Incident On The Isthmus (June 1968 | Volume: 19, Issue: 4)

Incident On The Isthmus

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Authors: John Castillo Kennedy

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June 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 4

In the telegraph room of the Panama Railroad station the operator was tapping out an anguished message to the company’s chief engineer in Aspinwall, miles away across the Isthmus: bullets were coming through the room, it said, and the telegrapher added, “I shall be shot. I must go.” But there was no place to go. It was no longer possible even to send a telegram; outside, a mob had just torn down the telegraph wires.

Downstairs, in the darkness, the battering of the doors continued. Men were piled in a human barricade against them, while scores of others crouched on the floor, trying to escape the bullets coming up from outside. At the back of the building a group of natives was bringing burning coals to set the building on fire.

White men, women, and children at the mercy of a mob of natives—either a scene from poor-grade fiction or, if true in fact, surely the by-product of long years of oppression. The scene was true enough in this case, but it came in 1856, early in the relationship between the United States and Panama (then a state of New Granada, which later became Colombia). The relationship had begun in the late 1840’s, when thousands of Americans first began hurrying across the Isthmus en route to the gold fields of California.

Earlier on this Tuesday, April 15, 1856, nine hundred and forty people, more than half of them women and children, had arrived at the port of Aspinwall (present-day Colon), the United States Mail Steamship Company’s Atlantic terminus. They had gone directly to the waiting coaches of the American-owned Panama Railroad, and four hours later—at about four-thirty—they were at the railroad’s depot on the Pacific.

They could go no farther for the time being. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s John L. Stephens , which would take them to San Francisco, was anchored in the bay, but the steamer Taboga , which would ferry them out to the Stephens , was stranded in the mud at the foot of the railroad wharf and would remain mired until the tide came in late that night.

The railroad terminal was situated along the beach three eighths of a mile north of the walled city of Panama. The station building was a split-level structure built of plain pine boards. The lower floor, seven feet off the ground, was primarily a freight room, with a baggage room and a railroad and ticket office at the eastern, or beach, end of the building. On that same end, stairs led up to three more offices and a telegraph room on the second floor.

It had not been built with passenger comfort in mind. Nowhere in the building, or anywhere else on the grounds, was there anything resembling a waiting room, unless one cared to sit on a trunk in the baggage room. The ticket office opened onto