1914.
The Panama Canal is completed.
The Atlantic and the Pacifiic are joined.
The most ambitious construction project since the great pyramids of Egypt.
The work has spanned nearly half a century,
and claimed the lives of 25 thousand men and women.
Now it is fimished and the world is suddenly smaller.
But behind this epic tale,
there is another story of two unsung heroes.
One is an engineer from the Rockies with the vision to move mountains.
The other, a soft spoken Alabama physician
whose enemies are ignorance, disease and death.
Together, they take on a wilderness that had defeated the best engineers in the world.
Without either one, the Panama Canal could not be built.
And yet, one of these visionaries
will suddenly and mysteriously walk away
before the canal is fimished.
And take the secret of his departure to his grave.
The Republic of Panama, Central America.
A barricade between two oceans.
With a blanket of jungle. And a spine of mountains.
Today, 14,000 ships sail through these peaks and forests each year.
Their miracle highway is the Panama Canal.
50 miles long. One of the wonders of the modern world.
A miracle that, on a rain soaked day in July, 1905,
no one in Panama would have believed possible.
At the port of Colon, a new American fiield boss has
arrived to take control of a dying dream.
At age 52, John Stevens has built more miles of railroad than
any other engineer in the world.
The Rocky Mountains have been his home.
And spanning them his greatest challenge until now.
In Panama, yellow fever has killed hundreds of workers,
most of them from the West Indies, and terrifiied the rest.
The men call it The Great Scare.
But his orders come directly from the President of the United States.
In his fiirst address to Congress
Roosevelt vows to chop the Isthmus of Panama in half
and complete The Big Ditch.
"We must build the Isthmian Canal...
No single great material work which remains to be undertaken
on this continent is of such consequence
to the American people."
Roosevelt's motives are patriotic, economic and military.
A canal would trim nearly a month from the travel time
between New York and San Francisco.
Making the shortest path between the oceans a superhighway
of American commerce
and the lifeline of the nation's burgeoning two ocean Navy.
Roosevelt inspires thousands of young American laborers
to set off for Panama.
But they disembark in a steaming hell.
Soaring heat...
punishing rains...
ancient jungles.
Temperatures top 130 and it can rain daily for eight months.
In the unbroken forests,
lethal predators await the innocent arrivals.
But the most mortal dangers are too small to see
Confused, chaotic, and deadly.
Teddy Roosevelt's Big Ditch Project is a quagmire
sucking up millions of dollars, and hundreds of lives.
To slice through the bureaucratic nightmare,
Roosevelt authorizes John Stevens to ignore any orders
that do not come directly from the White House.
Stevens agrees.
And he advises the much younger president
to keep his promise.
I'm to have a free hand.
I'm not to be hampered or handicapped by anyone high or low.
And I'm to stay on the Isthmus only until success is assured.
It is no accident that Stevens has been recruited.
For the Canal to succeed, it must fiind a way
through the mountains of the Continental Divide,
the backbone connecting North and South America.
Roosevelt hopes America's greatest railway man
can save his Canal and ensure his political future.
Stevens is a railroad man, not a Washington insider.
Day after day he tramps through the construction zone,
focused on every detail of the job.
His cigars are so enormous that the men call him "The Big Smoke."
But they respect him immediately.
Finally, they have a boss who will listen.
"Mr. Stevens did not talk much but asked questions
and could that man ask questions!
He found out everything I knew.
He turned me inside out and shook out the last drop of information."
Frank Maltby, Division Head
After decades of back breaking labor, workers have slashed a route
through the jungle that the canal is to follow.
By 1905, excavation is concentrated
in a mountainous area of the Continental Divide.
Stevens is appalled at what he fiinds.
Trains lie rusting off their tracks. Steam shovels lay idle.
Workers have no blueprints, no guidance, no hope.
"I believe I faced about as discouraging a proposition
as was ever presented to a construction engineer.
I found no organization... no answerable heads...
Nobody was working but the ants and the typists."
In Panama, it has been this way for more than 30 years.
For the Americans now; for the French in the 1880s.
Having succeeded at linking Europe and the Orient by building
the great Suez canal in Egypt,
the French try to repeat their success in Central America.
They believe that slender Panama should be an easy target.
It is a fatal miscalculation.
Disease, accidents, and exhaustion take the lives of 22,000 laborers.
One man must succeed where the world's best have failed.
Workers tell The Big Smoke that their greatest worry
is the treacherous Culebra Cut,
the mountain pass where the French lost the most men.
At Culebra, they must dig out a man made Grand Canyon.
A twisting, nine mile,
water fiilled chasm as deep as a 25 story building.
Like the French, the Americans don't know what to do
with the staggering amount of dirt that is being dug out of Culebra.
It is simply dumped wherever space can be found.
Creating unstable mountains of debris that crumble in the continual rains.
At Culebra, the Spanish word for snake,
John Stevens, the great American engineer is stymied.
Here, the French fiinally surrendered.
Here, John Stevens must fiind a way through.
Topography is only half the problem.
In the work camps,
where three quarters of the work force are impoverished West Indians,
the human toll is appalling.
Even Roosevelt's eager American volunteers,
in their segregated barracks,
are barely surviving on rations of crackers and sardines.
Crammed into hovels with no toilets or running water.
Tormented by dysentery,
parasites and fear of yellow fever The Great Scare.
Desperate to defeat The Great Scare
to restore the spirits of his frightened workers
Stevens visits Dr. William Gorgas, chief medical offiicer of the canal.
In the yellow fever ward of the Ancon hospital,
Dr. Gorgas introduces the victims of this horrible plague.
Like Stevens, Gorgas has been hand picked by the President.
At 49 years old, he is a light hearted Southerner
plunged into a nightmare of tropical sickness.
In Cuba, newly freed from Spanish rule by Roosevelt and his Rough Riders,
Gorgas has succeeded in virtually eliminating yellow fever.
Panama has proved to be a far more diffiicult assignment.
"When the United States took possession in 1904
the Isthmus was generally looked on as ...the most unhealthy spot in the world
Probably it would not be extreme to say
that there is no other place that has as bad a reputation."
He has been in Panama for more than 13 months
when John Stevens joins him.
For Dr. William Crawford Gorgas, it has been a year of anguish.
At Ancon, he relates the toll
47 men dead of yellow fever in the past few months.
Hundreds of other lives claimed by malaria, pneumonia, chronic dysentery,
and, even, Bubonic plague.
John Stevens knows that his canal cannot be built without human labor.
Stevens has to act quickly.
He has come to build a canal but must fiix a disaster.
In Panama less than a week. He knows what he must do.
It is a decision that will shock everyone.
With undiminished energy despite the heat and rain,
John Stevens spends seven grueling days
inspecting every inch of the biggest excavation in human history.
The men expect Stevens to order them
to speed up their work on the President's Big Ditch.
Instead, he commands them to lay down their tools.
Hundreds of workers and technicians are shipped home to America.
John Stevens tells them
that the Panama Canal is unfiit for further labor.
In Washington, the new President waits anxiously for progress reports
from his new chief engineer.
But the news from panama is stunning.
The project has been shut down!
"Regardless of the clamor of criticism...
as long as I am in charge of the work...
and I am confiident that if this policy is adhered to,
the future will show its absolute wisdom."
Stevens understands that the canal's fatal problem
is not the mountains, but the men.
Disease and fear sap their souls before they raise a shovel.
Stevens turns to Dr. William Gorgas for help.
Like the French before them,
the Americans live in morbid terror of catching the disease
they call Yellow Eyes, Yellow Jack or The Great Scare.
A horrifying disease.
Delirium and death can follow within eight hours of infection.
Yellow fever patients fiirst complain of crippling muscle pain.
As the aches intensify, body temperature rises steeply.
The skin and eyes turn yellow,
thirst becomes unquenchable
and patients lose consciousness.
Spasms of black vomit signal the fiinal crisis.
Fewer than 50 percent of patients survive.
Gorgas believes in a new theory
that explains the cause of yellow fever mosquitoes.
In 1901, scientists have discovered
that the Stegomyia mosquito carries the yellow fever virus
from person to person.
In Panama, only Gorgas understands the mosquito's deadly secret.
Dr. Gorgas fiinds that yellow fever mosquitoes live in towns, not jungles.
To destroy them,
he will need to fumigate every puddle and rain barrel on the Isthmus.
He envisions the largest, most costly public sanitation campaign
the world has ever seen.
It is not a vision shared by the canal bureaucracy.
For eighteen months,
offiicials scoff at the mosquito theory
and turn down all of Dr. Gorgas's requests for funds and supplies.
But John Stevens listens.
Only a healthy work force can rescue Teddy Roosevelt's dream.
He will withdraw his men from the mountains,
and send them to war against the mosquito.
But Stevens does not ignore the other war he faces.
The battle against Panama's impassable geography.
Somehow, he must fiind a route beyond Culebra.
Through the jagged jungles to the sea.
He studies the French plans and realizes that
the millions of tons of dirt and rock
must be not only excavated, but removed entirely.
Simply piling the spoil at the side of the cut
is an invitation to landslides and disaster.
"Effiicient transportation
is nearly always the key to success in construction.
If dirt is to fly,
there must be a smooth and uninterrupted movement of trains."
Stevens conceives a radical new plan for disposing of the dirt.
He draws on his experience with railways in the Rockies.
Instead of hauling men, in Panama,
the trains will be used to cart the dirt away.
But to do it, the entire rail system
must be revamped to handle such a heavy load
exactly the kind of thing Stevens does best.
"There is no element of mystery involved.
The most important stage in any great undertaking is the prepatory stage.
The digging is the least thing of all."
While Stevens attacks the Continental Divide,
Dr. Gorgas sends out his own battalions.
Fumigation brigades burn sulfur, clean up sewage, and seal windows.
"It would be impossible to fumigate more extensively than we did... in 1905.
We had about 400 men engaged in this work
and they went over the whole town three times,
fumigating every house in the town, besides fumigating every block
each time a case of yellow fever occurred in that block"
Screens are installed and water barrels are covered.
Ditches where mosquitoes breed are drained.
Quarantined clinics treat 900 patients a day
and keep them in mandatory isolation.
Stylish, sleepless and impervious to the heat,
Gorgas works around the clock
He stretches Roosevelt's promise of an unlimited budget
to the breaking point, importing 120 tons of insect powder,
America's entire output for a year.
He orders $90,000 dollars worth of copper screening
in a single shipment.
Nearly double his previous yearly budget.
It is the largest and most expensive war
ever waged against tropical disease.
Meanwhile, John Stevens fiights his own battle.
He dismisses the existing rail line as
"two streaks of rust and a right of way."
Using his legendary status as a drawing card,
Stevens lures the best railroad men in America to the Isthmus.
Within six months of his arrival, he triples the work force to 24,000.
Stevens constructs the most durable railway in history.
Double sided tracks of the heaviest rails on earth
allow the world's heaviest freight cars to travel in both directions,
24 hours a day.
Track shifting machinery moves huge sections of rail line faster and easier.
A telegraph system, new bridges and massive locomotive sheds take shape.
Stevens thinks big, and buys big.
He has decided that the French suffered because their machinery was too small.
He will not repeat their mistake.
Every weapon in his arsenal is enormous.
His coal burning steam shovels weigh 45 tons each.
Mechanical dinosaurs.
Three times larger than anything used by the Parisians.
"Now I would liken that French plant
to a modern one as baby carriages to automobiles.
This is no reflection of the French, but I cannot conceive
how they did the work they did with the plant they had."
But Stevens has learned another lesson on the railroads.
That morale is more valuable than machines.
And the best way to restore morale is to keep workers clean and dry.
There are three diseases in Panama.
They are yellow fever, malaria, and cold feet;
and the greatest of these is cold feet.
The labor camps built during the French regime
have tumbled into misery.
Unpaved streets are ankle deep in mud.
Waste is emptied onto passerby from second story windows.
Stevens wades in like a Wild West sheriff.
Closing brothels, demolishing decrepit barracks,
building a new city of paved streets and sanitary dwellings.
The Canal line begins to look like a continuous city
under construction from one end of the zone to the other.
As 1906 begins, fiive months after being in Panama,
he feels he has made Panama livable.
He is ready to begin digging at Culebra again.
A few months later,
Dr. William Gorgas declares victory over The Great Scare.
"Take a good look at this man, boys.
For it's the last case of yellow fever you will ever see.
There will never be any more deaths from this cause in Panama."
Panama is busy again healthy and fearless.
Along the entire length of the Canal corridor,
the racket of hammers and saws and the roar of engines can be heard.
President Roosevelt's dream of splitting a continent
is being brought to life again.
As a new railway is pushed through the jungles of Panama,
John Stevens rarely rests.
It is the summer of 1906, Stevens drives himself to exhaustion
and expects his men to do the same.
"I gauge everybody by myself.
I work from 14 to 18 hours.
You may make mistakes
but there is only one mistake you can make that will be fatal with me,
and that is to do nothing."
Stevens believes his workers are safe from the Great Scare.
But yellow fever has been relatively easy to eradicate.
Now a far more formidable enemy must be confronted malaria.
"If we can control malaria,
I feel very little anxiety about other diseases.
If we do not control malaria our mortality is going to be heavy."
The Anopheles mosquito that transmits malaria
is not the same insect that carries yellow fever.
It is an entirely different species and far more diffiicult to control.
She lives longer, flies further,
and thrives in the stagnant waters of the Panamanian forests.
Right where John Stevens's new railway is being built.
The latest arrivals from North America
and the West Indies are in gravest danger from being bitten.
Most Panamanians, as Gorgas knows,
develop a natural immunity to malaria in childhood.
But nearly every new comer including Dr. Gorgas and his entire medical staff
become infected within months enduring recurring episodes of
fever, chills, depression, and intense pain.
Gorgas warns Stevens that the new settlements
he is building along his railway
are placing thousands of American workers at risk
"I suppose it is no exaggeration to say that any man
who spends a night in one of these villages will contract malaria."
John Stevens knows the danger of malaria.
But also knows that work must continue if the canal is to be built.
All along the line, the pace of construction intensifiies.
Laborers from North America, Europe, the Orient and the West Indies arrive.
Many bring their families, building a new life in a new country.
Feeding the masses is an enormous job.
Bakeries turn out 40,000 loaves of bread a day.
Stevens builds laundries,
and recreation halls for the men and their families.
An amazing ice house brings the loudest cheers.
The very idea of ice cream in the jungle delights the crews.
Music fiills the air.
They begin to call Culebra "Stevens City."
But the deadly plague of malaria is never far away.
Dr. Gorgas and his fumigation brigades keep ahead of the track gangs.
Cleansing the new villages.
Pushing deep into the wilderness.
They drain swamps and spray oil on cesspools
to prevent eggs from hatching.
Stagnant water is routinely tested for the presence of larvae.
A modern running water system as good as in an American city
is installed and acres of brush are burned.
Daily doses of quinine made from the bark of a tropical tree
are part of each man's diet.
They call the bitter tasting drink a "Panama cocktail."
As Dr. Gorgas battles the mosquito, John Stevens battles the mountain.
This is the ultimate roadblock the Continental Divide.
Stevens calculates that he must dig a channel nine miles long
and 272 feet deep through solid volcanic rock
It will require that man and machines move enough dirt
to build the Great Pyramids of Cheops 63 times.
John Stevens has been given command
of the grandest construction project in four thousand years.
"Even with the fiinances of the most powerful nation on earth,
we are contending with Nature's forces.
When we speak of a hundred million yards
of a single cut not to exceed nine miles in length,
we are facing a proposition greater than
was ever undertaken in the engineering history of the world."
Making a sea level canal from the Atlantic to the Pacifiic
means cutting deep into the mountain range.
The French spent nine years trying, and failed.
Now Stevens wonders how he will conquer Culebra.
The problem is water.
The tropical rainy season arrives in April.
Massive flooding, daily down pours
and the constant risk of deadly landslides.
Stevens has never faced anything like this in the Rocky Mountains.
He realizes that to build a sea level canal here will be a deadly undertaking
that could take twice as long as anticipated.
And there is another enemy.
When the rain comes, the placid Chagres River swells with anger,
rising 20 feet in just one day.
The floods will inundate any canal Stevens tries to dig through it.
Even if he moves the mountains, he cannot stop the rains.
"The one great problem in the construction of the canal
is the control of the Chagres River.
That overshadows everything else."
Stevens now realizes that a sea level canal is not possible.
The mountain is too big.
To dig it all the way down to sea level
and transport it away is beyond their current technological capabilities.
There is, however, another way,
one that will use the geography of Panama rather than conquer it.
It is a plan that will change the course of history.
But fiirst he needs to convince the President.
To sell his revolutionary new plan to the President of the United States,
John Stevens must sail to Washington.
For a man who is chronically sea sick
the voyage is as forbidding as the destination.
At the White House, Stevens unveils his amazing new blueprint.
He intends to lift the world's largest ships
up one side of the Continental Divide,
then down the other.
He will dam the Chagres River to create a huge artifiicial lake.
And build a series of mammoth locks to conquer the steep spine of Panama.
In essence, the mountain won't be cut down to sea level.
The ships will be floated up to the mountain
and sailed across a bridge of water.
It is an audacious plan.
A clear statement that Stevens believes that
the French struggled for nine years
and lost the lives of 16,000 men to a doomed dream.
But in 1906 no one knows if Stevens's plan will work either.
Theodore Roosevelt has promised Stevens his unconditional support.
Now he proves it.
In February of 1906, Roosevelt signs a Presidential sanction
authorizing the construction of Stevens' new high lake lock plan.
Fifteen months after taking charge of Panama,
Stevens is fiinally ready to build the President his dream.
Roosevelt must convince Americans
that John Stevens and William Gorgas can conquer nature and geography.
Convince skeptics that a canal can be built.
To prove his faith,
the President decides to stage one of the 20th century's fiirst media events.
He and the First Lady will visit the Big Ditch themselves.
It is a decision that captivates the nation.
No American president has ever visited foreign soil while in offiice.
To grasp fiirst hand the diffiiculties of the project,
Roosevelt insists on being in Panama during the rainy season.
On the second day of his visit, three inches of rain fall in two hours.
One inch falling in 15 minutes.
It is the worst downpour in Panama in fiifteen years.
With photographers never far away,
the young President strolls through construction camps,
dines in a mess hall with the men and shares meals with John Stevens.
He visits the Culebra Cut,
and delivers stirring prep talks in the jungle,
telling workers that they are soldiers
fiighting a glorious war for America's destiny.
The laborers are impressed and honored.
Their applause rivals the thunder in the tropical skies.
"You, here, who do your work well
in bringing to completion this great enterprise,
will stand exactly as the soldiers of a few, and only a few,
of the most famous armies of all the nations stand in history."
With his signature showmanship, the President,
in his famous white suit and Panama hat,
leaps aboard one of the mighty 95 ton Bucyrus shovels.
The men cheer this icon of American know how, a reminder that,
for Americans, there is no obstacle too formidable.
But another war is being won, far from the spotlight.
On the second day of his tour, Roosevelt quietly slips
away from the cameras and the secret service
to pay Dr. Gorgas an unannounced visit.
The two men walk through an almost deserted ward.
It is a quiet moment of proud victory.
Stunning evidence that the Alabama doctor
has brought health and sanitation to deadly Panama.
The Great Scare is over.
Roosevelt reciprocates with the public praise Gorgas
has hungered for since he fiirst arrived in Panama.
When Roosevelt praises the miracle in Panama
and cites Stevens and Gorgas by name,
they become celebrities across America.
"They are doing something
which will redound immeasurable to the credit of America,
which will benefiit all the world, and which will last for ages to come.
Under Mr. Stevens and Dr. Gorgas this work
has started with every omen of good fortune."
While the President boasts and bellows,
the mountains of Panama remain unconquered.
Stevens has devised an ambitious plan, but it remains no more than a blueprint.
To make the plan a reality,
Stevens will begin with the damming of the Chagres River,
creating the largest man made lake in the world.
Dozens of villages must be evacuated,
their residents relocated to higher ground.
A new city, called Gatun, must be built from scratch.
Surveying parties outline the contours of a body of water
that will cover 164 square miles.
The entire region must be clear cut by hand.
This job alone will take almost fiive years to complete.
And with this new plan will come massive concrete and electrical work
unlike anything the world has ever seen.
Things that John Stevens has little experience working with.
Such a massive construction project will also invite bureaucratic red tape,
and increased political interference from Washingt
The very things that John Stevens has fought against all his life.
Meanwhile dynamite crews risk their lives and begin blasting into Culebra
to loosen the mountain from its ancient domain.
Stevens continues his daily routine
of surveying the work in Culebra for himself.
96 million cubic yards of dirt will be moved by train,
along hundreds of miles of new track
Enough dirt to fiill enough hopper cars to circle the globe four times.
The work force healthy and excavation well under way,
Gorgas and Stevens have fiinally set in motion a plan
to bring down the mountain.
It is a plan that will prove Stevens right
and fiinally get the Canal built.
But there is one more surprise.
One of these men will walk away.
Less than three months
after President Roosevelt's confiidence boosting visit,
John Stevens quits the project and leaves Panama.
It is a mysterious gesture.
He offers no reason to his workers, to Dr. Gorgas, or his own family.
Not even the President.
Theodore Roosevelt is deeply angered.
Publicly, he conceals his anger, telling friends that Stevens
is unable to withstand the punishing Panamanian climate
that he has become ill and sleepless.
But privately the president feels betrayed.
Others believe that the solitary mountain man
could not endure the massive bureaucracy of the canal commission
or the contract system that was forced upon him.
It is a secret he takes to his grave.
"The reasons for the resignation were purely personal.
I have never declared these reasons
and probably never will, as they are private."
Nearly a century later,
no one knows why the greatest civil engineer of his era
abandoned the most important project of his lifetime.
Suddenly and without warning.
Perhaps he sensed that the hardest work was already behind him.
That history had anointed him to plan the canal,
then move on while others built it.
In eighteen months, John Stevens succeeded
where others had labored in vain for generations.
He provided decent housing and food for his loyal workers.
And pushed through a jungle railroad network
to move huge quantities of earth.
Perhaps most important of all,
he cast the weight of his prestige behind Dr. Gorgas.
Understanding that fear, not mountains,
blocked the path between the seas.
In 1914, seven years after Stevens's departure,
Dr. Gorgas silently paddles a small wooden canoe
through the freshly cut canal.
He is the fiirst to travel voyage through the Canal.
The offiicial opening of the canal won't happen for three more months.
All around him is evidence of John Stevens' vision.
A magnifiicent bridge of water that lifts ships out of the ocean
and sails them smoothly across the Isthmus of Panama.
After 30 years and the loss of thousands of lives,
the dream of Columbus, has been achieved.
The union of the oceans.
And the shrinking of the world.
It has taken seven years to complete the Canal.
The President asks the Army to fimish the job.
And though it would be wider and deeper,
it would resemble almost perfectly the lock system
that John Stevens had convinced
Teddy Roosevelt to build across the Isthmus.
And it is a spectacular vision.
The locks at both ends are the largest in the world.
Over 80 feet high, they are fiive blocks long
and stand as tall as a six story building.
Monstrous T shaped cantilever cranes
that can be seen from miles away float plates of steel through the air.
More concrete four and a half million barrels
than has ever been used in history is poured into the locks.
Six million rivets are needed to build the lock gates.
Gatun Lake, at 164 square miles,
would be the largest man made lake in the world.
And Gatun dam, made from the spoil of the Culebra Cut,
is the largest in the world to be made of earth.
It is a mile and a half long and half a mile wide at its base.
The Canal is the work of more than 100,000 laborers
from 97 different countries.
Most would not live to sail through it.
The fiinal bill.
Over $600 million dollars.
In an age when a worker was fortunate to earn a dollar a day.
The single greatest engineering undertaking in American history.
Teddy Roosevelt never returns to the Big Ditch
to see his dream brought to life.
He leaves offiice in 1909 and dies in 1919,
seven months before America's Pacifiic Fleet
fiirst passes through the Canal.
John Stevens fiinds another mountain and another railway.
In 1917 he is sent to Russia by President Woodrow Wilson
to reorganize the Trans Siberian Railway.
Not until 1937, at age 83,
does he return to Panama to gaze upon his masterpiece.
He dies in North Carolina six years later at age 90.
Only Dr. William Crawford Gorgas
sees America's work in Panama through from start to end.
By the time he returns to the United States,
he has completely eradicated Yellow Fever
from the Canal Zone and reduced malarial infection
to rates lower than most American cities at the time.
The physician's work in Panama brings him great public acclaim.
He is appointed Surgeon General,
a supreme honor for a country doctor from Alabama.
He leads the American Medical Services Corps to Europe
during the First World War.
In 1920 he dies a hero and is given a state funeral.
One man battled mountains.
The other, the tiny bearers of death.
This is their monument.
The bridging of a continent.
The union of the seas.