CHAPTER XXIV
CROSSING THE ISTHMUS
Governor Stevens, with his family, consisting of his wife, four children, the two youngest being only two and four years old respectively, and the nurse Ellen, a bonny young Irish woman, sailed from New York, September 20, 1854, en route for his far Western home. The vessel was packed full, with thirteen hundred passengers. The food was execrable, meats and poultry tainted and almost uneatable. Ice was charged extra, twenty-five cents a pound. The second cabin table rivaled at times a scene from Bedlam. The hungry passengers would often hurl the spoiled chickens overboard amid loud complaints, laughter, and the imitated crowing and cackle of cocks and hens. Christy’s minstrels were on board, bound to San Francisco,—a reckless, noisy, drinking crew, but fine performers, both instrumental and vocal, and always ready and willing to entertain the passengers with their pleasing melodies. The best state-rooms were allotted the governor and family, with seats next the captain at table, but the younger children had to sit at the second table. The ship put in at Havana for a day, where the family enjoyed a delicious repast of broiled birds on toast and guava jelly at the Dominica restaurant, and viewed the cathedral and tomb of Columbus. Crossing the Caribbean sea in hot and sultry weather, they arrived at Aspinwall on the 29th.
This place was squalid, dreary, and repulsive. Low, flat, swampy morass, some filled-in land; great pools of dirty, green, stagnant water; a frail, rickety wharf, which the ship hardly dared touch lest it fall over; a railroad track along the shore; a hundred yards back, a number of large, cheap-built wooden houses, like overgrown tenement houses, unpainted and dilapidated; the street a bed of mud, littered with broken boards and refuse lumber and piles of rubbish; black pigs roaming and rooting about; many rascally and worthless-looking natives, in whom the negro predominated,—the whole thoroughly wet down by heavy, drenching, tropical showers,—such was Aspinwall, as the disappointed passengers landed, and sought the shelter of the buildings supposed to be hotels, but where almost everything was lacking except extortionate charges.
After a comfortless night and miserable breakfast, the party embarked on the cars, and proceeded about twenty miles to the “Summit,” which was half way to Panama, and as far as the road then extended, and which was reached about noon, and learned that the rest of the way across had to be made on horse or mule back. There were no animals ready, but it was announced that the party would have to wait until the next morning, when plenty of mules would be provided. Some railroad sheds, a few native huts, and a huge pavilion, consisting of an immense pyramidal thatched roof surmounting low sides mostly open, comprised the only shelters, and into them the passengers flocked.
The great pavilion belonged to a huge, jet black Jamaica negro, named Carusi, and was not partitioned off, consisting of nothing indeed but the earthen floor and the roof above it, with the low sides. At night this rude structure was thronged with the weary passengers. Delicate ladies and children, rough men, and people of every kind and condition fairly covered the floor, or rather ground, seeking rest as best they could; while in the centre of the apartment, in a big, old-fashioned, four-poster bed, lay the gigantic Carusi side by side with his fat wife, their ebony faces contrasting with the white pillows and sheets. The minstrels improved the occasion with banjo and song until late at night, when some of them, becoming drunk, began disturbing the company with oaths and obscene language, but Governor Stevens rebuked them in such stern and minatory manner that they were cowed, and relapsed into silence.
The expected mules began arriving in small bands under charge of natives about noon the next day, and with much bargaining and contention the passengers secured their mounts, and started off in groups. The governor employed two natives to carry the two youngest children, who were mere babies, on their backs in chairs, and set off followed by the rest of the family mounted each on a mule. It soon began to rain in torrents. In an hour it as suddenly ceased, and the sun came out, hot and sultry, soon to be followed by another downpour, and so deluge and sunshine alternated all day. After riding two hours over narrow, muddy trails, and up and down steep though short hills, where the mules had trodden the clay into regular steps, they reached the Chagres River, and found all the passengers who had preceded them collected on the bank, gazing in dismay on the raging yellow flood, for the stream was up under the tremendous rains, and fearing to essay its passage. After viewing the river carefully, the governor forced his mule into it, and, guiding him diagonally across, safely made the opposite bank. Then, returning, he led the way across again, his little daughter Sue, only eight years old, close behind on her mule, then the rest of the family, and after them followed all the waiting crowd. It was dark when they reached Panama, and found shelter in an old cloistered stone convent, now used as a hotel, exchanged their wet clothes for dry purchased at the nearest shop, and obtained much-needed food and rest. But nothing was seen or heard of the natives with the two babies, since they stole off on a footpath soon after starting, and late in the evening the governor mounted a fresh animal, and with a guide went back to find them, spending the greater part of the night in a vain search. At breakfast the next morning the natives brought in the children, safe and well and perfectly contented. They had taken the little ones to their huts on account of the heavy rains, where the native women fed them and put them to bed, dried their clothes, and sent them in the next morning, safe and sound.
During the day the passengers were taken out in boats to the steamer Golden Age, which was anchored in the bay three miles from the town. She was a larger and more commodious ship than the other. The voyage up the coast began the next morning. A stop of several hours was made in the land-locked harbor of Acapulco, which the governor improved by taking his family ashore, and treating them to a dinner of fried chicken at a small posada on the old and quaint paved main street. The Panama fever soon made its dreaded appearance among the passengers, owing to their exposure on the Isthmus; many fell sick, and a considerable number died and were buried at sea. The weather was fine, the sea calm and smooth save for the long rollers of the Pacific, and the voyage would have been an enjoyable one had it not been for the fearful fever and the crowded condition of the vessel. On the fourteenth day she entered the Golden Gate, and rested in the welcome port of San Francisco.
The governor took rooms at the Oriental Hotel. His wife and the three little girls were all seized with the fever on the ship, and their condition was serious when they landed. Doctors Hitchcock and Hammond, old army friends of the governor, were unremitting in their attentions, and after several weeks’ care brought the sufferers past the danger point, all except the little four-year-old Maude. Her case they at length pronounced hopeless. But her father would not give her up. He had a hot bath administered as a last resort, and sat by her bedside hour after hour, giving liquid nourishment drop by drop, and at last she passed the crisis and began to recover. By all this sickness they were forced to remain in the city over a month; but in the society of his old friends, and amid the bright, vigorous men and bustling scenes of the new-born metropolis, the time passed rapidly and well improved. Folsom, a man of wealth, placed his fine carriage and horses at Mrs. Stevens’s disposal. Halleck would have long talks with the governor. Dr. Gwin and his family, old friends and neighbors, met them with real Southern cordiality.
One incident is worth relating, because it materially affected subsequent events, as the governor believed. A number of officers and other gentlemen were conversing together at the hotel one evening, among whom was General John E. Wool, then commanding the United States forces on the Pacific coast. The talk turned on the battle of Buena Vista, and General Wool loudly claimed for himself all the credit for that battle, disparaging in an offensive manner General Taylor and the part he took in it. At length Governor Stevens, whose strong sense of justice was outraged by the boastful and unfair tirade, spoke up and said: “General Wool, we all know the brilliant part you bore in the battle, but we all know and history will record that General Taylor fought and won the battle of Buena Vista.”[10] Wool, although visibly offended, made no reply to this rebuke, but it rankled and caused a bitter animosity, which subsequently found vent in hostile speech and action.