"The Path Between the Seas"

Steven's era:

• In the dead of winter, 1889, Stevens found the Marias Pass, Hill's passage over the Continental Divide... At an elevation of 5,215 feet, (it） gave the Great Northern the lowest grade of any railroad to the Pacific... He had made the discovery on foot alone，after his Indian guide had given up and turned back.
• Stevens.. built.. as much (railroad) as had been built by any one man in the world.
• "The digging is the least thing of all," he declared. Starting at once, Dr. Gorgas was to have whatever men and supplies he needed... Entire communities were to be planned and built from scratch.
• Gorgas to Stevens: "Our relations, yours and mine, stand out in my memory... as a green and pleasant oasis."
• The building of the Panama Canal was.. one of the greatest of all triumphs in American railroad engineering.
• At the Great Northern the "best-fitted" men were given tremendous authority, then held strictly accountable for results.
• Stevens saw at once, as the French had not, that the Panama Railroad was the lifeline along which not only men, food, supplies, everything needed to sustain the work, would have to move freely and efficiently, but the Culebra dirt trains as well. He also saw that there was no sense in working with anything less than the biggest, heaviest equipment possible.
• Until Colon's new water system was completed, he used the railroad to run trainloads of clean water into the city night and day.
• Stevens preferred contract Chinese labor gangs above all other choices (but it didn't work out...)
• The canal in certain respects was a simpler undertaking than other less conspicuous engineering projects of the era. There was plenty of space within which to work. . only the steam-shovel and locomotive engineers were unionized; and never any question about the money supply.
• Stevens reported to Washington: '' ... the problem is one of magnitude and not miracles."
• Compounding this problem of magnitude was,.. the enormous primary task of approximating the conditions of a modern industrial community.
• In more abstract terms... Stevens' greatest contribution was the basic vision of the excavation of the canal as a large-scale problem in railroad freight.
• As possibly no other engineer could have, he devised an elaborate yet ingeniously elastic system of trackage within the Cut whereby loaded trains would roll out on a downgrad and trains of empty cars would be constantly available to serve the steam shovels.
• According to Stevens, .. it was only because he "talked to Teddy like a Dutch uncle".. that Roosevelt swung around to favor the lock plan.
• TR on Stevens: "He has the same trick that I have of reading over and over again books for which he really cares." Stevens' favorite of all was Huckleberry Finn.
• It was merely that if Stevens was the sort of man who looked upon the task as something to take or leave at will, then he was someone Roosevelt could quite readily do without and put from mind.

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