Minor Cooper Keith
by B.C. Forbes
by B.C. Forbes
ONE American could have a crown for the asking. He is the
uncrowned king of the tropics, the Cecil Rhodes of Central
America, a demigod in the eyes of half a dozen republics.
He sits daily in an unpretentious office at Battery Place, New York, a silent Hercules transforming the American tropics from a jungle to a fruit garden; creating prosperity, health, and peace where only poverty, disease, and revolutions formerly luxuriated; steel-rail Central American republics to one another as a necessary preliminary to their union into one powerful commonwealth; and plodding, also, to make it possible to travel from New York, Chicago, or San Francisco all the way by rail to Panama or even to Rio de Janeiro.
"When Mistah Keith comes here de country has a holiday. You can't get within blocks of de station. He is de greatest man ever live an* de best-hearted. De poor know dat."
That was the tribute paid Minor C. Keith by a coloured waiter in the San Jose Hotel in Costa Rica's capital when I mentioned the great civilizer's name.
Minor C. Keith was a Brooklyn lad who, at sixteen, started in a men's furnishing store on Broadway, New York, at $3 a week; didn't care for selling collars, socks, and neckties; and quit in six months to become a lumber surveyor. He made $3,000 in the first year and then went into the lumber business on his own account, his father having been in that industry.
Before old enough to vote he was raising cattle and hogs on a bleak, uninhabited island called Padre Island (as long as Long Island) near the mouth of the Rio Grande. He had looked over the country after the Civil War and decided to settle on this forsaken territory. Only one other family lived on the island.
Here young Keith trained for the battle of life, under rough, nerve-trying circumstances, with two revolvers never unhitched from his belt and with cattle-thieves and other care-free gentlemen all about him when he crossed to Texas and the Mexican border to buy cattle.
He rose at four every morning, roughed it for sixteen hours daily, often slept outside and prospered.
He reared and bought cattle all over the surrounding territory to kill for their hide and tallow. The beef, not worth anything in Texas in those days, was fed to swine! He amassed a herd of 4,000 stock cattle and 2,000 pigs. Stock cattle were then worth $2.50 to $3.00 and steers brought $1.00 for each year of their age. (To-day, alas! we city folk pay 35 cents a pound or more for the choicest parts of such steers!)
Once a hurricane blew fully a thousand cattle over the edge of the island into the sea. They swam to the mainland, five miles distant. After the hurricane they were rounded up and driven back across the shallowest part, where the water ordinarily reached the pommel of the cowboy's saddle. A count revealed that not more than a dozen had been drowned.
Then something happened to change the course of Keith's career. His uncle, Henry Meiggs, was the famous builder of the first railway over the Andes and of other epochal South American lines. Minor's eldest brother, Henry Meiggs Keith, had joined his uncle in Peru and had taken over a contract from his uncle to build a railroad in Costa Rica for the Government. One day, in 1871, Minor received a letter from his brother asking him to come to Costa Rica.
"He told me," said Mr. Keith, "that I would make more money in Costa Rica in three years than I could make in Texas all my life. Perhaps there was a railroad tinge in the family blood. I went."
Little did he dream that his migration was destined to shape Central American history.
The whole Atlantic Coast from Mexico to Panama was then a dense, unexplored, formidable jungle, with only a few Caribs and Creoles here and there who eked out an existence by fishing for hawksbill turtle, gathering sarsaparilla, vanilla beans, and wild rubber. There was no steamship service to any port in Central America on the Atlantic side.
Minor's job was to run the commissariat of the railway. His brother subsequently died and the constriction of the railway was suspended through the Government not being able to supply the
money. In order to carry out his brother's undertaking he recontracted the coast line of the railway with the Government. Also, to make possible the building of the mountain section for which the Government had not the needful $6,000,000, he made a contract with the Costa Rican Government to settle their external debt which had been defaulted for thirteen years. He proceeded to London and after many difficulties arranged a settlement of the debt and all arrears of interest, and obtained $6,000,000 for the construction of the railway.
Before the railroad was begun the journey from San Jose down to the coast, about 100 miles, took, during bad weather, about two weeks' trudging through woods, bogs, and jungles infested with reptiles. The Costa Ricans had a saying: "The man who makes the journey once is a hero; the one who makes it twice is a fool."
Puerto Limon was the name given the coastal starting-point of the railroad. Not one house marked the spot. Not one pound of fresh beef was to be had, not a single fresh vegetable, not an ounce of ice to combat the satanic heat. All was jungle, snakes, scorpions, monkeys, mosquitoes.
The construction of the railway on the coast commenced in a jungle and ended in a jungle, which was entirely devoid of population. Many of the rivers had no name. Subsistence for two or three years was principally on salt codfish and a sprinkling of canned goods.
The surveying over, the real troubles began. Labour could not be enticed to such a graveyard. The natives abjured the fever-soaked coast as they would a plague.
But Minor C. Keith had undertaken to build this railroad for the Costa Rican Government and he meant to do it.
Off he went to New Orleans and began engaging labourers cut-throats, robbers, thieves, and other riff-raff. He rounded up 700 of them. The Police Commissioner warned Keith that his collection was more dangerous than dynamite.
Such was the cargo of the first steamer in history to sail from New Orleans for Central American Atlantic ports, the Juan G. Meiggs, owned by the Keiths. The voyage was eventful.
The boat struck a coral reef north of Belize, Honduras, and began to pound, pound, pound, upon the jagged rocks. The captain lost his head the pandemonium was terrific. A barrel of liquor fell into the hands of the 700 ruffians and scores of them promptly got drunk! Then they mutinied and became threatening. But Keith was not white-livered. He armed his foremen, issued peremptory orders and succeeded in cowing the 700.
The ship finally backed off, Port Limon was eventually reached and the men set to work, at a dollar a day. Of the 700 not more than twenty-five ever returned. The deadly jungle claimed the rest.
Subsequently De Lesseps was struggling to cut the Panama Canal and labour was not to be had, as the higher wages paid in Panama enticed the labourers away. Yet Keith would not give in, although hundreds died around him, including first one and then another of his own brothers. Fever also overtook him often, but he fought on fought and planned.
On account of the difficulty in obtaining labour 2,000 labourers were brought from Italy. At the cost of $200,000 for transportation, food, and drink acceptable to the Italians, wages, etc., he brought them and fondly imagined he had solved his labour problem. Alas! blackhand letters quickly began to bombard him; disease of course broke out, and the digging of so many graves unnerved the whole squad.
One night the entire gang disappeared into the woods! And the first thing Keith knew, a ship sailed along and took away the last man of them to Italy! Their leaders had slyly chartered the vessel.
What was the cost in life of the first twenty-five miles of that Costa Rican line?
Four thousand lives, including three of Minor's own brothers. Yet the average working force was only 1,500.
Civilization was advancing through blood and bleached bones.
Another tragedy happened. The Government ran short of money. It could not pay the monthly estimates except by notes. The enterprise on which the country had set its heart would have to be abandoned.
Costa Rica did not know Minor C. Keith as well then as it does today. He determined to spend his own last cent in prosecuting the work. But the financial panic of 1873, as bad as any in American history, upset all calculations, and his resources gave out.
Even then he did not succumb.
He had in his employ about 1,500 Jamaican Negroes. Summoning them, he explained the circumstances and offered to repatriate those who were sick or who wanted to go home. Such was their faith in "Mistah Keith" that a decision to stand by him was carried by acclamation. For nine months those 1,500 black men worked loyally for Minor C. Keith without a pay-day.
"That incident gives me as much satisfaction as any in my whole life," Mr. Keith admitted. "I pensioned many of the Jamaicans who had worked with me and had risked their life with me times with-out number."
When the financial skies cleared and the Costa Rican Government was in funds, the full nine months' wages were paid, and the Government paid all its obligations to Keith, including his large losses caused by the want of funds.
But fever, reptiles, labour, and money were not the only things the pioneer railroad-builders had to contend with. In Costa Rica when it rains it rains. Port Limon had a fall of over 20 feet 250 inches in one year. The rivers became leaping torrents.
Washout after washout occurred. Temporary bridges were swept away time after time until permanent steel structures were erected. One, on the Matina River, was destroyed thirty-one times!
"The narrowest escape I ever had was on that bridge after the permanent one was erected," Mr. Keith remarked reminiscently.
"I've had so many close shaves that I've forgotten about most of them. I've been shipwrecked three times, been upset in the surf and rivers many times, had tropical fevers of all varieties, and encountered all kinds of difficulties. But that day sticks in my mind!
"My superintendent wired me to come and inspect the bridge at Matina River. When I got there the river had risen twenty-five feet. The superintendent and a mason were standing on the bridge and a white man and four Negroes were working on it. I saw that the only thing that was supporting the cylinders (on which the bridge rested) was a steel cable they had fastened to a tree on the shore. Before I could order all hands off the cable snapped and the structure collapsed.
"I made one desperate leap toward the shore span, the base of which rested on an offset of the cylinder. This span did not collapse, but stood out over the river like a bracket. I caught the end of a tie with my left hand and gripped it as I had never gripped anything before. I was athletic and didn't slip. But I didn't hang there over that boiling torrent very long! The superintendent and the mason saved themselves somehow, but the other five were pitched into the river and drowned."
In the midst of his arduous railroad building the pioneer conceived other projects.
This jungle road had no traffic, nor would it have any until it reached the 5,ooo-feet mountain-tops. But he leased the uninviting coast road from the Government. Shortly after landing he had brought a few banana plants from Colon, and the Juan G. Meiggs took 250 bunches to New Orleans from Colon on her first voyage, these being the first bananas taken by steamship to the New Orleans market. Year in, year out he expanded his banana plantations, and the hauling of the fruit kept his road busy. In 1915 over 7,000,000 bunches of bananas say, 1,000,000,000 bananas, or ten for every man, woman, and child in the United States were shipped from Port Limon! Mr. Keith also built up large interests in Panama, Colombia, and Nicaragua.
Ever on the alert for opportunities, he early set up as a storekeeper. Commissaries in Costa Rica were followed, in 1873, with a store in Bluefields, Nicaragua, the first there, and various other points on the Central American coast as far north as Belize, Honduras, for the purchase of rubber, sarsaparilla, and tortoise shell.
His experience in growing bananas, his knowledge of soil and jungle, his familiarity with transportation by water and land, his ability to attract and satisfy Jamaican labour, his reputation for trustworthiness, his adamantine physique, his irrepressible energy, his unconquerable will all these qualities contributed to his success.
He became the largest grower of bananas in Central America. His shipping facilities developed apace. His store and commissary operations alone ran into millions of dollars. And he finished his Costa Rican railroad after seventeen years' building.
All this brought him wealth.
Then disaster came.
His United States agents, to whom he consigned all his bananas, failed. Over $1,500,000 paper bearing his name and drawn upon this firm was outstanding.
Keith had saved Costa Rica. Costa Rica, to its eternal credit, sprang to save Keith. Within a few days $1,200,000 was offered to him by the Government, the Costa Rican banks and individuals. In two weeks he reached New York and met every dollar of his debts.
Without delay he had to find new distributing agents for his bananas as his whole international machinery was out of gear.
Andrew W. Preston was then the greatest factor in the banana industry in New England and the North, just as Mr. Keith was in the South. The Preston fruit came from Jamaica, Cuba, and San Domingo and did not compete in the Southern markets.
The two giants joined forces. They formed the United Fruit Company, destined to become the greatest single force in developing Central America, in bringing the United States into commercial and social touch with her Latin neighbours, in conquering the tropics and in keeping down the cost of living in this country.
Mr. Keith's fruit properties were valued at over $4,000,000 on going into the United. His hardships had not been suffered in vain!
The record of the Preston-Keith enterprise embracing Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Salvador, and the Canary Islands forms one of America's most romantic commercial chapters. The United Fruit Company has spent over $200,000,000 in cultivating the tropics; it gives employment to 60,000 men at wages several times the rate they formerly received; it has built and operates over 1,000 miles of railway and tramways; it has spent millions of dollars in fighting fever and in building hospitals. Its "Great White Fleet" constitutes the best and largest array of ships America can boast some forty-five steamers are owned outright and nearly as many more are under long charter. The United has knit together every republic and every island in the tropics by its huge wireless stations. It has built many lighthouses on the coast of Central America.
It is the biggest farmer, and almost the biggest grocer, on earth. It owns upward of 1,200,000 acres, equal to half the State of Delaware. Over 250,000 acres are actually under cultivation. Its livestock includes 20,000 cattle and 6,000 horses and mules!
Its tropical plantations and equipment are valued at over $50,000,000 and its steamships at $17,000,000. Its total assets foot up to $90,000,000.
But Keith is first, last, and all the time a railroad builder. His heart is in that. Two steel rails run through all his dreams.
Like Cecil Rhodes, the far-seeing founder of the Cape-to-Cairo railroad, Minor C. Keith "thinks in continents." Also like Cecil Rhodes, he has conceived an international railroad that stirs the
imagination, a railroad, as already told, that will join North America's transportation system with that of Central America and later with South America, a steel highway that one day may run from one end of the New World to the other. The advance of civilization, the welding of peoples together, the abolition of racial misunderstanding these are the inspiring aims and end sought.
To dream and not do, avails little. Keith has laboured with unbelievable success to make his dream come true.
The International Railways of Central America the "PanAmerican Railway" is not a mere paper railroad. Half of it is already built. Connection has been made, on the Pacific side, with the National Railways of Mexico, at the Guatemala boundary. The road runs down the Guatemala coast and then cuts clear across the continent, to Puerto Barrios, on the Atlantic side; this transcontinental line is now in profitable operation. From mid-continent the line is being built straight through the little republic of Salvador to La Union, on the Pacific. Next it will pass through Honduras and join the Nicaraguan road. The Costa Rica system will then be reached, and from Port Limon to the Panama Canal will be the final link on the northern side of the "great divide." The South American extension, Mr. Keith is confident, will follow.
Some 600 miles of the International Railways are actually operating and making money. And the daring project is daily creeping toward completion.
"I have heard, Mr. Keith, that you hope to bring about the union of the five Central American republics Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Is that your ambition?" I asked. He gazed into space. Then:
"I believe that will come. It will be a great thing for them all. But only railroads can bring it about. The people of Costa Rica are still strangers to the people of Nicaragua although their countries adjoin. There must first be commercial and social intercourse. The railroad will make that possible."
When you travel in Central America you learn that Minor C. Keith can have anything he wants because the people regard him as their biggest friend, their "father" their leader, one of themselves. Mr. Keith married the daughter of one of Costa Rica's early presidents, Jose Maria Castro, lived there continuously for twenty-seven years, spent millions in relieving disease in the tropics, and feels in a sense responsible for the welfare of these undeveloped little nations. Not once has he or his companies had the slightest rupture with any Latin government.
So if Keith by and by decides that the time is ripe for the creation of a Central American Commonwealth the chances are that it will be established.
uncrowned king of the tropics, the Cecil Rhodes of Central
America, a demigod in the eyes of half a dozen republics.
He sits daily in an unpretentious office at Battery Place, New York, a silent Hercules transforming the American tropics from a jungle to a fruit garden; creating prosperity, health, and peace where only poverty, disease, and revolutions formerly luxuriated; steel-rail Central American republics to one another as a necessary preliminary to their union into one powerful commonwealth; and plodding, also, to make it possible to travel from New York, Chicago, or San Francisco all the way by rail to Panama or even to Rio de Janeiro.
"When Mistah Keith comes here de country has a holiday. You can't get within blocks of de station. He is de greatest man ever live an* de best-hearted. De poor know dat."
That was the tribute paid Minor C. Keith by a coloured waiter in the San Jose Hotel in Costa Rica's capital when I mentioned the great civilizer's name.
Minor C. Keith was a Brooklyn lad who, at sixteen, started in a men's furnishing store on Broadway, New York, at $3 a week; didn't care for selling collars, socks, and neckties; and quit in six months to become a lumber surveyor. He made $3,000 in the first year and then went into the lumber business on his own account, his father having been in that industry.
Before old enough to vote he was raising cattle and hogs on a bleak, uninhabited island called Padre Island (as long as Long Island) near the mouth of the Rio Grande. He had looked over the country after the Civil War and decided to settle on this forsaken territory. Only one other family lived on the island.
Here young Keith trained for the battle of life, under rough, nerve-trying circumstances, with two revolvers never unhitched from his belt and with cattle-thieves and other care-free gentlemen all about him when he crossed to Texas and the Mexican border to buy cattle.
He rose at four every morning, roughed it for sixteen hours daily, often slept outside and prospered.
He reared and bought cattle all over the surrounding territory to kill for their hide and tallow. The beef, not worth anything in Texas in those days, was fed to swine! He amassed a herd of 4,000 stock cattle and 2,000 pigs. Stock cattle were then worth $2.50 to $3.00 and steers brought $1.00 for each year of their age. (To-day, alas! we city folk pay 35 cents a pound or more for the choicest parts of such steers!)
Once a hurricane blew fully a thousand cattle over the edge of the island into the sea. They swam to the mainland, five miles distant. After the hurricane they were rounded up and driven back across the shallowest part, where the water ordinarily reached the pommel of the cowboy's saddle. A count revealed that not more than a dozen had been drowned.
Then something happened to change the course of Keith's career. His uncle, Henry Meiggs, was the famous builder of the first railway over the Andes and of other epochal South American lines. Minor's eldest brother, Henry Meiggs Keith, had joined his uncle in Peru and had taken over a contract from his uncle to build a railroad in Costa Rica for the Government. One day, in 1871, Minor received a letter from his brother asking him to come to Costa Rica.
"He told me," said Mr. Keith, "that I would make more money in Costa Rica in three years than I could make in Texas all my life. Perhaps there was a railroad tinge in the family blood. I went."
Little did he dream that his migration was destined to shape Central American history.
The whole Atlantic Coast from Mexico to Panama was then a dense, unexplored, formidable jungle, with only a few Caribs and Creoles here and there who eked out an existence by fishing for hawksbill turtle, gathering sarsaparilla, vanilla beans, and wild rubber. There was no steamship service to any port in Central America on the Atlantic side.
Minor's job was to run the commissariat of the railway. His brother subsequently died and the constriction of the railway was suspended through the Government not being able to supply the
money. In order to carry out his brother's undertaking he recontracted the coast line of the railway with the Government. Also, to make possible the building of the mountain section for which the Government had not the needful $6,000,000, he made a contract with the Costa Rican Government to settle their external debt which had been defaulted for thirteen years. He proceeded to London and after many difficulties arranged a settlement of the debt and all arrears of interest, and obtained $6,000,000 for the construction of the railway.
Before the railroad was begun the journey from San Jose down to the coast, about 100 miles, took, during bad weather, about two weeks' trudging through woods, bogs, and jungles infested with reptiles. The Costa Ricans had a saying: "The man who makes the journey once is a hero; the one who makes it twice is a fool."
Puerto Limon was the name given the coastal starting-point of the railroad. Not one house marked the spot. Not one pound of fresh beef was to be had, not a single fresh vegetable, not an ounce of ice to combat the satanic heat. All was jungle, snakes, scorpions, monkeys, mosquitoes.
The construction of the railway on the coast commenced in a jungle and ended in a jungle, which was entirely devoid of population. Many of the rivers had no name. Subsistence for two or three years was principally on salt codfish and a sprinkling of canned goods.
The surveying over, the real troubles began. Labour could not be enticed to such a graveyard. The natives abjured the fever-soaked coast as they would a plague.
But Minor C. Keith had undertaken to build this railroad for the Costa Rican Government and he meant to do it.
Off he went to New Orleans and began engaging labourers cut-throats, robbers, thieves, and other riff-raff. He rounded up 700 of them. The Police Commissioner warned Keith that his collection was more dangerous than dynamite.
Such was the cargo of the first steamer in history to sail from New Orleans for Central American Atlantic ports, the Juan G. Meiggs, owned by the Keiths. The voyage was eventful.
The boat struck a coral reef north of Belize, Honduras, and began to pound, pound, pound, upon the jagged rocks. The captain lost his head the pandemonium was terrific. A barrel of liquor fell into the hands of the 700 ruffians and scores of them promptly got drunk! Then they mutinied and became threatening. But Keith was not white-livered. He armed his foremen, issued peremptory orders and succeeded in cowing the 700.
The ship finally backed off, Port Limon was eventually reached and the men set to work, at a dollar a day. Of the 700 not more than twenty-five ever returned. The deadly jungle claimed the rest.
Subsequently De Lesseps was struggling to cut the Panama Canal and labour was not to be had, as the higher wages paid in Panama enticed the labourers away. Yet Keith would not give in, although hundreds died around him, including first one and then another of his own brothers. Fever also overtook him often, but he fought on fought and planned.
On account of the difficulty in obtaining labour 2,000 labourers were brought from Italy. At the cost of $200,000 for transportation, food, and drink acceptable to the Italians, wages, etc., he brought them and fondly imagined he had solved his labour problem. Alas! blackhand letters quickly began to bombard him; disease of course broke out, and the digging of so many graves unnerved the whole squad.
One night the entire gang disappeared into the woods! And the first thing Keith knew, a ship sailed along and took away the last man of them to Italy! Their leaders had slyly chartered the vessel.
What was the cost in life of the first twenty-five miles of that Costa Rican line?
Four thousand lives, including three of Minor's own brothers. Yet the average working force was only 1,500.
Civilization was advancing through blood and bleached bones.
Another tragedy happened. The Government ran short of money. It could not pay the monthly estimates except by notes. The enterprise on which the country had set its heart would have to be abandoned.
Costa Rica did not know Minor C. Keith as well then as it does today. He determined to spend his own last cent in prosecuting the work. But the financial panic of 1873, as bad as any in American history, upset all calculations, and his resources gave out.
Even then he did not succumb.
He had in his employ about 1,500 Jamaican Negroes. Summoning them, he explained the circumstances and offered to repatriate those who were sick or who wanted to go home. Such was their faith in "Mistah Keith" that a decision to stand by him was carried by acclamation. For nine months those 1,500 black men worked loyally for Minor C. Keith without a pay-day.
"That incident gives me as much satisfaction as any in my whole life," Mr. Keith admitted. "I pensioned many of the Jamaicans who had worked with me and had risked their life with me times with-out number."
When the financial skies cleared and the Costa Rican Government was in funds, the full nine months' wages were paid, and the Government paid all its obligations to Keith, including his large losses caused by the want of funds.
But fever, reptiles, labour, and money were not the only things the pioneer railroad-builders had to contend with. In Costa Rica when it rains it rains. Port Limon had a fall of over 20 feet 250 inches in one year. The rivers became leaping torrents.
Washout after washout occurred. Temporary bridges were swept away time after time until permanent steel structures were erected. One, on the Matina River, was destroyed thirty-one times!
"The narrowest escape I ever had was on that bridge after the permanent one was erected," Mr. Keith remarked reminiscently.
"I've had so many close shaves that I've forgotten about most of them. I've been shipwrecked three times, been upset in the surf and rivers many times, had tropical fevers of all varieties, and encountered all kinds of difficulties. But that day sticks in my mind!
"My superintendent wired me to come and inspect the bridge at Matina River. When I got there the river had risen twenty-five feet. The superintendent and a mason were standing on the bridge and a white man and four Negroes were working on it. I saw that the only thing that was supporting the cylinders (on which the bridge rested) was a steel cable they had fastened to a tree on the shore. Before I could order all hands off the cable snapped and the structure collapsed.
"I made one desperate leap toward the shore span, the base of which rested on an offset of the cylinder. This span did not collapse, but stood out over the river like a bracket. I caught the end of a tie with my left hand and gripped it as I had never gripped anything before. I was athletic and didn't slip. But I didn't hang there over that boiling torrent very long! The superintendent and the mason saved themselves somehow, but the other five were pitched into the river and drowned."
In the midst of his arduous railroad building the pioneer conceived other projects.
This jungle road had no traffic, nor would it have any until it reached the 5,ooo-feet mountain-tops. But he leased the uninviting coast road from the Government. Shortly after landing he had brought a few banana plants from Colon, and the Juan G. Meiggs took 250 bunches to New Orleans from Colon on her first voyage, these being the first bananas taken by steamship to the New Orleans market. Year in, year out he expanded his banana plantations, and the hauling of the fruit kept his road busy. In 1915 over 7,000,000 bunches of bananas say, 1,000,000,000 bananas, or ten for every man, woman, and child in the United States were shipped from Port Limon! Mr. Keith also built up large interests in Panama, Colombia, and Nicaragua.
Ever on the alert for opportunities, he early set up as a storekeeper. Commissaries in Costa Rica were followed, in 1873, with a store in Bluefields, Nicaragua, the first there, and various other points on the Central American coast as far north as Belize, Honduras, for the purchase of rubber, sarsaparilla, and tortoise shell.
His experience in growing bananas, his knowledge of soil and jungle, his familiarity with transportation by water and land, his ability to attract and satisfy Jamaican labour, his reputation for trustworthiness, his adamantine physique, his irrepressible energy, his unconquerable will all these qualities contributed to his success.
He became the largest grower of bananas in Central America. His shipping facilities developed apace. His store and commissary operations alone ran into millions of dollars. And he finished his Costa Rican railroad after seventeen years' building.
All this brought him wealth.
Then disaster came.
His United States agents, to whom he consigned all his bananas, failed. Over $1,500,000 paper bearing his name and drawn upon this firm was outstanding.
Keith had saved Costa Rica. Costa Rica, to its eternal credit, sprang to save Keith. Within a few days $1,200,000 was offered to him by the Government, the Costa Rican banks and individuals. In two weeks he reached New York and met every dollar of his debts.
Without delay he had to find new distributing agents for his bananas as his whole international machinery was out of gear.
Andrew W. Preston was then the greatest factor in the banana industry in New England and the North, just as Mr. Keith was in the South. The Preston fruit came from Jamaica, Cuba, and San Domingo and did not compete in the Southern markets.
The two giants joined forces. They formed the United Fruit Company, destined to become the greatest single force in developing Central America, in bringing the United States into commercial and social touch with her Latin neighbours, in conquering the tropics and in keeping down the cost of living in this country.
Mr. Keith's fruit properties were valued at over $4,000,000 on going into the United. His hardships had not been suffered in vain!
The record of the Preston-Keith enterprise embracing Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Salvador, and the Canary Islands forms one of America's most romantic commercial chapters. The United Fruit Company has spent over $200,000,000 in cultivating the tropics; it gives employment to 60,000 men at wages several times the rate they formerly received; it has built and operates over 1,000 miles of railway and tramways; it has spent millions of dollars in fighting fever and in building hospitals. Its "Great White Fleet" constitutes the best and largest array of ships America can boast some forty-five steamers are owned outright and nearly as many more are under long charter. The United has knit together every republic and every island in the tropics by its huge wireless stations. It has built many lighthouses on the coast of Central America.
It is the biggest farmer, and almost the biggest grocer, on earth. It owns upward of 1,200,000 acres, equal to half the State of Delaware. Over 250,000 acres are actually under cultivation. Its livestock includes 20,000 cattle and 6,000 horses and mules!
Its tropical plantations and equipment are valued at over $50,000,000 and its steamships at $17,000,000. Its total assets foot up to $90,000,000.
But Keith is first, last, and all the time a railroad builder. His heart is in that. Two steel rails run through all his dreams.
Like Cecil Rhodes, the far-seeing founder of the Cape-to-Cairo railroad, Minor C. Keith "thinks in continents." Also like Cecil Rhodes, he has conceived an international railroad that stirs the
imagination, a railroad, as already told, that will join North America's transportation system with that of Central America and later with South America, a steel highway that one day may run from one end of the New World to the other. The advance of civilization, the welding of peoples together, the abolition of racial misunderstanding these are the inspiring aims and end sought.
To dream and not do, avails little. Keith has laboured with unbelievable success to make his dream come true.
The International Railways of Central America the "PanAmerican Railway" is not a mere paper railroad. Half of it is already built. Connection has been made, on the Pacific side, with the National Railways of Mexico, at the Guatemala boundary. The road runs down the Guatemala coast and then cuts clear across the continent, to Puerto Barrios, on the Atlantic side; this transcontinental line is now in profitable operation. From mid-continent the line is being built straight through the little republic of Salvador to La Union, on the Pacific. Next it will pass through Honduras and join the Nicaraguan road. The Costa Rica system will then be reached, and from Port Limon to the Panama Canal will be the final link on the northern side of the "great divide." The South American extension, Mr. Keith is confident, will follow.
Some 600 miles of the International Railways are actually operating and making money. And the daring project is daily creeping toward completion.
"I have heard, Mr. Keith, that you hope to bring about the union of the five Central American republics Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Is that your ambition?" I asked. He gazed into space. Then:
"I believe that will come. It will be a great thing for them all. But only railroads can bring it about. The people of Costa Rica are still strangers to the people of Nicaragua although their countries adjoin. There must first be commercial and social intercourse. The railroad will make that possible."
When you travel in Central America you learn that Minor C. Keith can have anything he wants because the people regard him as their biggest friend, their "father" their leader, one of themselves. Mr. Keith married the daughter of one of Costa Rica's early presidents, Jose Maria Castro, lived there continuously for twenty-seven years, spent millions in relieving disease in the tropics, and feels in a sense responsible for the welfare of these undeveloped little nations. Not once has he or his companies had the slightest rupture with any Latin government.
So if Keith by and by decides that the time is ripe for the creation of a Central American Commonwealth the chances are that it will be established.
This is a selection from the book
Men Who Are Making America by B(erti) C(harles) Forbes.
Published in 1917. Original spelling has been retained.
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In Keith's search for an alternative port to New Orleans, he discovered St Andrew Bay in the panhandle of Florida. Although he did not elect to employ the deep-water port there, he did fall in love with the St Andrew Bay and selected his retirement site on the bay shore. However, his wife, accustomed to a more refined social environment, choose Long Island, NY instead. In a 1980 study done by University of Florida, St Andrew Bay was determined to have the highest diversity of inhabitants of any ecosystem in north America.
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