On the same day in 1906, two men arrive in Panama seeking to build new lives. One is white, one black. As such, their prospects and conditions in the segregated U.S. Canal Zone, a ten-mile wide strip of new American territory cutting across the isthmus, couldn't be more different.
Jack Adams, 27, is a Spanish-American war veteran who fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt's Rough riders at San Juan Hill. He was a detective with the San Francisco police when an earthquake destroyed the city in April, 1906, and killed his fiancée and her parents. Homeless and penniless, he takes a recruiter up on offer to become a Panama Man.
Asa Hawkins, 19, is a cane-cutter in Barbados, where sugar prices have hit an all-time low. Desperate for a better life, he joins the thousands of able-bodied men sailing to Panama, where it's rumored they'll earn ten times what they make now per day.
Jack lands in Panama City on the Pacific side and steps into a job with the Canal Zone Police. Because he is a white American, he gets paid two dollars a day in gold, along with free housing, paid sick days, six weeks' paid leave and many other benefits.
Asa lands on the Atlantic coast in hot, stinking Colón, so hungry after a week-long trip through violent seas that he fights through a crowd of men to eat sugar from a bag on the dock. He is herded in a cattle car to the hellish gorge known as the Culebra Cut, where dynamite crews blast away the walls of the Continental Divide and the biggest steam shovels ever made hack away the spoil. He is housed in a dorm with 71 other men, gets substandard food and works 12-hour days in miserable conditions. All for one dollar a day in silver.
That is life in the American Zone, as segregated as any town in the south under Jim Crow laws.
Everything shifts when Asa, desperate for money after his best friend falls ill, agrees to pose naked for an artist. A sudden act of violence leaves the artist dead, with Asa on the run and Jack in pursuit.
Once Asa is caught, Jack comes to see him as a victim, not the murderer he is made out to be. He doesn't believe Asa deserves the harsh sentence meted out by a swift and severe Canal Zone justice system.
All seems lost until Jack learns the mighty Teddy Roosevelt himself plans to inspect the Canal Zone in November. No sitting president has ever left the U.S. but Roosevelt, never one to abide by rules, has to convince Americans the canal is on track amid rumors of mismanagement.
Assigned to Roosevelt's protection detail, Jack dogs him from the red-light district of Cocoa Grove to the depths of the Culebra Cut, hoping to get the president's ear and save his newfound friend from death in a hellish prison.
