres of ornamental grounds, with avenues shaded by beautiful royal palms from Cuba. There was one warehouse full of what looked like wooden snow-shovels, but were probably designed for shoveling sand, which is not found on the canal line, and in another were several thousand oil torches for the parade at the opening of the Canal. When we consider these things, the wonder is, not that the French failed to dig the Canal, but that they dug as much as they did. Our army engineers speak very highly of their predecessors' plans and surveys. The French suffered, like the Scotch in Darien, from the lack of a leader, for there was usually a new chief engineer every six months, and the work was split up among six large contractors and many small ones. Though the engineers who directed the work were French, the two contractors who did most of the digging were not. It was a Dutch firm (Artigue, Sonderegger & Co.) that took a surprisingly large quantity of dirt out of the Gaillard Cut, with clumsy excavators that could only work in soft ground, and little Belgian locomotives and cars that look as if they came out of a toy-shop. The dredges and other floating equipment were much better, and many of them are still in use. Most of these dredges were built in Scotland. But it was an American firm (the
- ↑ Dr. Wolf red Nelson, "Five Years in Panama."
