On my arrival in Benguet in 1901, I found that good progress had been made on the upper end of the road, which had penetrated for a short distance into the canon proper without encountering any considerable obstacles.

On October 15, 1901, the commission stated in its annual report to the secretary of war, “He [509] has been much delayed by the difficulty of procuring the labour necessary for its early completion, and several months will yet elapse before it is finished!” They did!

On August 20, 1901, Captain Meade was relieved, and Mr. N. M. Holmes was made engineer of the road.

On February 3, 1902, a little sanitarium was opened in a small native house at Baguio.  During the following July I was sent to it as a patient, and while in Benguet again inspected the road which had been continued high up on the canon wall to a point where, on a very steep mountain side, a peculiar rock formation had been encountered at the very grass roots.  This rock disintegrated rapidly under the action of the sun when exposed to it.  Comparatively solid in the morning, it would crack to pieces and slide down the mountain side before night.  A sixty-foot cut had already been made into the precipitous mountain side, and the result was an unstable road-bed, hardly four feet in width, which threatened to go out at any moment.

My trip to Baguio promptly relieved a severe attack of acute intestinal trouble from which I had been suffering, and when Governor Taft fell ill the following year with a similar ailment, and his physicians recommended his return to the United States, I did my best to persuade him to try Baguio instead.  He decided to do so.

Five rough cottages had meanwhile been constructed for the use of the commissioners, the lumber for them being sawed by hand on the ground.  Boards had been nailed to frames as rapidly as they fell from the logs, and had shrunk to such an extent that a reasonably expert marksman might almost have thrown a cat by the tail through any one of the houses.  At night they looked like the old-fashioned perforated tin lanterns, leaking light in a thousand places.  These were the luxurious homes provided for the high officials of the government of which so much has been said!

We paid for them an annual rental amounting to ten per cent of their cost, which had of course been excessively high on account of the necessity of packing everything used in them, except the lumber, up the Naguilian trail.

However, we were in no frame of mind to be critical.  We had put in three years of killing hard work, labouring seven days in the week, and keeping hours such as to arouse a feeling little short of horror among old British and other foreign residents.  We were all completely exhausted, and Mr. Taft was ill.  For my part, I would gladly have paid almost any sum for a tent under the pine trees and the privilege of occupying it for a few weeks.