The 42nd Parallel

Emperor of the Caribbean

When Minor C. Keith died all the newspapers carried his picture, a brighteyed man with a hawknose and a respectable bay window, and an uneasy look under the eyes.

Minor C. Keith was a rich man’s son, born in a family that liked the smell of money, they could smell money half way round the globe in that family.

His Uncle was Henry Meiggs, the Don Enrique of the West Coast. His father had a big lumber business and handled realestate in Brooklyn;

young Keith was a chip of the old block

(Back in fortynine Don Enrique had been drawn to San Francisco by the gold rush. He didn’t go prospecting in the hills, he didn’t die of thirst sifting alkalidust in Death Valley. He sold outfits to the other guys. He stayed in San Francisco and played politics and high finance until he got in too deep and had to get aboard ship in a hurry.

The vessel took him to Chile. He could smell money in Chile.

He was the capitalista yanqui. He’d build the railroad from Santiago to Valparaiso. There were guano deposits on the Chincha Islands. Meiggs could smell money in guano. He dug himself a fortune out of guano, became a power on the West Coast, juggled figures, railroads, armies, the politics of the local caciques and politicos; they were all chips in a huge pokergame. Behind a big hand he heaped up the dollars.

He financed the unbelievable Andean railroads.)

When Tomas Guardia got to be dictator of Costa Rica he wrote to Don Enrique to build him a railroad;

Meiggs was busy in the Andes, a $75,000 contract was hardly worth his while,

so he sent for his nephew Minor Keith.

They didn’t let grass grow under their feet in that family:

at sixteen Minor Keith had been on his own, selling collars and ties in a clothingstore.

After that he was a lumber surveyor and ran a lumber business.

When his father bought Padre Island off Corpus Christi Texas he sent Minor down to make money out of it.

Minor Keith started raising cattle on Padre Island and seining for fish,

but cattle and fish didn’t turn over money fast enough

so he bought hogs and chopped up the steers and boiled the meat and fed it to the hogs and chopped up the fish and fed it to the hogs,

but hogs didn’t turn over money fast enough,

so he was glad to be off to Limon.

Limon was one of the worst pestholes on the Caribbean, even the Indians died there of malaria, yellow jack, dysentery.

Keith went back up to New Orleans on the steamer John G. Meiggs to hire workers to build the railroad. He offered a dollar a day and grub and hired seven hundred men. Some of them had been down before in the filibustering days of William Walker.

Of that bunch about twentyfive came out alive.

The rest left their whiskyscalded carcases to rot in the swamps.

On another load he shipped down fifteen hundred; they all died to prove that only Jamaica Negroes could live in Limon.

Minor Keith didn’t die.

In 1882 there were twenty miles of railroad built and Keith was a million dollars in the hole;

the railroad had nothing to haul.

Keith made them plant bananas so that the railroad might have something to haul, to market the bananas he had to go into the shipping business;

this was the beginning of the Caribbean fruittrade.

All the while the workers died of whisky, malaria, yellow jack, dysentery.

Minor Keith’s three brothers died.

Minor Keith didn’t die.

He built railroads, opened retail stores up and down the coast in Bluefields, Belize, Limon, bought and sold rubber, vanilla, tortoiseshell, sarsaparilla, anything he could buy cheap he bought, anything he could sell dear he sold.

In 1898 in cooperation with the Boston Fruit Company he formed the United Fruit Company that has since become one of the most powerful industrial units in the world.

In 1912 he incorporated the International Railroads of Central America;

all of it built out of bananas;

in Europe and the United States people had started to eat bananas,

so they cut down the jungles through Central America to plant bananas,

and built railroads to haul the bananas,

and every year more steamboats of the Great White Fleet

steamed north loaded with bananas,

and that is the history of the American empire in the Caribbean, and the Panama canal and the future Nicaragua canal and the marines and the battleships and the bayonets.

Why that uneasy look under the eyes, in the picture of Minor C. Keith the pioneer of the fruit trade, the railroad builder, in all the pictures the newspapers carried of him when he died?