Panama, past and present/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
HOW WE LIVE ON THE ISTHMUS TO-DAY[1]
WHEN Bill Smith, steam-shovelman, went to Panama in 1904, he wrote to his wife in Kansas City that it looked to him like a pretty tough camp. The food was bad and the water was worse, and there wasn't enough of either. His quarters were in an old French house full of scorpions, and the only mirror he could find to shave himself in was a broken piece of window-glass tilted back against the wall. Some of the boys were living in tents, and others in native shacks with mud floors, thatched roofs full of snakes, and walls you could throw a cat through. There was no place for a man to go after he finished his day's work but a saloon full of bad liquor or a crooked gambling-house. Two of the men who came down with him had died of fever, and three more had gone back on the next boat north. But Bill Smith thought he would stick it out a little longer. It took more than a little courage to make that resolution in 1904.
In 1912, Bill is still on the Isthmus, and Mrs. Smith and the children are there too. They are living rent-free in a "Type 17 House," a neat little cottage that Uncle Sam has not only built for them, but also furnished, from the concrete piles it stands on, to the ventilator in the galvanized-iron roof. Grass rugs, mission furniture, silverware, bed linen, coal for the kitchen range, all are provided by the United States Government, to say nothing of free electric light, and a free government telephone. The wide veranda is screened with copper netting (iron would rust too quickly) to keep out the few mosquitos that have escaped Colonel Gorgas. The garden is planted with flowers provided by the quartermaster's department, and a cement walk leads to the macadamized and electric-lighted street that eight years ago was covered with primeval jungle.
They dine well at the Smiths', though virtually every mouthful of their food has to be brought by sea from New York or New Orleans, in ships fitted with cold-storage. From the great storehouse at Mount Hope, every morning a long train of refrigerator-cars crosses the Isthmus, and brings fresh supplies to the hotels and local commissaries in all the camps and towns. A bachelor, quartered in a hotel, comes down from his comfortably furnished room that costs him nothing, to a meal that costs him thirty cents, and which he would be lucky to get in New York for less than a dollar. Mrs. Smith buys her meat and groceries at the commissary store at wholesale prices. But in neither case is anything sold for money. Everything is paid for with checks torn out of booklets issued to employees and charged against their salaries, and with these you can buy anything from a pair of khaki trousers to an ice-cream soda. For Uncle Sam began by supplying frontier necessities, and ended by providing every luxury that you would expect to find in a thriving community of ten thousand Americans.
STREET OF MARRIED QUARTERS AT PEDRO MIGUEL.
TYPICAL DINING ROOM IN ISTHMIAN CANAL
COMMISSION HOTEL.
The life of the five thousand American engineers and clerks and foremen, and that of their wives and children, is very much like what it would be at home. Though it is summer all the year round, the temperature seldom rises above eighty-six, and it is always cool and pleasant at night. There are band concerts, and firemen's tournaments,—there is a well-equipped and efficient fire department,—and women's clubs, and church societies, and a Panama Canal baseball league.
Hundreds of sturdy, sunburned American children (for though the English cannot raise healthy white children in India, we can in Panama) go galloping about on little native ponies, or study in the Canal Zone public schools. The pupils of the high school publish a monthly paper called the Zonian. Several patrols of boy-scouts have been organized, and they have the advantage of a real jungle to scout in.
Uncle Sam had no intention of becoming a benevolent landlord and caterer when he went to Panama to dig the Canal. But in order to get the best class of American workingmen, and keep them fit to do their best work, he had to keep adding one thing after another, until now there are government laundries, bakeries with automatic pie, cake, and breadmaking machines, electric-light plants, ice factories, plants for roasting coffee and freezing ice cream; a harness shop, livery stables, printing-press, and an official newspaper, the Canal Record.
If Bill Smith were struck by a flying fragment of rock after a too-heavy blast in the Cut, he would find a first-aid package beside his seat on the steam-shovel, receive free treatment at Ancon or Colon Hospital, and spend his convalescence at the comfortable rest-home on the beautiful island of Taboga in Panama Bay. Instead of losing his pay in gambling, which is strictly forbidden and effectively kept out of the Zone, he and the other employees send home over a quarter of a million dollars worth of postal money-orders every month. He no longer spends his noon hours and evenings at a saloon, but at one of the Government club-houses or recreation-buildings, reading, bowling, playing basket-ball, and otherwise enjoying himself. Or he can drop into the lodge-room of his fraternal order,—as an "old Canal man" of 1904, Bill Smith would certainly belong either to the "Incas," or the "Society of the Chagres." He works for union hours for better than union pay, and every year he and his family are given first-class passages at reduced rates to New York and back on one of the Government-owned ships of the Panama Railroad Steamship Line, and a six-weeks' vacation in the United States.
Bill Smith is not a real man, but his name is the only thing about him that is "make-believe." He is a typical example of the employees on the "gold roll," virtually all of whom are American citizens. But even with such housing and treatment and an annual trip to colder and more bracing air, a northern white man could not do good pick-and-shovel work in the tropics. So the great bulk of the force, below the grade of foreman, is drawn from the warmer parts of the world. Because they were at first paid in Panamanian silver, whose face value is worth only half that of American gold, they are known as the "silver roll men."
Of the thirty thousand and more common laborers, 
SHIFTING TRACK BY HAND.
TRACK SHIFTING MACHINE.
the great majority are negroes from Jamaica or Barbados, or other parts of the British West Indies. They are very peaceable and law-abiding fellows, but exceedingly lazy, and unbelievably stupid. There is room in their heads for exactly one idea at a time, and no more. One of them was given a red flag by the foreman of a section-gang on the Panama Railroad, and told to go round the curve and stop any train that might come along, while they replaced a rail. He went to his post, and just as they had taken up the rail, a switch-engine came sailing round the corner, flew off the track, and nearly killed two men. When they asked the Jamaican why he had failed to flag it, he replied, "You told me to stop trains. That wasn't a train, it was a locomotive."
When the Irish-American foreman started to say what he thought of him, the Jamaican ran away to the British consul, and complained that he was being called names. These big, strong, black men have to be looked after like so many children. Before we stopped them, they used to sleep in their rain-soaked clothes, waste their lunch-money on perfumery or lottery-tickets, and come to their work half-starved and sickly. Now they get three good hot meals a day, besides better pay and quarters than they ever dreamed of in Jamaica. Besides, they have learned that if they do not work, we can get other men to fill their places.
To stimulate the Jamaicans by competition, we have brought over several thousand peasants from Galicia, in the north of Spain, and these men, being strong and healthy and used to labor in a hot climate for a fraction of what they earn on the Isthmus, do very good work. Each of them gets twice as much as a Jamaican, and more than earns it. Many of the Gallegos stick to their picturesque flat velvet caps and gay sashes. Then there are Italians, and Greeks, and Armenians, and Turks, and French-speaking negroes from Martinique, and turbaned coolies from India, and ever so many more besides. There are no Chinese or Japanese coolies, because the Republic of Panama excludes them by law, as does the United States. But almost everywhere in the two cities and the Zone, you can find a prosperous Chinese storekeeper, who was a coolie in the days of de Lesseps.
It is a motley and interesting crowd that throngs round the pay-car when it goes over the line twice a month. At every stop the men file up steps on one side of the car and down the other, past open counters piled high with silver and gold. (Several times the springs of the pay-car have been broken by the weight of its load of coin.) The men are paid, not by name, because most of them cannot write, and many of them often change their names whenever a new one strikes their fancy, but by the number on the brass check which every employee carries at his belt. There has never been any attempt to "hold up" the pay-train, though it is only guarded by half a dozen policemen. But they are very bad men to start a fight with, these tall, bronzed ex-troopers of the United States Cavalry, in the smart olive-green uniform of the Zone Police. They are the men who have made brigandage a lost art on the Isthmus, and taught the Panamanians to vote with ballots instead of machetes and Mauser rifles. About two hundred and fifty of this efficient little military constabulary, much resembling the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police, keep the four hundred square miles of the Canal Zone as peaceful as a New England village on Sunday morning. All the officers and first-class troopers of this force are Americans, and about seventy-five second-class troopers are Jamaican negroes, who have served in the British West Indian Constabulary, or the British West Indian Regiment. These are very fine, soldierly men, far more intelligent than the average Jamaican. They are used to police their own countrymen on the Isthmus, which they do with much more tact and less friction than an American could.
Any one who mistakes the Canal Zone of to-day for a lawless frontier community is more than likely to find himself making roads with the rest of the chain-gang. There are three United States Circuit Courts on the
SEAL OF THE CANAL
ZONE.
From Official Handbook.
Isthmus, and the three justices sit together as the Supreme Court of the Canal Zone. As a rule, they sit without a jury, for most of the laborers come from countries where jury trials are unknown. Interpreters skilled in many tongues are as much needed as in the police courts of New York. A code of laws has been put in force, to take the place of the clumsy and cruel old Spanish laws we found when we came to the Isthmus. A penitentiary at Culebra contains such prisoners as are not working on the roads. If a convict breaks jail, there is no place for him to run to, for on each side of the Canal Zone stretches almost unbroken jungle, and there is a Zone policeman standing at the gangway of every steamer.
Roads were an unknown luxury on the Isthmus in 1904, except for the muddy streets of the towns and a few rough trails through the jungle. Now there are many miles of macadamized highway, with concrete drains and bridges, and some day these will be connected to form an automobile speedway from ocean to ocean. One of the first-built and best-known bits of road is the three-mile drive from Panama City out over the beautiful rolling plain of Las Sabanas, to where the red-roofed haciendas, or summer bungalows, of the native aristocracy stand under the palm-trees. Here the rich citizens of Panama City spend the dry season, in primitive shacks, all doors and no windows, that an American dry-goods clerk would turn up his nose at for a week-end camp. But even the poorest of them has plenty of grounds round it and a more or less elaborate gateway, and if you do not go near enough to notice the sickly chickens peeking round the touring-car in the drive, and the fat women in loose wrappers shading themselves on the veranda, the effect is not so bad.
When I was writing this book at my father's house in Ancon, in the dry season of 1912, we used frequently to take a gallop on Las Sabanas in the afternoons. Very varied and interesting were the people we met on the road: pretty American trained-nurses riding astride, and rice-powdered señoritas leaning back in victorias; a farmer from the hills, with rude sandals on his feet and a three-foot machete thrust through his red sash, driving three tiny donkeys laden with yams and cocoanuts; a string of motor-cars full of American tourists, bound for the ruins of Old Panama (they'll be going there in trolley-cars before the Canal is opened); a big Zone Police trooper saluting the President of Panama in his heavy carriage, painted with the arms of the republic; and two black-robed priests talking to a sturdy negro boy, whose only covering was the water running down his back from the five-gallon Standard Oil tin he was carrying on his shoulder, by way of a bucket. Often, when we cantered home through the swarming negro suburb of Calidonia, and up over the high-arched bridge across the tracks at the Panama Railroad station, I thought how for a hundred yards that road had been covered with dead and dying men, when a charging column of revolutionists was raked by a machine-gun placed on that bridge and operated by an American soldier of fortune in the Colombian service. That was in the unsuccessful revolution of 1901. To-day that soldier of fortune is a drill-foreman in the Cut.
At the Panama Railroad station (they are building a handsome new one of terra-cotta and concrete), you can take a "spickety" cab to any part of Panama City, or the American suburb of Ancon for ten cents, American, or twenty cents, spickety. What is "spickety"? When the Americans first came to the Isthmus, the drivers of the native cabs (rickety little two-seated buggies drawn by ponies as big as rabbits) used to cry, "Me speak it, the English!" which meant "I speak English," but sounded like "Me spickety English." So our men began to call their speech "spickety English," and their cabs "spickety cabs," and now everything Panamanian is spickety.
On the side of Ancon Hill, a small volcano, extinct since prehistoric times, between the port of Balboa and the city of Panama, is the American settlement of Ancon. It is a very beautiful town, that has no named or numbered streets, but is like a garden laid out in terraces with pretty little houses here and there, and a big red-tiled administration building for the Governor, and the Canal Commissioners. Here, too, is the Ancon Hospital, built by the French, and a large hotel, called the Tivoli, that is run by the United States Government through the War Department. It was built as a social center for the Americans on the canal force, and they are changed two-thirds as much as the tourists that stop there. The Tivoli would be considered a very good summer hotel anywhere in the United States, and if you want to engage a room there during the dry season, when the flood of visitors is at its height, you had better cable in advance.
Two white posts on either side of the road from the Tivoli to the railroad station mark the Zone line, and the place where a President of the United States first entered foreign territory. That was in 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt drove down the Avenida Central, and made a speech from the steps of the cathedral.
The Avenida Central or Central Avenue—a hundred years ago they called it the Calle Real or the Royal Road—is the great thoroughfare of Panama City. It runs from the railroad station to the Cathedral Plaza. For the first mile or so it passes through the tawdry new 
A SQUAD OF MOUNTED ZONE-POLICE IN THE FRONT OF THE ANCON HOSPITAL.
quarter that has shot up like a Western boom-town since 1904, round what used to be the little suburb of Santa Anna, outside the city wall. The old church of Santa Anna—once the family chapel of a Spanish grandee—still stands on the plaza of that name, with a dance-hall on one side, a vaudeville theater on the other, and saloons all round it.
A few blocks beyond Santa Anna Plaza, you pass a street-shrine with ever-lighted candles that marks the site of the landward gate, and enter the old part of the town. Here the houses have walls three feet thick, and narrow windows with very stout shutters, for, in the disorderly old days, it was frequently necessary to turn them into fortresses on short notice. Even the churches were loopholed for musketry, and they are still connected by underground passages with the cathedral in the center of the town. When you walk down one of the narrow streets at night, under the long double row of Spanish balconies, you half expect to see a file of halberdiers go clanking past in the moonlight, or to hear the "clink and fall of swords." But all you hear is a cheap phonograph playing an American popular song of the year before last, and the only armed men you meet are self-important little native policemen, about four and a half feet high. It takes several of them to arrest one drunken Canal laborer.
This national police is the nearest approach to an army they have in Panama. On the site of the old Colombian barracks, the Panamanians have built a handsome Government Palace, that is a combination White House, Treasury Building, and National Theater. Whenever the President wishes to go to the theater, all he has to do is to walk down a short corridor running directly from his apartments to his official box.
Over on the other side of the city, just across the street from Ancon, stands the new National Institute, that is to be the university and normal school of Panama. At present, its pupils have not advanced beyond the primary grades, which speaks eloquently of the lack of public education under the old régime, and the determination of the Panamanians that their children shall not grow up in ignorance.
Some of the other "improvements" the Panamanians have made are, unfortunately, in much worse taste. They have painted the time-mellowed cathedral and most of the churches—the oldest of which was built in 1688—until they look like brand-new suburban villas; they have clapped a tin roof over the moss-grown tiles of the lovely little chapel on Taboga Island, turned the ruined Jesuit monastery into an apartment-house, and are now proposing to tear down what is left of the Church of San Domingo, with its famous earthquake-defying "flat arch," that "is the wonder of every visiting engineer and architect. Even if they care nothing for the monuments of their own past, any European hotel-keeper could tell the Panamanians that they would make more money by exhibiting their ruins to American tourists than by tearing them down.
Almost everybody you meet on the streets of Panama wears American ready-made clothing, and there is almost nothing in the stores but cheap American goods. Every year a few ship loads of German-made curios and imitation Panama hats are imported to sell to the tourists. The finest and softest of the so-called "Panama" hats—the kind you can fold up and put in an envelope without cracking them—are made in Ecuador, and a coarser sort in Peru. No Panama hats are made in Panama. In fact, there are no manufactures there of any sort, and therefore, as everything must be imported, there is only a low tariff. As a result, you can sometimes buy Chinese silks or European novelties for less than you would pay in the United States, and there are one or two little shops where genuine Ecuador hats are sold for a quarter of what they would bring in New York. Or, if you are very lucky, you may be able to pick up a necklace of old Spanish goldsmith's work, but there are not many of those left. Most of the things that are shown you on the Isthmus as "old Spanish" are about as genuine as the "old Spanish gun" on that part of the sea-wall called Las Bovedas, not far from where the fishermen beach their boats at low tide, and the townspeople walk out and hold a market on the sea-bottom. This cannon—which they will tell you was used against the bucaneers—is a Parrott rifle of the type used in our Civil War, and has stamped on one of its trunnions the date "1864."
From the founding of the city to the present day, the heart and soul of Panama has been the Cathedral Plaza. Here the Isthmus declared its independence from Spain, and, later, from Colombia. After the latter event, an attempt was made to change the name of the square to "Independence Plaza," but the new name has failed to stick. The cathedral was built about the middle of the eighteenth century by a negro, who, though born the son of a poor charcoal burner, was the first of his race to become the bishop of this, the oldest diocese on the American continent. It is a bit startling to American eyes to see, in the ground-floor of the episcopal palace, the offices of the National Lottery. The drawing takes place every Sunday, between mass and the bull-fight.
PARROTT RIFLED CANNON, ON THE SEA WALL, PANAMA CITY.
Relic of American Civil War, usually mistaken for an old Spanish gun.
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OR, UNIVERSITY OF THE REPUBLIC OF PANAMA.
American Administration Building in background
bull-fighting or cock-fighting, is strictly forbidden in the Canal Zone. The worst you can say of our Sundays there is that we let our wives and sisters go to church for us in the morning, and go ourselves to baseball games in the afternoon.
The Panamanian Republican Band plays in the little park in the center of the Cathedral Plaza, every Sunday evening from eight to ten. Everybody from the President to the boot-black turns out in his best, to walk round and round the space in front of the bandstand and look at the pretty girls, or sit and sip iced drinks at a table outside one of the cafés, and criticize the music. Like all Latins, they are born musicians, those little brown bandsmen, and they play well.
But no music of theirs can stir an American's heart like that which he can hear at the camp of the Tenth United States Infantry at Empire, or of the Marines at Camp Elliott, when the men stand at attention as the flag comes slowly down, at the end of evening parade. Then you know what music means, when you hear a regimental band play "The Star-Spangled Banner," at sunset, down there in the jungle, two thousand miles from Home.
- ↑ Written in 1912.