Chapter X (2)

Now we may almost say that “Leach” is synonymous with “JUJUY” and vice versa, and enterprises initiated by this family now embrace all branches of industry of which the Province is yet capable, including large sugar plantations and machinery. Now, the National Central Northern Argentine Railway connects Jujuy with the outer world, but before its advent it was indeed a far-off land to be reached only after many weeks’ arduous journeying. Jujuy is the most distant and, after Tucumán, the smallest Province of the Republic.

It is bounded on the North and North-West by Bolivia, on the West by the National Territory of Los Andes and on the South and East by the Province of Salta.

Jujuy produces not inconsiderable quantities of wheat, maize, barley and alfalfa and, as has been said, sugar.

In the North it has a number of salt lakes, which are exploited commercially, as also are some deposits of borax.

The climate of Jujuy is very varied, according to altitude, but in general is much more temperate than the actual latitude of the Province would lead one to suppose. There is always a considerable rainfall during hot weather. Its chief river is the Rio Grande de Humahuaca, a tributary of the Bermejo, which coming from the North curves in a semicircle through the Central and South-Eastern parts of the Province.

Jujuy, with its broken surface, claims rivalry with Tucumán as the most picturesque of the Argentine Provinces. In some of its southern districts the vegetation is tropical. In the North-West there is a high tableland much of which is dry and practically desert, interspersed with fertile valleys.

In the South of the Province the population is of mixed racial origin with a very large element of native Indian blood. In the North it is practically pure Indian. The native Humahuaca dialect is preponderant everywhere, even in Spanish as spoken there. In the North there is little or no pretension to speak anything but Humahuaca.

The Capital, however, the City of Jujuy, was, strangely enough, the first Argentine town to have its streets paved. It was the scene of the assassination of General Lavalle, one of the heroes of the Wars of Independence, and possesses the original flag of General Belgrano, the blue and white chosen by him for the nascent Republic, and ever since retained by it. Later the National Colours and those of Uruguay (a slightly different arrangement of the same blue and white) were officially emblazoned with the golden “Sun of May”; the 25th of May, 1810, being the date of the Declaration of Independence from the rule of Spain.

As has been mentioned above, most of such prosperity as Jujuy as yet possesses is due to the patient energy of the Leach family. Such administrative and fiscal discredit as attaches to the Province is, on the other hand, due to the native element among its politicians. These evils inevitably must soon be swept away by the advance of civilized ideas and necessity for better management by public authority. The mass of the population will, no doubt, continue to live in its own long-accustomed primitive fashion.

It hardly contains the racial elements of rapid advance towards a much higher civilization.

Future immigration must be relied on to do much to develop Jujuy’s natural resources.

At present a certain amount of rather primitive, and some contraband, export and import trade is done with Bolivia in the Northern parts of the Province.

Jujuy is poor in Live Stock even of the native kinds.

SALTA

With Salta we complete the list of the less important outlying Argentine Provinces.

Like Jujuy, it is bounded on the North by Bolivia, on the West by Jujuy and the National Territory of Los Andes, on the South by Tucumán and Santiago del Estero, and on the East by the National Territory of Formosa.

Salta is indeed historic ground; so full of reminiscence of the Wars of Independence that it may almost be called the cradle of the Republic. It was also in Salta that Jabez Balfour was at length taken into custody, after a long struggle for an extradition treaty between Great Britain and Argentina.

The writer is well acquainted with a gentleman, since then become a prominent figure in the railway world of the River Plate, who “specially” drove the engine of the train which brought Balfour down to civilization and captivity. The prisoner had money which he had spent freely among his new neighbours, and attempts at rescue were expected. So the train rushed on its downward course with a velocity to which the then permanent way and rails were totally unaccustomed, but, as all the world was soon made aware, arrived at its destination without accident.

The prisoner had been the victim of his own luxurious habits, for he had grown so fat that it was impossible to convey him through frontier mountain passes into Bolivia, as his friends had intended and as would have been possible, in point of time, to do before the expected warrant for his arrest could have found its way into the not too willing hands of the local authorities.

Until his recent death, the present generation had scarcely heard of Jabez Balfour. Yet he was widely celebrated in contemporaneous popular song as “The man who broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”

In Salta is still to be found a much more really interesting personage in the GAUCHO, the Cavaliere Rusticano of the River Plate and the hero of all its earlier poetry and romance. He of the guitar-accompanied improvised verse, of the quick flashing knife and equally quick REBENQUE.[26] He was no small element in the victories won over the Spanish soldiery nor in the long years of civil war which followed Independence. He is still in Salta; one of the last parts of the Republic in which he can be found. Comparatively uncontaminated by the encroachments of the drab uniformity of civilization.

He remains romantic and brutal, chivalrous and treacherous, hospitable and quick to resent the mere implication of an insult. Still a cattle herd adept with lazo or _boleadora_,[27] a nomad ever seeking fresh fields and pastures new within the limits of his native territory. Give him a uniform he is a very useful soldier, and a fair military policeman, save for his rather erratic fits of truculence. For the rest no good at all outside of the few spheres mapped out for him by the limitation of his own strongly marked individuality. But he will always know again an animal he has once seen, and will track out a lost sheep across a very maze of confused spoor.

Mr. Herbert Gibson[28] has written of the gaucho with true feeling and appreciation in the following words:—

Skilled in horsemanship, quick of hand and of eye; in his
beginnings the Arab and nomad of the plains; indifferent of his
neighbour’s life, for his own he carried in his hand to risk
at the first hazard, yet “loyal to his own law” even in his
most lawless exploits—the gaucho of the Pampa constitutes the
genuine emblem of the Argentine genius. He is the materialized
expression of the spirit of the vast and lonely plain. “Bearing
allegiance to neither King nor thing,” as Azara writes, he
followed the fate of the live stock of the colony; when the
cattle escaped control he too declared himself free, running
wild and beyond the pale of even nominal domestication. The
Pampa was his home, and in his ears the breeze moving over the
plains whispered to him of liberty. To colonial rule succeeded
the new order of Independence, and the gaucho, inured by his
style of living to the stress of weather and to the struggle
with savage animals, became the right hand of the petty chiefs
of party faction, ever joining the side in conflict with
the ruling power. The words law and order signified for him
oppression and servitude, and he became the declared enemy of
all authority. But with all his faults the gaucho, in his own
element, mounted on his beloved horse, with lazo secured to
the back of his saddle and his _boleadora_ hanging from his
waist, was the henchman beyond price for the work of the old
estancia, knowing how to dominate and domesticate the savage
herds and droves of wild mares. In all that he has seemingly
been modified by the progress of the times, he has remained
unmodified in his spirit which is the essential manifestation
of his climate and of his habit. The nomad gaucho of the
colonial period converted into the loyal gaucho of the
estancia, the man with no other belongings than his horses and
the silver clasp and buttons hanging at his belt to whom the
breeder entrusted all his herds, and the grazier the money
wherewith to buy the droves of bullocks, without for one
moment thinking, either the one or the other, that he would
neglect his charges or fail to render account to the uttermost
farthing committed to his care. Alike loyal and venturesome in
the fulfilment of his duties, and kindly and hospitable in his
lowly home life, he is the hero of the rural romance of the
Pampa. Not without regret and tender reminiscences must we take
farewell of a period of pastoral life, from whose remembrance
all the hardships and bitterness have disappeared, only leaving
to us the recollection of that patriarchal and wholesome life
which the late Hernandez has so skilfully depicted in the
picturesque language of the gaucho who tells his story by
the fitful light of the fire on the kitchen hearth while his
fingers caress the melancholy strings of the guitar.

And now approaches the new era of railways, of fenced-in
paddocks, of ingenious drafting gates and all the mechanical
entourage of the modern pastoral industry. The gaucho, like
Othello, is without an occupation, but the spirit which in
divers forms and epochs has characterized him shall not die.
It is the native spirit of the Argentine genius which enters
the immigrant ere for long he has settled in the land and
which inspires the sons born to him in this country; it is the
instinct of independence and individuality engendered by the
free air of a rural life, and which is the antithesis of the
dependent spirit symbolized in city life by socialism.

Salta is a large, sparsely populated Province, the inhabitants of which outside the circle of its aristocratic families, are composed of our friend the GAUCHO and his families and the COYA Indians. These last, cowboys and shepherds, are much more unpleasant people; morose, avaricious in their necessarily small way, and full of sullen duplicity. Their only obvious virtue is their devoted attachment to the small allotments of land they can call their own. This solitary virtue does not, however, make them any the pleasanter to strangers; all of whom indiscriminately they regard as possible enemies come to rob them of their rights in some mysterious way or other.

Naturally, with such a population and on account of its distance from the great commercial centres of the Republic, Salta is not yet very far on the road to any great or settled prosperity.

It has some sugar plantations, cultivates some tobacco and makes some wine, but with its many generally well-watered and easily irrigable large areas of rich soil it could easily, and of course eventually will, progress.

It could grow a great deal more maize and alfalfa than it does, and could carry much more and better live stock than it yet troubles to do.

It produces some fruit and could produce all sorts of much choicer kinds in great variety; also potatoes, cotton and, as experts affirm, excellent coffee.

Of course there are here the old difficulties of irrigation, in some places, cost of transport and lack of intelligent labour. The first two are rapidly being overcome by the National Government, the last must be looked for overseas. The Gaucho and the Coya not only are not sufficiently numerous for Salta’s future needs, but (alas for the romance of the former!) they must be classed amongst the doomed unfit; to be merged in or overwhelmed by the march of modernity.

The aspect of Salta, like that of most of the northern Provinces and Territories, is varied. Mountain and low valley, broad plain and forest, deep river and rushing stream all alternate and give picturesqueness and diversity of climate. Goats, mules and sufficient horses for existing local needs are to be found here as in the neighbouring Provinces; all of which are justly famous for products, the mention of which must on no account be overlooked, the native cloths and PONCHOS, hand-woven of vicuna and guanaco wool. Soft, warm and durable, these cloths are highly and justly valued in the more civilized regions of the River Plate.

The manufacture of them dates from times which are prehistoric in America.

The forests of Salta contain a great quantity of Quebracho of excellent quality, and there are several indigenous creepers of caoutchouc-bearing kinds. This latter has as yet been little exploited, and then only in an extremely primitive manner.

Salta boasts a large hydropathic establishment in connection with the hot mineral springs of Rosario de la Frontera.

Salta, the Capital, is another of the old Colonial cities, amid the low houses of which fine new public buildings occur incongruously; iconoclastic. It has also a zoological garden which, wisely, contains many interesting specimens of local fauna, fine, luxuriantly planted public gardens and Plazas and an excellent Police Band.

In the oligarchic days of only a very few years ago the police forces of these outlying Provinces were extremely important political instruments. Under the Constitution the Provinces cannot raise or maintain independent soldiery; but who could say them nay if the exigencies of an uncultured population necessitated a large police force armed with Mausers?—to ensure due obedience to the orders of and agreement with the policy of the Provincial powers that were.

There are few commercial centres in Salta having populations sufficient to give them importance as towns. Metan is the largest, and after it come Cafayate, Campo Santo and Rosario de la Frontera, which, as has been said, is noted for its hot springs.

MENDOZA

This is one of the richer Provinces on account of its vines and the large wine-making industry. Similarly with Tucumán and Sugar, one may say that Mendoza and Wine are in Argentina practically synonymous; this observation also applies to its neighbour, San Juan, the second great wine-producing Province. Indeed it is quite common—very common indeed, in fact—to say of a person who shows signs of being under alcoholic influence that he is “Entre San Juan y Mendoza” (between San Juan and Mendoza).

Besides those of its vines, the greatest agricultural products of Mendoza are alfalfa, grown over very considerable areas of salt-impregnated soil, and a much smaller proportion of maize.

The population of Mendoza is small and the number of its live stock very little larger: although in point of superficial area Mendoza ranks third (after Buenos Aires and Córdoba) among the Argentine Provinces. It is only fair, however, to add that much of the Western Area of Mendoza is very mountainous, since it includes a long stretch of the Eastern side of the Andes.

This Province is bounded on the North by that of San Juan, on the West by Chile, on the South by the National Territories of Neuquen and the Pampa Central, and on the East by the Province of San Luis.

Its department of San Rafael is a very large one, larger indeed than the whole of the rest of the Province put together; in it is found the greatest agricultural activity, including the great alfalfa fields. The Mendoza cattle are of all kinds and varieties, little attention having been yet, generally, given to the science of cross-breeding. It, however, exports numbers of cattle to Chile, either by way of mountain passes or the Transandine Railway; but a great many of these have been bred in neighbouring Provinces and sent to Mendoza for a fattening period before exportation.

Irrigation is a great feature of Mendoza, which was the first Province to receive any notable attention in this regard. Now, if we except, perhaps, the great irrigation works and schemes already well advanced in the National Territories of Neuquen and the Rio Negro, Mendoza has, with San Juan, the largest and most comprehensive systems (both existing and in advanced stages of consideration) in the whole Republic.

The fall of the mountain rivers and the eastward drop of the whole surface of the Province makes irrigation here a comparatively easy task, while the natural fertility of the soil quickly and richly repays the initial cost and upkeep of reservoirs and canals. One menace there is which hangs ever over Mendoza, that of volcanic eruptions. The whole of its Capital was completely destroyed as recently as 1861. The city has, however, been rebuilt on its former site, a sort of shelf of land situated on the spring of the great Andine range. Gradually the loosely built low adobe houses have been and are still being replaced in the New Town by several-storied buildings of solid masonry; courage growing as the date of the last great earthquake grows more remote. Still slight shocks are of frequent occurrence in the Capital and elsewhere in this Province.

The City of Mendoza is rich in public gardens and avenues filled with luxuriantly umbrageous vegetation and has, of course (what self-respecting Argentine town has them not?), electric light and trams; but its just pride is the great West Park, situate on another level shelf of land projecting from the foot of the Cordillera on a higher level than that on which the City is built.

This Park has a sheet of water of almost a mile in length by some seventy-five yards broad, in which are ornamental islets and on which regattas are held. For these festal occasions there is a huge stone grand stand at one end of the water. The Park has many magnificent electric-lighted avenues lined with trees of majestic proportions, and all over it are gardens of subtropical shrubs and plants. Within its great bronze gates are also a zoological and a, specifically, botanical garden.

With all this, if Mendoza has drawn somewhat on the future to foot the bill of its many embellishments, it has done no more than many other cities of the still new South American countries, and with more immediate prospect of justification for its expenditure than have several others. What Mendoza has got to do now is to create an export trade for its wines, on the condition precedent that it manufacture wines that will keep and will improve with keeping. Otherwise with increased irrigation it may run the risk of over-production, since the home consumption is as yet a limited one. The increase of the population of the River Plate countries is, as we have seen, still slow, and outside the towns very little wine is drunk by the majority of the people except on special and rare occasions; mate sufficing for their habits and needs.

Mendoza sends large quantities of table-grapes and other fruit to Buenos Aires, and hopes one day to send them overseas. This latter consideration depends greatly on the adoption of improved methods of picking and packing, matters to which the management of the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway has given much practical attention. Care in such details is, however, but little in the Argentine nature generally, and even in a less degree in that of the strong mixture of Indian blood which marks the working classes of Mendoza, as it does in all except the littoral Provinces. Very good canned peaches come from the Mendoza factories and are in large demand throughout the Republic.

Coal and petroleum have both been found in the Province, but further working tests are needed before their probable commercial value can be ascertained.

From the City of Mendoza the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway (familiarly B.A.P.) strikes upward to where it passes through the Transandine tunnel; on the Mendoza side of which is the famous Puente del Inca (the Inca’s bridge), a vast block of stone which, lying across a ravine, makes a natural bridge, recalling the giant-built palace of the old Norse Gods. Here are also some hot mineral springs celebrated for treatment of rheumatism; to which treatment the dry, rarefied mountain air perhaps contributes its less recognized quota.

SAN JUAN

This Province is bounded on the North and East by the Province of La Rioja, on the West by Chile, and on the South and South-East by the Provinces of Mendoza and San Luis respectively.

Of all the Argentine Provinces San Juan has shown itself, until very recent times indeed, probably the most recalcitrant towards financial orderliness. A repeated _non possumus_ was the only answer its inertness returned to the many periodical fulminations and menaces of the National Government in respect of its treasury bonds or depreciated Provincial paper money. So depreciated, in fact, that it was worth nothing at all outside the Province itself, and was by no means welcome, although legal, tender within its boundaries.

San Juan pleaded that it could not call this paper in since it had nothing with which to replace it—all the little National money it got for its wines and other produce went immediately back to Buenos Aires again for necessary purchases.

The National Government insisted that San Juan _must_ remove the disgrace from its financial escutcheon or all sorts of things would happen. San Juan regretted deeply and asked for time. In the meanwhile it contrived to raise another of those loans, without much more than a shadow of adequate security or provision, which long have been the nightmare of the National Government, and it still kept on using its depreciated notes. So, and in many other ways for long, very long, did San Juan wrestle, successfully according to its lights, with the spirit of progress until irrigation, fostered by the National Government, came to the aid of the latter in a way there was no denying.

San Juan _had_ to become more prosperous and to begin to pay its way in respectable fashion. It evidently did not in the least want to do so, but it could not any longer see any way by which it could avoid recognition of its just liabilities. Thus are the good old times of this Province vanishing; the good old times which made sufficient provision for an aristocratic oligarchy and in which vassals had no opportunity of acquiring luxurious tastes.

First the railway, slow in this case, however, in its usually tonic effects and then irrigation, which poured water on to a naturally very fertile soil, brought it about that one day San Juan woke up to find itself faced with financial responsibility.

People from the littoral and even from overseas came and bought land and paid good prices in hard cash for it and then planted vines of new, productive kinds; trimmed them in new, productive ways; and made better wine out of them than San Juan had ever deemed at all necessary. Other people planted wheat and alfalfa, and even troubled to grow more maize than there had been before. In fact, if ever a Province had greatness thrust upon it in a bewilderingly short space of time it was San Juan. People are even prospecting and actually exploiting its long-latent mineral wealth, looking for and finding deposits of gold, silver, copper, iron, zinc, lead, sulphur, alum, mica, rock salt, lignite and marble.

The exploitation of many of these has not yet attained any very great commercial importance,[29] but that of others has already done so, and all the companies concerned have brought money into the Province and pay wages to many native workers. All this troublesomeness tends to curtail the daily siesta, but a consequent bundle of full-value national dollars operates as a consolation to even the most conscientious observer of traditional custom. The next generation of San Juan inhabitants will doubtless be as wide awake as their neighbours, and strikes may take the place of old-time rebellion to the orders of patriarchal overlords; while the latter will be put to it to work their ancestral lands intelligently in order to maintain the due measure of their proper dignity.

Not only has the National Government fostered large systems of irrigation in and given irrigation to this Province, but it has also run a railway connecting the City of San Juan with the Federal Capital; thus providing another outlet for its grapes, wines and other produce.

An instance of the former commercial apathy of San Juan, and of its neighbour Mendoza for that matter, was, not long ago, to be found in the manner in which the growers of table-grapes allowed themselves to be continually and methodically jockeyed by the fruit ring of Buenos Aires.

The worthies composing this ring were low-class, ignorant men, who could only grasp the possibilities of monopoly and market rigging on a very small scale. Their simple method was to put only a certain limited quantity of fruit each week on the retail markets of the Federal Capital and to charge exorbitant prices therefor. To the poor, three-quarter Indian, ignorant people of the islands of the Paraná they said that Buenos Aires did not care much for peaches, and so they only went there once a week or so to fetch a few, at miserable prices, for market. The rest of huge crops were left to rot on the trees. San Juan (and Mendoza) were evidently given to understand that a similar situation existed in regard to grapes.

How this could have been so is hard to understand, except on the ground of extreme apathy on the part of the Provinces concerned, for lots of vineyard owners live at least half the year in Buenos Aires, and could have told of the scarcity and high price of fruit in that city.

However this may have been, the fact remained that so many kilos of table-grapes, and no more, went down to Buenos Aires in specially constructed trucks placed on the B.A.P. trains three days per week. Until the General Manager, Mr. J. A. Goudge, decided to act in the better interests of the Provinces concerned and, incidentally, also in those of his company, by running grape trains six days a week.

He thought, perhaps, that the Buenos Aires fruit merchants would call at his offices with illuminated testimonials. If he did so he was entirely mistaken. They did call, but it was to curse not bless. He would ruin them all, they said; they had comfortably arranged for such and such supplies of grapes, but more would upset their plans and businesses completely! They left Mr. Goudge unconvinced. So much so, indeed, that considering the menace of the ring to boycott his new trains, he hit on the simple but adequate expedient of running three grape trains per week from San Juan, non-stopping at Mendoza, and three starting from the latter place. San Juan needed its three trains, so did Mendoza, and therefore no one could boycott either service. Result, the arrival at Buenos Aires of six grape trains per week. The ring soon accommodated itself to the extra supply and went on robbing the busy, light-hearted Porteños (as people born in Buenos Aires are called) till the continued efforts of a paternally wise Municipality at last, after a long and bitter struggle, crushed the power of all the food rings in that formerly ring-ridden city.

This little piece of economic history is here intended to show the depths of somnolence and blindness to their own interests in which the grape growers of San Juan and Mendoza reposed till, so to speak, only the other day.

San Juan is capable of producing good quality cotton and tobacco. Its general climate is warm, hot in summer, and in parts very dry; though the humidity of the soil and atmosphere of the chief vine areas are greater than in those of Mendoza. Hence the relative general superiority and freedom from insect pests of the Mendoza vineyards.

The city of San Juan is Colonial in almost all its aspects, and its public and private gardens, filled with mingled tropical and temperate zone trees, shrubs and flowers, exhale the lazy atmosphere of days the memory of which is so constantly recurrent in all distant Argentine towns. Sleepy hollow; maybe, but its charm! A charm which will not nor can ever be “reconstructed,” try all those of us who are afflicted with unhappy artistic temperaments, never so hard. But that charm is still in San Juan, in Misiones (the one-time “Jesuit Empire”), Salta and Jujuy; in spite of new Government and Municipal Buildings, electric light and trams.

Later, we will go to the Falls of Iguazú, greater and more magnificent than Niagara or the Victoria Falls. These wonderful Falls are in the great up-to-date, go-ahead Argentine Republic. What proportion of our “Man-in-the-street” has ever heard of them? And how many good intelligent inhabitants of Buenos Aires have any clear idea of what they are really like?

NATIONAL TERRITORIES

THE PAMPA CENTRAL

The name of the Pampa is also redolent of romance; of memories of vast herds of wild cattle and horses, picturesque gauchos and raiding Indians; but the PAMPA CENTRAL of to-day is a great and ever-growing cereal area, soon, no doubt, to become in its own right the fifteenth Province of the Republic. A Province probably destined to outstrip rapidly many of its older compeers in the race for wealth and very modern in its utilitarian progressiveness.

Its superficial area is approximately equal to that of Mendoza, and though as yet it lacks population, that will come to it sooner than to many other parts of the Republic, since it already grows much more than double as much wheat as all the rest of the Republic put together, after exception made of the Provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fé and Córdoba, and more than double as much linseed after exception made of the Provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fé, Córdoba and Entre Rios. It also produces more maize than any Province or other Territory with the exception of the last-mentioned four.

Its development has been the most rapid of any part of quick-moving Argentina. No just comparison of progress can be made with Uruguay; the conditions under which the latter country has until so recently struggled having been adverse to rapidity of material development, whereas the Pampa Central was freed from its only, though great, disturbing element, nomadic hordes of native Indians, as long ago as 1884.

This Territory is bounded on the North by the Provinces of Mendoza, San Luis and Córdoba, on the West by Mendoza and the National Territory of Neuquen, on the South by the National Territory of Rio Negro, and on the East by the Province of Buenos Aires.

Some parts of the Pampa Central are hilly and wooded and, as in some parts of the Province of Buenos Aires, ever-moving sand-hills vary the monotony of other portions of its surface, but the greater part of it is the continuation of a vast plain, begun in the Province of Buenos Aires, the PAMPA of the Indians, from which it takes its name. It is, in fact, the Central Pampa; the Eastern being in the Province of Buenos Aires and the Southern extending into Patagonia.

Though the Pampa Central boasts only two great rivers, the Rio Colorado and the Rio Negro, the latter of which forms its southern boundary, it has many both fresh-water and saline lakes, and water is seldom to seek far from its surface.

The chief products of the Pampa Central are wheat, linseed, maize and oats, but with the growth of its alfalfa fields and the planting of good grasses in lieu of the native hard pasturage, it has also become a great centre of the Live Stock fattening industry, especially during the winter months.

The sandy, salty soil of much of this territory, with water near the surface, provides, as has been said of similar tracts elsewhere, just the conditions most favourable to lucerne; while in other parts the soil is extremely rich in humus.

Three of the great railway systems serve the Pampa Central; viz. the Buenos Aires Western, the Buenos Aires Pacific, and the Buenos Aires Great Southern, carrying its produce to the ports of both Buenos Aires and Bahia Blanca.

Santa Rosa de Toay is the Capital of this Territory; a purely commercial town which by its rapidly grown importance supplanted the old Capital, General Acha.

The Pampa Central has also numerous other active centres of the cereal trade and general commerce.

On the question of its becoming a Province of the Republic there is considerable local difference of opinion; a good many of its business men holding that honour dear at the price of having to maintain a Provincial Congress and various Ministries and the rest of the appanages of autonomy. In this they are right. Direct National Government is certainly the cheapest and it is also very far from being the worst.

The Pampa Central now exports large quantities of high-class wool and hides. It also has some copper mines, the present output of which, however, is not of great importance.

This territory would already, no doubt, have been much more populous than it is had it not been the scene of one of the most glaring of the labour-exploiting scandals referred to elsewhere in these pages.

Here the cases were sufficiently numerous and contemporaneous to render a menace of serious disturbance possible to and partially effective by people who had been cajoled into developing virgin land only to be threatened with expulsion (as soon as that work had been done and before they had been able to derive any profit from it) by owners who only revealed their existence at what seemed to them the propitious moment for their appearance on the scene of other people’s labours. Compromises were arrived at by which the farmers consented to pay rent for their holdings, but the scandal undoubtedly kept many others away from the Territory, and even now an evil result of it continues in the shape of almost every tenant being obviously only anxious to get the most he can out of the land while it is his to work. Few tenant farmers in the Pampa spend much money in buildings or other improvements.

The Pampa Central is a crying case for the adoption and insistence by the National Government on the real practical working out of a true colonization policy. A policy by which the small farmer could obtain the indisputable freehold of land which he develops and on which he lives, be he Argentine or foreigner.

In all else the foreigner actually enjoys under the Constitution the same privileges (except eligibility for high Government office, etc.) as a born Argentine. But land! It must go hard with an Argentine ere he part with his ultimate rights in that. Yet, I repeat, he must make up his mind to do so on a large scale or he will find his whole progress arrested as surely as if the Antarctic zone had suddenly extended its icy influence over half of his Republic. If he will not give them land the class of colonist he most needs—the real _settler_—will continue to give the country a wide berth and its output must remain stationary at the point at which it fully occupies all available labour.

NEUQUEN

This is one of the least generally known parts of Argentina. Misiones figures in the history of the Spanish Conquest and that of the Jesuit Missionaries,[30] from which it takes its present name; the Territory of the Rio Negro has of late years become prominent by reason of great schemes of irrigation (these, however, also affect the Eastern portions of Neuquen); Chubut came into notice in connection with the not over-successful establishment of a Welsh colony; the Chaco is vaguely associated in the general mind with Indian Reservations and occasional real or reported disturbances caused by the aborigines confined therein; but the Territories of Santa Cruz, Formosa, Los Andes and Neuquen are still little more than geographical expressions to even the vast majority of the inhabitants of the rest of the Republic.

A principal cause of this is that most of the inhabitants of Neuquen are to be found on the Western and most distant side of it (in which the most fertile, and almost the only really fertile parts of it, until irrigation is an accomplished fact, are situated) and because they not only do all their trading with Chile, but, to all intents and purposes, are Chileans.

It is quicker and easier to get backward and forward through well-known Andine passes between Neuquen and Chile than to accomplish the journey between the rail-head at Senillosa, a little to the West of the township of Neuquen, and the productive and well-watered Andine valleys. The Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway, which serves this Territory, now, however, has under construction an extension of the Neuquen line to far up the Andes; from whence it is intended to connect with the Chilean Railway system.

Therefore the richest parts of Neuquen are as yet practically Chilean colonies; from which cattle and agricultural produce find their way, some paying and much contriving to escape payment of duty to the neighbouring Republic, which in return sends such manufactured articles as the colonist’s somewhat humble needs demand.

This Territory is bounded on the North by the Province of Mendoza, on the West by Chile, on the South by the Territory of the Rio Negro, and on the East by the Territory of the Pampa Central.

Neuquen, though Argentina at large knows little of it, grows more wheat than any other National Territory, except the Pampa Central, and more alfalfa than any except the last named and the Territory of the Rio Negro. It also sends small quantities of potatoes and other table vegetables to Chile. Its chief exports to that country consist of cattle and sheep on the hoof.

The whole of the Andine side of Neuquen is extremely picturesque, and abounds in fertile valleys well watered by mountain streams. These streams, after their arrival at the foot of the Andine range, form a network of ultimate tributaries of the great rivers Colorado and Negro; after having formed a whole system of lakes of which Nahuel Huapí is the largest. The scenery of this lake, with the great snow-covered volcanic mountain TRONADOR (the Thunderer) on its Southern end, is Scandinavian in its tree-clad magnificence. The superficial area of this lake is some 1000 square miles and its depth in some parts is over 700 feet.

On one of its islands, Victoria, the enormously wealthy Argentine family of Anchorena have founded a colony to work its wealth of virgin timber, on a 99 years’ lease from the National Government.

A number of small steam and sailing boats ply on this lake, gathering the wood, hides and other produce of the farms on its borders and bringing to the farmers their necessary supplies.

Neuquen is credited with alluvial goldfields and has some copper. Its mineral wealth is as yet, however, really unascertained; the prospecting and tentative exploitation of it having been up to the present only done by syndicates or small companies whose resources have been too limited for the tasks they have set themselves in, from the point of view of transport, such inaccessible regions.

The Western and South-Western parts of this Territory are rich in timber, and its Eastern plains should, with irrigation, repeat the prosperous history of the Pampa Central.

It has many hot and other mineral springs, the medicinal and other virtues of which are already known in Chile; from which country they attract many sufferers from rheumatism and stomachic and other ailments.

In dealing with all the yet little known outlying parts of the vast Argentine Republic one is apt to become wearisomely tautological in one’s endeavours to give some true idea of their enormous latent natural wealth. Yet if one set out, ever so modestly, to bring some conception of them home to the Northern Hemisphere, one must tell the truth even at the risk of reiteration. And the truth is that for the future wealth of all these regions there is only one word, INCALCULABLE.

The Territories of Neuquen and the Rio Negro will soon have irrigation on a vast scale and of most modern design. This work is being carried out for the National Government by the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway Company and is already far advanced.

The virgin soil of the plains of these Territories is almost incredibly rich in humus and alluvial deposit; and they have a wealthy Railway Company ready to afford all necessary means of transport to deep-water ports which nature has already provided on the Atlantic Ocean at, comparatively, no great distance from any of, and in many instances close to, what will be their chief centres of agricultural production (in the widest sense of that term).

RIO NEGRO

The most important of the general observations applicable to this Territory have already been made immediately above; remains in their connection only to be said that the Northern side of the valley of the Rio Negro itself contains some of the naturally richest soil to be found anywhere in the Republic. Anyone armed with a watering-pot can grow any temperate-zone crop, fruit or plant and be astounded by the brobdingnagian proportions of its yield, accomplished in a space of time suggestive of Jack’s Beanstalk.

And this anywhere in the midst of what now is an arid desert, on which the only vegetation is sparse, stunted, scrubby, useless bush.

The reasons for this are that these eastern regions of the South have practically no rainfall at all and that all the water running from the Andes to the Sea has already found its way, farther west, into one or other of the great Rivers Colorado and Negro.

The huge irrigation scheme now being carried out will utilize an enormous natural hollow formerly known as the CUENCA VIDAL, now rechristened Lago Pellegrini (after a once prominent Argentine statesman) as a natural storage reservoir. The surplus water from the lake and river system, which makes a network over the whole of the western part of the territories of Neuquen and the Rio Negro, at the base of the Andes, will be utilized for the irrigation of their eastern plains. This system is also destined to serve another necessary purpose: namely, to regulate the flow of the Rio Negro.

This is very necessary indeed; for this river, swollen by the melting of Andine snow and ice, which has in some years taken place in an exceptional degree, comes down suddenly with overpowering violence, headed by what is like a huge tidal wave, and sweeps everything within miles of its normal, deep-cut, banks before it.

Several times during the past fifty years have settlers been tempted by the rich alluvial soil, brought down by centuries of just such floodings, to establish themselves near enough to the actual river to irrigate by some one or other rough lift system, and remained there year in year out, in the false security enjoyed by peasants on the slopes of a volcano, till one day a thunderous roar has been the only warning of the immediate approach of a torrential flood. Lucky the man who could catch and mount his horse in time to gallop away and thus save his life. All the rest, cattle, house and crops, were swept away in a second by the great head wave and following floods of the river suddenly swollen by the simultaneous overflowing of its innumerable tributary lakes.

Now all this will be guarded against, and, incidentally, the Rio Negro may be rendered really navigable for a very considerable distance by other engineering works for the removal and control of its bar.

However, and when, this last may be, there can be no doubt about the magic change that the first partial irrigation of these present desert plains will quickly create. Trees will soon grow on the irrigated portions, and these trees and other vegetation will arrest the clouds which now fly on unheedingly to the superior attractions of the Andes or the southern hills of the Province of Buenos Aires. The very southernmost portion of that Province is now in the same sad case as the rest of the valley of the Rio Negro, of which it forms a part.

As the result, smiling verdure will replace arid desert; in a short space of time, because of the natural fertility of the soil on which the transformation will take place.

Already two dotted lines on the railway map, one between Bahia Blanca and Carmen de Patagones, near the mouth of the Rio Negro, and the other branching from it to San Blas, show where the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway intends to run its first two lines through the southernmost strip of the Province of Buenos Aires which lies between the Rios Colorado and Negro, and other two dotted lines, one running southwards from the township of Rio Colorado to the bay of San Antonio, in the San Matias Gulf, and the other from the centre of the first to a junction, near Choele Choel, with the main line to Neuquen, show the first intentions of the Buenos Aires Great Southern line towards that portion of the valley of the Rio Negro which falls within its agreed sphere of influence.

In agreeing to a division between them of the productive and prospectively productive areas of the southern parts of the Republic, these two great Railway Companies not only removed from their own paths the disastrous temptation to cut each other’s throats by tariff war, but also to a considerable extent precluded profitable competition by outside enterprise.

The National Government has now a line running from the port of San Antonio running East and West right across the Territory. The construction of this line will soon reach Lake Nahuel Huapí.

San Blas deserves special mention as the probable future chief port of the Rio Negro valley. On a long inlet of the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of which is a large projecting island and having deep water right up to its shores, San Blas has been described by high British authority to be the finest natural port, after Rio de Janeiro, on the Atlantic coast, both for commercial and strategic purposes.

It formed part of a concession made many years ago by the National Government to the late Mr. E. T. Mulhall, the Editor and, with his brother, Mr. Michael Mulhall, the eminent statistician of his time, joint founder of _The Buenos Aires Standard_, in recognition of services done for the development of the Republic; which in those days of its obscurity and distress was much aided towards a better and truer knowledge of its possibilities in Europe by the efforts of what now is the oldest established newspaper in America. _The Standard_ is printed, as it always has been, in the English language.

The Rio Negro Territory already grows a good deal of wheat and oats and has the largest area under alfalfa of any National Territory except the Pampa Central; it also has some vineyards and many European fruit trees grow in the fertile valleys at the foot of the Andes.

The minerals of this Territory are as yet an almost unknown quantity, except some copper and salt. Petroleum has also been found at Bariloche, but its commercial value is not fully ascertained.

The climate of the Rio Negro is temperate and, as has been indicated, for the most part very dry. One disadvantage to agriculture in the flat parts of these southern Territories is the furious winds which frequently sweep over them. The force of these will, it is reasonably hoped, be broken by trees in the days to come.

This reminds one of the tragi-comic history of the contemplated exploitation of certain great salt marshes situate not very distant from San Blas.

The brine from these was to be, and indeed on a great inaugural occasion was, run through pipes into immense shallow basins, where it was to lie until its moisture had been evaporated by the sun and wind. Afterwards the salt was to be shipped at the port of San Blas to Buenos Aires or elsewhere.

All seemed very well with this plan. The brine was duly accumulated in the drying basins, the sun shone fiercely on it—and, then, the wind blew and blew. So hard that it emptied the basins and distributed the brine they had contained over the rest of the Universe. Thus was a good scheme brought to naught by the miscalculations of its initiators. These, however, were wealthy enough to take the matter in good part. Indeed, it was from one of them that the present writer had the story. Still there is plenty of good salt in the Territory.

The Rio Negro has as yet only townships of rough-and-ready architecture, the centres of its nascent commerce. Viedma, its capital, is in a fertile tract of land at the mouth of the Rio Negro; it was, however, almost completely destroyed by a great flood in 1899. Its communication with the Federal Capital is maintained by the steamers which call at Carmen de Patagones, on the opposite bank of the river, and by ferry thereto and coach to the head of the above-mentioned new line of the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway which already reaches half-way between it and Bahia Blanca. The completion of this line will greatly affect Viedma for the better, while the regulation of the current of the Rio Negro will protect it from repeated destruction by flood. This Territory has a fair stock of sheep, but few cattle.

CHUBUT

Chubut has struck oil, literally. Petroleum was discovered there only a few years ago (1907), and since the first discovery many more wells have been sunk in greater or less proximity to the first find in the district of Comodoro Rivadavia, situate almost on the southern boundary of this Territory and on the Gulf of San Jorge. On this gulf of the Atlantic Ocean, the new oil-fields enjoy an admirable commercial situation. Remains only to prove fully their commercial value; of which the great Argentine Railway Companies are evidently not yet fully persuaded as far as fuel for their purposes is concerned, since they still use imported coal.

A long continuance of this present European war might, however, give stimulus to experiment with Chubut petroleum, which evidently has some value, even if it need more preparation for use than the North American and European kinds.

These oil-fields were, as has often been the case in such matters, discovered by accident, but the discovery was made by the National Hydrological Department in the course of a search for an available water supply for the then new Comodoro Rivadavia port.

On these fields claims have been allotted to Companies and private individuals and a certain area has been reserved to itself by the National Government. Most brilliant results of tests of all kinds are announced, the Government line of railroad from the Rio Negro port of San Antonio to Lake Nahuel Huapí “uses no other” (fuel); and yet, and yet, Comodoro Rivadavia petroleum is slow to make history in the markets of the world.[31]

Still, time must be given for proof, especially in Chubut, the general appearance of which Territory suggests that it was the last word of creation, in one sense, after, of course, utterly desolate Tierra del Fuego. It is only about two decades since the Argentine authorities themselves seem to have grasped the idea that such a place did exist in their dominions. It is only so long ago, anyhow, that the National Government thought fit to send the first resident Government officials to Chubut to look after whatever might need to be looked after there. Before that, a small part of it was under the absolute control of a Colony of Welsh people who first settled there in 1856-66. The rest of it was, and to a great degree still is, almost exclusively inhabited by native Patagonians.

The capital of the Territory, Rawson, was founded by the Welsh colonists at the place of their first landing on the South Atlantic coast. It has twice been destroyed by the flooding of the Chubut River, at the mouth of which it stood; but it has now been rebuilt more solidly than before and on a site rather more out of harm’s way.

The original Welsh colonists seem to have been a strangely puritanical and narrow-minded set of persons to find themselves in such an out-of-the-way corner of the earth as Chubut then was. So, however, it may be observed, were certain other persons who landed in North America a much longer while ago from a ship called the _Mayflower_. Anyhow, the Welsh built and their descendants still maintain Protestant churches and a stern religious spirit in their town of Rawson, a somewhat bigoted spirit, be it added, since it forbade the inter-marriage of its flock with anyone not of their own, or at any rate British, nationality; nor would it, until very recently, permit their acceptance of the most tempting offer to sell any part of the land within the colonised areas to a “foreigner,” Argentine or otherwise. And this last restriction does not seem to have been so much due to foresight of a future increase in land value as to a simple objection to the admission of any stranger within the fold.