American Dredging and Contracting Co.) that dredged the opening of the Canal from Colon to beyond Gatun. This company was the only contractor that made an honest profit out of the enterprise, and its big homemade, wooden dredges had cut fourteen miles inland, when the smash came in 1889.
Instead of the $120,000,000 originally asked for by M. de Lesseps, he had received and spent over $260,000,000. Instead of completing the Canal in six years, his company had dug less than a quarter of it in nine. Not a stone had been laid on the proposed great dam at Gamboa. Nothing had been done on the tidal basin except to discover that a few feet under what the Technical Commission had supposed to be an easily dredged swamp lay a solid ledge of hard rock. Year after year M. de Lesseps had kept explaining, and putting off the opening of the Canal, and asking for more money, until more had been spent than any possible traffic through the Canal could pay a profit on. Instead of finding Panama an easier task than Suez, the French had already dug 80,000,000 cubic yards, several million more than they did at Suez, and spent more than twice as much money. It was plain that the end had come. The French fled from the Isthmus, leaving it strewn as with the wreckage of a retreating army. Trains of dump cars stood rusting on sidings, or lay tumbled in heaps at the bottom of embankments. In one place, over fifty vine-covered locomotives can be counted at the edge of the jungle, from which the Americans dug out miles of narrow-gage track, cars, engines, and even a whole lost town. A lagoon near Colon was crammed
