Photos

Believe it or not, if you were travelling from New York to San Francisco in the 1850s, you would be travelling upstream this river, San Juan, right thru the middle of a jungle. The town you see now is tiny San Carlos (pop. 7,000).

With the beginning of the California Gold Rush in the 1850s fast and safe transportation from the East Coast of the US to the West Coast was needed. An overland trip was long, dangerous and arduous, as no routes were established yet.

Tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt took advantage of the opportunity, and established the Accessory Transit Company (ATC). The company took passengers by steamer from New York to the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. From there, they travelled up the San Juan River (in the shot) to Lake Nicaragua, then crossing the lake to the town of Rivas. A stagecoach then crossed the narrow isthmus to the Pacific coast, where another steamer travelled to San Francisco.

The ATC provided the cheapest and shortest route to California, so it was more popular than competitors that used the Panama route (before the building of the Panama canal).

A few years later political upheaval in Nicaragua put the business in jeopardy, so Vanderbilt made a bold business move, he simply offered his competitors to close the ATC company in exchange for a considerable amount of money to be paid to him every year. An agreement was reached and that was the end of the Nicaragua route. It also meant that the canal was eventually built in Panama, and not in Nicaragua.

So next time you fly over Kansas in an American Airlines carrier on your flight to San Francisco or Los Angeles - think about the pioneers that had to cross rivers and lakes in the jungle, on an ATC ship, to get to the promised land - California.

(scan; tilt corrected, couple of antennas cropped out, some saturation, brightness lowered in sky area, border added)