The gold exports come mainly from the mines of the Darien Company, a French company which has been working for years. The whole isthmus is strongly under suspicion of gold. All the streams show evidence of it, and prospectors are always searching the Darien country and the provinces of Los Santos and Veraguas for the saint-seducing metal. No other minerals are worked in the isthmus. There are "coal-deposits" of a sort in the canal zone, but the coal is of no commercial value. The only railway at present existing in the republic is that between Colon and Panama, the entire stock of which is owned by the United States government, and is worked as a company under the laws of the state of New York. This line, which has had to be largely reconstructed owing to the course of the new canal, was opened in 1855. It is rather surprising that it should not have been more extensively employed for traffic between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of America. As a matter of fact, it was the main highway of transcontinental traffic until 1869, when the Missouri River was first linked up with the Pacific coast by the Union and Central Pacific Railroads, and the first continuous line across the States came into existence. After that date the traffic fell off very rapidly. The causes of this decline are various. To begin with, the great trunk-lines across the States competed ruthlessly with the old isthmian route, getting control of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which was for long the only regular line between the west coasts of the United States and Panama. Then the French and American construction work has seriously interfered with the route by limiting the amount of commercial freight that could be handled across the isthmus. Another cause of depression has been the opening of the Tehuantepec route in South Mexico. In 1906 the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company made an agreement with the Tehuantepec National Railway, which runs across the isthmus, and withdrew its vessels from the old Magellan route, establishing regular services between New York and Puerto Mexico on the Atlantic side, and on the Pacific between Salina Cruz, the Pacific terminal of the canal, and the west coast ports of the United States and Hawaii. The route so organized was opened in 1907, and has proved very successful, chiefly owing to the enormous increase in the sugar exports from Hawaii. The intercoastal traffic by Tehuantepec from New York to Pacific ports advanced from 114,900 tons in 1906 to 295,800 tons in 1911, and from Pacific ports to New York from 32,000 tons in 1906 to 162,500 in 1911.