On May 6th, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed John F. Wallace Chief Engineer of the Panama Canal Project. The job awarded Wallace a $25,000 annual salary -- the highest of any government employee other than the President. On June 21, Wallace, along with assistant engineer William Karner, set sail on the Allianca from New York. After a rough weeklong voyage, the ship arrived in Colón, Panama during the rainy season. The streets were thick with impassible mud and houses elevated just a few feet above dirty, foul smelling water. Wallace and his men were not optimistic about the future in their new home.
Wallace realized almost immediately that the Isthmus' harsh terrain would be
a serious obstacle to construction. The task ahead of him seemed impossible: to
dig a channel 50 miles in length and 30 feet below sea level stretching from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific coast. He would have to cut through dense jungle,
control parts of the flood-prone Chagres River and haul away sections of the
Culebra Mountain hundreds of feet above sea level. Daunted, Wallace asked for
more time to survey the area, but Roosevelt's directive to "Make the dirt fly!"
prevented any further delay
To meet the government's demands for fast, visible progress on the canal,
Wallace attempted to excavate the spoil as quickly as possible, but flooding and
landslides caused repeated setbacks. The delays damaged morale among workers
already suffering from terrible food and living conditions.
Logistical problems added to the inefficiency. At the start of the project,
the laborers only had at their disposal the antiquated machines left behind a
decade earlier. Soon Wallace ordered newer equipment from the U.S., but the
giant steam shovels excavated more spoil than the existing train infrastructure
could remove, forcing Wallace to operate them at 25% of their peak efficiency or
less.
Wallace also faced bureaucratic challenges from Isthmian Canal Commission
(ICC). A seven-member presidential committee was established to help avoid the
inefficiency and corruption that had plagued the French 15 years earlier. The
ICC had to approve every decision Wallace made in the Canal Zone. With engineers
filling out more than 1,000 work request forms weekly, even the simplest tasks
often took months to complete.
Overwhelmed, Wallace resigned abruptly in June 1905. His successor was
railroad mastermind John Stevens, engineer of the Great Northern Railroad that
traversed the Pacific Northwest. Right at the start of his tenure Stevens did
the one thing that Wallace failed to do -- stop digging.
