Prowling About Panama

In 1919, Panama was barely sixteen years old: a newborn nation born from a political divorce with Colombia, an engineering miracle half-finished, a place where indigenous traditions rubbed shoulders with French canal engineers and American businessmen. George A. Miller arrived not as a journalist or scholar but as a prowler, someone willing to get lost in the right way. His book captures a country in motion, still carrying centuries of Spanish colonial heritage while the Panama Canal reshaped its economic and political destiny. Miller wanders from the cobblestone streets of old Panama City to jungle interiors, observing the indigenous peoples, the newly arrived workers, the strange energy of a place that feels both ancient and startlingly new. This is travel writing before tourism, a document of a nation finding itself at the crossroads of empire and independence. For readers who love early travel narratives, who want to see a place before it became a caricature of itself.