Life in Spigotty Land (14 March 1908)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

 The PANAMA SUN & HERALD didn't turn up a "spigotty" in a short search.  Harry A. Franck's ZONE POLICEMAN 88 (1913) wasn't the first citation.  I checked the SATURDAY EVENING POST, as Sam Clements suggested.  It's there.
  This is the fifth time I've tried to send this post...I'm booked for Panama in sixty days (February 15).


  14 March 1908, SATURDAY EVENING POST, pg. 3, col. 1:
_LIFE IN SPIGOTTY LAND_
_Something About the Cheerful Side of Canal-Digging_
_By Samuel G. Blythe_
  GET a carriage," said the man in the white duck suit, as we stood on the steps of the Tivoli Hotel, "and it will cost you twenty cents, Spigotty.  I'd get a driver who can talk English, too, if I were you, instead of a Spigotty driver.  it might save a row if you want to make more than one trip.
  "Spigotty?" Iasked.  "What's Spigotty?"
  "Why," he replied, surprised at my ignorance, "a Spigotty is a native, of course."
  That was my first morning on the Isthmus.  Before noon I had added the word to my vocabulary, for every American down there has cast aside the cumbrous "Panamanian."  Whatever is native is Spigotty.  It is the broad, comprehensive term which the men who are digging the canal have applied to the small brown persons who inhabit the Republic of Panama, their products, habits, customs, money and morals.   So far as the money is concerned it is synonymous with "tin" money or "monkey" money, and means that what the Spigotty folks fondly call a dollar, the same having been minted for them in Philadelphia by our paternal and protective Government at cost, is worth fifty cents.   It is a good term, too, for most of the things Panamanian look Spigotty, if you can imagine that.  It comes from the earliest days of the American invasion to dig the canal, when there was nothing along what is now the populous, busy and clean Canal Zone but a few miles of jungle-grown ditch left by the French, much rusted French machinery, yellow fever, mosquitoes, dirt and desolation.   The early Americans found the Panama people haughty in the possession of their new republic, which had been made over night for them by our aforesaid paternal and protective Government, we needing a republic there smaller in extent than Colombia, but most anxious to reap the benefits of intimate association with these curious people from the North, who insisted on digging a ditch across the Isthmus when there was already a railroad there, to say nothing of good _cayuco_ traveling on the Chagres River part of the way and a trail that could be used at a pinch.
  All Americans are alike.  They don not bother to learn foregin languages when they go to a foreign country, but they force the natives to learn American.  So, when the Panamanians presented themselves, if they could talk English, they prefaced their attempts to cheat the Americans out of something--it really made little difference what--with the statement, accompanied by eloquent gestures: "Spik d' English."   If they couldn't they said: "No spik d' English."  One or the other was the universal opening of conversation, andthose early Americnas soon classed the whole race of men who could or could not "Spik d' Eng." as "Spikities," and from that grew the harmonious and descriptive Spigotty.