Book Alert / Path of Empire

Path of Empire -- Panama and the California Gold Rush by Aims McGuinness, Cornell UP '08, 249 pages, ISBN #0801445213. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

With the advent of the California Gold Rush in the late 1840s, hordes of intrepid fortune-seekers trekked westward. Conventional wisdom has it that they took the arduous and sometimes treacherous land route. But as University of Wisconsin historian Aims McGuinness relates, more than 200,000 came by ship to the east coast of Panama, crossed the Isthmus of Panama that would in three generations become the Panama Canal, and then embarked on the final leg of their trip by boat to California.

The author describes the commercial hub that Panama became in those days, as gold, silver and mail was transported over the land route, a task made easier in 1855 with the completion of a railroad route, built by an American company, across the Panamanian neck. He dramatizes the frenetic activity of those days against a backdrop of Panamanian society, the abolition of slavery, establishment of universal manhood suffrage, and the creation of an autonomous Panamanian state.

The stimulation of commerce caused by use of the transcontinental route, with passage made easier with the railroad, inspired entrepreneurs and nations to envision the wealth that would accrue to whoever succeeded in digging a canal in its place. As David McCullough famously relates in The Path Between The Seas, the French first ventured forth in the 1880s and 1890s only to fall prey to the tropical terrain and malaria. It was no easier for Americans, who battled the elements for decades before finally opening what we know as the Panama Canal in 1914.