The Building of the Panama Canal

Under American jurisdiction, a population of 54,325 workers to build the panama canal. in the heart of a wilderness two thousand miles from the base of supplies.

In this population are included forty nationalities, ranging from Austrians to Canadians, from Chilians to Chinese, from Jamaicans to Scandinavians.

Of the total number of residents, nearly 20,000 are fed at Government mess tents and hotels, making a monthly average of one million meals which Uncle Sam must serve! To meet the diversified tastes of the patrons, literally a world restaurant must be maintained—in the tropical underbrush.

From the ten-cent rations of the West Indian negro and the twelve-and-a-half-cent meal of the European laborer, the scale ranges upward to the thirty-cent menu of the Government hotel—and not one pound of the tons of provisions consumed is obtained from the Isthmus itself. A transportation problem of nearly twenty-five hundred miles must enter into the preparation of every meal.

Further, the Government must supply provisions to those residents who do not board at Federal quarters. The commissary department carries a pay-roll of 524 employees and its monthly expenses total $350,000. Entries such as the distribution of fifteen tons of rice and three tons of sugar a week are common in this wilderness department-store.

In the shadow of the jungle, have likewise been established a Federal cold-storage plant, with a capacity of 620 tons, from which 435,000 pounds of beef alone are distributed each month —an artificial ice factory, producing sixty tons daily, seven days in the week,— and a Government bakery turning out 18,000 loaves every 24 hours, with no Sunday rest!

In the same list follow a Federal laundry and a printing office, with plans under way for macaroni, coffee-roasting, pie-and-cake-baking plants, and even a tailoring establishment! A jungle police force with 208 members has been formed, eleven fire-engine stations have been erected, 24 schools have been organized on this Central American frontier with one thousand enrolment, and the Canal Commission has lately added to its pay-roll eleven chaplains. American energy has even installed eight hundred telephones in the wilderness!

Consider the starting point. The canal was buried under a mass of tropical vegetation. A settlement was unearthed by the Government engineers after days of backcramping

labors, where even the blade of the

machete seldom found room to strike. Thirtytwo

solidly constructed buildings—nine married

quarters, twenty-two barracks, and a machine

shop dating from the glory of De Lesseps—were

uncovered beneath the tangled tons of foliage,

which had hidden them so completely that their

existence was entirely unsuspected. As dusty pigeon-

holes unfolded the history of the settlement,

it developed that it had disappeared from the

records of men.when the French had been routed

from the Canal Zone a generation ago—with

millions of francs in useless equipment behind

them and millions of francs in useless debt before

them. It had needed but twenty-five years for

the talons of the jungle to bury a village large

enough to shelter a thousand men!

This is