Brevet Captain Grant procures food and medicine from the natives during the
crossing of Panama.
“U.S. Grant Crosses the Isthmus of Panama”
Brevet Captain Ulysses S. Grant received his promotion to first lieutenant in the regular army. He now would receive the pay of a first lieutenant while he had the responsibilities of a captain. In 1852, His regiment was ordered to the Pacific Northwest and the thirty year old Brevet Captain U.S. Grant was in charge of the trip. As Quartermaster he would find the ships to take the 4th from New York City around Florida and across the Gulf to Panama, mules to cross the Isthmus, and more ships in the Pacific to take the Regiment to Northern California.
The trip on the steamship “Ohio” to Panama was crowded and sea sickness was rampant. The money allotted to Grant to procure a ship would not allow Ulysses to hire a ship large enough to comfortably transport the Regiment. The ship hired was built to carry 330 and there were a total of 750 soldiers, wives, and children in the Regiment. Several people got severely sick on the voyage but amazingly only one man died before landing in Panama.
Once ashore Ulysses found out that only two thirds of the mules needed for the Regiment to make the dangerous overland passage to the Pacific had arrived. The Colonel decided to go ahead with the healthy soldiers and all of the mules and supplies.
He left Captain Grant with a command of all of the sick soldiers, the wives of the regiment, and their children. Grant had no mules or guides to make the trip. It took
two weeks to get enough mules for Ulysses’ new command and by that time malignant cholera broke out on the Isthmus.
Colonel Bonneville’s advance party of the healthy troops would be struck by cholera when they were about half way across the Isthmus and strong soldiers died
in as little as six hours after showing the first symptoms of cramps. Two hundred and fifty of the five hundred soldiers in this command would be buried in Panama.
Grant’s column of the women, children, and sick soldiers were to cross Panama during July, the rainiest month of the calendar in a tropical country. The party would start the journey with no doctor or medicine and little food and no other officer. Ulysses would negotiate with the natives for food along the way and treat the sick as best he could. One survivor of the trek would say of Grant, “He was like a ministering angel to us all.” Another called Grant, “A man of iron, so far as endurance went, seldom sleeping, and then only two or three hours at a time.”
It would take three weeks for Ulysses’ command to traverse the Panama jungles. Every day was a struggle. The trip was single file up narrow muddy paths that hugged the sides of ravines over raging streams swollen by the heavy rains. Once up to the peak of the ridge the poor travelers would descend the other side, ford another swift stream, and climb to the top of the next rise just to repeat the torturous advance over and over again. At night no tents were there to give protection to the worn out travelers because Colonel Bonneville had all of them with his command. All this in torrential rains that gave way to 100 degree heat and matching humidity under a blazing tropical sun and constant swarms of mosquitoes.
Ulysses traded for food along the way and was sure it was washed and thoroughly cooked before anyone ate. All of the water was boiled before it was used to wash food, or people, or drunk. Each cholera case was nurtured by the young Captain.
Finally the little command emerged from the jungle on the Pacific coast but not before a terrible price was paid. Ulysses wrote to Julia, “The horrors are beyond description, every child of Fred’s age (2 years old) or younger, and there were twenty of them, died on the crossing or shortly after.” The passage of the Isthmus of Panama would never leave Grant’s thoughts.
Soon, Ulysses would find his situation would now get worse instead of better. The ship that was to take the remaining survivors up the Pacific coast to California, the “Golden Gate”, was now a floating hospital ship. The hundreds of sick of the 4th Infantry were quarantined aboard the “Golden Gate” and Col. Bonneville had again abandoned his command and gone ahead to Fort Vancouver.
No one appeared to be in command so Ulysses took over. When orderlies refused to tend to the sick, Ulysses took care of them himself. Julia Sheffield, a wife of one of the officers, credited Grant with the presence of mind and tireless energy to check the spread of the disease. She also said, “It is not easy to control men during a siege of cholera, for they grew nervous and panic stricken and Captain Grant had not only the sick ones to contend with but also the well.”
Of the original 750 that began the voyage from New York only 450 men,
women, and only a few children would reach California. Grant survived the
epidemic without getting sick but the passage would leave a dark memory for Ulysses.
People would later recall that General Grant would talk more of the crossing of
Panama than of his great victories in the Civil War. In his first address to Congress he would be the first President to recommend the construction of a canal across Central America and recommended a naval commission be formed to explore American alternatives. The commission was formed in 1870 with Grant’s friend from Brown County, Admiral Daniel Ammen, as its capable chairman. Finally in 1914, President Theodore Roosevelt would open the canal and complete Ulysses’ greatest dream. The canal would reduce the trip from New York to San Francisco around South America by 47 days and 9111 miles and save thousands of lives of those who no longer had to cross the Isthmus on foot.