Carleton Watkins Canoa!--Canoa!
While at Gorgona, Jessie's brother-in-law and chaperone, Richard Jacob, became afflicted with a debilitating fever and her group stayed put to nurse him through the last week in March, when she would have had more opportunities to connect with Collis, Carleton or one of the other Otsego County boys. Her brother-in-law went from bad to worse and it was decided to send him back to New York on the next steamer from Chagres.
Towards the end of the first week in April, Jessie and company continued across the isthmus to the Pacific Ocean at Panama City. She described the journey as "a distance and not a road." Journalist, Theodore Johnson, described the route thus:
"For many miles the path is worn into deep holes, the mules stepping continuously from one to another, which in the process of time, have formed many narrow ravines, often several feet in depth. When entering one of these, we frequently heard shouts of muleteers approaching the opposite way, and were obliged to wait till they passed—the way often being so narrow that we were forced to lay on the back or necks of our horses."[20]
The route from Gorgona to the Pacific Ocean followed by the Crescent City forty-niners [Fig. 3a--in green] was the same one that had been in use for two centuries earlier by Spanish adventurers to carry supplies westward across the isthmus and return the same way with Peruvian gold and silver. The deep ruts and crevices in the path were literally worn into the soft stone by the passage of thousands of mules.
Collis learned first hand from the process of coordinating the transit of baggage for two hundred sixty former Crescent City passengers that an important trading opportunity available to him and his team was in the prompt and reliable transportation of freight across the isthmus.[21] Towards the end of the first week in April he and his boys along with others from the Crescent City arrived at the east gate [Fig. 5] of the walled city of Panama, where the native cargadores deposited all the newly conveyed baggage.[22] Waiting for their arrival was a daily activity of the migrants and stories of failed delivery and lost possessions abounded. It was a problem in need of a solution.
Most of the details of how Collis and the Otsego County boys spent the month of April and most of May are subject to conflicting accounts. One version of the story says they set up camp near the Gorgona Gate.[23]