Carleton Watkins Canoa!--Canoa!
However, lacking anything more than flimsy A-frame tents, they would have been subject to the rainy season that began in April. Jessie described the rain coming in such profuse torrents that it seeped through the walls of her room running down the interior in rivulets.[24] Along with rain came mosquitoes. It is more likely that some of Otsego County boys rented hammocks in the Alcalde's barn near Gorgona for one dollar per night, while those working the west side of the cargo transfer operation could have lodged in one of Panama City's cheap hotels advertised in the English-language Star newspaper.
The most authentic first-hand accounts of daily life on the isthmus in 1849 are found in the pages of the Star published in Panama City. Volume one, number one was issued on Saturday, February 28, 1849, a month before the Otsego County boys and the Frémont party—along with the other Crescent City passengers-- landed at the mouth of the Rio Chagres. On page one it was stated there were about fifteen hundred persons on the isthmus waiting for vessels to transport them to California. Three hundred fifty more arrived on the Crescent City, along with a few dozen others debarking from smaller vessels, making a total of between two and three thousand[25] hopeful adventurers who made their way from Chagres via Gorgona to Panama City, where they waited for transportation to California.
In bold type on page one of issue number one we find the notice: "Caution to Emigrants-Most of the preserved meats bought in New York are entirely spoiled and unfit for use." Collis immediately grasped two realities: every last one of the new arrivals would need their baggage conveyed across the isthmus, and once there needed food. The pages of the Star record how between February and August many services came into existence to satisfy these needs, some of them operated by Collis and the Otsego County boys.
In 1888 or early 1889 Collis decided for the first time to speak on the record about his adventure on the isthmus in 1849, however, much of the story as published by H. H. Bancroft[26] is contradicted by circumstantial evidence. Collis told the unidentified scribe who was hired by Bancroft to record Huntington's memoirs, that while on the isthmus he was engaged in several different profitable enterprises that capitalized on the needs of desperate forty-niners: 1) organizing the Chagres to Panama City transportation for steamship Crescent City passengers; 2) organizing a