Who said let the dirt fly in panama

Said the fly, "Let us flea. Log in. Panama Canal. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Study guides. World War 1 24 cards. Which president worked with Colombia for the opportunity of building a canal in Panama. The US and Spain had a conflict over the two Spanish colonies of.

Austria-Hungary declared was on Serbia when. In the British French and Russians formed an alliance called the. World War 1 26 cards. What was the purpose of the Munich conference. Where did Iwo Jima battle take place. What side was the United States in World War 1.

Allied powers during World War 2. Panama 20 cards. Why did anti imperialists oppose US expansion. Which president built Panama Canal. Which 3 countries are closest to Haiti. What did William Henry seward want to do. Q: Who said let the dirt fly? Write your answer Related questions. The Americans tackled the job using explosives, steam shovels, dredges, and backbreaking labor in intense heat. Culebra Cut, where the central spine of mountains forms the continental divide, was the most challenging and dangerous area to excavate.

Lidgerwood unloader plow blade sweeps spoil from the flat cars. View in Digital Collection». In the 9-mile-long Cut, rock was blasted out. The unloader, a plow-like device, was pulled forward from the end of the cars by a cable powered by the locomotive. It could scrape the spoil off all 20 cars in 10 minutes. A dirt spreader car equipped with steel blades spread the material flat. Once an area was filled a track shifting machine picked up the rail tracks and moved them to a new area.

Roosevelt; and after the more than kind and cordial reception which you and the Senora have extended to us. It is difficult for me to express on behalf of Mrs.

Roosevelt and myself how profoundly touched and pleased we are. To the President of Panama, M. Amador Guerrero. Related to This Manuscript. Between The Lines. The average student of American history has never heard of Stevens. Today the only engineer popularly identified with the Canal is the Army man, Goethals.

That this is so, however, seems due largely to the particular make-up of John F. Stevens as well as that of the man who put him in charge at the Canal Theodore Roosevelt. The impulsive T. Stevens was fifty-two in , powerfully built and strikingly handsome, with a somewhat swarthy complexion and a thick black mustache. He had been raised on a farm near West Gardiner, Maine.

Like many other engineers of his time he never received any formal training, although virtually all his career would be spent building railroads.

He first did some surveying in Maine and then went west in He worked as a rodman in Minneapolis, a section hand in Texas—driving spikes at a dollar ten cents a day—and eventually as an assistant engineer laying out lines for a half dozen western railroads, including the Canadian Pacific. They had five children, two of whom died in infancy. In Stevens went to work for James J. During his years in the West, and particularly those with Hill, Stevens had educated himself as thoroughly as any man in the profession.

He had earned a reputation as a worker and about the ablest engineer in the business. Later, in the Cascades, Stevens found another important pass that, against his wishes, was named for him. By the time he moved on in , Stevens had built bridges, tunnels, and more than a thousand miles of track for Hill quite probably as much track as any man in the world , and the Great Northern was recognized as the best-engineered railroad in the country.

Stevens later called Hill the finest man he ever knew. Like Hill, he believed in giving subordinates as much authority as possible and then holding them responsible for results. He was decisive, intelligent, highly intolerant of incompetence, and never did he leave anyone in doubt as to who was boss.

But it was his ability to instill spirit and personal loyalty among workingmen that gave Stevens his most obvious resemblance to Hill and had the most immediate effect at Panama.

Stevens found the situation a good deal worse than it had been described to him. At high tide tons of garbage drifted about the piers at Colon, the terminal where ships from New York docked.

Wharves were crowded with goods nobody seemed able to account for and men with little to do. Colon itself and Panama City, the opposite terminal, were vile, depressing places with foul drinking water, dreadful food, and streets strewn with filth. The American workers all seemed possessed by fear of yellow fever. Black laborers and others native to the Caribbean or Panama were largely immune. And though the trouble to date was nearly all in their minds, there was still no guarantee that a real epidemic might not break out any day.

Few workers appeared to know what they were doing. For those who did there was a maddening tangle of red tape to cope with. At one point Stevens saw two new recruits from Martinique hoist a wheelbarrow full of dirt up onto the head of a third man, who carried it off that way.

Carpenters were forbidden to saw boards over ten feet long without a signed permit. When he went out to Culebra Cut later renamed Gaillard Cut , the place midway across the zone where the Canal would have to slice some nine miles through the mountain spine of the Isthmus, every steam shovel in sight was idle.

Since the Americans had taken over, surprisingly little had been done. Equipment left behind by the French, which Wallace had tried futilely to make do with, was nearly all too antiquated to be of value, and scarcely any new equipment was on hand.

Wallace had wanted to experiment at length with various kinds of steam shovels, dump cars, and other machinery before deciding on what to order. The famous Panama Railroad had only one track, and its undersized rolling stock was twenty years out of date. There were no sidings and no warehouses. The Canal was to follow the line of the railroad, which was approximately the route the French had figured on.

The French, contrary to popular opinion in the United States, had accomplished quite a lot considering the equipment they had. But the jungle had long since returned over most of the French work, and the forty-two-mile stretch between Colon and Panama City looked about as it had to Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who had discovered the Isthmus four centuries earlier.

There was still no final plan authorized by Washington, and Stevens had seventeen thousand men waiting to be told what to do. He would prepare to dig a canal. Making dirt fly, he saw from the start, was not at all what was called for. That, he estimated, would be the easiest part of the job and it could wait. So he stopped all excavation and announced that it would not resume until he had everything ready a very unpopular move back home where the American people were eager for news of progress.

His first step was to do something about morale, and that came easy to him. And the worst of these is cold feet. Any men who were not needed, now that the digging had stopped, he sent home. They would be hearing from him later, he said. The rest he put to work building decent housing, mess halls, hospitals, schoolhouses, churches, jails—whole communities.

Under his direction approximately five thousand new buildings were built, old French facilities refurbished, streets paved, and new harbor installations, a sewage disposal plant, and water mains put in. He installed a telephone system. He established a commissary to feed the entire force at cost. He introduced refrigeration equipment, something unknown in Panama, and the men began eating dressed meats, eggs, and perishable vegetables for the first time.

He built clubhouses and organized band concerts and a baseball league, with each settlement along the line getting up its own team.

When a young clerk told him there were no funds available to build seven or eight home fields, Stevens said to charge them to sanitary expenses. For months he had twelve thousand men doing nothing but putting up buildings. The most imposing structure, the Tivoli Hotel, was rushed to completion when it became known that Roosevelt was coming down to visit. Previous plans were for the chief engineer to be quartered in a palatial residence to be built overlooking Panama Bay.

But Stevens wanted no part of that. He and his family would live on the side of Culebra Cut, he said, where he could watch the work progress from his front porch. So he had a plain house with a corrugated roof put up there. But for all his talk of cold feet, Stevens had a very realistic fear of yellow fever and considered it the one overriding threat to success. He said as much only in private, but unlike his predecessor—or his successor—as chief engineer he had total confidence in the courtly and dedicated Gorgas, and he decided at the outset that giving Gorgas whatever he needed to do the job was the only sensible course.

Gorgas was the doctor who had rid Havana of yellow fever, but many people, completely discounting his mosquito theory, considered him a crank all the same. Commission Chairman Shonts, for example, wanted Stevens to fire Gorgas first thing. Every dwelling in the Zone would be fumigated. Stagnant pools would be sprayed with kerosene, drainage ditches built, rain barrels dumped, grass kept cut—everything possible to destroy the breeding places of the stegomyia and anopheles mosquitoes, the respective carriers of yellow fever and malaria.