Claiming Panama: Genre and Gender in Antebellum U.S. Isthmiana

[W]e have arrived at that dreadful place. … [I]t is the most beautiful spot I ever saw.

Mary Jane Megquier
Chagres, Panama
March 13, 1849

I was too weak to attempt to cross the Isthmus; therefore, all hope of returning home was abandoned.

Mrs. D. B. Bates, Incidents on Land and Water, or Four Years on the Pacific Coast (1857)

[T]he United States guarantee positively and efficaciously to New Granada … the perfect neutrality of the before mentioned Isthmus, with the view that the free transit from the one to the other sea, may not be interrupted or embarrassed in any future time … [T]he United States also guarantee … the rights of sovereignty and property which New Granada has and possesses over the said territory.

Article 35^th, “Bidlack–Mallarino Treaty,” signed December 1846 and ratified by New Granada in 1847 and the United States in 1848

In March 1849 Gold Rush emigrant Mary Jane Megquier journeyed across the Central American isthmus with her husband, arriving in the Pacific port city of Panama only to find hundreds of encamped travelers scrambling for limited berths on absent steamships to San Francisco. While in a note to her daughter back in Maine (referenced above) she finds the isthmus at once “dreadful” and “beautiful,” a subsequent letter to a friend offers additional nuance: “[Panama City] is surrounded by a wall twenty feet high and as many feet thick, on the water side it is surmounted by enormous big guns weighing two or three tons which the Americans have worn quite smooth sitting astride them looking for the steamer.”¹ In her description Megquier evokes the city walls and old cannons—persistent symbols of the declining Spanish empire—as background for restless forty-niners, who scan the horizon for long-delayed ships. Anxious as the travelers are, they also form part of a frozen and static scene repeated day after day; they are powerless to do much more than look out to sea from this isthmian perch. Moreover, Megquier’s prose establishes her independence by positioning her as an observer, at a distance from this group marked as “Americans,” who also display the masculine prerogative of publicly straddling a cannon. And throughout her letters from Panama and from California, Megquier continues to outline differences between herself and her fellow migrants, including her husband Thomas. After two voyages together to California, each followed by a visit home to Maine, Megquier made her third trip solo, leaving Thomas behind with their children.

Approximately one year after Megquier wrote her letters, “Mrs. D. B. Bates” also found herself in Panama City. She and her ship-captain husband had just endured an around-the-horn adventure in which they had to abandon not only his burning ship at sea but, if the narrative is to be believed, their next two vessels as well, and for the same reason. They then spent a week shipwrecked on an “uninhabited” Peruvian beach, all prior to even reaching the isthmus. For someone in Bates’s situation, such a bustling locale as Panama, with its markets, shelter, fellow USAmericans,² and simple terra firma, could have seemed like an oasis. Instead, in her adventure narrative, Incidents on Land and Water, or Four Years on the Pacific Coast (1857),³ Bates presents the isthmus as an obstacle, a threat, a place of ultimate sorrow that highlights the separation from loved ones and “home.” For instance, as in the second epigraph above, she wrote of being stuck on the wrong side of the isthmus, a symbolic captive with no choice but to continue to the north and west to San Francisco.⁴ Four years later, her eastward crossing—as she finally heads back to the Atlantic side of the isthmus—would mark the end of her California experience and, apparently, the end of her marriage, as her narrative implies their separation due to her husband’s neglect and possible philandering in Gold Rush–era California.

The writings of Bates and Megquier juxtapose the derelict guns of old empire with the frantic and anxious Gold Rush–travel of the...