The Pan American Railway

Abstract

The dream of connecting the Americas by means of a railway was not that of one man but of several and perhaps of many. It may have been conceived in the Pan Americanism of Henry Clay and developed by the historic tendency of the nations of the New World towards co6peration. The first known advocate of such a project was Francis Thomas, United States minister to Peru, who in 1872 sent to the State Department an official despatch urging that the government build a trunk-line from some point on the Southern Pacific Railroad through Latin America to Cuzco or to Santiago.' Seven years later Hinton Rowan Helper, flamboyant author of The Impending Crisis in the South, began a crusade in behalf of an intercontinental railway that ended only with his death in 1909. Though Helper in his book, Oddments of Andean Diplomacy, published in 1879, claimed that he conceived the idea of the project in 1866, while sailing to New York from Buenos Aires, where he had served as United States consul,2 he may have borrowed it from Thomas, whom he visited in Peru about the time that diplomat sent his despatch to Washington. In any case, Helper was the first to give the project widespread publicity. In several books and essays he deplored the lack of regular and cheap transportation between the United States and South America. Most of the trade of the continent went by speedy steamship service to Great Britain, France, and Germany. Helper wrote that he was personally acquainted with many Argentine and Chilean merchants who, contrary to their sympathies and desires, did not trade with the United States because letters they addressed to business