Isaac Grier Strain (March 4, 1821, in Roxbury, Franklin County, Pennsylvania – May 14, 1857, in Aspinwall, (alternative name of Colón, Panama) Colombia), an American midshipman.
In 1849 he explored parts of South America and wrote Cordillera and Pampa, Mountain and Plain: Sketches of a Journey in Chili and The Argentine Provinces in 1849, published in New York in 1853.
The Englishman Gisborne had put pen to perhaps fallacious or inaccurate, but certainly misleading, journals that would lend ambiguity and deaths to Strain's route for traversing the Gap.
The Strain party, in part proceeding upon Gisborne's records, wandered circuitously, split, and became plagued by deteriorating equipment, unreliable and often dangerous native guides, malnourishment, foot-soreness, flesh-embedding parasites, and infectious tropical diseases.
The courageous but ill-fated expedition nevertheless contributed to future establishments of land routes, a railroad, and the eventual linking of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by a Panama Canal.