Brave Companions

Put Antietam on your list. Go to Antietam in Maryland and stand on the hillside near the old whitewashed Dunker church and try if you possibly can to imagine what happened there that terrible day, September 17, 1862.

awesome vision of an ancient age of ice.

On August 3, 1804, Humboldt and Bonpland arrived at Bordeaux, causing a great commotion, since their death by yellow fever had been widely reported some time earlier. They had been gone five years. In addition to all their instruments and Humboldt’s journals and record books, they had brought with them “forty-two boxes, containing an herbal of six

The idea for a railroad to supplant all of that originated in New York in the late 1840s, shortly before the news of California gold reached the East. The founders were three unlikely, dissimilar individuals, none of whom knew anything about building a railroad, even under favorable conditions. Henry Chauncey was a Wall Street financier. William He

It was Agassiz, at age thirty-three, who first presented to the world the

All told they spent nearly two years in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. From Bogotá they went over the Andes on foot, picking the more difficult of two possible routes. They were in the Andes, crossing and recrossing, from September 1801 until October 1802, and they must have made a picturesque caravan, with their guides and mules and scientific instr

The Panama Railroad—the first steam road to El Dorado—was begun in 1850, at the height of the California gold craze. And by anyone’s standards it was a stunning demonstration of man’s “wonderful skill, endurance, and perseverance,” just as Pim said, even though its full length was only forty-seven and a half miles. It was, for example, and as almos

The major discovery produced by the survey was a gap in the mountains some thirteen miles from Panama City that was only 275 feet above sea level. This was a good two hundred feet lower than what heretofore had been the lowest known pass at Panama, and, as further explorations and further surveys would verify, it was, except for one at Nicaragua, t

At best, a crossing from ocean to ocean took four to six days, and for all who survived, it remained one of life’s memorable experiences.