This web site is dedicated to the thousands of unknown workers from many countries who lost their lives during the construction of the fortyseven and a half miles of railroad joining the Atlantic city of Aspinwall (now known as Colón) with the Pacific city of Panama, making it the world's first transcontinental railway.

The story of their struggles with the obstacles and perils of a tropical wilderness, with sickness and death as their constant companions, is a record of pluck and indomitable persistence rarely equalled and never surpassed in history. Nothing that those who followed them in the construction of the Panama Canal, under French and American direction, were called upon to endure was comparable to what they encountered and overcame.

The honor due these intrepid engineers, who with their men held to duty when it was more reasonable to leave it, has never been given: and the tragic fate that befell many of them has not been written in epic, song or story. Their only monument today is the Panama Railroad, the completion of which marked one of the greatest achievements of the age and will ever be a memorial to the dauntless courage of its brave builders and their story is one of the most gallant in the annals of commerce.