Carleton Watkins Canoa!--Canoa!
boss and the Otsego County boys, who learned from a master how to make two plus two become five or more.
After the Crescent City was anchored in the harbor on March 24 while preparations were being made to ferry the passengers to land, Captain Charles Stoddard had a frank conversation with Jessie Benton Frémont. In her memoirs she tells how he pleaded with her to stay on the Crescent City and return to New York for her own safety and how he warned her that because its heat, disease, and restless men, the isthmus of Panama was no place for a woman, much less a child. But Jessie was determined to rendezvous with her husband, John, in San Francisco as they had planned months before. Despite her fears, she and Lily descended onto the waiting transfer boat.[16]
While Collis, Carleton and the other Otsego County boys, scrambled to hire canoes and crew, Jessie, Lily, and Richard Jacob were escorted five miles up the river in the shaded steamship company boat, where they changed to native boats for thirty or so miles of river travel to Gorgona. For the isthmus crossing Jessie and party slept on cots in the well-outfitted camps of the engineering crew surveying for a future rail line across the isthmus.[17] Nights for the Otsego County boys were spent camping by the river with meals self-prepared from provisions they carried from New York. Travelers heard monkeys shrieking, and saw great flocks of parrots, as well as an occasional alligator slithering through the water, according to Jessie's report.[18] Reflecting on the journey across the isthmus several decades later Jessie said, "When we reached Chagres, if it had not been for pure shame. . .I would have returned to New York."[19]
Upon arrival at Gorgona [Fig. 3a], which consisted of a collection of about one hundred bamboo huts similar to those in the town of Chagres, Jessie recalled in her memoirs the conditions of her Crescent City compatriots: "There were hundreds of people camped out on the hillsides at Gorgona in apologies for tents, waiting for a certainty of leaving Panama [City], from which as yet there was no transportation."[20] The contingent from Otsego County was among those so encamped around Gorgona during the last week of March and first week of April, 1849.
[16] Jesse Benton Frémont, "Great Events During the Life of Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont and Jessie Benton Frémont," Unpublished MS, Bancroft Library, cited in Pamela Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography, New York, Franklin Watt, 1987, p. 187.
[17] Herr, p. 188.
[18] Herr, p. 188
[19] A Year of American Travel: Narrative of Personal Experience By Jessie Benton Fremont, San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1960, p. 26
[20] Frémont, p. 40.