Carleton Watkins The Living Present
by the Spanish defenses. Morgan breeched the fort and crossed the isthmus in 1671, when he burned the earliest city founded on the Pacific Ocean.
Panama had a storied past. Nearly every ounce of gold and silver taken from the mines of Peru and Bolivia during the 1500s through 1700s was first transported to Panama City by boat, then carried across the "Alps of the Isthmus" along the very same route used by Collis Huntington's mule trains that handled the U. S. Mail and other freight between the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Panama before the isthmian railroad was opened in 1855. In the nearly two centuries between Morgan's heist of a fortune in Spanish pieces-of-eight, the burning of the original Panama City, and the arrival of the Gold Rush emigrants, the city was rebuilt five miles to the west resulting in a new town and picturesque "old town." Time past and time present were found side-by-side in ways not seen in Otsego County, New York. Time itself was poised to become a palpable substance for Carleton through the medium of photography.
During Carleton's two month isthmian residence the ruins of the original Panamá viejo were a place of recreation for some emigrants. Jessie Benton Frémont favorably recollected a picnic to the site in April 1849. It is unlikely that Carleton and the Otsego County boys had the leisure to experience the ruins of Panamá viejo [Fig. 4], as a picnic place, but these and other antiquities would surely have left a vivid impression on young men who were brought up in an environment where the oldest structures were about their same age (twenty to thirty years old).
In Panama the Otsego County boys would have experienced a culture with everyday patterns that were dramatically different from back home. They saw Roman Catholic churches where holy mass was celebrated with great pomp and ritual by ceremoniously dressed priests—holy men who also had a passion for gaming and cock-fighting. According to one observer a priest would "sometimes enter the fighting ring with a bird under each arm."[19] The Otsego County boys could also have observed native women going about their daily business naked to the waist and breast feeding their children in public [Figs. 5a,b]. High stakes card games proliferated, while native women beckoned the deprived foreigners from the streets directly into their private quarters.[20]
Panama was part of the Spanish Empire for 300 years (1538–1821) and before that was occupied by the Chibchan, Chocoan, and Cuevan