Vol. XXV, No. 2 WASHINGTON 



February, 1914 



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BATTLING WITH THE PANAMA SLIDES 



By William Joseph Showalter 



Author of "The Panama Canal" and "The Countries of the Caribbean/' in the 

 National, Geographic Magazine 



THE only reason why ships have 

 not been using the Panama Canal 

 since last October is that Nature 

 has been battling to the last ditch in her 

 efforts to thwart the purpose of man to 

 put a shipway through the vitals of proud 

 old Culebra Mountain. But for this great 

 battle, Culebra Cut would have been a 

 finished job two years ago. 



The weapons used by Nature in her 

 efforts to confound the plans of the canal 

 engineers have been slides and breaks in 

 the banks of the ■ canal, and effective 

 weapons indeed have they proven. How, 

 with them, she has stood between the 

 canal army and the completion of the 

 task to which it addressed itself consti- 

 tutes the most thrilling episode in the 

 history of canal engineering. 



Over 250 acres of ground lying outside 

 of the intended banks of the canal, and 

 containing over 30 million cubic yards of 

 material, have swept, with silent but ter- 

 rific force, down into the canal. Now 

 this onslaught has demoralized an entire 

 railroad system ; now it has put the com- 

 pressed air and water systems out of 

 commission ; now it has bottled up one 

 end of Culebra Cut with an avalanche of 

 debris ; now it has imprisoned dirt trains 

 and wrecked steam shovels. But with all 

 the wreck and ruin and chaos there have 

 been men with wills of iron who have 

 met each new situation with a new spirit 

 of determination : men who have never 



permitted any catastrophe to turn them 

 aside from their ultimate purpose; men 

 whose achievements in the face of un- 

 precedented difficulties make a story as 

 inspiring as anything in human history. 



No one who failed to visit the Isthmus 

 during the construction period can under- 

 stand the full import of the coming of 

 these slides into Culebra Cut. With each 

 passing year they have renewed and re- 

 doubled their attacks on the canal plans. 

 They seem to be maneuvered by the hand 

 of some great marshal and sent forth to 

 the fray in every way calculated to put 

 the canal engineers to discomfiture. 



Now they are quiescent, attempting to 

 lull the engineers into a false security ; 

 now they make a feint, stopping short of 

 an actual conflict ; now they come in the 

 dead of night, spreading chaos and dis- 

 rupting everything in whatever direction 

 they move ; now they set up the appear- 

 ance of being rendered thoroughly harm- 

 less by allowing dikes of basalt to peep 

 out which seem to tie them to the bowels 

 of the earth, only to destroy the hopes 

 which these dikes arouse in the hearts of 

 the besiegers, by shearing them off as if 

 they were but pipe-stems, and then flow- 

 ing, unrestrained, into the cut. 



Consider what the removal of 30 mil- 

 lion cubic yards of material means. It 

 is enough to build a sort of Chinese wall 

 7 feet thick and 7 feet high reaching 

 from New York to San Francisco. It is 



