After writing ABC Biography of Frederick Schaffner (1828-1899) Family of Germany, New York and San Francisco, based on my genealogical research, I asked Anthropic Claude to tell the family story of the Schaffner's migrating from New York City to San Francisco by sea.
The first part of the story was posted in The Golden Shore -- A Schaffner Family Story: Parts 1 and 2. Here is the second part of the story:
(Infographic created by Google NotebookLM - Parts 3 and 4 of The Golden Shore)
The Golden Shore
A Story of the Schaffner Family
New York to San Francisco, 1855
Part Three
Aspinwall
The Caribbean coast of Panama, late June 1855
They saw the coast of Panama before they smelled it, which surprised Frederick, who had been warned by everyone on the ship that the isthmus had a smell that announced itself for miles. But it was the green that hit him first — a green so violent and absolute that it looked unreal, like a painted backdrop, the jungle rising from the water's edge in an unbroken wall of extravagance.
Then the smell arrived. It was the smell of things growing and rotting simultaneously, of standing water and enormous flowers and soil so alive it was almost moving, and underneath all of it something Frederick could only describe as heat made visible. The air was a physical substance. You didn't breathe it so much as wade through it.
Herman, standing at the rail as the Illinois nosed into the harbor at Aspinwall, said: "It smells like the greengrocer."
"Much bigger greengrocer," Frederick said.
Aspinwall was chaos with a harbor. It sat on a coral island barely above the waterline, connected to the mainland by a causeway, and its streets were a confusion of wooden buildings, tents, warehouses, and a permanent population of several thousand mixed with the transient population of however many passengers happened to be passing through at any given moment — which in June of 1855 was a very great many. Californians going east, easterners going west, Panamanian boatmen and provisioners and luggage handlers and a small army of men whose precise profession was unclear but who seemed to involve themselves in any transaction that might yield a commission.
The moment the Illinois anchored, these men were alongside in canoes, shouting up to the passengers in a mixture of Spanish and English, offering to carry baggage, sell food, change money, provide accommodations, guide them to the railroad station. The noise was extraordinary.
"Hold Herman's hand," Frederick said to Martha Matilda, unnecessarily — she had already gripped the boy's wrist with the efficiency of a woman who had grown up with six brothers.
"What do we do?" she asked.
"We follow the crowd," Frederick said, "and we trust nothing that costs more than it should."
— ★ —
The Panama Railroad station was a low wooden building at the edge of town, and in front of it there was a crowd of several hundred people all attempting to accomplish the same thing at the same time, which created a bottleneck of impressive proportions. Frederick stood in the queue for ninety minutes in the noon heat, with Herman on his shoulders for the last forty of them because the boy's legs had given out, and sweated through his shirt twice over.
The agent behind the window was a thin American with a moustache and the expression of a man who had explained the same things to the same kinds of people eleven thousand times.
"Two adults, one child," Frederick said, in his careful English. "To Panama City."
"Twenty-five dollars the two adults. Child rides free under six." The agent looked at Herman with professional suspicion. "How old?"
"Four," Frederick said.
"He's big for four."
"He is," Frederick agreed.
A pause. The agent stamped three tickets. Frederick paid. The tickets were printed on yellow card and Herman immediately tried to eat his.
— ★ —
They spent one night in Aspinwall, in a boarding house on the main street run by a Panamanian woman named Señora Reyes who spoke five languages with equal authority and charged prices that reflected this. The room was small and very hot and had a window that looked into the side of another building, and from somewhere in the city there was music all night — a guitar and a drum and a man singing in Spanish — and Frederick lay awake listening to it while Martha Matilda slept with her arm around Herman and the ceiling fan turned overhead in slow, hypnotic circles.
He thought about Darmstadt. He did this sometimes, involuntarily, the city surfacing in his mind like something released from the bottom of a lake. The linden trees on the Luisenplatz. The smell of the bakery near the house where he'd grown up. His mother's hands. He had left all of that when he was twenty. He had left New York now. He seemed to be a man constitutionally incapable of staying in one place.
Or perhaps, he thought, looking at the slow fan, he was simply a man who kept moving toward something he hadn't found yet.
He thought California might be it. He was not certain. But a man who waited for certainty never left his room.
He closed his eyes. The guitar played on.
Part Four
The Railroad
The Panama Railroad, July 1855
The train left at six in the morning, before the worst of the heat, and it was the most remarkable thing Frederick had ever been on. He had ridden trains in Germany and in America, and they had been fine machines — purposeful, impressive in their way — but this was something different. This was a train that had been built across forty-seven miles of jungle and swamp and river and mountain, completed just six months before, at a cost the newspapers said was two hundred and ninety-five lives per mile of track, and every one of those miles was visible as the jungle pressed against the windows on both sides and the locomotive fought the grade with a noise like sustained argument.
They had a bench seat near the middle of the car. Martha Matilda sat by the window. Herman sat on Frederick's lap for approximately four minutes and then demanded to move to the window seat beside his mother, which she allowed, and then he pressed his face against the glass for the entire journey with the focused attention of a scientist.
"Affe!" he suddenly shouted. Monkey.
Several passengers looked over. Martha Matilda peered through the glass. Sure enough, in a tree perhaps twenty feet from the tracks, a small monkey sat regarding the passing train with philosophical calm. Then another. Then a whole colony of them, high in the canopy, invisible until they moved.
"Monkeys," Herman announced to the car in general, in case anyone had missed them.
Frau Bauer, who had the seat across the aisle, laughed her deep, generous laugh. The O'Brien children, several rows back, craned their necks. The thin American who had sold them their tickets — he was on the train too, apparently, commuting in some official capacity — looked up from his newspaper with the expression of a man who had seen a thousand monkeys and did not find them remarkable, then looked back at Herman's face against the glass and something in his expression shifted slightly, just for a moment, before the newspaper came back up.
— ★ —
The jungle gave way twice to rivers — wide, brown, slow-moving rivers that the train crossed on iron bridges that vibrated with a deep metallic singing. Each bridge crossing brought a collective hush from the passengers, as though by silent agreement everyone had decided to concentrate very hard on the fact that the bridge was holding.
It held.
In the middle section of the crossing, the train climbed into hills and for a few minutes the jungle thinned and they could see — briefly, before the trees closed in again — an enormous green distance: valley after valley folding away south and west, the Pacific somewhere beyond. Frederick craned his neck to see it and caught a sliver of something flat and silver at the horizon before the jungle swallowed the view again.
"Was that the ocean?" Martha Matilda asked.
"I think so."
She was quiet for a moment, looking at where it had been. "We're more than halfway, then."
"We're more than halfway," Frederick agreed.
She nodded, once, in her way, and turned back to making sure Herman didn't fall off the seat.
— ★ —
Herman stood on the platform with his head tilted back and his arms slightly out from his sides, like a small figure attempting balance on a moving deck, though the platform was perfectly still. The wind flattened his hair. He was looking at the ocean.
"That's our ocean now," Frederick told him.
"Our ocean?"
"The one we cross next. The Pacific."
Herman turned to look at him. He had a smear of something on his cheek — chocolate, possibly, from a piece Frau Bauer had pressed into his hand as they boarded. His eyes were very dark and very serious.
"How many oceans are there?" he asked.
Frederick thought about it. "Five," he said. "We'll have crossed two."
"Have you crossed the others?"
"No."
"Maybe we will," Herman said, and turned back to look at the water with an expression of open and uncomplicated ambition that made Frederick want to laugh and put his arm around the boy's shoulders at the same time. He did both.
A work of historical fiction
Characters based on the real Schaffner family of San Francisco.
All dialogue and scenes are imagined.
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The AI Google NotebookLM Video Overview of this story is in:
This is historical fiction based on known events in the lives of my ancestors - it might have been this way. The family mentioned is my wife's ancestral family (Frederick Schaffner is her 2nd great-grandfather), and I have significant information about their lives from the available records, but know nothing about their day-to-day lives.
After I read these types of social history summaries, I wish that I could be a time traveler for one day to visit the Schaffner family in New York and San Francisco and witness their daily lives. I'm glad that the general lifestyles and occupations are known from historical records and witness accounts.
Information like this is very helpful to add historical events and social history content to a person's biography.
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Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.
Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver
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