Gold Seekers of 49 | Page 5

and has accomplished little actual headway. An enormous amount of money has been wasted. The company is declared insolvent and a receiver is appointed by the French court.
1894--The company is reorganized as the New Panama Canal Company. In five years it expends $8,000,000, in work on about two-fifths of the canal.
1899--By authority of Congress President McKinley appoints an Isthmian Canal Commission to investigate the property of the French company and see by what methods it can be purchased. The commission in its report recommends a route up through Nicaragua. Estimates are made that $102,000,000 and ten years' work will be required.
1901--The question of a Panama canal or a Nicaragua canal is debated in Congress. Expert opinion from engineers and shipping interests favors the Panama route.
1902--By authorizing the purchase of the French company's property and franchises for $40,000,000 the United States declares its purpose to build a Panama canal itself. The Secretary of War is instructed to make plans upon an expense basis not to exceed $130,000,000.
1903-1904--The United States formally takes over the French rights and concludes a canal treaty with Panama, the canal to be completed in fourteen years.
1904--The Canal Commission appointed by the President and under supervision of the Secretary of War, William H. Taft, arrives on the Isthmus to pursue the building of the canal. John F. Wallace is engineer-in-chief. The commission decides on a lock canal, instead of a sea-level canal as originally planned.
1905--John F. Stevens succeeds Mr. Wallace as chief engineer.
1906--The foreign members of an International Board of Consulting Engineers which visits the canal at the invitation of the United States report in favor of a sea-level canal; American members, in the minority, report in favor of the lock canal.
1906--In his message to Congress President Roosevelt supports the minority report favoring the lock canal. Congress adopts the minority report.
1907--Engineer Stevens resigns. The canal work is placed under the direction of the War Department. Lieutenant-Colonel George W. Goethals, Corps of Engineers, U. S. A., is made engineer-in-chief. He estimates the cost of a lock canal at $375,000,000; of a sea-level canal, $563,000,000.
1913--October 10 (the anniversary of the day upon which Balboa took possession of the Pacific Ocean) the Gamboa dike, marking the division between the canal waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific, is blown open when President Wilson presses an electric button at the White House. This year a mud scow passes through the canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
1914--January 7, the steam crane boat Alexander la Valley, 1200 tons, makes the passage--the first vessel by steam. February 1 the ocean tug Reliance, Captain R. C. Thompson, having steamed around the Horn returns to the Atlantic through the canal--the first commercial vessel to pass.
1914--The annual report of Colonel Goethals states that the cost of constructing the canal to date, has been $353,559,049, including fortifications.
1915--The great canal is formally opened. Including the $40,000,000 paid to France, and the $10,000,000 paid to the Republic of Panama, the outlay represented by the canal as built by the United States totals about $400,000,000, of which not a cent was misused.

GOLD SEEKERS OF '49
I
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
Charley Adams was trudging up to his knees in snow, on his way home from down town. It was Washington's Birthday, 1849, and winter had sent St. Louis a late valentine in shape of a big snowstorm. As this occurred seventy-five years ago, there were no street-cars in St. Louis (or in any other American city, for that matter); and even had there been street-cars they doubtless would have been tied up. At all events, Charley had walked down, and now he was trudging back with the mail.
His father was very anxious to see that mail. It contained the Eastern papers, and these probably would add to the tidings printed in the St. Louis papers, from the marvelous gold fields of California.
Since January, when President Polk's annual message to Congress had been read in St. Louis, in the papers, St. Louis people, like the whole population of the United States, had been crazy over the California gold. It was claimed that as far back as January, 1848, a man named Marshall, while digging a mill-race somewhere in interior Upper California, for a Captain Sutter of Sutter's Fort ranch, on the emigrant trail over the Sierra Nevada mountain-range down to Sacramento, had washed into plain sight an unlimited supply of gold flakes.
However, when the news first had reached Washington and New York and had filtered back to St. Louis, it was several months old and seemed scarcely worth attention, California being such a long way off. But now the President himself was authority for the fact that gold actually was lying around loose, for anybody to pick up, in this fair new land of California, and that thousands of people already were gathering it!
The President offered