The local traffic developed by the canal proved something phenomenal. Early in the history of its construction it became generally known that the country, for hundreds of miles about Lake Nicaragua, was not an unhealthy tropical jungle, but an elevated, breezy table-land, environed and divided by snow-clad mountains, with an average temperature only a few degrees warmer than that of California, and with a much more even distribution of rainfall.
A knowledge of these advantages was followed by a large incursion of American settlers. There is perhaps no product of field or forest more profitable than the coffee plant. Steadily the demand for the fragrant berry is upon the increase, while, beside having few enemies in the insect world, the area within which coffee can be advantageously grown is very limited. While the coffee plant does not require an exceptionally hot climate, it will not thrive where frost is a possibility. The hill slopes and table-lands of Nicaragua were found to be peculiarly adapted for its growth, and thousands of acres of young plantations were already thriving where for centuries only wild grasses had waved. Short lines of railroad, centering on Lake Nicaragua, and running in every direction, had made accessible a large extent of country. The scream of the gang saw was heard amid forests of dyewoods, rosewood, and mahogany. Mines of gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal were opened. Cotton, sugar, and indigo plantations were developed, and Millerville, on Lake Nicaragua, when the war ships passed through the canal to attend David Morning’s dynamic exposition, was already a city of fifty thousand people, provided with electric lights and cable roads.
The advantages to the people of the United States of the completed Nicaragua Ship Canal were almost incalculable. The freight-carrying business of the world between the east coast of Asia and Europe was rapidly transferred to American bottoms. The iron manufacturers of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia were given an opportunity, previously denied them, of marketing the product of their furnaces and foundries on the Pacific Coast of North America. The dwellers in the Mississippi Valley could now send their cotton, meats, and manufactures to trans-Pacific and Antipodean markets, and California redwood and Puget Sound fir and cedar lumber could be sent over all the Northwest.
On the Pacific Coast the canal added twenty-five per cent to the productive value of every acre of grain and timber land. The cost of sacking, and half the cost of transporting wheat was saved to the farmer, and the freight upon all machinery and heavy goods brought from the East was greatly lessened.
On Puget Sound the construction of a ship canal, costing less than $2,000,000, connecting the fresh waters of Lake Washington with the salt water in Elliott Bay, gave to Seattle such facilities for warehousing, loading, and dry-docking, and such independence of tides and teredos, that a commercial rival of San Francisco was spreading over the hills of the fir-fringed Queen of the New Mediterranean, while at the extreme southwestern corner of the republic the city of bay and climate—San Diego—was rapidly regaining the population and prestige which temporarily slipped from her grasp at the subsiding of the boom which, during 1886 and 1887, enkindled the imagination, and beguiled the judgment, and encrazed with the fever of speculation, the people of Southern California.
Even during the dull times which annihilated so many promising fortunes in Southern California, the attractions of Coronado Beach were sufficient to secure for it exemption from the dire distress which overtook other localities.
The company owning this enterprise successfully defied not only a bursted boom but the very forces of nature, for they riprapped the beach in front of their hotel, and baffled the Pacific Ocean, which, after gnawing up the lawn and shrubbery which fronted its restless waters, had set its foam-capped legions at work to undermine the foundations of the great ballroom.
Parks, avenues, and streets were improved, museums and gardens developed, and races and hops and fishing and boating parties encouraged. Excursions from neighboring cities were organized, the East was flooded with pamphlets praising Coronado, and the pleasure-loving and health-seeking world was in every way reminded that in this land of rare delights it could pick ripe oranges and enjoy surf bathing in midwinter, while Boston was shivering and New York swept with blizzards.
The band at the hotel was kept playing every day at luncheon and dinner, and it discoursed sweet music in the ballroom regularly upon hop nights to auditors, who found—as all people can find—more of the physical comforts and delights of life at Coronado Beach than anywhere else in the world, for nowhere else is there such music in the sea, such balm in the air, such sunshine, and fragrance, and healing, and rest.
The faith and patience of the owner of the great hotel were, in the end, rewarded. Month by month and year by year did the numbers of his guests increase, until, in 1895, the capacity of the house was more than doubled, by the addition of a building something over a quarter of a mile in length, and the great hotel could now accommodate quite two thousand guests.