Reflections on leaving Panama

Looking out the windows of the Boeing 757 taking me away from Panama it remains hard to believe that the railroad (1850-55) and then the canal were built.  They had no aircraft and therefore could not perform aerial surveys of a roadless unknown country.  They had no insect repellant in a place swarming with mosquitoes, sand flies, and other sources of nasty bites (so perhaps it was for the best that, until the Americans came along, nobody believed that mosquitoes caused malaria and yellow fever).  The development of this country is a remarkable tribute to the triumph of energy over natural caution. 

Most of that energy came from the American West.  The California gold rush of 1849 provided the impetus for the construction of the railroad and most of its initial revenue.  When the French effort failed two citizens of Medora, North Dakota played key roles.  The best-known is
that of one-time rancher Theodore Roosevelt.  As president of the United States in 1903 it was Roosevelt who encouraged Panamanians to secede from Columbia and subsequently approved taking over the French concession in the isthmus.  Canal historian David McCullough in Brave Companions writes about another Medoran in his book Brave Companions.

Antoine Amedee-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Mores, was a French aristocrat married to the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street banker.  Of North Dakota the Marquis wrote “I like this country for there is room to move about without stepping on the feet of others.”  He invested much of his wealth in the North Dakota badlands, in a local slaughterhouse, and in refrigerated rail cars to deliver beef to markets in the East, in competition with the Chicago stockyards.  Roosevelt was frequently a guest in the Marquis’s house in Medora until a cruel winter drove them and their herds out. The Marquis blamed the failure of his enterprise on “the Jewish beef trust” and, upon returning to France, satisfied the French public’s demand to know what had gone wrong with their sea level canal with the explanation that the Jews were to blame.  The Marquis successfully stirred many thousands of his countrymen to anti-Jewish riots regarding the canal and subsequently played an important role in the Dreyfus Affair.  He was less successful outside France. According to McCullough, the Marquis was “murdered in June 1896 by a band of Tuareg tribesmen in North Africa”, where he had been engaged in an effort to “united the Muslims under the French flag in an all-out holy war against the Jews and the English.”