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“... delve through hills for nine miles ;
cut a channel with an average depth of 120 feet, with a minimum
width of 300 feet; to slice through the continental divide,
Gold Hill and Contractors’ Hill separating the watersheds,
toward the Pacific and Atlantic ; remove a clear depth of 375 feet
of hill; haul away about 100 million cubic yards of rock and
earth—nearly half the total excavations in the Canal con-
struction—have the work constantly checked by thousands
of tons of the hill-sides sliding into the Canal, bringing into the
Cut streams which had been diverted, and threatening to flood
the workers out: there is something dramatic, majestic and
occasionally terrible in it all.
Originally known as the Culebra Cut, it was, on
April 17th, 1913, renamed by President Woodrow Wilson
the Gaillard Cut, after Lieut.-Colonel D. D. Gaillard, of
the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, who was in
charge of the work from 1907 until its virtual completion
in 1913.
To appreciate the...”
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