Chapter V: Chilean Landscapes (2)

It was wet and sloppy and all the world was drowned in a dense fog when I set off again at dawn. Everyone who owned them wore heavy overcoats and neck-scarfs, keeping even their noses covered. One would have fancied a demand that trains be heated would be in order in such a climate, but if the lack of artificial heat is at times unpleasant it is healthful, and the traveler in South America is likely to return with a prejudice against it. At San Rosendo I caught a branch line along the shining Bio-Bio, the largest river of Chile, and followed it northwestward to the coast, the sun at last breaking through and suddenly flooding all the scene as the train took to rounding many rolling hills covered with scrub growth. The _huaso_ was everywhere busy with his fall plowing, his ox-drawn wooden implement as primitive as those of Peru, except for its iron point. Here there was considerable eucalyptus, the foster child of the Andean tree world, though the poplar was more in evidence and the weeping willow frequent.

I spent a day in Concepción, third city of Chile, a brisk and mildly pretty town scattered over a hillside, center of a large grain district with coal fields near, hence the site of many factories, flour-mills, even sugar refineries, which import their crude product from Peru. Though it is the scene of considerable modern industry, and has the usual two-story, be-skirted tramcars, brilliant ponchos and gaunt oxen dragging clumsy, creaking carts are to be seen in its main streets. A splendid view of the town may be had from the Cerro Caracol, crowning point of a long ridge of rolling hills of reddish soil, yet covered with grass, so rare in South America, and much of it with a thick fir forest. A “snail” roadway winds upward, and immediately at the climber’s feet spreads out the entire city, flat and low for the most part, with the plethora of bulking churches common to all Chilean towns. There are many Germans in Concepción, south of which they grow ever more numerous. Along the Avenue Pedro de Valdivia, squeezed between the river and the hills in the outskirts, live scores of men of this nationality who came out less than half a century ago as simple clerks and who now have sumptuous mansions and large estates—_quintas_ they are called in Chile—a single row of them eighteen blocks long on this one avenue boasting such names as “Thuringia” and “Die Lorelei” and the top-heavy architecture which goes with them. In Arauco province, a bit to the south, with a private railroad running into Concepción, are some of the few coal mines in South America, Chile being virtually the only country on that continent not entirely dependent on Newcastle or Australia for this sinew of industry. It seems to be a soft surface coal, mainly productive of smoke, great clouds of which frequently wipe out the beauties of the landscape in this vicinity.

Talcahuano, six miles farther northwest, is on Concepción Bay, national naval rendezvous and the best harbor in Chile, being seven miles across and bottled up by the island Quiriquina. The town, thrown around the inner bay like a wrap about a throat, with pretty residential hills climbing up close behind the modest central plaza, the outskirts scattered far and wide over a rolling, verdant country, has considerable shipping, but the Pacific is seen from it only through the rifts of islands and promontories. Forty years ago American whalers often entered this harbor, and some of the wealthy families of the vicinity to-day are descended from the deserting sailors they left behind.

In Talcahuano I found an American consul who had been there for decades, evidently long since forgotten by the authorities at home. Of the many tales he had to tell the most picturesque were those of his early days as a guano digger on the west coast, but he was more filled with the alleged rascality of the Germans in Chile. There were in Concepción, he asserted, forty German business houses as against four English and no American—or perhaps I should say “North American,” for the Chilean grows more enraged than any of his neighbors at our assumption of a term to which he considers himself equally entitled. The consul was greatly grieved to see the Germans steadily taking away the little trade Americans once had, driving out even our stoves and agricultural machinery from what had formerly been a United States stronghold. But the Germans were more apt to make things to fit local tastes, or the customer seldom had any fixed notion of what he wanted and fell easy prey to the clever and unscrupulous German salesman. The consul had recently discovered a German house secretly sending to the Fatherland a binder and a reaper which it had imported from New York, evidently because direct importation would have called official attention to the plan of copying the machines for the South American trade. He had recently bought what purported to be a reputable implement made in the United States and known by the trademark “Eureka.” It worked badly, however, and the parts broke so easily, that he finally examined it more closely and found that it was really a “Hureka,” made in Germany. Though Americans and English are hard to assimilate, clannish, little inclined to take Chilean wives, the Germans marry freely with the natives and gain much commercial and political advantage from such alliances. The Chilean-born children of Germans are legally Chileans, but at heart, according to the consul, they are still Germans. The Teutons have driven the natives out of all important business, except in the case of wealthy landowners, and these usually live in Paris and intrust their holdings to a German or other foreign manager. Our forsaken representative was also highly incensed at “the nonsense of American business men running down to South America in droves, making themselves laughing-stocks among the natives by their geographical ignorance, their manners and public drinking, and only stirring up the Germans to greater underground efforts.”

Though all Chile below Santiago is noted for its agriculture, its fertility increases with every degree southward. South Chile, which may be reckoned as beginning at the Bio-Bio River, where the vineyards end, is an almost virgin land, only a fraction of which is as yet under the plow. The Bio-Bio marks the point below which the Spaniards were never able to make a permanent conquest, for the region below it was the home of the most valiant Indians of South America, a race much more like our own untamable red-skins than the slinking tribes farther to the north. The river was finally agreed upon as the southern limits of Spain’s authority, and such it remained until that had wholly disappeared from the American continent. After the independence of Chile the republican government confirmed the valiant Mapuches, as the Araucanians call themselves, in their claim to regard the Bio-Bio as a frontier. It was not until forty years ago, when at last the white man’s fire-water had done what the Spaniards were never able to do, that the Araucanians were at last pushed back into limited reservations and Araucania formally taken under the rule of Santiago. The land was divided up among white settlers, and when the Indians objected the central government “sent out soldiers to shoot down the rebels, following just the same policy as you did in the United States,” as a Chilean told me in a naïve, matter-of-fact way.

The “first-class” coach in which I crossed the Bio-Bio, not so long before a proud product of St. Louis, was a rattling old wreck, the floor so sloppy and wet one needed rubbers, its window panes either broken or missing entirely, some of them pasted over with paper, the seats more worn and dirty than those on a backwoods branch line in the United States. As the weather had grown steadily colder from Talca southward, everyone on board was wrapped and overcoated beyond recognition. We moved slowly through a woodless, brown, rolling country almost invisible for the rain. In the early afternoon the train crept cautiously across a bridge far up above a small but powerful stream, amid green hills of plump, indistinct outline. The reason for the caution soon appeared. Just north of the city of Victoria we were suddenly routed out into a cold rain flung against us by a roaring wind like the spray from an angry sea, and found ourselves at the edge of a mighty chasm. At the bottom, in and about the stream which raged through it far below, lay the wreckage of a freight train that had dropped with the bridge a month before, killing the crew. Across this chasm swung a narrow, wire-suspended foot-bridge a furlong in length, which swayed drunkenly back and forth as the stream of wet and shivering passengers, a few women and aged, infirm men among them, crept fearfully across it, followed by all the boys and ragamuffins of the vicinity carrying the hand baggage—no white-collar Chilean of course, would carry his own even in case of wreck. We were bedraggled indeed when we climbed out of the mud and rain into another train, and another good hour was lost in transferring the mails and the heavier, fare-paying baggage before we were off again.

I found Temuco, up to the present generation the capital of the land from which the sturdy Araucanians were at length dispossessed, the most interesting town in Chile. It was more nearly like the cities of the Andean highlands, with something Mexican about it also, thanks to its mixture of dirt, poverty, and the “picturesqueness” of which the tourist rants. The Mapuche Indians are thick-set, the women especially so, broad-faced, with a reddish tinge showing through a light copper skin, due perhaps to the colder climate of their temperate homeland. Some of the women were comfortably fat; they wore their coarse hair in two braids, a band of colored cloth or silver coins about their round heads, this sometimes securing a gay head-kerchief flying in the wind. The mantos about their shoulders were usually a dull red, their skirts a true “hobble,” being a simple strip of cloth wrapped tightly around the waist and tucked in, with the raw edge down one leg. Their feet were bare, chubby, and by no means clean, though more nearly so than those of the typical Andean Indian. The children ran about bare-legged for all the wintry air. The older Indians of both sexes had rather dissipated features, as if the white man’s fire-water were still doing its work among them. The men wore a mildly gay short poncho, some still home-woven, most of them made in Germany, flannel drawers, a black or near-black skirt brought together between the legs, shapeless felt hats, and black leather boots of light material. The more poverty-stricken wore a rude moccasin and any head-gear available, even the cast off stiff straw hats of the summer-time _futres_ of Temuco; and May is not the month for straw hats in southern Chile. The nearest Indian settlement is but half an hour’s ride from Temuco, and some of the Indian women rode into town on horses decorated with as many trappings and large silver ornaments as themselves; others carried baskets on their backs, with the leather band supporting it drawn tightly across chest or forehead. Babies were not carried on the mothers’ backs, that custom having disappeared where I turned eastward from the Andes across tropical Bolivia.

The modern Araucanian’s land is secured to him, and an official of the Chilean Government, known as “Protector of the Indians,” sees to it that the acreage he owns to-day is not alienated. But the tribe is dying, like all Indians in contact with European civilization, and the time is not many generations distant when the rest of his land will go to the white man. To all appearances the Araucanian has lost most of the warlike courage for which his ancestors were famous, though he has by no means degenerated to the cringing creature one finds in Quito or Cuzco. As in those cities, shopkeepers are obliged to learn the tongue of their most numerous customers, and Araucanian was heard on every hand, among whites as well as Indians. Some of the latter could speak nothing else, though now and then a familiar Spanish word broke out of the jumble of sound. The Mapuches had some of the superstition of the Quichuas and Aymarás toward the “little magic box with one eye,” and for the first time in months I was forced to resort to simple trickery to catch my chosen pictures.

Rain was almost incessant in Temuco, and the mud so deep that the better-to-do used _suecos_, wooden clogs on which were nailed imitation patent-leather uppers in any of the little shops devoted to that industry. The next most familiar sight was that of oxen pulling solid wooden wheeled wagons, straining laboriously through the sloughs called streets until one fancied the animals, with the yoke across their brows all day, must end each night with a raging headache.

Below Temuco the train crossed several considerable rivers. Long stretches of stumps and scattered wooden shacks suggested the days of Lincoln and Daniel Boone. Much rough lumber was piled at the flooded stations, which served ugly frontier hamlets tucked away among rolling hills once thick wooded and still so in places. Curiously enough this more southern section of Chile is an older country, in the settler’s sense, than that about Temuco. Seventy years ago, long before it was able to force the stronghold of the central valley of Araucania, the Chilean Government made an entry far to the south, catching the Indians in the rear and settling with foreign immigrants wide areas of what are now the provinces of Valdivia and Llanquihüe. The town of Valdivia and several other strategic points, chiefly on the coast, where the Spaniards had erected forts and established small precarious settlements, were moribund when Santiago turned its attention to the region in the middle of the last century. The coming of European colonists has given the district new life and considerable prosperity.

The methods of Chile in settling this wilderness of the south were simple. An agent in Germany sought colonists; an agent in Chile was sent to Valdivia to receive them when they landed. The first-comers were placed on the Isla de la Teja, where they would be secure against possible attack by the Indians on the mainland. There are still a number of German factories on that island, the inevitable brewery among them. When the colonial agent was forced to look farther to the unknown south for more land, he found nothing but matted forest. A trusted renegade Indian named Pichi-Juan was given thirty _pesos fuertes_ (in those days nearly fifteen dollars) to burn this primeval woodland. Smoke clouds, visible from Valdivia, rose for three months, and at the end of that time a strip forty-five miles long and fifteen wide, from Chan-Chan to the Andes, was ready for the colonists.

All the way to Valdivia the product of the saw was in evidence,—rivers of planks, seas of squared logs. New little towns, built entirely of wood, and visibly growing, dotted the line of the railroad; in small clearings, about shacks as rough as those of our Tennessee mountains, the soil that had been turned up was rich black loam; the scattered inhabitants had the hardy, self-sufficient, hopeful air of all frontiersmen. Then great damp forests, strangely like those of the far north, grew almost continuous on either hand. I stood for half the afternoon on the back platform of our wreck of a first-class car, watching the cold, wet world race away into the north, and the temperate zone night, so different from that of the tropics, settle slowly down.

In the darkness we came to a little station called Valdivia, but it was merely the landing-place for the small steamer to the town of that name, which lay twelve miles up the river. It is named for Pedro de Valdivia, a companion of Pizarro in Peru and afterward conqueror of Chile—with reservations; for he had no such luck against the Araucanians as against the docile Quichuas farther north and finally lost his life in his efforts to subdue them. But Valdivia is Spanish only in name; in nearly all else it is extremely Germanic, so different from the typical South American town that one seems suddenly transported to another continent. Well built, two stories high, new and clean, without a suggestion of luxury, yet comfortable as a town of the north temperate zone, it might easily have been mistaken for one in the newer sections of Washington or Oregon. Most remarkable of all, at least to a man who had been traveling for years in lands of adobe, brick, or stone, it was made entirely of wood.

Saw-mill whistles awoke me at dawn. The sun, after a long struggle with the dense clouds rising from the unseen sea not far to the west, won the day, and every living thing was visibly grateful for its benign countenance, for continual rain is the customary lot of this part of Chile at this season. For once the weather was fine—except underfoot. The streets and roads of Valdivia were literally impassable, with the exception of those that were laid with plank floors, planks which would have been worth almost their weight in silver in most of the continent. Heavy rains bring thick forests, however, and here wood served every possible purpose. Wooden fences were everywhere, wooden sidewalks drummed under my heels with an almost forgotten sound; houses were covered with a rough species of clapboarding; even the few buildings that seemed at a distance to be of stone turned out to be made of wood tinned over, the roofs covered with lumber rather than shingles, either because Valdivia does not know how to make the latter or because boards are cheaper than labor. The unfloored streets were incredible sloughs of mud. One was named the Calle Intrépido, and the man would have been intrepid indeed who ventured out into it. A few aged hacks, smeared with mud to their wooden roofs, plied along the few principal streets between the Germanized plaza and the rather wide river which the town faces. To enter almost any shop was to be suddenly transported to the little towns of the Harz or the Black Forest, though the shopkeeper was likely to address a stranger in Spanish, usually with more or less foreign accent.

Isolated for a considerable period after their first arrival in southern Chile, the Germans began to move northward as the Chileans moved south, and the hostile Indians were squeezed between them. With the advent of the railroad, which reached Temuco a short generation ago and Valdivia some time later, the Chileanizing of the immigrants and the territory advanced rapidly, and even before the World War direct relations between these settlers of Teutonic blood and the Fatherland seem to have been rare. Yet the harsh German speech echoes everywhere through the trains and hotels of South Chile to-day, though the German-Chilean speaks Spanish as well as he does the tongue of his grandfather colonist, exercises all the rights of Chilean citizenship, and frequently marries into Chilean families. His ways are somewhat enigmatical, sometimes ludicrous, to the Latin-sired native, however, and for all his industry, he is to a certain degree the butt of the older society. What we know as an “Irish bull” is called in Chile a _cuento alemán_—a “German yarn.”

Below Valdivia lies a great potato-growing country, occupying the site of the burned forest, now a rich, rolling agricultural section. Blackberries were thick along the railroad. The centers of this uncouth, wood-built, prosperous region are the large German towns of La Unión and Osorno, towns in which German was the language of the schools and almost all the local officials bore Teutonic names. From Temuco southward the railroad had been running out like a dying stream, with ever decreasing traffic. I left Osorno by the daily freight, which dragged behind it one passenger car with two long upholstered seats along its sides serving also as a caboose and densely packed with well-dressed men entirely European in origin. Several young men were plainly of German parentage, yet they spoke Castilian together, and one such pair was wondering how they could escape the year of compulsory military service in Chile, “since our fathers came out here largely to avoid such slavery.” Rail fences, rude cabins in rough little clearings, rolling hills scratched over with wooden plows, countrymen in ever thicker ponchos and with but rare traces of Indian blood, burned woods covered with charred stumps and grazing cattle, lined the way on this journey. The railroad, here only a few months old, faded to a little grass-grown track. Then the land opened out, flattening away to the edge of Lake Llanquihüe, and I came to the end of railroading and mainland in Chile.

Puerto Montt, more than a thousand kilometers south of Santiago, and capital of the province of Llanquihüe, below which Chile breaks up into islands terminating in Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, was founded by Germans in the middle of the last century. It is a quiet hamlet of three or four thousand inhabitants, built of planks or wooden bricks, in a style reminiscent of Switzerland or Westphalia, on the edge of an immense harbor which hopes some day to serve as a station of a partly overland route between Australia and Europe. The commerce of the region is almost wholly in German hands, there being but two Chilean merchants, while the native population is miserable and poverty-stricken. Barefooted women, ragged gamins, not a few beggars, are to be seen in the streets, and there are far too many shopkeepers in proportion to producers. Here, too, may be seen women on horseback, wearing heavy ponchos and wide brimmed felt hats which give them a suggestion of misplaced “cow girls.” A short steamer trip from the town lies the large island of Chiloé, said to be the original home of the potato and still producing it in great quantities. Many of the neat, well-managed farms of Chiloé are owned by Boers who refused to endure British rule after the South African War, though a majority of the Chilotes are of old Spanish stock with a considerable strain of Indian blood.

I had come more and more to regret that I had not reached this wet and shivering corner of the world in the brilliant summer-time of Christmas and New Year’s. The regret was all the keener because it was coupled with the necessity of altering long-laid plans and retracing my steps, always an abhorrence. From Puerto Montt I might in summer have crossed the two Chilean lakes of Llanquihüe and Esmeraldas, Laguna Fría in the Argentine, and finally famous Nahuel-Haupi, and, with ten days’ tramping across the pampas, have come back to Buenos Aires by Neuquen and the “Great Southern.” But at this season such a journey was impossible and, having no taste for polar explorations, I let Puerto Montt, in a latitude similar to that of Boston, stand as my “farthest south,” and turned tail and fled back into the warmer north.

At Temuco I wired ahead for a berth on the night train to Santiago. The precaution was hardly necessary. At the end of the train waiting in San Rosendo were two brand new cars stencilled “Pullman Company, Chicago,” which had not yet had time to go to rack and ruin. There were but few passengers in the first of them; in the second I found myself entirely alone. The conductor bowed low over my pass with, “Will you have a berth or a stateroom?” The porter was a ragged _roto_ such as might have been picked up at any station, but he lost no time in making up my private parlor. Just how much the huge yearly deficit of the government railways of Chile is due to the hauling back and forth of empty first-class cars, and the ease with which general passes are granted, is of course a question for financiers rather than a random wanderer. Before I turned in, I impressed upon the melancholy porter the necessity of calling me in time to get off at Rancagua, station for a famous American copper mine up the mountainside to the eastward. He was vociferous in his advice to me to “lose care.”

Unfortunately I did so. By and by I was disturbed by a thumping on my door that finally brought me back to consciousness. I sprang up and—and heard the irresponsible half-Indian masquerading as porter say in a mellifluous voice:

“You wished to get off at Rancagua, señor? Well, you must hurry, for I overslept and we are just pulling out of there.” No doubt, being a Chilean _roto_, it had never occurred to him that his “gringo” charge had taken off his clothes to sleep. By the time I might have had them on again we were miles beyond, and I had gone back to bed. From Santiago I hurried back to the Argentine so fast that I paid in cash the breath-taking fare between my two railroad passes. I was just in time; for the very next train was forced to back down to Los Andes again, and the transandean pass remained snowed in until the following September.