Carleton Watkins Canoa!--Canoa!
story may be the untold reason why Carleton Watkins changed his plans and did not board the sailing ship Alexander von Humboldt on May 20 headed for California along with Collis and four[1] other Otsego County boys.
Meanwhile, in Panama City Jessie received a letter from her husband, John Frémont, dated January 27 that was written from Taos, New Mexico, wherein he describes his brush with death in the San Juan Mountains of New Mexico. On May 18, after nearly two months on the isthmus, Jessie and Lily boarded the crowded steamship Panama, bound for San Francisco, where she would reunite with her husband after being separated for seven months. Designed for hauling mail rather than passengers, the steamer was built with accommodations for only eighty, though it now carried four hundred forty-niners.
During the first half of 1849 transportation north from Panama City by steamship was erratic since the sailors, too, were bitten by the gold bug, and jumped shipped once in San Francisco, thus many vessels had no manpower for the return to Panama. Despite the obstacles, a few ships made the journey each month and tickets for passage from Panama City to California were a commodity that was bought and sold like shares of stock. The Otsego County boys would have had money in their pockets from their shares of the profits from the cargo transfer operation as well as profits from trading in food staples, which could have been the reason they risked their lives by staying longer than would have been absolutely necessary.
But all good things do come to an end and the wind-powered vessel departed Panama City on May 20 with five of the six Otsego County boys. Carleton Watkins was not listed as being on board the ship.[2] If Carleton did not travel to San Francisco with the four others from Otsego County, where did he go? Some answers will be explored in Chapter Six.
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End Chapter Five: Canoa!--Canoa!
For a detailed map of the isthmus of Panama click here.
[1] Le Roy Chamberlain, Daniel Hammond, George Murray, and Egbert Sabine
[2] Humbold Association, Thirtieth Anniversary, San Francisco: 1879, pp. 3-4, lists the people who arrived in San Francisco on the sailing ship Alexander von Humboldt on August 30, 1849, including the Otsego County boys, Collis Huntington, Le Roy Chamberlain, George Murray, and Egbert Sabine. Carleton Watkins is not listed as a passenger on the ship.