review

Riding the rails back to the Panama of the 1800s

A book review by Robert Raymer

El Caballo de Oro

by Juan David Morgan
Ediciones B
(available at Ecedra books and Gran Morrison)

Was the profit worth so much pain, so many privations, so many deaths?

from Elizabeth Benton’s diary

Panama is the site not only of the monumental engineering feat of building the famous Panama Canal, it is also the location for the monumental engineering feat of building the less-well-known Panama Railroad, the world’s first transcontinental railway, completed in 1855. Compared with the seeming-impossible Panama project, the construction of the US transcontinental railroad, inaugurated at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, seems almost a cakewalk. The Panama route was only 48-miles long to the US continental railroad construction of 1,774 miles --- over 200 times the distance of the Panama track. More than 12,000 workers lost their lives on the Panama project, while fewer that 2,000 fatalities are estimated to have resulted from the US transcontinental track laying. The Panama Railroad cost about $145,833 per mile (about $7 million --- or about seven times its initial estimate), compared with an average of about $35,000 per mile for the US route.

Panamanian author Juan David Morgan’s “El Caballo de Oro” (The Golden Horse) is a both intimate and panoramic tale of the almost overwhelming difficulties the builders of the Panama Railroad faced in order to traverse from Atlantic to Pacific oceans across the swamps and jungles of the Isthmus of Panama in the mid-19th century --- including filling in a viscous, deadly swamp in order to create the terminal city of Aspinwall, later called Colon. It is the story of struggle to the point of exhaustion and despair and victory snatched from the brink of seemingly certain defeat. It is also the biographical moments of numerous anonymous men from around the globe so impoverished that they were anxious for jobs at a few dollars a day in a pestilent jungle where their chances of surviving did not pass 50 percent and where the many who died --- most from “Chagres fever” or yellow fever, at a time when mosquitoes were thought to be no more than nuisances --- were buried unmourned in unmarked graves, if they were lucky, or pickled in brine in a barrel by the eccentric Dr. Totten and sold to medical schools around the globe to help pay for his financially struggling hospital for the moribund construction workers. Hundreds of Chinese railroad workers died in a particularly sad, unique manner.

The novel’s title, The Golden Horse --- compare with the iron horse of US railroad lore --- refers to the financial gold mine that the Panama Railroad turned out to be, albeit briefly, for its US investors at New York’s Aspinwall & Howland transportation company at a time when gold fever drove men by the thousands to desert their homes and families to rush to the California gold fields before the nuggets disappeared. The narrow Isthmus of Panama was a magnet for the transit from ocean to ocean. Although the novel is in Spanish, it is written from its mostly American protagonists’ points of view, with an effective mixture of narrative and diary entries from the main characters that keeps the reader interested. Heroine Elizabeth Benton is the rebellious daughter of a Missouri senator destined to find in Panama the deepest love and most tragic loss; famous travel writer and investor John Lloyd Stephens is one of Elizabeth’s husbands and president of the Panama Railroad; sea captain Cleveland Forbes is valiant, but unlucky in love. Numerous other players people the novel, including the notable former Texas Ranger Randolph “Ran” Runnels, hired by Aspinwall & Howland to eliminate the scourge of highway bandit murderers who operated along the route across a then essentially lawless Panama, a department of a constantly civil warring New Granada (later to be known as Colombia). The mystic Texan, on his own sacred mission, accomplished his task in a very effective, if macabre, fashion --- even if it did horrify both his employers and the isthmian population.  

The narrative of author and otherwise lawyer Juan David Morgan --- who has written several other novels in Spanish using the pen name Jorge Tomas --- paints vivid pictures of the fatalism and hardness of life in the expansive, pre-modern medicine mid-19th century world in general and in particular the changes wrought in a once poor backwater but tranquil Isthmus of Panama that tasted prosperity from the passage of the thousands of goldfields-destined Argonauts but at the cost of sometimes terrible social change. The accompanying benefits of racial and cultural diversity reverberate yet today in the modern Republic of Panama. One notable incident was the so-called “Watermelon War,” a brief  though violent clash of cultures described almost at the novel’s denouement, which leads directly to one of this story's most tragic and unexpected losses.

The well-researched El Caballo de Oro, the story of the building of the Panama Railway --- still in operation today as the Panama Canal Railroad --- will satisfy both history buffs and aficionados of a good historical novel. Although an English translation is in the works, those who read Spanish will find this smoothly-written, 448-page epic an enjoyable read indeed.

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