Page:Panama-past-present-Bishop.djvu/120

100 papers, the Star and the Herald, which, after a brief rivalry, combined in the present Panama Star and Herald, a daily, printed in both Spanish and English. Trade boomed, brigandage flourished, and there was more hiring of mules, renting of lodgings, raising of prices, and fleecing of strangers, than the Isthmus had seen since the roaring days of the Galleon Fair.

As soon as California and Oregon had been taken into the Union, Congress had authorized a line of steamers to be run down either coast to the Isthmus, and had appropriated money to pay them for carrying the United States mail. Mr. William H. Aspinwall, who had secured the line on the Pacific side, and Mr. George Law, who had that on the Atlantic, combined with a third New York capitalist, Mr. Henry Chauncey, to build a railroad across the Isthmus. Chauncey and John L. Stephens, an experienced Central American traveler, had already obtained from the government of the Republic of New Granada, of which Panama was now a state, the exclusive right to build such a road; and Stephens had explored the route with a skilled engineer, Mr. J. L. Baldwin, and reported that it could be built at a profitable cost.

The Panama Railroad Company was accordingly incorporated, with a New York charter and a capital of a million dollars, and the construction of the road entrusted to two experienced contractors, Colonel Totten and Mr. Trautwine. But no sooner had they reached the Isthmus than they found that the "gold-rush," now fairly begun, had so raised the local prices of labor and materials that they begged the company to release them