Mainer key to success of Panama Canal effort

Many Mainers had developed a bad case of “Panama fever,” the Bangor Daily News announced in late January 1905. They were taking civil service tests to get jobs as engineers, railroad workers, carpenters, steam shovel operators and many other occupations working on the “big ditch” that within a decade would make it easier for ships to go from sea to shining sea.

On July 20, the most famous Maine native to work on the Panama Canal set sail from New York City with much fanfare. “Maine Man Bound to Make Best of Conditions as He Finds Them There,” the headline read on Page One in the BDN. And what a mess John Frank Stevens would find!

Stevens had recently been appointed chief engineer by President Theodore Roosevelt. Born on a farm in West Gardiner in 1853, he had never taken a college engineering course. A graduate of the normal school in Farmington where he excelled at mathematics, he had tried teaching for a few months before deciding he wanted to be an engineer.

Switch ahead to 1889 when Stevens was assistant engineer for tycoon John J. Hill, known as the Empire Builder in the race to crisscross the West with railroads. That was back in the days when being a civil engineer could mean being an explorer and adventurer as well.

Abandoned by his Indian guide in 40 below zero weather in northwestern Montana, Stevens was about to become famous. Tramping through the deep snow all night to keep from freezing, the assistant engineer had just discovered Marias Pass. It turned out to be the lowest pass through the Rocky Mountains north of New Mexico, and it saved the Great Northern Railway 100 miles of track.

Stevens, who got his own title, “the Hero of Marias Pass,” always seemed bigger than life although he attributed all his success to hard work and long hours. In 1890, another pass, through the Cascade Mountains in Washington, was named after him. In 1925, a huge statue of him was erected in Marias Pass, and a few years later an 18-mile canyon on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River was named in his honor.

Hill made him chief engineer and general manager. After Stevens had left his employ, Hill recommended his work to President Theodore Roosevelt. Here was a man who could tame the mess in Panama that threatened to embarrass the United States in the eyes of the world.

Roosevelt saw in Stevens the kind of man he admired – a big, burly “backwoods boy” and “a rough and tumble westerner.” Roosevelt may have realized as well that Stevens was a rough and tumble Mainer, from the state where the President had learned about roughin’ it during his Harvard days before he bought a ranch in the Dakotas.

The Panama Canal would prove a challenge, however, even for the Hero of Marias Pass. In the end, the burly boy, who lacked the diplomatic skills to be a government bureaucrat, and the rough rider, who sometimes seemed to wish he were back on San Juan Hill, would part company.

The U.S. had tried to make good where the French had failed. But in 1905, when Stevens arrived, workers were demoralized and frightened. The project’s organization was chaotic and seemed strangled in red tape.

Yellow fever and other diseases were killing workers. Food and housing were inadequate. Many workers were resigning shortly after they arrived..

Stevens turned out to be a gifted organizer as well as engineer. His blunt take-charge attitude turned things around. “There are three diseases in Panama,” he told his employees. “They are yellow fever, malaria and cold feet.”

He was tough, but most of his staff seemed to love it. He advised one engineer that the only way he would be fired was if he did nothing. Mistakes could always be corrected.

Stevens walked the 47-mile length of the canal zone, studying what needed to be done. He convinced the president and Congress to build a canal with locks, not the sea-level canal supported by conventional wisdom. He expanded and updated the antiquated Panamanian railroad system so that it could be used to move earth from the upcoming excavations.

He improved the food supply and other living conditions. Perhaps most importantly, he gave his full support to Dr. William C. Gorgas and his costly and controversial ideas for eliminating yellow fever in the zone. In the end, Gorgas credited Stevens for making the achievement possible.

Then, after all these successes, Stevens quit abruptly and mysteriously in 1907, writing an intemperate six-page letter to Roosevelt, which the president decided to interpret as his resignation. The letter was full of complaints about the strain of the job and “enemies in the rear.” But one passage settled his fate, according to historian David McCullough in his book “The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914.”

With typical bluntness, Stevens wrote, “The ‘honor’ which is continually being held up as an incentive for being connected with this work, appeals to me but slightly. … There has never been a day since my connection with this enterprise that I could not have gone back to the United States and occupied positions that to me, were far more satisfactory. Some of them, I would prefer to hold, if you will pardon my candor, than the Presidency of the United States.”

The letter angered Roosevelt. He never mentioned Stevens or his great accomplishments in his long account of the building of the canal in his autobiography.

What happened remains a mystery to this day, and Stevens would never comment later. Rumors abounded that he had a nervous breakdown, or that he was angry over a contract or the plans for a major dam, or that he had stumbled across corruption, or that he was merely letting off steam and was startled by the President’s reaction.

Whatever the case, he remained extremely popular among his workers, who raised a petition with thousands of names urging him to stay. His successor William Goethals, the Army engineer who would spend most of the next seven years finishing the project, said he had never seen such affection displayed for one man.

In later years, some would even argue that Stevens, who had laid down the organizational plan of the great project, should get the credit as the canal’s builder. In his book, McCullough rejects this suggestion: “Indeed, all the great construction work of the canal had yet to begin – the building of Gatun Dam, the building of the locks – tasks of unprecedented magnitude requiring technical expertise that Stevens really did not possess.”

For his part, Goethals wrote in a letter to his son, “Mr. Stevens has done an amount of work for which he will never get any credit, or, if he gets any, will not get enough.”

After leaving Panama, Stevens continued his career as a railroad engineer, roving the world and winning many honors. In 1962, 19 years after his death, the U.S. government designated the principle traffic circle in Balboa, C.Z., as Stevens Circle. A memorial to him bore the tribute from Goethals: “The Canal is his monument.”

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.