The Argentine Republic: Its Development and Progress

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Title: The Argentine Republic: Its Development and Progress

Author: Pierre Denis

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THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC

[Illustration: THE FALLS OF THE YGUASSU.
_Thirteen miles above the confluence with the Parana. Like the
Parana at the Salto Guayra, the river cuts through a layer of basalt
intercalated in the red sandstone. The forest of the province of
Misiones has a tropical character near the river. The araucarias cover
only the higher parts of the tableland._
PLATE I. Frontispiece.]

THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC

Its Development and Progress

PIERRE DENIS, D. ES L.

Agrege d'Histoire et de Geographie

Translated by Joseph McCabe

T. Fisher Unwin Ltd
London: Adelphi Terrace

First published in English in 1922

INTRODUCTION

In the following chapters I have endeavoured to indicate the
essential aspects of colonization in modern Argentina: the conquest
of the soil by man, the exploitation of its natural resources, the
development of agriculture and cattle-breeding, and the growth of the
population and enlargement of the urban centres.

For a new country like Argentina it is not convenient to adopt the
strictly regional plan which seems to be the best means of giving
a complete and methodical description of the historic countries of
western Europe, where it is the only way to keep in close touch with
the geographical facts. In western Europe each region is really an
independent unity. It has for ages lived upon its own resources; each
population-group has its horizon definitely limited; and the complex
action of the environment upon man, and of man upon the country,
has proceeded in each district rather on the lines of an isolated
and impassioned dialogue between the two. It is quite different in
Argentina. There, many of the facts which we have to record consist in
an expansion of the population, a spread of methods of exploitation
from zone to zone of the country, and the influence upon colonization
of commerce and of the varying needs of the markets of the world.

It may be well to reply in advance to a criticism which my Argentine
friends are sure to make. They will complain that I have paid no
attention to the people of Argentina, the creators of the greatness of
the country. It is true that I have deliberately refrained from any
reference to the political and moral life of the Republic, the national
character and its evolution, the stoicism of the gaucho, the industry
of the colonist and the merchant, or the patriotism of the Argentinians
generally. My work is not a study of the Argentine nation, but a
geographical introduction to such a study.

I began the work during a stay in Argentina which lasted from April
1912 to August 1914. In the course of these two years I was able to
visit most parts of the country; and, as the information I gathered
during my travels is one of my chief sources, I give here a summary of
my itineraries.

_October-November 1912_: Rosario--Region of the
colonies of Santa Fe--Forestry-industries of the Chaco
Santiagueno--Banados of the Rio Dulce--Salta--Jujuy--Sierra de
la Lumbrera.

_November-December 1912_: Tucuman--Valley of Tapi--Santa Maria
to the west of Aconcagua--Cafayate (Valley of Calchaqui).

_December 1912-January 1913_: Catamarca--Andalgala--Valley of
Pucara--Cordoba--Villa Maria.

_January-February 1913_: Region of the Pampas (Province of
Buenos Aires, south of Cordoba and of S. Luis, district of the
Central Pampa).

_March 1913_: Corrientes--Posadas--Asuncion--Forest-industries
of the Chaco of Santa Fe.

_August 1913_: Region of the Pampas (Province of Buenos Aires).

_March 1914_: Lake Nahuel Huapi--Valcheta--San Antonio--The
Rio Negro.

_April 1914_: Rioja--Sierra de los Llanos--San Juan--Mendoza.

_July 1914_: Entre Rios.

These journeys, by rail or on well-known roads, were not supposed to
be for the purpose of exploration or discovery. Their one object was
to enable me to make a provisional classification of the chief types
of country and forms of colonization, and to draw up a methodical
programme for more thorough research. The work which I trusted to
do in a more leisurely way was, however, suspended in 1914, and, in
spite of my very strong desire to do so, I was unable to resume it on
the spot in 1919. I have therefore been compelled to publish my first
observations, completing them, as well as I could, by a bibliographical
study of the country. I have made use of some fragments of a popular
work which I began, at the request of the Argentine Commission, for the
International Exhibition at San Francisco, of which several chapters
were published in my absence by the University of Tucuman (Pierre
Denis, _Modern Argentina: Chapters of Economic Geography_. Publications
of the University during the Centenary of the Congress of Tucuman of
1816. Buenos Aires, 1916).[1]

[1] I take the opportunity to thank M. J. B. Teran, who
undertook to edit these chapters, and to express, with him, my
satisfaction that events have falsified his rather pessimistic
predictions as regards the author.

My knowledge of the publications on Argentina has two conspicuous
gaps. The first is deliberate. I declined to study at second hand the
documents and chronicles which are our sources, to the end of the
eighteenth century, for the history of the various provinces that were
to form Argentina. Hence the historical data on colonization which
will be found in the following chapters relate almost entirely to the
nineteenth century.

The second gap I was, to my great disappointment, unable to fill up.
A large part of the local publications--official or other--maps,
statistics, etc., never reached Europe, and Buenos Aires is the only
place where one can make a thorough study of them. These publications
were available to me until 1914. Since then I have been restricted to
the resources of the Paris and London libraries, which are very scanty;
and less has been sent from Argentina since the war. I have not the
complete statistics up to date.

I trust, however, that this picture of Argentina has much more than
a retrospective character; that it is not out of date before it is
published. I may add that no statistics would enable one to solve
the problem which Argentina in 1920 presents to an observer. Has the
European War merely retarded the economic evolution of the country,
or has it given that evolution a new direction? Will or will not the
relations which Argentina is now resuming with the rest of the world be
of the same character as the pre-war relations?

The effects of the war upon the life of the country must not all be
put on the same footing. That some of the exporters to Argentina
have gained by the war and others lost--that the share of the United
States, and even of Japan, has greatly increased--is a fact that
may be regarded from the Argentinian point of view as of secondary
importance. The war has, moreover, had the effect of disorganizing
marine transport and bringing about a sort of relative isolation which
is not yet quite over. The reduction in the imports of English coal has
made the petroleum wells of Rivadavia of greater value to the country.
It has compelled the Argentinians to make a hurried inventory of their
natural resources in the way of fuel. Local industries have tried to
meet the needs of the Argentinian market, where they had no longer to
bear the competition of European goods. The grave disturbance of prices
has enabled them to export certain products which had hitherto been
confined to home markets. The war has, moreover, not interfered with
the existing streams of export on a large scale from Argentina. The
Republic continues to send its cereals, meat, hides and wool to Europe;
and there is no reason to suppose that the competition of buyers is
likely to diminish, or that the cultivation of wheat and lucerne must
become less profitable.

The two essential effects of the war seem to have been the stopping of
the stream of immigration and the progressive reduction of the support
which Europe gave to the work of colonization in the form of advances
of capital.

From 1914 to 1918 only 272,000 immigrants landed at Buenos Aires, while
482,000 emigrants left the country. In 1918 the figure of immigration
and emigration was only 47,000, less than a tenth of what it was in a
normal year before the war. The withdrawal of European capital was felt
from the very beginning of the war, and it has gone on uninterruptedly,
capital from North America not being enough to supply the deficiency
entirely. At the same time the extraordinarily favourable balance
of trade has led to the storing of an ample reserve of capital in
the country. Argentina has, in a very short time, won a financial
independence which, in normal conditions, would have entailed long
years of work and prosperity.

However it may seem, these two facts--the interruption of immigration
and the accumulation of capital--cannot be considered independently
of each other. The inquiry opened by the Social Museum of Argentina
(_La inmigracion despues de la guerra_, Museo Social Argentino, "Bol.
Mensual," viii, 1919, nos. 85-90) show that a speedy restoration of
immigration is expected in the Republic. Certainly it seems clear
that the political and social insecurity in Europe, the misery of the
old world, will probably enhance the attractions of Argentina. We
must remember, however, that the stream of emigration from Europe to
the Republic in the nineteenth, and the beginning of the twentieth,
century was provoked by a complex combination of economic conditions
which were closely related to each other. High wages in Argentina were
connected with the high interest on money; that is to say, in other
words, with the scarcity of capital. The future will decide whether
immigration, and the rapid progress of colonization and production,
which characterize pre-war Argentina can be adjusted to the policy of
accumulation of capital to which the war has condemned the country.

CONTENTS

PAGE
INTRODUCTION 5

CHAPTER I
THE NATURAL REGIONS OF ARGENTINA 17
The physical environment--Colonization and the natural
regions--The struggle with the Indians--Argentine
unity--Argentina and the world.

CHAPTER II
THE OASES OF THE NORTH-WEST 36
The inhabited zones of the Andes in the north-west--_Valles_,
_Quebradas_, _Puna_--The irrigation of the _valles_--The
historic routes--Convoys of stock--The breeding of mules and
the fairs--The struggle of the breeders against drought--The
Sierra de los Llanos.

CHAPTER III
TUCUMAN AND MENDOZA 68
Tucuman and the road to Chile--The climate and the cultivation
of the sugar-cane--The problem of manual labour--Irrigation at
Mendoza--Water-rights--Viticulture--Protection and the natural
conditions.

CHAPTER IV
THE EXPLOITATION OF THE FORESTS 96
Manual labour on the _obrajes_--The land of the _banados_
and the agricultural cantons of Corrientes--The timber-yards
of the Chaco and the tannic-acid works of the Parana--The
exploitation of the _mate_--The forestry industry and
colonization.

CHAPTER V
PATAGONIA AND SHEEP-REARING 119
The arid tableland and the region of glacial lakes--The
first settlements on the Patagonian coast and the indigenous
population--Extensive breeding--The use of pasture on the
lands of the Rio Negro--Transhumation.

CHAPTER VI
THE PLAIN OF THE PAMPAS 161
The limits of the prairie--The rains--The wind and the
formation of the clay of the Pampas--The wind and the
contour--The zones of colonization on the Pampas--Hunting
wild cattle and primitive breeding--The sheep-farms--The
ranches--The region of "colonies"--The region of lucerne,
maize, and wheat--The combination of agriculture and
breeding--The economic mechanism of colonization--The
exchanges between the different zones of the Pampas.

CHAPTER VII
ROADS AND RAILWAYS 209
Roads on the plain--The salt road--The "trade
route"--Transport by ox-waggons--_Arrieros_ and
_Troperos_--Railways and colonization--The trade in
cereals--Home traffic and the reorganization of the system.

CHAPTER VIII
THE RIVER-ROUTES 234
The use of the river before steam navigation--Floods--The
river plain--The bed of the Parana and its changes--The
estuary and its shoals--Maritime navigation--The boats on the
Parana.

CHAPTER IX
THE POPULATION 260
The distribution of the population--The streams of emigration
to the interior--Seasonal migrations--The historic towns--The
towns of the Pampean region--Buenos Aires.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 277

INDEX 291

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE

I. THE FALLS OF THE YGUASSU _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
II. THE ARID ANDES--
PUNTA VACAS, ON THE TRANS-ANDEAN RAILWAY 22
QUEBRADA DE IRUYA 22

III. THE PATAGONIAN ANDES 38

IV. VEGETATION OF THE INTERIOR VALLEYS (ANDES OF THE NORTH-WEST) 48
FOREST ON THE OUTER SLOPE OF THE SUB-ANDEAN CHAINS 48

V. DRY SCRUB OF THE CENTRAL CHACO 58
MARSHES (ESTEROS OR CANADAS) OF THE EASTERN CHACO 58

VI. THE _VALLE_ OF SANTA MARIA, NORTH-WEST OF MOUNT ACONCAGUA 70
THE OASIS OF ANDALGALA 70

VII. THE OASIS DEL RINCON, BELOW SAUJIL (ANDALGALA LINE,
PROVINCE OF CATAMARCA) 82
THE MONTE AT EL YESO 82

VIII. A VINEYARD AT SAN JUAN 92
A VINEYARD AT MENDOZA 92

IX. THE LAND OF THE BANADOS 100
LORETO: FARMING BY INUNDATION 100

X. LORETO: THE RIO PINTO IN THE DRY SEASON 112
LA BANDA (SANTIAGO DEL ESTERO) 112

XI. QUEBRACHO TRUNKS LYING AT THE STATIONS 116

XII. YOKE OF CREOLE OXEN USED FOR THE TRANSPORT OF TIMBER ON THE
EASTERN CHACO, OR CHACO OF SANTA FE 128
WORKS AT TARTAGAL (EASTERN CHACO) FOR MAKING TANNIC ACID 128

XIII. THE VOLCANO PUNTIAGUDO 142
CERCAS ON THE LIMAY (RISING IN LAKE NAHUEL HUAPI), NEAR THE
CONFLUENCE OF THE TRAFUL 142

XIV. THE PATAGONIAN TABLELAND (NEUQUEN) 154

XV. THE PAMPEAN PLAIN--
TRES ARROYES (BUENOS AIRES PRAIRIE BETWEEN THE SIERRA DE
TANDIL AND THE SIERRA DE LA VENTANA) 166
TOAY, ON THE CENTRAL PAMPA (590 FEET) 166

XVI. THE PAMPEAN PLAIN--
THE RIO BAMBA (IN THE SOUTH OF THE CORDOBA PROVINCE,
500 FEET ABOVE SEA-LEVEL) 182
BUENA ESPERANZA (SAN LUIS PROVINCE, 1,166 FEET
ELEVATION) 182

XVII. THE PAMPEAN PLAIN--
BUENA ESPERANZA (SAN LUIS PROVINCE) 194
JUNIN (150 MILES WEST OF BUENOS AIRES, 330 FEET
ELEVATION) 194

XVIII. AN OX WAGON 210
THE MAIL COACH 210

XIX. THRESHING ON THE PAMPA 220
SACKS OF WHEAT READY FOR LOADING ON THE RAILWAY 220

XX. CONFLUENCE OF THE YGUASSU AND THE PARANA 236

XXI. THE PARANA AT CORRIENTES 244
THE BARRANCA AT PARANA (ENTRE RIOS), LEFT BANK 244

XXII. THE PARANA ABOVE THE ESTUARY 250

XXIII. THE OLDER INDUSTRIES OF THE PAMPA--
DRYING HIDES 262
DRYING SALT MEAT 262

XXIV. A HERD OF CREOLE CATTLE 268
A HERD OF DURHAM CATTLE 268

MAPS

I. ARGENTINA: THE NATURAL REGIONS 28

II. IRRIGATION IN THE WEST AND NORTH-WEST OF ARGENTINA 52

III. THE CATTLE-BREEDING AREAS 188

IV. DENSITY OF THE MAIZE CROP 198

V. DENSITY OF THE WHEAT CROP 200

VI. THE RAILWAYS 226

VII. ESTUARY OF THE RIO DE LA PLATA 254

The Argentine Republic

CHAPTER I

THE NATURAL REGIONS OF ARGENTINA

The physical environment--Colonization and the natural
regions--The struggle with the Indians--Argentine
unity--Argentina and the world.

The South-American continent is divided, from west to east, into three
great zones. The lofty chains of the Andes stretch along the Pacific
coast; at the foot of these are immense alluvial tablelands; further
east are the level plains of the Atlantic coast. The eastern zone,
the tablelands, ends southward at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata.
It enters Argentine territory only in the north-east corner of the
province of Misiones. Below 35 deg. S. lat. the alluvial plains open
freely upon the ocean. The position of Buenos Aires, in the threshold
of the plain of the Pampas, is somewhat like that of Chicago at the
beginning of the prairies; if you imagine the north-eastern States
and eastern Canada struck off the map, and the sea penetrating inland
as far as the Lakes.

The three essential aspects of Argentine scenery are mountain, plain,
and river. The Parana, indeed, is a whole natural region in itself,
with its arms and its islands, and the ever-changing low plain over
which its floods spread, as one sees it from the top of the clay
_barrancas_ (cliffs); though it is so broad that one cannot see the
opposite bank. It wanders over the plain like a foreigner, an emissary
from tropical America; for it has a flora of its own and tepid waters
which often cause a fog over the estuary where they mingle with the
waters of the sea.

From the general mass of the Argentine plains, we must set apart the
region between the Parana and the Uruguay, which Argentinians call
"Mesopotamia." While aeolian clays form the soil of the Pampa on the
right bank of the Parana, fluvial deposits--sands and gravel, in which
it is impossible to distinguish the contribution of the Uruguay from
that of the Parana--cover a great part of Mesopotamia. The earlier beds
of the rivers may be traced here, not only by the alluvial deposits
they have left, but by the lagoons which still mark their course.
Running waters have shaped the landscape and scooped out a system of
secondary valleys, and these reflect the history of the river itself
and the variations of base-level which led to alternate periods of
erosion and deposit.

On the right bank, on the contrary, the Parana has no tributaries of
any importance except at the extreme north of the country. The scarcity
of running water is, in fact, one of the characteristic features of
the plain of the Pampas. Except in the east, along the Parana, where a
network of permanent streams develops on a comparatively impermeable
and fairly humid soil, and except at the foot of the mountains, where
irregular torrents and streams, swollen after a storm and scanty in
the dry season, disappear, as a rule, within sight of the hills that
gave them birth, there is no superficial organized drainage. As a
whole, the alluvial covering of the Pampas, the upper beds of which are
cut through by the _barranca_ of the Parana, is not of river origin;
it was brought and distributed by the wind, which took the place of
running water. The clay of the Pampas is a present from the winds. The
increasing dryness of the climate toward the west, as one approaches
the Cordillera, explains the feebleness of the erosion by water and the
extent of the erosion by wind.

It is aridity, too, that gives their particular character to the
Argentine Andes. They have little trace of perpetual snow, the lower
limit of which approaches to within about four miles of the Bolivian
frontier. There are no glaciers there; they reappear in the south
only in the latitude of San Juan and Mendoza, on the flanks of the
three giants of the southern Cordillera, Mercedario, Aconcagua, and
Tupungato. Below the small number of steep furrows which the glaciers
have carved, and usually up to the top of the mountain, there spreads
what has been called, very expressively, "the zone of rubbish." In this
the winter's snows, fretted by the sun in that clear atmosphere, form
those multitudes of narrow pyramids which the Argentinians compare to
processions of white-robed pilgrims. The underlying rock is rarely
visible. It is covered with a thick cloak of rubbish, split off by the
frost, which the slow-moving waters released by the melting of the
snows heap up at the foot of the slopes, at the bottom of depressions.
The half-buried summits are succeeded by basins of accumulation. In
the valleys round the mountains there are immense beds of detritic,
half-rounded shingle. The torrents have cut their way through the
alluvial mass, and they flow at the foot of high terraces which mark
the sites of former valleys.

The spread of colonization toward the south during the last generation
has extended Argentine territory beyond the limits of these classic
scenes. The Patagonian Andes differ profoundly from the Northern Andes;
and the change is not more sudden than that of the climate, to which
it is due. Going toward the south, one passes, almost without a break,
from the Atlas Mountains to Scandinavia. The moisture increases in
proportion as the mean temperature falls. The mountains are covered
with snow, and the glaciers lengthen. In one part of Patagonia they
still form a continuous cap, an "inland sea," concealing the rock over
the entire central zone of the Cordillera; though they are only the
shrunken remainder of a glacial cap which was once far more extensive.
Here ice was the chief sculptor of the scenery. It has made elevated
tablelands, broadened the deep valleys which cut the flank of the
mountain, polished their sides, and deposited at the point where they
open out the amphitheatres of the moraines, behind which the waters
have accumulated and formed lakes; and these lakes stretch back like
fiords to the heart of the Cordillera, and are the pride of Patagonia.

The waters of these moisture-laden mountains have, to the east, carved
out the Patagonian tableland. It is crossed by broad and boldly cut
valleys, several of which, abandoned by the rivers which scoured
them, are now dead valleys. The rubbish from the wearing down of the
mountains and the glacial moraine has been spread over the whole face
of the tableland in the form of beds of gravel. But the rivers that
rise in the Andes cross a country of increasing aridity as they descend
eastward. There is no tributary to add to their volume. There is none
of that softening of lines, of that idle flow of a meandering stream
which characterizes the final stage of a river in a moist district.
Their inclination remains steep, and their waters continue to plough up
coarse sediment; and everywhere, up to the fringes of the valleys, the
fluting of the sandstone and steepness of the cliffs bear witness, like
the edges of the _hamadas_ of the Sahara, to some other form of erosion
than that effected by running water--the influence on the country of
the westerly winds. On the tableland the wind polishes the rounded
pebbles, makes facets on them, and gives them the colouring of the
desert.

Thus from the north to the south of Argentina there is a complete
contrast in the way in which the controlling forces of the landscape
are distributed. In the north the moist winds come from the east;
the rains lessen as they pass westward. The clays, capped with black
soil, of Buenos Aires are aeolian deposits, brought by the wind from
the desolate steppes which close the Pampa to the west, fixed and
transformed by the vegetation of a moister region. In the south, on
the contrary, the rains come from the Pacific, and the fluvio-glacial
alluvial beds of the Patagonian tableland are evidence of copious
reserves of moisture in the Andes; but the arid climate in which the
waters have left them has made its mark upon their surface.

This diversity of the physical environment is only fully brought
out by colonization. It is colonization, the efforts and attempts
of human industry to adjust agricultural or pastoral practices to
the natural conditions, which enable us to assign the limits of the
natural regions. In this differentiation it is essential to notice the
historical element.

The introduction of new crops gives a geographical meaning, which
had hitherto escaped observation, to climatological limits such, for
instance, as the line of 400 millimetres of rainfall which is the
western frontier of the region of cereals. These limits of crops remain
uncertain for a time, then experience and tradition gradually fix them.
They always keep a certain elasticity, however, advancing or receding
according as the market for the particular produce is favourable or
unfavourable.

Improvement in the methods of exploiting the soil--the adoption of
better agricultural machinery, dry farming, etc.--usually leads to the
extension of the sphere of a particular type of colonization, as it
enables this type to overcome some natural obstacle which restricted
its expansion. Sometimes, however, it brings to light a new obstacle
and creates a new geographical limit.

To this category belongs the northern limit of the belt of selective
breeding, which slants across the plain of the Pampas from the Sierra
de Cordoba to the Parana. The more or less degenerate cattle of the
natives had spread over the whole of the South American continent,
except the tropical forests, since the seventeenth century, adapting
themselves easily to very different climatic conditions, from the
Venezuelan _llanos_ to the _sertao_ of Bahia and the plains of
Argentina. But pedigree animals, more valuable and more delicate,
introduced on to the Pampas fifty years ago, are not able to resist the
malady caused by a parasite called the _garrapate_. Hence the southern
limit of the _garrapate_ suddenly became a most important element in
the economic life of the Republic. It would lose its importance if we
discovered a serum that would give the animals immunity against Texas
fever.

The range of one and the same cause varies infinitely with the
circumstances. The limit of the prairie, as of the scrub (_monte_)
which surrounds it on every side, and keeps it at a distance of 320 to
440 miles from Buenos Aires, had no decisive influence on primitive
colonization. Whether covered with grasses or brushwood, the plain
is equally suitable for extensive breeding. The ranches are the same
on both sides of the border. At the end of the nineteenth century,
however, when the area of cultivation increased, the prairie was
at once found to be superior. The labour required for clearing the
brushwood before the plough can work is enough to divert from it, at
least for some time, the stream of agricultural colonization. While the
population of the _monte_, wood-cutters and breeders, are indigenous,
the prairie has absorbed the immigrants from Europe, and the border of
the scrub has become in many places an ethnographical frontier.[2]

[2] See E. A. S. Delachaux, "Las regiones fisicas de la
Republica Argentina," _Rev. Museo Plata_, XV, 1908, pp.
102-131.

[Illustration: THE ARID ANDES. PUNTA VACAS, ON THE TRANS-ANDEAN RAILWAY.
_The bottom of the valley is 8,000 feet above sea-level; the sides
buried under rubbish. It is especially in this latitude, above a height
of 10,600 feet, in the zone where the moisture falls as snow even in
summer, that the rock is everywhere buried under its own rubbish. This
is Keidel's_ Schuttzone. _It extends to the foot of the Alpine peaks,
carved by glaciers._
Photograph by Moody, Buenos Aires.]

[Illustration: QUEBRADA DE IRUYA.
_Eastern slope of the Sierra de Santa Victoria, 65 miles from the
Bolivian frontier, in the zone of summer rain. The valleys have
been filled with an enormous mass of torrential alluvia. The water
afterwards made a course through the mobile deposits._
Photograph by Keidel, Mines Division.
PLATE II. To face p. 22.]

The changes which man has made in the floral landscape are, as a rule,
slight. The limits of the forest zone have scarcely been altered. The
beech forest of the southern Andes seems to be less tenacious than the
_monte_ which surrounds the Pampa, and it has been ravaged by fire
along the whole edge of the southern steppe at 37 deg. S. lat. The work
of man is generally confined to changing the primitive complexion of
the natural formations, without altering their general appearance. Thus
valuable essences are disappearing from the forest and the scrub, the
larch and the cypress from the district of the Patagonian Lakes, and
the red _quebracho_ from Santiago del Estero.

A change that is scarcely visible, but is of considerable economic
importance, thus takes place in the vegetation of the prairie owing to
the presence of herds. The _pasto fuerte_, composed of rough grasses,
which is the natural vegetation, is being succeeded by the _pasto
dulce_, in which annual species, soft grasses, leguminous plants,
etc., predominate. It is mainly composed of plants of European origin.
The difference between the _pasto dulce_ and the _pasto fuerte_ or
_duro_ is so important for the farmer that there is hardly a single
work on Argentina which does not dwell on it. The idea, however,
that the _pasto dulce_ has advanced steadily westward, starting from
the vicinity of Buenos Aires and constantly enlarging its domain, is
not strictly accurate. In 1895 Holmberg[3] traced the western limit
of the zone of the _pasto dulce_ through Pergamino, Junin, Bragado,
Azul, Ayacucho, and Mar Chiquita. When we compare this with earlier
observations, we see that in the course of the nineteenth century the
zone of the _pasto dulce_ has extended by about a hundred miles on the
southern Pampa. When Darwin travelled from Bahia Blanca to Buenos Aires
in 1833, he found no _pasto dulce_ except round Monte, on the right
bank of the Salado. Further north, on the other hand, the extent of the
_pasto dulce_ does not seem to have altered appreciably. The expedition
to the Salt Lakes in 1778 found that there were already thistles beyond
the line of the ranches, and these are characteristic of the _pasto
dulce_ in the Chivilcoy region on the Salado, which was then abandoned
to herds of wild cattle. "There was thistle enough to cook," says
the journal of the expedition. The difference is connected with the
history of colonization in the province of Buenos Aires, where ground
was gained only toward the south between 1800 and 1875. Since 1895 the
_pasto duro_ has been eliminated by agriculture rather than by the feet
of the herds. Hence the advance of the _pasto dulce_ is no longer in
a continuous line moving toward the west. It is sporadic, depending
upon the construction of new railways which open up the plain to the
plough.[4]

[3] Holmberg, "La Flora de la Republica Argentina," in the
_Secundo Censo de la Republica Argentina_, vol. i. (Buenos
Aires, 1898).

[4] _Diario de la expedition de 1778 a las Salinas_ (Coll. de
Angelis, iv.).

Colonization does more than emphasize the individuality of each of the
natural regions. It connects together different features, and blends
them in a complex vital organism which goes on evolving and renewing
itself.

The occupation of the whole of the soil of Argentina by white colonists
is quite a recent event. The second half of the nineteenth century was
characterized by a rapid territorial expansion, and over more than
half the country the expression "new land" must be taken literally. It
is only one generation since it was taken from the Indians. There can
be no question here of tracing the history of the relations between
the white population and the free Indians of the Chaco and the Pampa.
The most formidable of these were, in the north, the Abipones and
the Tobas. On the Pampa, the foes of the colonists were Indians of
Araucanian descent, Ranqueles, Pehuenches, etc., who came down from the
mountains and took to horses. At the close of the eighteenth century
the frontier of Buenos Aires was on the nearer side of the Salado, and
was bordered on the south-east and north-west by the fortresses of
Chascomus, Monte, Lobos, Navarro, Areco, Salto, Rojas, and Melincue.
The proposal of D'Azara to extend it as far as the Salado was not
carried out, and it was not until 1828 that there was a fresh advance
westward.[5]

[5] _F. de Azara, Diario de un reconocimiento de las guardias
y fortines que guarnecen la linea frontera de Republica
Argentina_ (1796, Coll. de Angelis, vol. vi.). The documents
collected by de Angelis show clearly that there had been some
idea in the middle of the eighteenth century of occupying the
whole plain to the east of the Sierra de Tandil. These ideas
of expansion, of which D'Azara's plan is another instance,
were interrupted by the Revolution (_Diario de D. Pedro Pablo
Pabon_, Coll. de Angelis, iv. etc.).

The new frontier, which would not be altered until 1875, passed by
Veinte Cinco de Mayo and Blanca Grande, at the north-western extremity
of the Sierra de Tandil. It included the entire region which lies
between the Sierra de Tandil and the lower Salado, where the village
of Tandil had been established in 1823. In addition, a line of forts
stretched from Blanca Grande in the south-west to Bahia Blanca. The
expedition sent in search of a port south of the mouth of the Plata
had not found any nearer site that was suitable. But Bahia Blanca was
to remain an isolated advance post until 1880, sharply separated from
both the colonized zone of the Pampas and the establishments on the
Patagonian coast.

While the cultivated area was thus growing toward the south, it was
being reduced in the north of the province of Buenos Aires and the
south of Cordoba. The lands of the lower Rio Cuarto were not occupied.
About 1860 (Martin de Moussy) the farthest establishments in this
sector were S. Jose de la Esquina and Saladillo on the Tercero. The
road to Chile by the Rio Cuarto, Achiras, and San Luis was threatened.
The advance of colonization in this zone was at first in the west to
Villa Mercedes on the Rio Quinto. The line of the Rio Cuarto by Carlota
was reoccupied, and before 1875 the frontier had been pushed back to
the Rio Quinto, where it joined the forts of southern Buenos Aires by
way of Sarmiento, Gainza, and Lavalle.

At last, in 1878, General Roca abandoned the classical methods
of fighting the Indians, and took the offensive. He deprived the
Indians of their refuges to the south of San Luis and the Central
Pampa, and threw them back toward the desert. The Argentine troops
followed in their steps as far as the Andes and the Rio Negro. There
are to-day few traces in the immense territory that was won of the
indigenous population. Its extreme mobility had masked its numerical
inferiority.[6]

[6] M. J. Olascoaga gives (_La conquete de la Pampa: Recueil
de documents relatifs a la campagne du Rio Negro_, Buenos
Aires, 1881) valuable documents concerning both the details
of the fight with the Indians and the distribution of their
_invernadas_ (common lands) in the region of the Pampas.
Olascoaga translates it "winter quarters"; it was pasturage on
which they kept their cattle and from which they set out on
their expeditions.

The history of the northern frontier is much the same. At the end of
the eighteenth century the Spanish outposts ran along the course of
the Salado. To the north of Santa Fe, at Sunchales, Soledad, and San
Javier, they protected the direct route from Santa Fe to Santiago del
Estero. These outposts were abandoned during the revolutionary period,
and the Indians advanced as far as the suburbs of Santa Fe. The roads
both to Santiago and, by the Quebracho Herrado, to Cordoba were cut.[7]
Urquiza reorganized the Santa Fe frontier, first as far as San Javier,
then below 29 deg. S. lat. between Arroyo del Rey on the Parana and
Tostado on the Salado. The expedition of 1884 brought the Argentine
army as far as the Bermejo, and broke the resistance of the Tobas. The
forts which, more to the north, guarded the province of Salta, on the
further side of the Sierras de la Lumbrera and Santa Barbara, had been
dismantled at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the tribes
in this part of the Chaco were not hostile.[8]

[7] See Thomas J. Hutchinson, _Buenos Aires and Argentine
Gleanings_.

[8] See Geronimo de la Serna, "Expedicion militar al Chaco,"
_Bol. I, Geog. Argentino_, xv. 1894, pp. 115-79.

The memory of the fights with the Indians is so completely blotted out
to-day, and the menace of invasion by the tribes has been so rapidly
extinguished, that it is difficult to realize fully the profound
influence they once had on colonization. The line of forts was a frail
barrier that was constantly broken through. The Indians of the Pampa
stole cattle from the ranches of Buenos Aires, and sold them in Chile.
Colonel Garcia calculates in 1816 that about 40,000 animals were stolen
every year.[9] Colonel Roca gives the same figure in 1876. The Pampa
put no natural difficulties in the way of the movements of the Indians,
no points which might serve as bases for the frontier. D. Pedro Pablo
Pabon points out that the proximity of the Sierra, instead of giving
protection to outposts in the Tandil region, would be an additional
source of insecurity, as it increased the difficulty of keeping watch.
In the north the Indian incursions followed the clearings in the scrub,
avoiding the dense and impenetrable parts. The lagoon of Mar Chiquita,
to the west of Santa Fe, was a valuable rampart, in the shelter of
which a fairly large population had established itself round Concepcion
del Tio.

[9] _Nuevo plan de fronteras de la provincia de la Republica
Argentina_ (Coll. de Angelis, vol. vi).

The enlargements of the frontier were sometimes due to expansive
movements of colonization, the breeders occupying new land beyond the
line of forts and demanding protection, and sometimes to the arbitrary
action of a Government which was eager to extend its territory, though
it was still without the means of exploiting it. Roca has well shown
the defects of this system of premature military occupation. "To go
far away from the populated districts in acquiring new territory is,
in my opinion, only an aggravation of the inconveniences of defensive
war, and it places a desert between the new lines and the settled
regions.... Invasions occur at once."[10] We should therefore be
likely to make serious mistakes if we were to identify the history of
colonization with that of military occupation. Moreover, the garrisons
of the forts did not take a very active part in the exploitation of
the soil. The plan which D'Azara proposed, of making _blandengues_
(lancers) colonists and rooting them to the soil by distributing it
amongst them, seems to have been purely Utopian. His description of
the frontier shows clearly how slight a hold the early colonization
had on the Pampa, where the only relatively industrious element was
represented by the groups of civilians (_paisanos_) who gathered about
the works and moats of the forts. It was different on the Santiago del
Estero frontier, where there was agriculture as well as breeding. Here
the fort was identical with the village, and each soldier had his plot
of wheat, maize, or water-melons.[11]

[10] Letter to the Minister of War, October 19, 1875.

[11] See the curious picture, which Hutchinson gives us, of
military life on the Rio Salado de Santiago about the middle
of the nineteenth century.

The provinces which were to combine in forming the Argentine Republic
had no economic unity. They were really two countries, two separate
worlds, the coast regions and the mountain regions (_de arriba_),
joined together, but not blended, by the main road from Buenos Aires
to Peru, by way of Cordoba, Tucuman, and Salta. They represented two
different branches of Spanish colonization. "Two human streams," says
Mitre, "contributed to the peopling of the vice-royalty.... The first
came directly from Spain, the mother country. It occupied and peopled
the banks in the basin of the Rio de la Plata, in the name of the
right of discovery and conquest, and fertilized them by its labour.
The other stream came from the ancient empire of the Incas, already
subdued by the Spanish armies. This spread toward the interior of the
country as it passed from the Pacific to the Atlantic, occupied the
land in virtue of the same rights, and exploited it by means of a
feudal system.... The same year, 1535, saw the foundation of the two
towns, Buenos Aires and Lima, and was the centre of these two cycles
of discoveries and conquests. Thirty-eight years later, in the same
year, 1573, the Conquistadores who came from Peru founded the town of
Cordoba, two hundred miles away from the Parana, while those who came
from the Rio de la Plata founded the town of Santa Fe on the banks of
that river."[12]

[12] Mitre, _Historia de Belgrano_, I, ch. i. pp. 4 and 5.

[Illustration: MAP I.--ARGENTINA. THE NATURAL REGIONS.
_The map shows the distribution of the natural regions--the dry Andes
in the north-west, with irrigated cultivation; the monte, or brush,
which is still used for extensive breeding; and the Pampa, with its
great areas of cereals and lucerne. The line marking the frontier of
1875 shows the speed at which colonization has developed in the western
half of the plain of the Pampas. The only regions not given on the map
are the plateau of Misiones, with its tropical forests, and the wet
Andes of Patagonia._
To face p. 28.]

Tucuman and Salta were established by conquerors from Peru, while San
Juan and Mendoza were built by the Chilean Spaniards. The line of
demarcation between the two zones of colonization crosses the immense
desert plains of the interior, not the elevated tablelands of the Andes.

The two types of Argentinians differed in every respect, in blood as
well as in environment. The indigenous race, which was eliminated on
the coast, mingled intimately with the conquering race in the interior.

The establishments on the Rio de la Plata had originally been merely
stages on the road to Peru, and had no value of themselves. The
elevated tablelands of the Andes long remained the economic centre of
Spanish America, and the provinces of the interior, which sold them
cattle and mules, depended very closely upon them. The end of the
eighteenth century was marked by more rapid progress in the region of
the Pampas. The vice-royalty of La Plata was created.

Freedom of trade was secured between Buenos Aires and the Spanish
ports. The export of hides increased. The influence of Buenos Aires
spread over the interior and, in spite of the Cordoba tariff, reached
the regions of the north-west. "The creation of the vice-royalty," says
Dean Funes, "and the new direction taken by commerce had the effect
that Buenos Aires became the centre of considerable and important
business."[13]

[13] D. Gregorio Funes, _Ensayo de la historia civil del
Paraguay, Buenos Aires, y Tucuman_ (Buenos Aires, 3 vols.,
1816).

This commercial development, which seemed destined to bring closer
together the two halves of Argentinian territory, was interrupted
in the first half of the nineteenth century. This did not, however,
break the connections between the provinces to the north-west of the
tableland and those on the Pacific slope, and indeed, they became
more varied and more binding. Packs of mules, carrying the ore of San
Juan and La Rioja to the foundries of the Chilean side, added life to
the Cordillera. When Chile, transformed into an agricultural country,
could not meet its own demand for cattle, the oases of the Argentine
side were sown with lucerne for fattening the cattle which were to
cross the mountains. The provinces of Mendoza, San Juan, La Rioja,
Catamarca, Tucuman, and Salta were held within the orbit of the Andes
districts.[14] There are historical reasons for this set-back to the
influence of Buenos Aires. The wars of the revolutionary period and
the conflicts between the Buenos Aires Government and the maritime
powers checked the commercial enterprise on the banks of the Plata.
This political isolation of the province of Buenos Aires, under the
Rosas Government, lasted until 1853. Poncel gives us statistics of the
imports of Catamarca which show the great importance of this date in
the history of Argentine commerce:

[14] The Woodbine Parish map (1839) puts Tinogasta eighty
miles out of its proper position, at the very foot of the Come
Caballos range, thus reducing by one half its distance from
Copiapo, on the Chilean slope.

Imports into the Province of 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854
Catamarca:

From the Pacific across the
Cordillera (in millions of 72 50 71 40 12
piastres)

From the Atlantic (Buenos Aires
or Rosario) 11 7 20 64 116[15]

[15] B. Poncel, _Mes itineraires dans les Provinces du Rio de
la Plata, Province de Catamarca_ (Paris, 1864).

In 1854-5 the Cordillera route definitely ceased to be of commercial
importance to Catamarca, and it was afterwards used merely for the
export of cattle.

But the attraction of Buenos Aires after 1853 was not merely due to its
commercial life and its intermediate position between the provinces
of the interior and Europe. It was chiefly based upon the economic
development of the region of the Pampas, which began about this date,
and altered the balance between the two halves of Argentina. The
exploitation of the Pampa, the improvement in breeding methods, and the
introduction and expansion of agriculture on the plain of the Pampa,
which fill all publications on modern Argentina, are in themselves one
of the great events in the economic history of the nineteenth century.
They had also an indirect but profound influence upon the life of other
parts of Argentina. The consuming capacity of the Pampa increased
simultaneously with its wealth and population. It absorbed the products
of the neighbouring provinces and in turn made customers of them,
distributing amongst them, according to the services they rendered,
part of the gold it obtained from beyond the Atlantic. One after the
other the provinces lost the relations which had hitherto connected
them with foreign lands. There was the same development all over the
zone of cereals and lucerne--the direction of the stream of commerce
was reversed. In some places, as at Tucuman and Mendoza the change
was accomplished a generation ago. In other places, as at Salta and
San Juan, it is still going on. In yet other places, the more remote
valleys, like Jachal and Santa Maria, it will occur in the near future.
By a singular anomaly the Far West of North America, which sprang up
half a century ago, tends to withdraw more and more from the influence
of the eastern States, which provided it with capital and immigrants,
while the Far West of Argentina, which is just as old as the east and
by no means a creation of the east, since it developed in isolation and
freedom, and was already adult and rich when they came into contact,
has nevertheless fallen into complete dependence upon the east in the
course of a few years.

The life of the whole country depended upon the great colonization
movement which transformed the plain of the Pampas. This brought about
an economic unity which was at once reflected in the political world.
The railway from Buenos Aires reached Tucuman before 1880; Mendoza, San
Juan, Salta, and Catamarca before 1890; and La Rioja before 1900. The
establishment of closer economic relations between the coast and the
provinces of the interior has nearly always inaugurated a period of
great prosperity for the latter. In every case the influence of Buenos
Aires vitalized them, put an end to their slumbers, and made them rich.

Not only did the coast take for itself the products of the western
provinces, which had hitherto found their way to other markets, but new
centres of production had to be created to meet its needs. The forests
of the Chaco received a great influx of wood-cutters, to provide the
sleepers for the railways. The valley of the Rio Negro was planted with
vines, to provide the wines of the colonies in the district of Bahia
Blanca. The attraction of the Pampa was felt as far as the frontiers.
Paraguay competed with Corrientes in the supply of tobacco and oranges;
with Misiones in the supply of _yerba mate_. Each district chose the
particular crop which was best suited to its climate, in order to
secure the highest possible advantage from its relations with Buenos
Aires.

The two most brilliant satellites of the Pampa, the most important
productive centres of the interior, are Tucuman and Mendoza. All the
other important towns of Argentina belong themselves to the region of
the Pampas. Tucuman and Mendoza, which live by supplying the Pampa with
sugar and wine, have become in turn secondary centres of attraction.
They are a sort of regional capitals, and they have their own spheres
of economic influence. A network of commercial streams has developed
about them, and this has led to the formation of new roads. These lines
of local interest are easily recognized on a map of the railways,
where one sees them superimposed upon the regular fan of lines which
converges toward Buenos Aires. La Rioja provides the props for the
vines of San Juan and Mendoza. From the north of Cordoba to Salta,
a distance of about 250 miles, the wood is cut for the fuel of the
sugar-works of Tucuman. Santiago dries the fodder for its troops of
mules. The prairies of Catamarca, which once fattened the cattle that
were intended for Chile, and often came even from Tucuman, now sell
their beasts to the butchers of Tucuman. The wines of San Juan find
their best customers at Tucuman. Even the nearest portions of the plain
of the Pampas, to the north-east of Santa Fe and the south of San Luis,
supply maize and wheat to Tucuman and Mendoza, instead of sending them
to the ports for export.

While Argentina lives on the Pampa, the Pampa lives on export. It has
been developed through the inflow of European immigrants, and Europe
pays by sending its manufactured products and capital. Except as
regards emigration, the United States had, before the war, much the
same relation to Argentina as the countries of Western Europe. Thus
the economic prosperity of the Republic binds it more and more closely
to the life of the whole world. Its position in the temperate zone of
South America had retarded its entrance into world-commerce, and this
explains the slowness with which its colonization proceeded at first.
Its climate and products were too similar to those of Spain. Not only
the mining and metallurgical centres of the Andes and of Mantiqueria,
but even the sugar and cotton regions of Brazil, the Antilles, and the
Guianas, were developed before the plains of the Pampas.

The turn of the Argentine Republic did not come until the growth of
population in the industrial countries of Europe made them dependent
upon foreign lands for their food, and until the application of steam
to ships made it possible to export wool, meat, and cereals on a large
scale.

When we compare the economic organization of Argentina with that of the
United States, we see that it is both less complex and less capable of
being self-contained. The difference is due to the architecture of the
country. I said at the beginning of this chapter that Argentina has no
equivalent for the zone of the Atlantic tablelands, which is now the
great industrial region of North America. The industrial prosperity of
eastern North America provides a safe home market for the farmers of
the west, and relieves them of the need of exporting their produce.
Moreover, the Atlantic tablelands, the original centres of population,
where the first generations of colonists lived on land that was often
poor, have seen the gradual formation of reserves of labour and capital
which were afterwards used in colonizing the west. The east sifted, in
a sense controlled, the influence of modern Europe in the colonization
of the United States. It classified and assimilated the new emigrants
who set out for the west, mingled with the troops of native pioneers
on their way to the prairies. In the same way, when European capital
flowed into the United States, it found in the eastern cities a large
treasury and a body of financiers in whose hands it had to remain.

In Argentina, on the contrary, everything speaks of the close and
direct dependence of the country upon oversea markets. The soil itself
bears the marks of this solidarity. It is seen in the network of the
railways, the concentration of the urban population in the ports, and
the distribution of the cultivated districts in concentric circles
which are often limited, not by a physical obstacle, but by the cost of
freightage between the productive centre and the port. Thus we get a
geographical expression of facts which seem at first sight to belong to
the purely economic or sociological order.

CHAPTER II

THE OASES OF THE NORTH-WEST AND PASTORAL LIFE IN THE SCRUB

The inhabited zones of the Andes in the north-west--_Valles_,
_Quebradas_, _Puna_--The irrigation of the _valles_--The
historic routes--Convoys of stock--The breeding of mules and
the fairs--The struggle of the breeders against drought--The
Sierra de los Llanos.

The whole life and wealth of the arid provinces of north-western
Argentina depend upon irrigation; the water-supply definitively settles
the sites of human establishments. The water resources are irregularly
distributed. They are especially abundant in the south (San Juan,
Mendoza, and San Rafael), where the torrents of the Cordillera are fed
by the glaciers, and on the outer fringe of the hills above the Chaco,
at the foot of Aconcagua, which gathers masses of cloud and rain on its
flanks (Tucuman). In the intermediate district, on the contrary, in the
regions of La Rioja and Catamarca, and in the interior of the hilly
zone to the north-west of Tucuman, the amount of available water is
small; the oases shrink into small spots far removed from each other.

This natural inequality was not felt at first. For a long time the
spread of cultivation and the progress of wealth were restricted only
by the scarcity of population, the difficulties of transport, and the
inadequacy of the markets. The best endowed oases paid no attention
to the surplus supply of water, for which they had no use. We have to
come down to the close of the nineteenth century to find men reaching
the limits which nature has set to colonization, and mapping out
their domain. It is not until then that La Rioja ceases to compete
with Mendoza, or Catamarca with Tucuman. While large industrial
enterprises develop at Mendoza and Tucuman, strong centres of urban
life arise, the population increases, and immigrants stream in, the
oases of the interior scarcely change. Their population does not keep
its level. Life has an archaic character that one finds nowhere else
in Argentina. The physical conditions have retarded, one would almost
say crystallized, the economic development. The living generation
exploits the soil in ways that to some extent go back as far as the
indigenous tribes, the masters of their Spanish conquerors in the art
of irrigation. The industry of fattening and convoying cattle, which
was once the chief source of wealth of the whole country, is still
alive in those districts.

The zone of the elevated tablelands of the Andes without drainage
toward the sea--the Puna--has still, below 22 deg. S. latitude on
the northern frontier of Argentina, a width of about 250 miles. This
breadth steadily contracts southward as far as 28 deg. S. latitude,
where the Puna ends about the level of the road from Tinogasta to
Copiapo.
To the east and south of the Puna the Argentine Andes are cut from
north to south by a series of long gullies and large basins, between
which there are lofty and massive chains with steep flanks. Some of
these lie in the heart of the mountains, while others often open like
gulfs upon the edge of the plain. These depressions with rectilinear
contours are a common feature of the topography of the Andes in this
latitude. The central plain of Chile is closely related to them.
In the Argentine speech they are called _valles_: Valle de Lerma,
Valle Calchaqui, Valle de Iglesias, de Calingasta, d'Uspallata. They
are, however, not "valleys" in the sense of hollows made by erosion
by running water. They owe their formation to tectonic movements,
subsidences of the surface. The scanty rivers of the arid Anacs are not
capable of doing work of that kind. When they enter the already formed
bed of a _valle_, they seem to be lost in the immense space. Often
they dry up in it, leaving behind the sediment and salts with which
the water was laden. In other places they cut at right angles across
the _valle_, escaping by narrow breaches in it, while the depression
continues its course on either side, taking in sections of a number of
independent streams.

Opposed to the _valle_ is the eroded ravine, carved out by water, the
_quebrada_. It opens upon a _valle_ with a V-shaped mouth, which widens
out at the top, and one can recognise at sight the various slopes and
the successive stages of erosion. Narrow and winding, a level bed
of shingle filling the entire base of the valley, it rises rapidly
toward the mountains and provides a route from the _valle_ to the
_puna_. These _valles_, _quebradas_ and _puna_ are the three inhabited
zones of the Andes. The first is the richest. The inhabitant of the
_valle_, proud of his comparative comfort, has for his neighbour in the
_quebrada_ or the _puna_--the _coyada_--a contempt such as one finds
the inhabitants of the good land in Europe feeling for the people in
poorer districts.

The narrower the _valle_, the less rain there is. The observations
give 112 millimetres of rain per year at Tinogasta, 290 at Andalgala,
and 200 at Santa Maria. Salta and Jujuy have a much moister climate,
and have no less than 570 and 740 millimetres of rain annually. This
is because the eastern chain of the Andes, which stretches from the
Sierra de Santa Victoria on the Bolivian frontier to Aconcagua, sinks
lower at the latitude of Salta, and lets in the moisture of the Chaco
to the heart of the zone of the Andes. The rains of Salta and Jujuy are
suspended during the winter, but they are so heavy during the summer
months (November to March) that maize, which needs only the summer
rain, can be cultivated without irrigation. But when we follow the
Valle de Lerma southward from Salta the maize harvest becomes more and
more uncertain, and it is no longer sown in dry soil when we get to
about twenty miles from Salta, in the latitude of the confluence of the
Arias and the Juramento. However, the summer rains, which are good for
maize, are very injurious to the vine; they spoil the grapes. Thus the
southern limit of the cultivation of maize in dry soil almost coincides
with the northern limit of the vine. At that point we have the real
beginning of the typical scenery of the _valles_.

[Illustration: THE PATAGONIAN ANDES. _Mount Tronador (11,500 feet) on
the Chilean frontier, dominating the road from Lake Nahuel Huapi to
Chile. The glaciers still reach the bottom of the valley, which they
filled at one time. A burnt forest in the foreground._ PLATE III. To
face p. 38.]

The need of irrigation is due to the scarcity of rain, but it is
accentuated by a number of causes which tend to increase the aridity.
The _valles_ are the scene of scorching day-winds, the _zonda_, like
the _Foehn_ of the Swiss Alps, which, there being no snow, dry up
the water of the springs and of the irrigation trenches, or use the
deposits left by the waters to form dunes, which they push southward,
sometimes like veritable glaciers of sand. Moreover, the soil of
the _valles_ is generally composed of coarse and permeable alluvial
deposits, which absorb the rain-storms immediately. There is at the
foot of both sides of the hills which enclose each _valle_ an immense
and far-lying bed of imperfectly rounded shingle. This double zone of
detritus is strangely desolate, for the vegetation on it is restricted
to isolated bushes of _jarilla_ and _tola_. From the sheepfolds on the
mountains to the oases in the valleys one hardly meets a single house.
The bed of the valley is not so desolate. A broad ribbon of sand marks
the dry bed of a torrent, and on the clays of its banks, if the sheet
of water underground is not too deep, one finds, in spite of the goats
and asses and charcoal-burners, little forests of _algarrobas_, which
the foundries use for fuel.

The modern alluvial beds, gravel and sand, represent the upper stratum
of a considerable series of continental deposits which lie on the
Paleozoic crystalline rock of the Andes.[16] They chiefly consist of
red sandstone and coloured marls, which crop up here and there through
the alluvial covering and give the landscape a rugged character, worn
by water and wind. There is no trace of humus: nothing to soften the
vivid colours of the rock. Bodenbender, to whom we owe the first
general attempt to classify the series, points out the importance of
distinguishing the different strata in connection with the question
of water supply and the conditions of human life.[17] A complete
geographical study would have to follow the geological description in
detail. In places--on the eastern edge of the Sierra de los Llanos--the
fine modern clays are in contact with the granites of the hills and
form above them a thick bed that is rich in fresh water. In other
places--south-westward of the Sierra de la Famatina, as far as the
Bermejo--the outcrop is of red sandstone only. The tablelands of
Talampaya and Ischigualasta, which are cut across by the gorges of the
tributaries of the Bermejo, form one of the most conspicuously desert
regions in the whole Republic. Wherever the gypsiferous marls of the
Calchaqui are near the surface, the springs are saline. The undulations
of the impermeable rocky substratum bring to light the water that
gathers in the alluvial beds. Thus the streams which come down the
Famatina range in the west disappear in the alluvial beds on the fringe
of the Sierra, but re-appear presently in the oasis of Pagancillo.

[16] This series, stretching from the Permian to the Tertiary,
also includes, especially in the region of the sub-Andean
chains, on the fringe of the Chaco, a number of marine strata
(see Bonarelli, _Las sierras subandinas del Alto y Aguarague y
los yacimientos petroliferos del distrito minero de Tartagal_
"Ann. Min. Agric.," Seccion Geologia, Mineralogia, y Mineria,
viii. No. 4: Buenos Aires, 1913).

[17] G. Bodenbender, _Parte meridional de la Provincia de la
Rioja y regiones limitrofes_ (Ann. Min. Agric., Seccion Geol.,
Minerol., y Mineria, vii. No. 3: Buenos Aires, 1912).

Hence the _valles_ are by no means wholly productive. The oases
represent only a limited portion of them. It would be impossible to
imagine a more striking contrast than that of the freshness and life
of the oases compared with the surrounding desert. Screens of poplars
shelter them from the _zonda_. The water runs along trenches paved
with round pebbles under the spreading vines, at the foot of which, to
economize water and space, lucerne is sown. Each garden feeds a family.
Near the raw-brick houses there are large earthenware vessels, as tall
as a man, in which the corn is kept. The hammering of the cooper fills
the air.

In places the oasis is watered by a stream. In those cases there is
on each side of the bed of the stream a narrow fringe, a continuous
ribbon, of smiling gardens, which hide the path. Above and below Santa
Maria a trench is opened every mile in the wet sands of the Rio. The
water rises in it and fills it, and is directed by it toward one of the
banks, where it is jealously collected and distributed. The water which
flows from the irrigated fields and returns to the river, as well as
that which the porous side of the trench has permitted to escape, goes
to fill another trench and supply other fields farther on. The region
of Los Sauces, in the northern part of the province of La Rioja, to the
south of Tinogasta, shows a different type of irrigated cultivation,
on account of the sandy course of the stream. The fields follow the
feeding artery for about fifty miles. It is bled at the beginning of
each bend, the waters remaining underground like hidden wealth.

In most cases however, the _valle_ has no running water. What
reaches it from the lateral _quebradas_ is lost in the alluvial beds
accumulated at the point where the _quebrada_ enters the _valle_. In
order to make use of it the cultivated areas are grouped on the cone of
deposition; at least, that is the position in the great majority of the
oases. A _costa_ is a line of separate oases with their backs to the
same slope. When the _valle_ is narrow, the _costas_ on either side of
the sterile depression face each other, like two parallel roads. The
water of the _quebrada_ is never sufficiently abundant to irrigate the
whole of the cone of the torrent. In order to create an oasis there,
they have selected the most easily cultivable zone, which is usually
the foot of the cone, where the deposits are finer and more fertile,
retain the moisture better, and require less watering. The summit of
the cone is composed of coarse stones, the first to be dropped by the
torrent as it loses its strength. These are bad lands, where the water
is wasted.

To meet the occasional drought and the danger of sudden floods in
this fluvial zone, which is entirely the domain of the torrent, there
is need of constant care and ingenuity. At Colalao del Valle the
cultivated fields are five or six miles from the summit of the cone.
After a number of successive years of drought the stream of water
which reached them on the flanks of the cone lost half its volume and
threatened to disappear altogether. They then built a stone dam at the
outlet of the _quebrada_, and the water accumulates behind this during
the night. At three o'clock in the morning the sluices are opened, and
the stream, having thus nursed its strength, reaches the fields down
below about seven o'clock. Then the sun and the wind rise, just at the
time when the reservoir is empty, and by the middle of the day the
stream ceases, and irrigation is suspended. At Andalgala, above which
rises the glittering crest of Aconcagua, the waters of the melting
snows which feed the torrent have not time to be "decanted" before they
reach the valley. They come down laden with mud and sand. Above the
points where the irrigation-channels begin the people make, in the bed
of the torrent, a dam of branches of trees which filters the water. It
is swept away by every flood that occurs, and is at once restored.

What is even more admirable than the ingenuity of the _vallista_
in utilizing the natural resources is the minute detail of the
water-rights. It seems as if the _vallista_ is even more cunning in
protecting himself from his neighbour than in dealing with nature. The
water-customs of these Andean valleys are worth an extensive study.
The water does not belong to the State, and is not used by concession
from the State. It is private property. The owner uses or abuses it as
he pleases on the lands which he has selected. A man may be poor in
land and rich in water, which he accordingly sells. There are frequent
business deals in regard to water-rights, just as in regard to the soil
and its produce. Appropriation of water often precedes appropriation
of the soil. Many oases are communities where the non-irrigated lands
are common to the whole population, and the irrigated fields alone are
divided.

A primary group of customs regulates the relations to each other of
communities higher up and lower down the same stream. At Catamarca the
water of a certain stream is shared by Piedra Blanca and Valle Viejo.
Piedra Blanca, in the upper part, absorbs the whole of the water for a
week, but it must then suspend its irrigation during the following week
and permit the stream to flow down the valley. The same evening, or the
next morning, according to the season, the water reaches Valle Viejo.
It is a custom known as the _quiebras_ in the southern valleys of the
desert side of Peru, where it allows different stages of cultivation
to proceed simultaneously. In the same way, above Santa Maria, where
several communities (S. Jose, Loro Huasi, etc.) receive the water
brought by a channel from the Rio Santa Maria, each of them has a
right to the full output of the channel for three days. At the end of
that time the sluices are closed, and the water passes to the next
community. There is grave trouble for any oasis that has its rights
infringed or does not compel the communities higher up to respect them.

Amongst individuals the water-right is generally defined by a
measurement of time, a certain number of days or hours--during which
the owner controls the entire flow of the spring or stream. It is
only when the water is more abundant that we find another method of
fixing the right of water, defining it by bulk. The water is then said
to be _demarcada_, as the unit is customarily the _marco_, or the
volume which passes through an opening about twenty-one centimetres
in width and eight in height. The _marco_ has infinite divisions, and
each subdivision has its own name--the _naranja_, the _bombilla_, the
_paja_, and so on.

As all the water is utilized, and the rights of all are equally
entitled to respect, the division of the water into _marcos_
(_demarcacion_) is in practice merely a proportional distribution of
it amongst those who have rights to it. If the sum total of rights
expressed in _marcos_ represents something like the total flow of
a stream during an average season, in the time of low water it is
disproportionate, and the water no longer flows to the tops of the
_marcos_. In other words, the quantity of water granted to each rises
or falls with the rise or fall of the stream itself.

Theoretically, when the water-right is defined in _marcos_ it is
permanent. Often, however, it is impossible to grant each proprietor
a permanent title to the water. Even in oases where the water is
"demarked," the _turno_--that is to say, the turn of the proprietors to
have water--which is the absolute rule in the poorest oases, reappears
during the months of scarcity, in winter, when there is no rain,
and at the beginning of summer. It reappears also when the right of
ownership has been broken up into fractions that are too small, and it
is better to grant a larger volume of water for several hours instead
of a constant stream of water which would be too scanty for profitable
use. At Andalgala the "turn" is sometimes obligatory, and regulated by
custom, in channels where the irrigating proprietors are too numerous;
at other times optional, and settled by convention amongst the owners
themselves, when water is scanty. At Valle Viejo (Catamarca), when
the water runs low, they set up the _mita_; that is to say, the
sluices remain closed in each channel during four days out of eight,
each proprietor in turn giving up his right to a permanent supply in
order to have a double allowance when his turn comes. The _turno_ is,
therefore, a general practice. Everywhere we can see the farmers on
the watch along the _acequias_, waiting for the moment to close their
neighbour's trench with a pellet of clay and to let the stream into
their own trenches with a blow of the spade.

The most minute precautions are taken in order that no one shall suffer
injury. As the irrigation is always slower and less thorough during the
night, they take it in turns to have the day and the night alternately.
When the community receives the water from another community higher up
the stream, the succession of "turns" amongst its members differs every
time. The water comes down charged with sediment, pushing in front of
it a mass of liquid mud, as the flush of a torrent does. It takes some
time for the stream to become regular and clear. The first irrigator
therefore exercises his right under unfavourable conditions. In the
local phraseology the _volcada de agua_ is not as good as the _corte
de agua_, which means the irrigation that begins when the _acequia_ is
full.

Irrigation entails the services of quite a staff of arbitrators and
administrators. The head men, who have jurisdiction of a higher order
and secure the accurate distribution of the water amongst a number
of channels or communities, are now, as a rule, officials of the
administration, appointed by the provincial authorities (_juez de
Irrigacion_ at Catamarca, _juez de rio_ at Rosario de Lerma). But the
_juez de agua_ of each community or each channel is a syndic elected by
the interested parties. At Santa Maria the _juez de agua_ is elected
by the owners and confirmed by the Government. He controls irrigation
throughout the department, settling all differences, submitting plans
of work to a meeting of the owners, and assigning their respective
charges in labour and contributions according to their rights.

* * * * *

This land of customs and traditions is also a land of lively movement.
The briskness of the traffic is primarily due to continuous exchange
between the various zones of the mountainous district. This large
trade, so scattered that the railways could not dream of satisfying
its needs, is carried, in the old fashion, on the backs of mules. The
lively aspect of the roads between the tableland and the lower valleys
of the region, the brisk interchange of goods between zones with
different climates, is one of the common features of life on the Andes.

But the classic spectacle presents a different aspect in different
latitudes. In Peru, and in southern Bolivia, the higher valleys--Jauja,
Cuzco, the Pampas of Cochabamba and Sucre--have centres of dense
population and agricultural wealth at a height of between 9,000
and 11,000 feet. They raise cereals, and receive from the tropical
districts (_montanas and yungas_) sugar, cane-brandy, cocoa, and
coca-leaf. The valleys of the Argentine Andes are usually at a less
elevation than the _yungas_ and _montanas_ of Bolivia and Peru. But
they are not hot districts, and have not tropical vegetation. Frost
prevents the harvesting of sugar-cane at Salta, at a height of 4,000
feet. As to the coca-leaf, which is not as much used here as in the
north, the Argentine _valles_ do not send it to the tableland, but
receive it indirectly from there, through the southern _yungas_. In
default of tropical crops, the Argentine _valles_ sow wheat and maize,
which they sell to the Indians of the cold districts of the Puna for
wool and salt.

These commercial currents are of very ancient, probably pre-Columbian
origin. Boman has discovered ears of maize in the prehistoric tombs
of the Puna de Atacama.[18] The Puna, at a height of 11,000 to 12,000
feet, is permanently inhabited, unlike the high valleys of the
Cordillera de San Juan, which are occupied only during the summer
season by Chilean shepherds. It is primarily a pastoral and mining
region, but it has some tilled land, at more than 6,700 feet above the
level of the valleys. The higher limit of annual cultivation in the
cold districts, which is fixed by the summer temperature, does not fall
in the same way as that of arboriculture in warm districts, because
trees suffer from the winter frosts. The Indians of Cochinoca and
Susques sow lucerne and barley for fodder, and the _quinoa_ and potato
for food. Transport between the Puna and the _valles_ is carried on
by the inhabitants of the Puna, and is not shared by the _vallistas_.
They are especially active in the north, in the province of Jujuy.
Belmar shows how important the sales of the Puna woollen goods were by
the middle of the nineteenth century.[19] These fabrics were used by
the mill-owners of the Rio Grande de Jujuy to pay for the work of the
Indians of the Chaco, whom they employed in the sugar-cane harvest.
The competition of the manufactured products of Europe now menaces the
domestic weaving of the Puna, just as the competition of the flour of
the Pampa menaces the cultivation of cereals in the _valles_.

[18] Eric Boman, _Antiquites de la region andine de la
Republique Argentine et de la Puna de Atacama: Mission scient.
G. de Crequi-Montfort et E. Senechal de la Grange_ (Paris,
vols. i. and ii. 1908).

[19] Belmar, _Les provinces de la Federation argentine_
(Paris, 1856).

Besides this traffic of local interest the _valles_ serve for a traffic
of a higher, almost a continental character. It seems certain that
during the pre-Spanish period the road from the Peruvian tablelands to
Chile avoided the inhospitable desert of the Puna de Atacama, entered
the region of the _valles_ to the east, and crossed the Cordillera in
the latitude of Tinogasta, or even a little further south. That was
the route of the armies of the Incas, which in the fourteenth century
came as far as Maule. The pre-Columbian roads, of which Boman has
found traces between the Valle de Lerma and the Valle Calchaqui, seem
to correspond with this direction of traffic. By this route the long
_quechua_ passed amongst the Diaguites populations. The conquerors
followed the Indian guides. Almagro, in going from Peru to Chile,
passed through the _valles_ at the eastern edge of the Andes.

Later the _valles_ were incorporated in the many variations of the
historic high road, one of the first and busiest of Spanish America,
which goes from the Rio de la Plata to Lima: a route both for armies
and merchants. The plan proposed by Matienzo (1566) to make a road
from the silver mines to the estuary of the Parana, through the Valle
de Calchaqui, seems to have been intended merely to improve a line of
communication that had already been in use. Buenos Aires for a long
time received European goods by this road. About 1880 the Salta route
recovered for a time its continental importance, during the Pacific
War and the occupation by the Chileans of the maritime provinces of
Bolivia.[20] At that time it was the only outlet for Bolivia.

[20] See Brackebusch, "Viaje a la provincia de Jujuy," _Bol.
Instit. Geog. Argent._, iv. 1883, pp. 9-17.

[Illustration: VEGETATION OF THE INTERIOR VALLEYS (ANDES OF THE
NORTH-WEST).
_Descent of Tafi del Valle, going to Santa Maria. The ravine is
excavated out of the mass of coarse deposits which forms a fringe
between the mountain and the valley. On this permeable soil the
vegetation is particularly thin. Cactus._
Photograph by the Author.]

[Illustration: FOREST ON THE OUTER SLOPE OF THE SUB-ANDEAN CHAINS.
_Sierra de San Antonio (Salta province). Perennial foliage, creepers,
ferns._ Photograph by the Author.
PLATE IV. To face p. 48.]

But of all the forms of traffic that have enlivened the _valles_ the
most constant, and the form that has had the most profound influence on
their existence, is the movement of cattle. The cattle trade has been
of fundamental importance in the history of the colonization of South
America. Animals were the only goods that could be conveyed any great
distance. At the beginning of the conquest the productive regions of
the continent, which supplied the export trade with Europe, were very
limited in extent. Pastoral colonization began at once, and spread
over a very wide area. Herds of oxen, for meat or draught, horses, and
mules, made their way toward the centres of consumption: towns like
Lima, Bahia, and Rio, the Peruvian mines, and the sugar-refineries of
the north-east of Brazil, and later toward the _yerbales_ of Paraguay
or the seaports of the Caribs and the Rio Grande do Sul, where the
jerked meat industry developed. The cattle routes converge upon these
centres.

The export of cattle and mules from the Argentine plains to Peru was
fully established by the close of the sixteenth century, and it seems
to have continued without interruption ever since. Upper Peru is,
however, not the only market on which the Argentine breeders lived. At
the end of the eighteenth century D'Azara demanded that they should
permit the sale of horses and mules to Brazil, for use in the mines.
The cattle traffic with Portuguese territory had not then assumed
the form of a regular commerce, and the Brazilians made raids on the
north-eastern provinces for the animals they needed--60,000 a year,
D'Azara says.[21] The export of cattle to Paraguay and Misiones was, on
the other hand, of substantial economic importance in the eighteenth
century. Before the Revolution, Rengger says, as many as 200,000 head
of cattle passed yearly from Corrientes to Paraguay, which paid for
them in _mate_ and tobacco.[22] This trade was kept up intermittently
in the nineteenth century. The exports from Corrientes were especially
important at the time when the Paraguay stock was reconstituted after
the war (40,000 head of cattle in 1875).

[21] _Memorias sobre el estado rural del rio de la Plata en
1801, Escritos postumos de D. Felix de Azara_, published by D.
Augustin de Azara (Madrid, 1847).

[22] A. Rengger, _Reise nach Paraguay in den Jahren 1818 bis
1826_ (Aarau, 1835).

Finally, the Chilean market was opened to the Argentine breeders about
the middle of the nineteenth century. In the time of Martin de Moussy
the convoys of cattle to Chile were so numerous that the lucerne fields
of both slopes were stripped bare at the very beginning of the season;
and they were rented at a high price.[23] Not only the mining provinces
of the north, but central Chile also, bought Argentine cattle. The
opening of the Chilean market was followed by a remarkable expansive
movement in the pastoral colonization of Argentine territory. We can
follow the progress of this not only in Martin de Moussy's book, but in
all contemporary works of travel. Its chief theatres are the provinces
of San Luis and of Santiago del Estero, north of the Rio Dulce, where
Hutchinson, in particular, describes the activity of the ranches.[24]
Finally, after the Pacific War (1880) the nitrate district, taken from
Bolivia and Peru by Chile, received a great influx of population, and
works sprang up in the midst of the desert. The nitrate fields, wholly
barren and doomed, under their shroud of grey dust, to an unalterable
desolation, became at once one of the chief centres of consumption for
Argentine stock.

[23] The fattening of cattle for Chile was no longer done in
the _invernadas_ of Mendoza at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. See an article on Mendoza in the _Telegrafo
Mercantil_, January 31, 1802, which tells of the development
of ranches on the Tunuyan. Mendoza and San Juan were their
only markets, and they did not sell cattle to Chile.

[24] T. J. Hutchinson, _Buenos Aires y otras Provincias
argentinas_ (translated by L. Varela, Buenos Aires, 1866).

It is difficult to give accurate details of the volume of trade in
cattle in colonial Argentine. However, the facts given by travellers
(though they often merely borrow from each other) suffice to show how
important this traffic was in the life of the country and the extent
of the zone that was occupied with it. As early as the middle of the
seventeenth century Cordoba seems to have exported to Peru as many as
28,000 to 30,000 mules annually.[25] At the close of the eighteenth
century, we read in D'Azara, 60,000 mules were exported; and Helms
gives the same figure.[26] The mules were bought young by Cordoba
dealers at Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and Corrientes, reared at Cordoba,
and then sent to Salta, where they were sold in their third year to
mule-dealers from Peru.

[25] Azcarate de Biscay, quoted in H. Gibson, _La evolucion
ganadera_ in _Censo agropecuario nacional_, Buenos Aires, 1909,
vol. iii.

[26] A. Z. Helms, _Voyage dans l'Amerique meridionale_ (Paris,
1812). The journey was in 1788.

An article in the _Telegrafo Mercantil_ of September 9, 1801
(reproduced in the _Junta de Historia y Numismatica americana_, Buenos
Aires, 2 vols., 1914-5) contains very valuable information in regard to
the mule trade. From 1760 to 1780 Salta sent between 40,000 and 50,000
mules annually to Peru. At Salta they were worth ten piastres each
before they were broken in, and thirteen or fourteen afterwards; and
they were sold at the age of four years. The _arrieros_, who conveyed
European goods and home products (_ropas y frutas_), bought a large
number of them. The _Telegrafo_ complains that this trade has been
gradually transformed. The mules now came from Santa Fe and Cordoba
to Salta two years old, and after the _invernada_ they were still,
at fair time, barely three years old. They suffered much during the
long journey to Lima, and the losses of the caravans were heavy. They
could not be loaded for the journey, and, as the _arrieros_ could no
longer secure adult and strong animals, the freight to the tableland
had risen, to the serious loss of merchants on the coast. The reply
of a Potosi mule-dealer (December 13th) clearly shows that the last
years of the eighteenth century had been marked by increasingly heavy
demands from Peru for Argentine mules. In order to meet these demands
the Cordoba breeders had developed production. The buyers, coming to
Salta from Lima, Cuzco, and Arequipa, took, without discussion or
examination, the batches that were offered them. The correspondent of
the _Telegrafo_ complains bitterly of these _caballeritos_ who came
from Peru with their 100,000 piastres, and raised the price at Salta,
alleging that their instructions were to get mules at any cost.

Robertson gave in 1813 the recollections of a mule-dealer as to the
convoys of mules between Santa Fe and the Andes, which had already
ceased at that time. Each convoy or _arreo_ comprised 5,000 to 6,000
mules. They came from Entre Rios, or even from the Uruguay, whence they
were brought, after crossing the Parana, to the Santa Fe ranches. The
Santa Fe breeders owned the best part of the land on the left bank of
the river. The expedition also included thirty waggons of goods and
500 draught-oxen; and fifty _gauchos_ were in charge of it. The main
expense was then tobacco and _yerba_. One feature of this mule traffic
that is emphasized in all the descriptions is that it was divided
into two stages, with an interval between them, for breaking in. As
we have already learned from Azcarate, Cordoba, Santa Fe, Santiago,
and Salta kept the mules for two or three years before sending them to
Peru. Cordoba and Santiago del Estero seem to have been important in
connection with the industry of breaking in the mules.

The sending of cattle on foot to Bolivia and Chile is now only a
subsidiary element of the national economy, but it is not yet quite
extinct, as the table on p. 53 shows.

Whatever its point of departure, the traffic in stock always passed
through the _valles_. Transport of cattle was particularly difficult
in the Argentine Andes. The chief obstacles were not the elevation of
the passes or the steepness of the roads, but the scarcity of water and
the extent of the _travesias_, which were equally poor in pasturage
and water, and had to be crossed rapidly by doubling the stages. The
difficulties of the journey were very profitable to the oases that
lay along the route. The cattle-driver could not dispense with the
hospitality of the _vallista_ or dispute the price he cared to charge.

[Illustration: MAP II.--IRRIGATION IN THE WEST AND NORTH-WEST OF
ARGENTINA.
_Extent of the irrigations in the north (zone of the great summer
rains), and the south (glacier zone) The historic industry of fattening
cattle in the invernadas and the export of cattle to the Andean regions
only survive in part. On the other hand large modern industries have
developed at Tucuman, Jujuy (sugar-cane), Mendoza, and San Juan
(vines), and they supply the Buenos Aires market._
To face p. 52.]

The length of the journey and the difficulty of keeping the animals
in good condition in the poor pastures of the breeding districts
made it advisable to stay longer in the oases. There thus arose
lucerne-farms--the _invernadas_--to receive and fatten the cattle which
passed through. Lucerne is the characteristic and most profitable
produce of the _valles_. It is grown wherever there is an assured
supply of water, and is invariably found in the upper section of the
system of irrigation-channels; the cereals are sown lower down, and
are the first to suffer from drought. In the _quebradas_, where space
is more limited, the lucerne-fields cover the entire oasis. Every
cattle track has a corresponding line of _invernadas_, which is often
completed on the opposite slope by a last group of lucerne-farms where
the beasts recover from the journey before they are sold and dispersed.

1910 1911 1912 1913 1914
Export of Cattle:
To Bolivia 3,600 6,600 6,200 6,300 4,800
To Chile 61,200 87,500 68,400 58,000 28,300
Export of Mules:
To Bolivia 2,700 4,600 7,900 8,300 2,500
To Chile 2,300 3,200 5,000 2,600 3,500
Export of Asses:
To Bolivia 9,000 10,500 15,000 15,600 14,400[27]

[27] Imperfect statistics given by Poncel for the province
of Catamarca give us some idea of the respective shares of
the various Andean districts in the export of Argentine
cattle about the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1855
the province of Catamarca sold 2,700 head of cattle (1,300 to
Chile, 200 to Bolivia, 600 to San Juan and Mendoza), 3,200
mules (2,500 to Bolivia 600 to Salta--which also were for
Bolivia), and 1,200 asses (700 to Bolivia and 400 to Salta).

Besides the official routes there have for a long time been clandestine
tracks, through more difficult ravines, by which stolen cattle were
conveyed with impunity. Guachipas was the gathering place for cattle
of suspicious origin, and, to avoid being seen in Salta and Jujuy,
they passed through the Quebrada del Toro or the Quebrada d'Escoipe.
When Brackebusch visited Guachipas in 1880 the inhabitants still kept
something of their reputation as smugglers.

A map of the cattle-tracks which are still used in the Argentine Andes
is a complicated network in which we can trace two main directions,
crossing each other at right angles. One set of tracks leads to the
west, toward the Pacific coast, the other set to the north, toward the
Bolivian tableland.

The cattle traffic is now restricted to Chile. It survives at San Juan,
Jachal, Vinchina, and Tinogasta. The cattle descend to Chile about
Coquimbo, Vallenar, or Copiapo. But the trade is now busiest in the
region of the saltpetre-beds. The roads lead from the Valle de Lerma
and the Valle Calchaqui toward the tableland by the Quebrada del Toro
or the Quebrada de Cachi or de Luracatao, crossing lofty passes at the
foot of the Nevados of Acay and Cachi, and reuniting between Santa
Rosa de Pastos Grandes and San Antonio de los Cobres to cross the
Puna de Atacama. _Vegas_ (pastures) and fresh water are scarce here.
The track passes interminably by depressions covered with a carpet of
glistening salt, dominated by volcanic crests. It is used in every
season of the year, but in winter the caravans are exposed to the cold
wind laden with snow, the _viento blanco_. San Pedro is the port in
this desolation. Here there are, on the flanks of the enormous cone of
Licancour, fields of lucerne and groups of figs and _algarrobas_. The
cattle are left there for a few days' rest, to prepare them for the
last stage, the Calama oasis on the Antofagasta railway.

The centre of this trade is Salta, or, rather, the little village of
Rosario de Lerma, nine miles south of it, where most of the caravans
are formed. The saltpetre works make yearly contracts in advance with
the Rosario dealers, fixing the number and price of the beasts to be
delivered at Calama. The cost of transport includes, besides the pay
of the cattle-drivers--eighty to a hundred piastres a journey--the
shoeing of the mules, the rent of pasture at San Pedro, and the value
of the beasts which die on the way. In 1913 the number of animals
exported by this route was put at 30,000. The saltpetre works buy also
draught-mules for their waggons. Draught-mules must be heavy, and only
animals over five feet in height are sent to Chile. Bolivia is now the
only market for the smaller mules and for asses.

The trade in mules in its traditional form and the industry of
breaking-in still flourish at Santa Maria. The mule-dealer's business
is very different from that of the cattle-dealer. The mules are
so tough that it is possible to send them by roads which would be
unsuitable for cattle.[28] The journeys are longer, and the contracts
are less settled in advance. Moreover, breaking-in is a delicate
operation that requires experience. The survival of the mule-trade at
Santa Maria is an example of the maintenance of an industry owing to
the presence of skilled handicraft. The men who break in the mules at
Santa Maria have a remarkable caste-pride. Their first job is to go to
Santiago or Cordoba to buy the mules. They bring them back to Santa
Maria by way of Catamarca or the valley of Tafi. At Santa Maria the
mules are broken in, then taken to the lucerne-farms at Poma to be put
into good condition. There they remain in pasture for several months;
and at length, when the season is suitable, the little band of Santa
Marienos gathers together and, driving the now docile beasts in front
of them, and putting no loads on them in order that they may keep
fresh, make for the fair at Huari in Bolivia, or even as far as Sucre.
There they sell at a hundred and fifty piastres each the animals which
they had bought for half that price before being broken in. The number
of mules hibernating at Poma is about 4,000.

[28] For instance, herds of mules are taken from Abrapampa, on
the line of the Quiaca, to the saltpetre mines of Antofagasta,
whereas every effort to convey cattle by this route has failed.

The business done in the fairs of the southern Andes is very varied in
character, but their main function was always as markets for stock.[29]
They are held in March or April, when the rains do not fall, but
pasture is still abundant and travelling easy. The fair at Vilque,
north of Lake Titicaca, is no longer visited by dealers in Argentine
mules. The Salta fair which was held at Sumala, near Rosario de Lerma,
has ceased to be important; at the close of the eighteenth century
it was the chief centre of the mule-trade. The fair held at Jujuy is
still, like the annual pilgrimage to the Virgen del Valle de Catamarca,
one of the great dates in the life of the Andes. In the eighteenth
century it was mainly a cattle-fair, but it is now frequented only by
mule-dealers. The development of the railways is gradually causing it
to decline.

[29] There is an interesting study of fairs on the elevated
tableland by G. M. Wrigley, "Fairs of the Central Andes," in
the _Geographical Review_ (New York), vii. 1919, pp. 65-80.

The cattle-trade has long been really a form of barter. The
Argentinians who took their herds to Peru brought back with them
European goods that had come via Panama and the Pacific. At Jachal
direct communication with Argentina is still so costly that they
prefer to get many manufactured articles from Chile. Everywhere
else, however, the sellers of stock take payment in cash. The Santa
Marienos bring back from Bolivia only a few bags of coca and, for
chief payment, letters of exchange, which they cash in the Salta banks
when they return. Their gains swell the profits of the merchants of
Salta, Catamarca, and Jujuy, who get their goods at the large importing
houses of Buenos Aires. It is the first form under which the influence
of Buenos Aires reaches the _valles_. It gets their custom before it
begins to absorb their produce.

A large proportion of the stock sent to Chile now comes from the
Andean valleys themselves. The most arid and desolate regions round
the oases breed only goats and asses; but as soon as the soil improves
sufficiently to give a better vegetation, it is found good enough for
a hardy and tenacious breed of horned cattle. The land is divided
into large ranches, and the owners have also lucerne-farms, either
individually or communally, the tillers of the oasis each putting in
their beasts, which wander about in small groups without control.
During the summer they go of their own accord up to the _cerros_,
where the rains have brought out the vegetation, and drinking-water is
found in the ravines for several months. In the winter they return to
the valley, within range of the reservoirs and permanent _acequias_.
Bodenbender gives us a few details about movements from place to place
owing to such differences, as they are in vogue in the western part of
the province of La Rioja, in the district of Guandacol. There the herds
are taken during years of drought up to the mountains of the west.

Apart from the Andes, the zone which used to feel the influence of
the trans-Andean markets has been steadily reduced in the last forty
years. At one time it comprised the whole range of the scrub, and
even overflowed upon the prairie region, but it is now limited to the
nearest cantons to the fringe of the mountains. Over the greater part
of the _monte_ the cattle are now sent in other directions; either to
Buenos Aires or to other Argentine towns with a growing population,
such as Cordoba, Mendoza, and Tucuman.

The rupture of commercial relations with Chile has, however, not made
any notable change in the pastoral industry. Pastoral life in the scrub
has very uniform characters. It is chiefly dominated by the question of
water-supply. Natural open water is scarce, and the cattle can drink
only where man's industry makes it possible. The problem of taming the
beasts, which the breeders on the prairies have not always been able to
solve, is simplified by the scarcity of water. There is no need to hunt
the cattle, no periodical _rodeos_, when the herd is drawn in every
night by thirst to the water-supply. Advance in colonization means the
provision of wells and reservoirs (_baldes_ and _represas_), without
which the breeders cannot occupy the plain permanently, but have to
fall back during the dry season upon the few streams that cross it.
The word _balderia_ means districts where the presence of a sheet of
water not far underground has enabled them to form a system of wells.
The best known is the Balderia Puntana, in the northern part of the
province of San Luis.

Of the regions apart from the Andes which still depend on the Chilean
market it will be enough to mention two, which may be regarded as
typical. The first is the Chaco Salteno, on the eastern slope of the
Sierra de la Lumbrera. The Lumbrera is a lofty anticlinal range of
limestones and red sandstones, which pass to the west underneath the
clay of the Chaco plain, and separate it from the great longitudinal
sub-Andean corridor, which was followed by the old road, and is now
followed by the railway from Tucuman to Jujuy. Colonization began
beyond the Lumbrera in the eighteenth century by passing round it, from
south to north, by the valleys of the Juramento and the San Francisco
(which joins the Bermejo). The ranches, which employed the Indians--the
occupation of the Chaco at this point being pacific--bordered the
Bermejo and the Rio del Valle, which flows from the Lumbrera range
toward the former bed of the Bermejo, and washes the foot of the range
at the edge of the plain.

[Illustration: DRY SCRUB OF THE CENTRAL CHACO.
_On the Anatuya line (province of Santiago del Estero). Cactus. The
leafless tree in the foreground is a red_ quebracho. _The leafy trees
are white_ quebrachos.
Photograph by the Author.]

[Illustration: MARSHES (ESTEROS OR CANADAS) OF THE EASTERN CHACO.
_On the Tartagal line (province of Santa Fe). It is by means of these
marshes, which form in the forest, that this part of the plain is
drained._
Photograph by the Author.
PLATE V. To face p. 58.]

The cattle live in the scrub during the summer, when the rains have
brought out the grasses. In winter they go up to the moist forest, with
perennial vegetation, which covers the flanks of the range.[30] The
comparative abundance of water lessens the labour of the breeders and,
at the same time, the discipline of the herds. When the time comes,
the whole ranch is mobilized for the purpose of collecting the adult
cattle and making a convoy of them. Horsemen, with the double leather
apron which hangs at the saddle-bow to protect them from the branches,
ride up the range with their dogs and plunge into the scrub. The savage
beasts are rounded up and held at bay. The procession is formed, and
sets out, either by the rugged paths across the forest and mountain or
along the easier tracks over the plain to Embarcacion or Lumbreras,
where they reach the railway. If buyers from the sugar-refineries at
Jujuy do not take them, the cattle are put into trucks and sent to
the Salta market, where there are sales all the year round. At Salta
the beasts are fattened on the lucerne-farms before crossing the
Cordillera. There is hardly any tillage, either because the winter
drought makes the result dubious or because the breeders are not good
at agricultural work.

[30] On Aconcagua also the moist forest serves as winter
pasture for the cattle from the ranches.

The Sierra de los Llanos in La Rioja is another centre for extensive
breeding. From the railway, which follows the range at some distance,
between Chanar and Punta de los Llanos, before it reaches La Rioja,
no one would have the least suspicion of the importance and life of
the region. It is, nevertheless, one of the main foci of Argentine
history. It has proved a cradle of population and wealth. It was there
that Quiroga and, later, the strange adventurer who was known by the
nickname of the "Chacho" gathered the strength that enabled them to
dominate part of Argentina. Colonization is even older here than in
the Chaco Salteno. It occupied two distinct periods, separated by a
long interval. At first it advanced from north to south, passing round
the foot of the Sierra. It is marked by a line of springs, poor but
permanent, the waters of which are absorbed as soon as they flow down
to the porous alluvial beds of the plain. They appear much in the names
of the district--_aguitas_, _aguaditas_, and so on, abound. The road
from La Rioja to San Luis passed these springs, and some population
grew up about them. Thus the two sides of the range--the _costa baja_
in the east and the _costa alta_ in the west--became inhabited. The
estate of Facundo is one of these _aguaditas_ of the _costa alta_.

The two _costas_ form the historic territory of the Llanos. It was from
there that colonization swarmed over the plain long afterwards. This
expansive movement began about 1850; that is to say, at a time when the
breeders enjoyed comparative peace and security, and especially when
the _invernadas_ of San Juan and Mendoza were developed, together with
the export of cattle to the agricultural provinces of Chile. The price
of stock rose, and the unoccupied land became of value. The occupation
and exploitation of the plain was the work of the last two generations.
They pushed on to the very edge of the salt lakes, leaving no vacant
space. The _travesias_ which surrounded the narrow inhabited zone of
the _costas_ were filled with life. The Sierra and its two _costas_
are no longer an oasis in the desert, as they were in the time of
Sarmiento; though they still differ from the remainder of the pastoral
zone in the density of their population and the variety of their
resources.

The early date of the colonization may be traced in a special system
of tenure, though this is also found in parts of the provinces of
Catamarca and Santiago del Estero. On the plain the right of ownership
was obtained in the nineteenth century by purchase or by concessions
of public lands which belonged to the provincial Government. They were
allotted in very large estates, and these, intact or broken up, are
the actual ranches. In approaching the foot of the range one passes
estates in the _mercedes_. The name indicates concessions that date
from the colonial epoch, and they are, in all parts of South America
that were early colonized, the source of land-ownership. But what is
peculiar to the _mercedes_ of the Llanos is that they have never been
divided amongst the heirs of the first owner.[31] Sometimes the number
of co-proprietors is small. They are conscious of their relationship
to each other and know the value of the rights of each. The _merced_
is in that case only an undivided property held in common. Sometimes,
however, the numbers of _comuneros_ is so great that they have lost
count of the exact share of the _merced_ which belongs to each of them.
The _merced_ feeds a whole population, legitimate heirs and usurpers
mixed together. In these cases it is a real communal property, and one
might compare it, in spite of its different origin, with the Indian
communities which exist in Argentine territory as well as that of most
of the other Andean States.

[31] The title of the _merced_ often shows clearly the
attraction which the springs at the foot of the Sierra had for
colonists. The land of the _merced_ of Ulapes is defined thus:
"The spring and the land within two leagues of it in every
direction." The spring is the centre. There its protecting
deities live.

The economy of the Llanos is less simple than that of the Chaco
Salteno. There is agriculture as well as breeding. There is not much
rain, and it is confined to the summer months. The mean rainfall is,
no doubt, higher than what we find at La Rioja (about 30 centimetres),
but it is not good enough to dispense with irrigation. The _aguadas_,
springs and brooks at the foot of the range, are the only provision of
permanent water, and it is very limited. The oases watered by these
springs and brooks cover only a few acres at the foot of the steep
cliffs of the range. It has not been possible to cultivate the land
far from the mountains. At Chamical a trench that was made to convey
water to the railway dried up. All that can be done is to follow for
a few miles with a line of wells a subterranean stream of fresh and
not very deep water. At Bella Vista a _comunero_ has dug an _acequia_
several miles long, and he sells the water at a rate of five piastres
for forty-eight hours. But when it reaches the end of the _acequia_, it
is lost between the trench and the field to which they would conduct
it. At Ulapes, though it is one of the chief centres, it takes the full
outflow of the spring during sixteen hours to irrigate one _cuadra_ (a
little over two acres), and each man's "turn" is for seventeen days.
The entire oasis measures about fifty acres. At Olta the thin stream of
water is surrounded by so many cupidities that the "turn" comes only
every fifty-eight days, so that each field has to live fifty-eight days
on one watering. At Catuna where a trickle of brackish water is eagerly
collected at the foot of a dejection-cone, the water-right is regulated
by an arrangement of turns that covers ninety days, so that plants die
of thirst in the interval. The plots vary according to the quantity,
quality, and regularity of the water. The orange-tree is the most
exacting, the fig the most tenacious, of the trees. The poorest oases
consist only of a few gardens of dusty fig-trees.

However small it is, the oasis always stands for a rudiment of communal
life, a _poblado_, a centre round which life is organized in this
pastoral, anarchic, amorphous world. Land that has a water-right is
regarded as detached from the _merced_ and never remains undivided.

Besides these properly irrigated lands there are the _banados_:
cultivated plots in the hollows, where the moisture left by the storms
is concentrated and preserved. These are much more extensive, and they
are very irregularly distributed. Inequalities of the alluvial ground
that almost escape the eye are sufficient to direct the streaming of
the water after rain, and it is quickly absorbed. Man assists nature as
well as he can, and one sees everywhere tiny ridges of earth across the
paths, for the purpose of diverting the water to the plots. These are
the _tomas_. When you follow a _toma_ downward, you see it after a time
pass under a hedge of dry thorn, and this encloses a field, a _cerco_.
The crops have to be jealously guarded against the cattle which roam in
the scrub. The _cercos_ are sometimes so numerous that they give the
impression of a regular agricultural district. Most of them are planted
with maize. The maize harvest rarely fails in the summer, for it is
then, on account of the regular rains, that the maize grows and ripens.
When the ears have been gathered, the cattle are let into the _cerco_,
as maize-straw is excellent fodder. But wheat also grows well in the
_banados_. Provided the year has had a few late showers, the wheat sown
in autumn stands the winter drought more or less well, and ripens after
the early rains, at the beginning of summer. The Llanos produce a hard
wheat; it is not milled, but eaten, like rice, in the grain. There have
been times when the Llanos have exported wheat. The census of 1888
gives the Department of General Belgrano, on the eastern slope of the
Llanos, an area of 900 acres under maize and 1,900 under wheat. When
the Chilecito railway was constructed, this wheat competed with that
brought on mules from Jachal, in the mining district of the Famatina
range. Like the gardens in the oases, the _cercos_ may be divided, and
they are the personal property of those who cultivate them.

Sowing and reaping are, however, mere episodes in the life of the
_Llanero_. He is mainly occupied with cattle-breeding. The quality
of the pasture differs considerably according to the nature of the
soil and the good and bad character of the season. Sometimes it forms
a thick carpet under the brushwood, but in other places it is poor
and there is nothing but the leaves and pods of the _algarroba_. If
the herd is too large, the grass will not grow again; the breeder
recognizes at a glance the _campo recargado_--the field which has had
its capacity overstrained. The pasture has to be carefully nursed. But
the most urgent problem is to get a supply of water for the cattle.
Round the Sierra the underground water is often fresh, and there are
plenty of wells. Still, in order to avoid having to draw the water,
they dig large trenches at suitable spots in the clay, and round
these they arrange the earth that has been dug out, with an opening
toward the hills to catch the water when it is raining. These are the
_represas_. As in the case of the _banados_, ridges of earth direct the
stream to the _represa_. It is surrounded by a hedge as carefully as
the field is. On the plain rain is rare, and the _represas_ are usually
the only reserve. They have to last the whole year; even two years if
there is a particularly dry summer that prevents re-filling. Thus they
become sometimes veritable lakes. From a distance you can see, above
the top of the brushwood, the bald curve of the mound of beaten earth
which encircles them. The water flows over it when there has been much
rain. The mound is sometimes 4-1/2 to 5-1/2 yards high; as it is at
Tello, between the Sierra d'Ulapes and the Sierra de los Llanos, where
the San Juan coach used to change horses.

The _represa_ is the real centre of the estate. The house is built near
it, and guards the entrance. From early morning until dusk the cattle
come to it, singly or in groups. The rancher admits them, lets them
drink, and closes the gate behind them. If the thirsty cattle have not
his mark and belong to a neighbour, he sends them to drink at their own
_represa_; but he gives water to lost beasts, from a distance, whose
owner will presently come for them. Near the _represa_ is the enclosure
(_potrero_) for calves that have just been born. The cows come there
every morning, and they are milked for a few months to make cheese.
Like the _cerco_, the _represa_ is the personal property of the man who
made it, or of one who has inherited it and sees to its upkeep.

The cattle of the Llanos move a good deal. There are certain irregular
migrations, and others that are periodic or connected with the seasons.
Everywhere on the fringe of the Sierra the cattle remain in the ravine
and on the foot-hills during the winter. In the summer they return of
themselves to their _querencia_ on the plain. The irregular migrations
are due to scarcity of water or pasture. Driven by hunger, the beasts
travel a long distance of their own accord. They mingle with other
herds, sometimes so far from the ranches where they were born that no
one recognizes their mark. Sometimes, again, the rancher himself goes,
when his _represa_ is dry, to ask hospitality in some more favoured
canton. He is fortunate if the drought has not been general; if part of
the country has been spared and can offer a refuge.

But it sometimes happens that the whole district has suffered, and the
land is naked and scorched everywhere. There is then no help except
a long journey, to San Luis or to the lucerne-farms of San Juan, for
the cattle. The misfortune of the Llanos sends up at once the rent
of the _invernadas_ all round. A general evacuation of the cattle is
a desperate remedy, and is, in fact, often impracticable. During the
whole summer the men wait patiently, hoping for the end of the drought.
There is room for hope until April, when storms are still possible. If
the month ends without rain, it is too late to remove the exhausted
cattle; the stages across the desolated country are too severe.

The memory of the worst years of drought--the "epidemics," as the
Llanero calls them--lives for a long time. They make a deep impression
on the popular imagination, and legend makes plagues of them, in the
Biblical way. The drought of 1884 was particularly disastrous. The
herds were destroyed, and families that had been wealthy the day before
set out on foot, "having nothing to put a saddle on": a touching
picture of misery for this race of centaurs, people who feel themselves
mutilated when they are not on horse. The rain returns next year. The
pasture grows all the better because the herd is smaller, and the
Llanos give the traveller who crosses them an exaggerated impression of
their natural wealth.

Until quite a recent date the cattle reared in the Llanos were destined
exclusively for Chile. Dealers from Jachal or Tinogasta came in the
autumn, and the cattle passed the winter in the _invernadas_ at the
foot of the Cordillera. From the Sierra d'Ulapes, which is a southward
continuation of the Llanos, the cattle destined for Chile were first
sent to San Juan. They took one or two weeks to reach it. Five men were
needed for a herd of a hundred beasts: eight for a herd of two hundred.
The caravan was directed by an _estanciero_ (rancher) or his _capataz_,
or by dealers who came originally from the Llanos.

Exports to Chile have not entirely ceased. In 1913 the dealers from
Tinogasta and Jachal, who had not appeared in 1912, came back. The
southern part of the Sierra d'Ulapes, which is some distance from the
railway, reserves its cattle for San Juan. The cattle are, however,
more and more sent by rail to the coast. In the Sierra d'Ulapes the
dealers from Villa Mercedes, which has become one of the great markets
of Argentina, come every year, rent an enclosure (_protrero_), and
collect in it, one by one, a herd of cattle, which they then take away
on foot. They are sold at the fair at Villa Mercedes, and they disperse
in every direction toward the fattening zones of the Pampa.

This commercial revolution has led to a rise in the price of cattle,
and this in turn has raised the value of land. When the value of the
land rises, the methods of working it are necessarily improved, there
is greater security, and thefts of cattle (_cuatrerismo_) become
impossible. The farmers are not content merely to enlarge their
_represas_ or dig deeper wells. They divide the fields by fences--cheap
iron wire stretched on home-made posts, or hedges of spines like those
which protect the _banados_. Thus pasture can be reserved untouched for
the difficult months.

This subdivision of the land by fences began in the south, in the
Ulapes district, in touch with the richer districts of San Luis and
Cordoba. In the Llanos proper the practice has scarcely begun. At
Ulapes it is even done on the _mercedes_. Each _comunero_, without
opposition, encloses as much space as he can, and leaves his cattle
outside, on the common land, as long as possible. He only brings them
into his enclosed land when the common pasture is exhausted. This will
bring about the end of the _mercedes_; and, indeed, communal ownership
is not suited to modern conditions. The latest sign of progress is the
appearance of lucerne fields. Lucerne can be grown on the _banados_
wherever anything else can be grown; and the creation of lucerne-farms
will give the pastoral industry a security and stability it never had
before, besides enabling the breeders to collect stores of dry forage
and exploit the full pastoral capacity of the _monte_.

CHAPTER III

TUCUMAN AND MENDOZA THE GREAT INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES

Tucuman and the road to Chile--The climate and the cultivation
of the sugar-cane--The problem of manual labour--Irrigation at
Mendoza--Water-rights--Viticulture--Protection and the natural
conditions.

The great industrial forms of cultivation, the sugar-cane and the
vine, gave a new aspect to the scenery of Tucuman and Mendoza at the
end of the nineteenth century. The increase of population and wealth
which they entailed was so sudden, the economic advance so swift,
that the owners of vineyards and the sugar-makers have now lost all
recollection of the primitive industries which gave life to colonial
Tucuman and Mendoza, and were maintained until the last generation.
Nevertheless, if one compares Tucuman or Mendoza with some centre of
irrigated tillage in north-west Argentina, one quickly perceives the
original features which three centuries of history have given them. The
system of land-tenure, water-rights, the distribution of the cultivated
zones, and a thousand other features, show that the colonization is
old. The exploitation of the soil and utilization of the water have
not proceeded on a methodical plan, conceived in advance, which would
make each piece of work--the dams and channels of distribution, for
instance--subordinate to the whole. The engineers who constructed the
great modern dams of Mendoza, San Juan and Sali, had not to create a
region of new estates, but merely to improve the water-supply, which
was used wastefully by the existing estates. There is nothing more
suggestive than the contrast between these stone dams, built according
to all the rules of hydraulics, and the network of irregular channels,
following the accidental variations of the land and the slope, which
preceded them, and to which they have been accommodated as far as
possible. In some cases the primitive _acequias_ could not be altered
so as to start from the dam. The accumulations of water succeed each
other down the slope, held up by a simple barrier of branches and earth
which is periodically destroyed by floods. The modern flood-proof dam
(_dique nivelador_), which cuts the torrent in its entire width, and
enables them to make use of its whole volume, allows a certain amount
of water to pass, for the use of the _acequias_ lower down. This falls
back into the broad, stony bed, exposed to evaporation and infiltration
as it was before.

* * * * *

Long before the development of the sugar industry on a large scale,
there was a typically urban life, added to the common fund of pastoral
life, at Tucuman. The neighbouring cantons of the scrub--Trancas,
Burruyacu, and Graneros--sent cattle and mules to Peru and Chile, like
the other Argentine plains. But Tucuman drew still greater profit from
its position as chief stage on the high road to Peru, at the point
where the plain passes into the mountain. Primitive Tucuman was an
excellent type of high-road village. The road determined its position
at the point where the Sali had to be crossed. The first site of the
town, near Monteros, was abandoned in the eighteenth century, when
the high road to Peru settled in the sub-Andean region and ceased
to run through the Calchaqui valley. The road sustained its chief
industries, tanning and harness-making for the muleteers of the Andes,
and waggon-making for the _troperos_ of the plain. The road and the
people travelling along it afforded an outlet for its wheat and flour,
and facilitated the export of its tobacco to the coast-provinces. The
waggon-owners were really contractors, conveying stuff at their own
cost. Moreover, part of Bolivia came to make its purchases at the shops
(_tiendas_) of Tucuman, and the merchants of the town took in exchange
Bolivian ore for export. Thus the road built up a nucleus of available
capital at Tucuman. This capital was invested, at the close of the
nineteenth century, in sugar; and it has increased a hundredfold. Most
of the works still belong to old families of the town.

The sugar-region is comparatively small. It covers an area which
has exceptional climatic features, owing to the vicinity of Mount
Aconcagua. While the higher chains of the Andes further north are
separated from the Chaco plain by lower ranges, on which the east winds
leave their stores of moisture less freely, Tucuman has on its west the
great mass of Aconcagua. It rises, a giant landmark, at the beginning
of the plains, from which there is nothing to separate it, and gathers
the clouds round it.

[Illustration: THE VALLE OF SANTA MARIA, NORTH-WEST OF MOUNT ACONCAGUA.
_At the bottom of the valle one can see the sandy bed of the river as
a white line in the foreground. Zone of torrential terraces, which
follows the edge of the valle._ Photograph by the Author.]

[Illustration: THE OASIS OF ANDALGALA.
_At the western foot of Aconcagua, the snowy crest of which can be
seen._ Photograph by the Author.
PLATE VI. To face p. 70.]

On the eastern slope of Aconcagua is the limit of the crescent of
tropical forest, which begins about three thousand miles away, on the
flank of the Venezuelan and Colombian Cordilleras, and is connected
in the centre, in the equatorial zone, from Guaviare to Mamore, with
the forests of the Amazon region. At its two ends it is reduced to a
narrow belt which does not reach, in the east, the alluvial plains,
the savannahs of the Orinoco and the scrub of the Chaco. The humid
forest of the Argentine Andes is nowhere more luxuriant than near its
southern limit, above Tucuman. There are no palms or tree-ferns, but
the convolvulus abounds, and the evergreen trees are covered with
epiphytes. Aconcagua is one of the sharpest climatological limits in
the world. In the latitude of Salta one has only to go about 150 miles
to pass from the moist forests of the sub-Andean chain of the Lumbrera
to the arid valley of Cachi. On both sides of Aconcagua there are less
than fifty-five miles between the sugar-cane fields won from the forest
and the oasis of Andalgala, or that of Santa Maria, which are right in
the desert zone. According as one approaches Aconcagua from the east or
the west, one finds, from base to summit, either the successive stages
of vegetation of the humid Andes--from forest to grain-sown prairie
(_paramo_ or _pajonal_)--or those which are characteristic of the arid
Andes, from the spiny scrub of the valleys to the fields of resinous
_tola_ of the Puna. The contrast of climates is repeated in the
character of the soils. Aconcagua contains in itself the entire Andes
in miniature. At the foot of the narrow zone of Alpine crests, in the
few square miles of the elevated valleys of Tafi and Pucara, there is a
small agricultural and pastoral world, in a temperate climate, that has
nothing quite like it elsewhere, narrowly confined between the forest
and the desert.[32]

[32] The higher valleys of Aconcagua offer inexhaustible
interest to the visitor. At Sancho (Pucara valley) there is a
group of Italian colonists who grow maize and wheat: a unique
fact, I believe, in the whole of this part of Argentina. The
Tafi valley is mainly pastoral, the pastures of the valley
being used in summer and the forest for winter pasture.

The sugar district of Tucuman is not, properly speaking, an oasis; that
is to say, it is not an irrigated canton in the midst of a desert, but
a moist patch in the heart of a less favoured region. The traveller who
comes from the Chaco finds that the dust disappears from the moister
air as he approaches Tucuman. The rainfall approaches 974 millimetres
at Tucuman. Irrigation is a valuable aid to the farmer, but it is not
indispensable. Maize is generally raised without watering, and part
even of the sugar-cane crop is raised on land that is not irrigated. It
is not the relatively heavy rainfall that has led to the development of
the sugar-cane estates at Tucuman, but the evenness of the temperature,
together with the atmospheric moisture and the rareness of frost.
The mists which develop at the foot of Aconcagua form a protecting
mantle above Tucuman which prevents nocturnal radiation. The nearer
one gets to the mountain, the later, rarer, and lighter the frosts
are. If, on the contrary, one goes out some distance westward toward
the plain, the frost becomes more severe, and it is impossible to grow
sugar-cane. Not only the humidity, but the contour also, has some
influence on the changes of temperature and the distribution of frost.
The depressions in which the cold air accumulates, in virtue of the
well-known meteorological phenomenon of inversion of temperature, are
more exposed than sloping districts, where the air circulates regularly
and freely. The eastern limit of the zone spared by the frosts passes
about thirty-five miles from the foot of Aconcagua. It has only been
made clear by experiment, and one can still see there the traces of
abandoned plantations.

The water-supply in the Tucuman district consists, primarily, of
numerous evenly flowing streams which come down the eastern flank of
Aconcagua (Lules, Famailla, Angostura, Gastona, Medinas, etc.). They
join the Sali to the south of Tucuman. The Sali is an irregular torrent
which rises in the sub-Andean depression to the north and Tucuman,
and, after squeezing Aguadita between the north-eastern extremity of
Aconcagua and the sub-Andean chain of Burruyacu, enters the plain
at Tucuman. It then flows southward, meandering over a large bed of
shingle in which it has not had force enough to excavate a valley, and
the inclination of the land on its left bank (to the east) is toward
the east and south-east. The lands on the right bank of the Sali are
consequently better provided with water than those on the left bank.
The difference is so marked that, as the estates on the right bank get
most of their supply elsewhere, the water of the Sali nearly all goes
to the left bank. In 1912 a siphon was actually constructed underneath
the bed of the Sali to convey the unused water of the Rio Lules to the
right bank. Lastly, to the north of Tucuman the Sierra de Burruyacu
provides a few intermittent streams of water, which the _estancias_
(ranches) formerly conducted, with great labour, to their _represas_.
These do not suffice for irrigation on a large scale.

The sugar-cane was first grown at the gates of the town and, to the
east, at Cruz Alta, on the left bank of the Sali. These were some
distance from the mountain because, as there was less rain and the
soil was fairly dry, the natural vegetation was less luxuriant, and
it cost less to prepare the ground.[33] The Central Cordoba Railway,
which passes along the right bank of the Sali south of Tucuman, is the
axis of another zone of cultivation and of old factories. Colonization
afterwards went further west. A new provincial railway, describing a
section of a circle, was grafted at Tucuman (1888-90) and Madria upon
the Central Cordoba line. It keeps close to the foot of the range, the
_falda_, and enables farmers to settle on it. The new estates have not
confined themselves to the alluvial plain; they have crept up the foot
hills, and are constantly going higher. In the latitude of Tucuman
the mountain approaches within eight or twelve miles of the Sali, and
the possibilities of extension westward are strictly limited; indeed,
they are already exhausted. Further south, on the contrary, the plain
extends more than fifteen miles to the east of the provincial railway.
West of Monteros, Concepcion, and the existing line of works, there
is a reserve of available land; there is room for a fresh advance
westward. There is also room for expansion to the north-east, at the
foot of the sub-Andean chain of Burruyacu, where the frosts are slight.
It is in this direction that most of the clearing is now going on.

[33] In 1894 it was calculated that ground that was not yet
cleared was worth 100 to 150 piastres a hectare at Cruz Alta,
and the cost of clearing 150 to 200 piastres, whereas in the
moist forest at the foot of the Sierra the land was worth only
75 to 100 piastres, the cost of clearing it was double (300 to
350 piastres).

These various districts do not offer quite the same conditions to the
farmer. The _Falda_ is the most suitable, not only on account of the
rareness of frost, but because of the fertility of the soil, as the
tropical forest has accumulated inexhaustible stores of humus. The
sugar-cane returns are higher there than anywhere else. Irrigation
is not necessary, but, on the other hand, the humidity reduces the
proportion of sugar in the cane. Irrigation is the rule in the next
belt, between the local railway and the Central Cordoba line (on the
right bank of the Sali). On the left bank a large number of the estates
must still do without watering.

The most original feature of the organization of the sugar industry
at Tucuman is the maintenance of a class of independent cultivators,
the _caneros_, side by side with the large enterprises. This survival
of small and medium properties is a fact to which we find no parallel
in the other sugar districts of tropical America.[34] Everywhere
else, in Brazil and in the Antilles, the farms which worked up their
own produce, on primitive methods, have been absorbed by the central
works. The home-worker has lost his land as well as been ruined in
his industry by the competition of the modern factory. At Tucuman, on
the contrary, the sugar industry never passed through the stage of
domestic production. It was set up in full development, some devoting
their capital to building works, others to growing the cane. Irrigation
seemed from the first to dictate a concentration of ownership; the
refineries at Cruz Alta constructed costly special canals to bring the
water of the Sali. It is only large proprietors who have the resources
needed to carry out work of this kind, and sufficient influence to
secure permission to conduct the water over adjoining estates. However,
the law of 1897 reorganized irrigation and withdrew the water-supply
from the control of a few privileged big capitalists. Public works,
undertaken by the provincial authorities, brought the water within the
reach of every farmer. Since 1897 the number of water-concessions has
risen from 230 to nearly 2,000.

[34] Except, perhaps, in Barbadoes.

The interests of the factory (_ingenio_) and the farmers (_caneros_)
are not indissolubly connected. Their respective parts in the final
product of the sugar industry are not invariable. The increase in the
number of factories means an increase in the number of cane-buyers,
and so tends to raise the price. During the years antecedent to 1895
the refineries improved their machinery, and their productive capacity
increased faster than the cultivated acreage. The price of the cane
then rose to about twenty piastres a ton. As this figure is far above
the net cost, the refineries endeavoured to profit themselves by the
advantages that accrued to the _caneros_, and they bought land for
cultivation. It is to this period that the big concerns of Cruz Alta
belong. Afterwards the production of cane increased, and nearly met
the demands of the refineries, so that their competition relaxed. They
ceased to buy land, and the price of cane was lowered.

The refineries now deal with cane which they grow themselves, with
paid workers of their own; with cane that they buy at a reduced price
from tenants (_colonos_), who grow it on their own estates; and with
cane sold them by _caneros_ who own their own fields. The range of the
country absorbed by each refinery is often very extensive. The Sugar
Congress of 1894 estimated that half the cane-harvest was transported
by rail, and that freight from one canton to another in the sugar
district brought the railways more than a third of what they got for
conveying sugar from Tucuman to the coast. Each railway company tries
to keep along its own line the cane it carries to the refineries, so
that the transport of the sugar when it is made will fall to itself.
Thus the cane-market is divided into two separate compartments, with
very little exchange between them. The first comprises the zone that
depends on the Central Argentine and the State Railway; the second is
the zone of the Central Cordoba and the old local line bought by the
Central Cordoba.

Certain parts, such as Cruz Alta and the district round the town, have
too many works in proportion to their production of cane, and they are
centres of import. The price of the cane is always higher here than
in the agricultural districts. Each works has its customers. At the
stations it instals weighing machines for receiving and weighing the
cane. It is only the more important _caneros_ who have the privilege
of selling by the truck-load, or selling to distant works. The small
growers are compelled to deal with the local refinery. They sell it
their canes direct, or, sometimes, through agents and dealers. In the
days when the works were competing for cane it became the custom to
sign the purchase-contracts as early as possible; sometimes at the
beginning of October, as soon as the harvest of the year is over. In
order to make sure of the loyalty of the _canero_ the manufacturers
advance money to him, in proportion to their difficulty in getting cane.

_Caneros_ and mill-owners have had to work together to settle the
problem of labour. There was not enough at hand, and it had to be
recruited elsewhere. Agents were sent all round--to Catamarca and
Santiago del Estero, and even to the province of Cordoba--to collect
and bring gangs of workers. They were a mixed, unsteady, undisciplined
lot. The owners of the works advanced them money in order to keep
them, and then, fearing to lose the money advanced, would not dismiss
them for laziness and irregularities. These troubles are not felt as
much now as they were at the time when the industry was expanding.
The population of immigrant workers has settled down and taken root.
Besides creoles it includes a small number of Italians and Spaniards;
but while the creoles have been definitely incorporated in the sugar
industry, the European immigrants use their savings to buy a bit of
land and take to farming.

In normal times Tucuman has all the labour it requires, but the harvest
always compels it to seek help in other provinces. In May and June
the agents, well supplied with money, set out for the Salado, the
districts round the Sierra d'Ancasti, etc. The temporary attraction of
Tucuman at this season is felt over a considerable distance. At Santa
Maria, on the far side of Mount Aconcagua, 600 people--men, women,
and children--emigrate for five months, and live on the cane-fields.
The merchants of Santa Maria make them advances, in the name of the
refiners, to the amount of about sixty piastres per worker. Further
north the Tucuman _enganchadores_ come into collision with those from
Salta and Campo Santo, and they divide the available labour between
them. Some of the temporary immigrants settle down permanently every
year, and swell the normal population of the sugar industry.

Outside the Tucuman district an unfortunate attempt was made to plant
the sugar industry at Santiago del Estero, and large works were
constructed. But the frost is severe there. For some years they tried
to keep the Santiago works going with cane brought from Tucuman, but
the freight was too heavy, and the works had to be abandoned, or else
dismantled and set up elsewhere. The valley of the Rio Grande, from
Jujuy to 200 miles north of Tucuman, in the sub-Andean depression
between the Sierra de Zenta and the Lumbrera, has, on the other hand,
suitable conditions for the cultivation of the cane. Frost is rare.
The climate is warmer than at Tucuman, the canes ripen more quickly,
and the average return is higher. The water-supply also is good. There
have long been plantations in this region. Their first market was
the region of the tableland and the valleys, where they chiefly sold
brandy: a traffic of long standing, which one always finds round the
cold districts of the Andes, from Colombia to the north of Argentina.
The modern refineries of Ledesma and San Pedro took the place of the
primitive mills as soon as the railway approached Jujuy, and even
before it entered the valley of the Rio Grande. They then sent their
sugar by waggon in November and December, between the close of the
sugar season and the commencement of the rains, which spoil the roads.

The sugar district of Jujuy now has a very different economic
and social organization from that of Tucuman. Here there are no
farmer-proprietors. Each centre is a large estate, in the midst of the
forest, where the workers are lodged and fed by the works that employs
them. The contractors who clear the ground for them are obliged by
the terms of their contract to import their workers directly from the
south, so that they will not take any away from the farming. There is
no available labour, no free market, on the spot. Since the completion
of the Quebrada de Humahuaca line, however, there has been a good deal
of immigration, to settle or temporarily, of the mountaineers of the
tableland. The sphere of influence of San Pedro now extends as far as
Bolivia. For the harvest, which, like that of Tucuman, requires a good
deal of additional manual labour, the works look to the wild Indians
of the Chaco. This curious stream of seasonal migration, which the
sugar campaign of Jujuy provokes every winter outside the zone of white
colonization, is of very old date, going back more than sixty years.
Belmar notices it about the middle of the nineteenth century. The
recruiting agents of San Pedro and Ledesma set out from Embarcacion,
where the railway ends, and enter the Chaco, from which each of them
brings a troop of some hundreds of natives between March and June.
The number of these temporary immigrants seems to be about 6,000. The
Chiriguanos of the north leave their families on the Chaco, and the men
come alone. The Matacos immigrate in whole tribes. They camp in huts
like those of their own villages, under the shelter of the works, and
are paid in maize, meat, and cigars. In October, when the _algarroba_
flowers and makes them dream of their own country, they receive the
remainder of their pay in money, and spend it in brandy, clothing,
knives, and firearms.

The history of Mendoza resembles that of Tucuman in many ways. In the
province of Cuyo, as at Tucuman, urban life has been precocious. In
the middle of the eighteenth century Mendoza and San Juan exported
wines, dried fruit (_pasas_ and _orejones_), and flour to the coast
and to Paraguay. Part of the so-called "Chilean flour" consumed on the
Pampa, really came from Jachal and Mendoza. This trade ceased in the
nineteenth century, but San Juan and Mendoza found another source of
wealth in fattening cattle and sending them to Chile. Belmar, in 1856,
estimates the extent of the lucerne farms of Cuyo to have been 150,000
_cuadres_(440,000 acres).[35] As at Tucuman, the present period is
characterized by a rapid expansion of cultivation and a rapid growth
of population. But, whereas at Tucuman the neighbouring provinces
have provided the whole of the manual labour required, and the actual
population is essentially creole, at Mendoza there has been a larger
number of foreign immigrants. In 1914, foreigners were 310 per 1,000
of the entire population of Mendoza: a larger proportion than for the
whole country. The immigrants going straight to Mendoza from the ports
numbered 12,000 in 1911, and 15,000 in 1912; almost as much as for the
province of Santa Fe, and more than for the province of Cordoba. Thus
Mendoza plays a part of its own in the charm which Argentina has for
the imagination of Europe. When we examine a chart of the population
of South America, we notice that the oases of Cuyo contain the only
important groups of European population at any distance from the coast.

[35] A few convoys of cattle still use the Uspallata road,
especially over the Espinacito pass in the Cordillera de San
Juan.

The prosperity of Mendoza to-day depends upon the cultivation of the
vine, just as that of Tucuman depends upon sugar. The cultivation of
the vine is possible in the greater part of Argentina. In the early
days of colonization there were vineyards as far as the Paraguay.
They still flourish at Concordia on the Uruguay and at San Nicolas
on the lower Parana. But the wet summers of the eastern provinces
are not suitable for them. The climate for them improves as one goes
westward, and there is less rain. The dry zone of eastern Argentina
is the special field of the vine. There it has spread over nearly
twenty degrees of latitude, and it depends, like other cultivation,
upon irrigation. In the Andean valleys of the north-west it rises to
a height of 7,500 feet. South of Mendoza the higher limit of the vine
sinks rapidly, and there are no vineyards in the mountainous district
itself. On the other hand, its range increases; in the east it spreads
as far as the Atlantic coast, in the valley of the Rio Negro.

The former centres of viticulture in the north-west, in the oases
of the _costas_ of La Rioja, Catamarca, and Salta, have scarcely
been affected by the advance; and, in any case, their extent is very
limited. The vine-district of the Rio Negro is only in process of
creation, and its output is still small. Thus the area of production
on a large scale is limited to the three oases of San Juan, Mendoza,
and San Rafael, which in 1913 yielded 4,750,000 hectolitres, out
of the total Argentine production of 5,000,000 hectolitres. These
three centres differ from each other to-day rather in their economic
development than in their physical conditions. At San Juan, the
transformation of the earlier methods of production and the traditional
creole industries is only now taking place. At Mendoza it is quite
finished. The San Rafael centre, on the other hand, is of recent
origin; it was created on the site of a fortress which guarded the
Indian frontier until 1880. Cultivated areas have appeared on virgin
soil, in the midst of the desert. These different circumstances account
for diversities which, though they will disappear in the course of
time, are still obvious to the traveller. The general scene is the
same everywhere. Arid and desolate mountains close the horizon in the
west; at their feet spreads the immense alluvial deposit on which the
vineyards, surrounded by rows of poplars, grow wherever water is to be
found.

There are so few gaps in the lower slopes of the Cordillera that the
available water is gathered at a small number of points. The Rio San
Juan alone drains a belt of the Cordillera at least 140 miles broad.
Each of the two oases, Mendoza and San Rafael, has two streams of water
to feed it. The Mendoza and the Tunuyan at Mendoza, and the Diamante
and the Atuel at San Rafael, approach each other, when they leave
the mountains, so closely that the estates they water blend into a
continuous area. Then, however, instead of uniting, they diverge and
are lost, separately, in the plain. These streams have less fall than
the thinner torrents of the oases of the north-west, and the average
inclination of the dejection-cones which bear the vineyards is slight.
The upper slopes of the cone, where thin beds of clay lie upon shingle,
give clear wines of excellent aroma. Hence, in the Mendoza district,
the vineyards of Lujan and, further down, of Godoy Cruz, Guaymallen,
and Maipu produce choice brands. On the plain, to the east of Mendoza,
at San Martin and Junin, the harvest is larger, but the wine is rough,
and one can often taste the saltpetre of the clayey soil. There is the
same difference between the upper and lower district at San Juan and
San Rafael.

The oases of San Juan and San Rafael spread evenly over the most
suitable parts of the alluvial talus, but the oasis of Mendoza has a
peculiar shape which can only be explained by historical causes. The
cultivated belt is a narrow strip along the Tunuyan, for more than
sixty miles, as far as the heart of the plain, out of sight of the
Cordillera. It is one instance, out of a thousand, of the influence of
traffic on colonization. As a matter of fact, the road from Mendoza
to the coast, by which the cattle convoys of San Luis went to the
_invernadas_, passes along the Tunuyan. The estates grew up by the
side of it. The villages of Santa Rosa, Las Catitas, and La Paz, which
mark the various stages of it, are all of ancient origin. Strangers
are rarely found there. One still sees in them very old houses, built
before the railway was made, dating from the days of the _carril_ or
waggon-road. The importance of this line of water across the desert is
clearly seen on the Woodbine Parish map.

The use of irrigation in this district raised different technical
problems from those of the north-western provinces. In this latitude
the torrents of the Andes are formidable when the snows melt, at the
beginning of summer. The flood is all the greater and more sudden as
the heat is late. From all the ravines of the mountains the muddy
waters then converge toward the valley. The flood scours the bed of
the river, erodes its banks, and threatens to find a way amongst the
estates. Even the towns of Mendoza and San Juan have more than once
been in danger. The fear of diverting the flood and of bringing it
upon themselves compelled them to be content with raising only light
and frail dams in the path of the torrent. At San Juan they used, for
a long time, the waters of the Arroyo del Estero, a small brook fed by
infiltration from the Valle de Zenda, and it was some time before they
ventured to draw upon the river itself.

[Illustration: THE OASIS DEL RINCON, BELOW SAUJIL (ANDALGALA LINE,
PROVINCE OF CATAMARCA).
_The dejection-cone, at the foot of which is the very small oasis, is
seen resting against the Sierra d'Ambato._
Photograph by the Author.]

[Illustration: THE MONTE AT EL YESO.
_Zone of clay hills at the foot of the Sierra de San Antonio, at
the edge of the Chaco. Corral (cattle park) made from tree-trunks._
Photograph by the Author.
PLATE VII. To face p. 82.]

Another problem, which the smaller oases of the north-west hardly
know--the problem of drainage--is of paramount importance at San
Juan and Mendoza, as far as a large part of the irrigated surface is
concerned. The water infiltrating into the soil forms a subterranean
sheet which approaches more or less to the surface according to the
topography. It comes to the surface at the foot of the cone, where
the slope diminishes and the cone gradually passes into the plain.
Hence the cone has, at its base, a belt of marshes (_cienagas_), and
sometimes a line of good springs (_barbollon_). At San Juan, if you
move far enough away to get a comprehensive view of the whole of the
estates, you see that they occupy the middle belt, half-way down the
cone, the top of which is composed of coarse shingle, while the bottom
is too wet. The advance of the plots upward and the steadily increasing
use of the available water tends to raise the level of the underground
sheet and enlarge the area of marsh.

There is a fine black soil, very fertile when it is drained, and no
irrigation is needed; as it is possible, according to the depth of the
drainage-trenches, to regulate the level of the underground water so
as to make it reach and feed the roots. The draining of the marshes,
again, opens up a field for the further expansion of the estates,
especially at San Juan, where it has scarcely begun. Moreover, the
water that is obtained by draining the marshes enables them to create
new irrigated estates further on. At Mendoza there is already a
considerable area irrigated by drainage-canals (_desague_).

The level of the water in the marshes sinks in the summer and rises
in winter, at the time when the irrigation of the upper districts is
suspended or greatly reduced, and when the surplus of the _acequias_,
which the fields no longer take, flows or infiltrates downward in any
way that it can. Thus, contrary to the torrent itself, it is in winter
that the drainage-canals are at their fullest. At Barriales (Mendoza),
and on the lower course of the Zanjon canal, thousands of acres,
watered by the drainage-canals and exposed to drought in the summer,
have the right to take water from the river or the canal during the
three summer months, from November to January. During the remainder of
the year they are restricted to the use of the drainage-canals. This
sort of concession seems to provide a means of using the surplus of the
river during the summer.

With this exception there are no temporary rights limited to the
high-water season and enabling them to raise quick crops, that ripen
in a few months, round the area of perennials. At least, the expansion
of the estates and the wish to use the full water-supply have led to
the creation of eventual rights, besides the definitive rights. They
do not come into play, theoretically, until the definitive rights
have had their full supply, and then only in a fixed order. They are
subordinated to the ordinary rights, and the market value of land with
eventual water-rights is much lower than that of land with definitive
rights.[36] At San Rafael, where colonization preceded the systematic
inventory of the natural resources, the concession of eventual
water-rights was a means of facilitating the development of estates;
though they were very badly informed as to the surplus of the Atuel and
the Diamante and the area that the new land might cover.

[36] There are at present in the Mendoza province 275,000
hectares with a definitive right, and 303,000 with an eventual
right. The concessions fed by the Diamante and the Atuel at
San Rafael, which amount to 120,000 hectares with a definitive
right and 150,000 with an eventual right, are not yet entirely
developed.

In practice, the co-existence of eventual and definitive rights
presents many difficulties, and more than one pretext for fraud.
Sometimes the owners of eventual rights have access to the river
higher up than the older intakes, which ought to be served first. A
whole group of canals feeding land with eventual rights is in this
way grafted upon the Tunuyan above La Paz, the rights of which are
definitive and ancient.

At Mendoza and San Juan the water-rights, codified in provincial laws
which date, like the dams, from the end of the nineteenth century, are
very different from the water-rights which hold in the Andean provinces
of the north-west. The variety of the physical conditions is reflected
in the institutions. Here water is not an object of private ownership
independently of the soil. The concession of water is assigned to a
definite estate, and it is formulated in superficial measurements. The
law fixes the volume of water that goes with each unit of surface.
If the output of the river is not large enough to provide the volume
stated in the law to the whole of the irrigated district, all the
lands with definitive rights receive at least an equal amount, and the
available water is shared by the canals in proportion to the extent of
the surface they irrigate.

No law could secure for the farmers of Cuyo, even those with definitive
rights, a constant supply of water, or save them from suffering in
common from the variation in the volume of the torrents, and it was not
even possible to guarantee them water in any permanent fashion. The
_turno_ is used everywhere when the water is low. Lower down, where the
drought lasts nearly the whole year, the _turno_ is the standing rule.
At La Paz, on the fringe of the irrigated area, it has to be applied
rigorously. The turn of each owner comes every eight, ten, or twelve
days. In normal times he receives the _suerte de agua_; that is to say,
the output of a sluice of a fixed size during a half-hour for each
hectare (a little over two acres) of land. But if the river runs low,
it becomes impossible to supply several neighbours simultaneously, and,
in order to avoid making the interval between supplies too long, the
duration of the _suerte de agua_ is reduced by half or three-quarters.

The oases of Cuyo are like the small oases of the north-west as
regards the function of those who are engaged in the administration of
irrigation. The water-laws give the provincial functionaries general
directions. Below them, however, to arrange the distribution of the
water and the upkeep of the canals in detail, they have allowed to
survive, and have merely regulated, certain primitive democratic
organisms. At San Juan the superintendence of the irrigation is
entrusted to elected municipal councils and the governor of the
department. At Mendoza, the owners appoint a council of three delegates
and an inspector for each canal, and these settle the annual budget of
the canal, submit it to the provincial authorities, receive the taxes,
carry out the necessary repairs, and so on. The great subdivision of
property and the large number of electors make these little republics
very lively; and they are very jealous of their autonomy.[37]

[37] There are more than 6,000 owners at San Juan to 91,000
hectares, and more than 9,000 at Mendoza (zone of the rivers
Mendoza and Tunuyan) to 130,000 hectares (statistics compiled
in 1899).

Even within the narrow limits of the Cuyo district the climatological
conditions, which control the growth of the vine, are not everywhere
the same. The opening of the vineyards varies by several weeks,
according to the locality.[38] The northern slope of the cone, exposed
to the sun and protected from the southern winds, is more precocious.
Some districts, poorly sheltered from the southern winds, and very
liable to have late frost, have not been planted with vines (district
of the Tucuyan below San Carlos, to the south of Mendoza). Everywhere
the dryness of the atmosphere causes the ripe grapes to remain long
on the vine, so that the harvest may last two months or more without
any harm. It thus requires a relatively small supplement of manual
labour, and does not necessitate seasonal migrations. The length of the
harvest, moreover, facilitates the trade in grapes, which is one of the
special features of the Argentine vine-industry.

[38] The difference is much greater at a distance from the
Cuyo province. Catamarca, which specializes in the production
of grapes for the table, is invaded by buyers from Buenos
Aires, and begins to send grapes in December, two full months
before the harvest begins in Mendoza.

The climate is not so suitable for making wine as it is for growing
vines. The temperature is high at the time of the harvest, and it
retards fermentation in the cellars. The grapes have too much sugar
and too little acid for the transformation of the must to proceed of
itself. Hence it is necessary to have an expensive equipment, improved
cellars, and skilled workers. This industrial organization is beyond
the reach of the small cultivators. The cultivation of the vine and
the making of wine are, therefore, not always associated. They are
taken up by two different classes of the population. Tucuman has its
_caneros_ and factories, and Mendoza, by a division of labour which
seems to the European visitor as strange as the climate which partly
explains it, has its vine-growers (_vinateros_) and its manufactures
(_bodegueros_).[39]

[39] While the cultivation of the cane has, for the most part,
become dependent upon the sugar industry, which represents
large capital, wine-making is, on the contrary, usually
regarded as merely an annex of wine-growing.

Each of these two classes has had its share in the common work. The
_vinatores_ have created the vineyard. The creole vine, imported into
Peru from the Canaries and spreading over the whole of the southern
Andes, yields great quantities of a sugary, but rough fruit, which
does not lend itself to imitating the wines of Europe. At Mendoza it
has almost entirely disappeared, though it survives at San Juan. It
is grown on trellis-work, wooden frames resting on forked branches of
_algarroba_; though sometimes the strong stems rise without support to
a height of about six feet and are crowned with shoots and leaves. The
new vine has been grown from French cuttings. While the creole vines
look like orchards, the French vines are grown in rows of iron wire.

The plantations were first made by creole workmen, who were paid by
the day. Afterwards, as immigration from Europe increased, long-term
contracts came into vogue, in virtue of which the colonist received
the bare land and undertook to have it planted with vines at the end
of three, four, or five years. The owner supplied the material, and
at the end of the contract the colonist received a few _centavos_ for
each vine, or sold the whole or part of the first harvest. On account
of these contracts there were always a great many foreigners in the
districts where vineyards were in course of formation. The proportion
is now less at Mendoza than at San Rafael, where colonization is more
recent. Whenever they could, the owners left to the colonists, not only
the business of planting the vines, but the upkeep of adult vineyards.
In those cases the colonist receives a fixed sum per hectare (100
piastres, for instance), and has to dig, prune, irrigate, etc. A large
number of these agricultural workers and small contractors have saved a
small capital, and purchased land of their own. This they have planted,
and they thus form a new class of working owners.

While the _vinatores_ were multiplying vineyards, the _bodegueros_ were
transforming the methods of making wine. The weakness of imperfectly
fermented wines, which turn sour and evaporate quickly, was all the
worse for the growers of the colonial period because transport was
slow, and there was no protection against the sun, which cooked the
_algarroba_ casks or the leather bottles on the backs of the mules.
The vineyard-owners often preferred to distil their wine and export
brandy, flavoured with aniseed, to the Andean tablelands or the coast.
The climate and the risks of transport had brought into existence an
astonishing variety of methods of treating the must. Sometimes it was
concentrated by boiling until it became a thick syrup (_arrope_),
something like, apparently, the thick wines of the Mediterranean in
former times. At other times the must was cooked without thickening
it, to prevent immediate fermentation, as is done with the _chicha_ in
Chile to-day; or sour wines were mixed with boiled must and ashes of
the shoots, which masked the acidity.

These traditions are now lost, but it is curious to see the
_bodegueros_ still endeavouring to meet the taste of the creole
population of the north-west, which has retained the preference for
sweet and fruity wines. San Juan, which caters to these customers,
manufactures _mistelas_--fresh boiled must with an addition of
alcohol--which are mixed with mature wines in order the imitate the
imperfect fermentation of earlier days. Perhaps there is no part of
the world where the art of wine-making has been pushed so far as in
the _bodegas_ of Mendoza. The correction of the must, and the analysis
and treatment of diseased wines, follow the most modern of methods.
The _bodegas_ produce a very steady wine, which is guaranteed by their
trade marks. The wine of the Mendoza type, which they endeavour to
produce, is a strong red wine, of heavy colour, with twelve or thirteen
per cent. of alcohol. It may euphemistically be called a blended wine,
but is in reality diluted wine. Argentina does not produce very light
wines, and has no use for diluted wine.

The number of wine-making cellars in 1913 was 997 at Mendoza and 336
at San Juan. But they differ very much from each other in size. Most
of them have only a small equipment and modest capital. Some, on the
other hand, are large enterprizes which could produce enough to supply
a city: vast constructions of brick or _adobe_, with light roofs as a
precaution against earthquakes.

The owners of the cellars almost always have their own vineyards, but
they also buy the harvests of cultivators who have not cellars. In 1908
it was calculated that 140,000 tons of grapes were sent to the press
by the owners and 175,000 tons bought by the _bodegueros_.[40]

[40] More recent statistics are not to hand. The proportion
differs a little every year according to the prices of wine
and grapes.

The conflicts of the interests of the _vinateros_ and the _bodegueros_
are the very woof of life at Mendoza. The price of grapes is infinitely
more variable than that of wine, and the _vinatero_ who has no cellar
is at the mercy of the _bodeguero_. If he does not want to see his
harvest go to waste, he has to accept unconditionally the price that is
offered him. The _bodeguero_ has, moreover, the advantage of disposing
of the grapes grown on his own estates. If the circumstances do not
encourage him to produce all he can, he sends to the press merely
his own harvest and will not buy any other. Thus the whole burden of
commercial crises falls upon the vineyard with no cellar.

The prices paid for the grapes differ a little for different parts
of the vineyard, but the variation is more due to the number of
_bodegas_ in the district and their capacity than to the quality
of the grapes. Transport of the grapes to a great distance is very
expensive. In exceptional times grapes have been brought from San
Rafael to the Mendoza cellars, but each _bodega_ gets its supply as
far as possible from its own district. At San Juan the capacity of the
cellars is proportionately less than at Mendoza, and the _bodegueros_
have imposed very hard conditions on the growers. The price fixed in
the purchase-contract does not of itself give a complete idea of the
benefits which the _bodeguero_ enjoys. The grapes are purchased by
weight, but the _bodeguero_ reserves the right to say at what date
they are to be delivered. He begins to harvest his own vines when the
fruit is scarcely ripe, but he puts back the harvesting of the grapes
he buys as far as possible, even to April or May. These grapes exposed
on the plant to the heat of the sun, become overripe; they gain in
sugar and lose in weight. They make wines with a higher percentage of
alcohol, and with these he can correct the lighter wines made during
the preceding weeks. Finally, the _bodeguero_ does not advance money to
the _vinatero_, as the manufacturer does to the _canero_ in the sugar
industry.

The only safeguard of the vine-growers is the lack of understanding
between the _bodegueros_ and the competition between them. Although
there are conventions amongst the _bodegueros_ which lay down
officially, before the vintage, the basis of all transactions, they
are not respected except in so far as they serve a man's interest.
If it is expected that the wine will easily be sold, and that grapes
will be short, buyers are abundant, and contracts are signed before
the fruit appears. It is a sort of gamble, as in the case of wheat and
cotton. Bulls and bears struggle for the market. If the bulls win, the
_vinateros_ grow rich.[41]

[41] Besides the causes of a geographical nature which I have
indicated, the separation of cultivation from wine-making has
other economic grounds, but they do not fall within the range
of this book. The large _bodega_ is better situated than the
small cultivator for organizing the sale of his wines on the
distant market of Buenos Aires. Also, the _bodegueros_ alone
are able to meet the competition of Buenos Aires merchants who
import European wines and make adulterated wines.

When we compare the diagrams which show the production of wine and
sugar in Argentina during the last thirty years, we see that they
clearly illustrate the condition of dependence of the vineyard industry
and the sugar industry as regards the home market. The prosperity of
the region of the Pampas, especially during the years before 1914,
is reflected at Mendoza and Tucuman. The expansive movement of the
estates is similarly bound up with the construction of railways to
connect them with the coast. Industry, on a large scale, began at
Tucuman in 1876: that is to say, at the opening of the Central Cordoba
line. The area planted with cane rose from 2,200 hectares in 1876 to
14,800 in 1886. The production of sugar was trebled in four years,
from 1876 to 1880. But the Central Cordoba was a narrow-gauge line,
expensive to use and necessitating a transfer of goods at Cordoba. In
1891 the broad-gauge line from Buenos Aires to Rosario was extended to
Tucuman; and in 1892 the narrow-gauge line from Rosario to Santa Fe,
San Cristobal, and Tucuman was also brought into use. The following
years were marked by rapid advances of the sugar industry. From 1891 to
1895 the area planted with canes rose from 14,200 to 40,700 hectares,
and the manufacture of sugar from 31,000 to 135,000 tons. At Mendoza,
also, the development of the vineyards dates from the completion of the
San Luis Railway in 1885. Plantations were at once started, and three
years later they came into touch. In 1887, the railway carried 27,000
hectolitres of wine from Mendoza to the coast; in 1890-91 it carried
268,000 hectolitres. Production had increased tenfold in that short
space of time.

As the home-production of wine and sugar increased, the imports from
abroad fell. As early as 1885 Tucuman was able to meet the home demand
for raw sugar, and refined only was imported. In 1888, a refinery was
erected at Rosario to deal with Argentine sugar which came by rail,
and foreign sugar which came up the river. Import ceased at this date,
or there have since only been occasional years of import, to meet a
scarcity. The imports of ordinary foreign wines continued to increase
until 1890 (800,000 hectolitres), or as long as the wine produced at
Mendoza did not suffice to meet the demand. They have steadily declined
since that date (350,000 hectolitres in 1913), and are now only seven
per cent. of the national production. We should add that, even in
regard to ordinary wines, the Mendoza and the imported wine are not
strictly comparable, that the competition between them is not simply
a matter of price, and that some customers continue to prefer foreign
wine.

[Illustration: A VINEYARD AT SAN JUAN.
_Trellissed creole vines._
Photograph by Boote, Buenos Aires.]

[Illustration: A VINEYARD AT MENDOZA.
_French vines on wire. An irrigation-trench along the path. In
the foreground (left) a wine-cellar_(bodega).
Photograph by Soc. Fotografica de Aficionados, Buenos Aires.
PLATE VIII. To face p. 92.]

The elimination of foreign wines and sugar and the development of
Mendoza and Tucuman were facilitated by a Protectionist tariff. The
details of this are very curious, as they had to be adjusted to the
natural conditions. The need of protection is chiefly due to the
distance of the market from the productive centres. Mendoza is 650
miles from Buenos Aires, Tucuman more than 750 miles. Freightage
on the railways is dear. It is thirty-five piastres a ton for wine
between Mendoza and Buenos Aires, or nearly double the normal maritime
freight for the European wines sent from Bordeaux or Genoa. The charge
for sugar is about thirty piastres a ton between Tucuman and Buenos
Aires. Thus the cost of transport is nearly one sixth the entire cost
of production. In spite of this common burden, the need of protection
is not at all the same in Mendoza and Tucuman. The climate of Mendoza
is excellent for the vine. The dryness of the atmosphere keeps down
cryptogamic diseases, and the risks of cultivation are slight. The crop
is abundant, the frosts late, and not serious. Hail is frequent, it is
true, at the mouths of the Cordillera valleys, but it is never general;
it affects only a small part of the harvest. The curve of production
is very regular. It rises every year very gradually, and in proportion
to the increase of the cultivated area. As a result of all this, the
wine market has a stability which the vine-growing countries of Europe,
with their less reliable climate, do not enjoy. The protective tariff,
therefore, remains fixed. The duty on foreign wines in the cask--eight
centimes (gold) per litre--has not been altered since the introduction
into Argentina of the wine-industry on a large scale.[42]

[42] Mendoza is further protected by law against fraud.
This legislation is partly national and partly provincial.
The national law, which takes into account the interests of
the merchants of Buenos Aires, permits the manufacture of
artificial wines. The provincial law, in the special interests
of the productive districts, is more stringent. It prohibits
the manufacture of artificial wines. It also fixes the minimum
percentage of alcohol, and prevents the dispatch from Mendoza
to Buenos Aires of alcoholic wines to mix with must. Finally,
it defends the _vinatero_ against the _bodeguero_ by fixing
the quantity of grapes to be used in making a hectolitre of
wine and so prevents fraud at the _bodega_.

The curve of sugar-production is just as irregular as that of
wine-production is regular. From one year to another the output may
vary by as much as 100 per cent., and the changes cannot be predicted:
147,000 tons in 1912, 335,000 tons in 1914, 150,000 tons in 1915. The
reason is that the sugar output depends upon the season. Canes which
have been touched by frost go sour and ferment in the ground. They
have to be milled quickly, and the harvest must not be prolonged. Even
in good years the costly equipment of the works is active during only
three months (July to September, but at Jujuy, July to October).

This irregularity of production, which makes protection inevitable,
also complicates it infinitely in practice. Sometimes the harvest
is not large enough to meet home demands, and imports have to be
permitted. Sometimes production is far beyond the home demand, and
the sugar-manufacturers have to export the surplus so as to prevent
a slump in prices on the overloaded home market. In order to meet
these very different situations, the protecting tariff has had to be
repeatedly modified and complicated. But it is impossible for us to
give the history of it in detail here. The duties on foreign sugar were
fixed, in successive instalments, between 1883 and 1891; and special
protective measures were taken in the interest of the refiners in 1888.
Over-production appeared for the first time in 1895. Export at a loss,
to relieve the home market, was at first organized by an association
of the producers themselves (in 1896). But in 1897 the Government
developed it by putting a premium on export. The export period lasted
from 1897 to 1904. The law of 1912, which gives its latest form to
the Protectionist regime, gives the Government the right to suspend
for a time the duties on imports and allow foreign sugar to come in.
As at Mendoza, the provincial Government intervenes as well as the
national. The alternation of bad and exceptionally good harvests leads
to the appearance of all sorts of unforeseen laws, modifying the bases
of taxation, regulating production in the works, and restricting the
acreage of cultivation.[43] Thus Tucuman has lived in an atmosphere of
storm and uncertainty and unceasing discussion, of discouragement and
insecurity; the price of its geographical position at the extreme limit
of the area in which cane can be grown.

[43] Especially during the crisis of 1902-3.

CHAPTER IV

THE EXPLOITATION OF THE FORESTS

Manual labour on the _obrajes_--The land of the _banados_
and the agricultural cantons of Corrientes--The timber-yards
of the Chaco and the tannic-acid works of the Parana--The
exploitation of the _mate_--The forestry industry and
colonization.

From the Andes of Tucuman and Salta to the banks of the upper Parana
in the province of Misiones the north of Argentina is now a vast
timber-yard for the exploitation of the forests. It resounds everywhere
with the axe. This exploitation of the forest is of early origin on
the river; in the eighteenth century Buenos Aires was supplied with
wood from the Parana. In the western Chaco the difficulty of transport
by land retarded the development of the forestry industry. The only
market for the timber of Tucuman was the Andean region. It was not sent
to Mendoza after the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the
willow was acclimatized in the oases of Cuyo. Below Rosas the wood of
the _quebracho_ was at first taken in waggons from Santiago to Buenos
Aires, but this traffic ceased when the river-route was reopened,
and we do not find it resumed until recent times, when railways were
constructed.

The outer fringe of the forest and the scrub where the industry has
had to find labour, is inhabited by a very sparse pastoral population.
There are, however, besides the thinly populated districts of the
farms, certain busy hives which lend animation to the scrub. These
over-populated cantons are districts of cultivation by _banados_, or
the cultivation of flood-lands. There is constant intercourse between
these ancient centres of creole life and the timber-yards of the
forest. The forestry industry recruits its workers there, on temporary
contracts. The wages paid are brought back to these centres and spent
there. They help to maintain social groups of an archaic type, which
the meagreness of their production would otherwise doom to extinction.

The _banados_ are scattered over the range of all the sierras within
the limits reached by the torrents from the mountains before they are
lost. They also stretch along the two rivers that are considerable
enough to cross the scrub, the Salado and the Dulce. The course of
the Bermejo, where the natural conditions are much the same, lies
outside the sphere of primitive creole colonization. The tilled lands
are not continuous on the Salado or the Dulce. There are no _banados_
wherever the bed of the river is enclosed by high banks which prevent
flooding. The course of the Salado threads together, in the manner of
a rosary, three main groups of _banados_ below 26 deg. S. lat., (Matoque
and Boqueron) between 27 deg. and 28 deg. S. lat. (Brea), and between 28
deg. and 29 deg. S. lat. (Le Bracho and Navicha). But the classic country
of the _banados_, where they cover the widest extent and sustain the most
considerable body of population, is the interior delta of the Rio Dulce
below Santiago del Estero, in the departments of Loreto, Atamisqui, and
Salavina.

Santiago is situated almost at the top of it. In its upper part the
Rio Dulce is enclosed between high clay cliffs (department of the Rio
Hondo). Below Santiago the river seems to run to the top of a sort
of flattened alluvial cone, over which it wanders. Instances of the
migration of rivers during the historical period are plentiful in the
north of the Argentine plain. The scrub is scored east of the Salado
with a network of dry beds, the edges of which gradually disappear as
the vegetation extends over them. But there is no other part where
the erratic nature of the waters is so marked, the vagabondage so
considerable, as in this section of the basin of the Rio Dulce. The
small towns of Atamisqui and Salavina, which lived on the waters of the
Dulce, were suddenly ruined in 1825, when the river, in consequence
of a particularly violent flood, turned away to the south and lost
itself in the Salinas Grandes. A canal was dug in 1897 to irrigate the
district of Loreto, on the left bank of the Dulce, but the entrance
was badly protected, and the flood of 1901 swept into it, and, guided
by it, reached the bed it had abandoned a century before, going
south-eastward toward Atamisqui. That town and Salavina recovered their
prosperity, while it was necessary to abandon the farms on the Rio des
Salines, which now has water only during high floods. Actual beds, old
beds that are always ready to serve again, and traces of canals changed
and cut by the stream, form a great network in the midst of the plain;
and the flood rolls to one side or the other according to the road open
to it, and the facility with which the various elements of the network
lend themselves to the passage of the water. Such is the land of the
_banados_.

You enter it to-day at Loreto station, where the line from Santiago
to Frias approaches within a few miles of it. This station is erected
in the midst of the arid _monte_, and owes its existence to the
neighbouring _banados_. Turning eastward from the railway, as soon
as one has crossed the broad, sandy bed of the Rio des Salines, one
finds oneself in the heart of the _banados_ farms. The road passes
between hedges (_cercas_), over the top of which one sees the green of
the wheat and lucerne. The plots are very small: gardens rather than
fields. In clearing the ground they have preserved the best-situated
trees, and the light foliage gives a useful shade to the crops. The
crown of the _algarrobas_ rises everywhere above the top of the hedges.

The fields do not cover the whole area of the annual inundations.
They are confined to the part where the flood is fertilizing; where
it leaves behind it a fine, useful clay which keeps the store of
moisture for several months. In other places the current is too rapid.
It furrows the soil, leaves large holes in it like the _lones_ in the
flood-area of the Rhone, and sweeps away the barriers; or the water
brings sterile sand which it deposits in long stretches; or again, if
it is not drained away in time and evaporates on the spot, it deposits
the salts it contains, and the land, looking as if it had a white
leprosy, becomes unfit for vegetation.

The floods begin in summer, during November or December. They are
caused by the rain-storms in the Tucuman district, and are very
irregular. Some of the houses are evacuated, and others are protected
by walls of earth, which are raised from hour to hour according to the
rise of the waters. Behind these walls the people await the abatement
of the flood. When the mud which is left behind has the proper
consistency, they till it and sow wheat. The wheat grows in the winter,
and is harvested in November quickly, so that the fresh flood may not
overtake it.

The caprices of the flood compel them frequently to change the sites of
their houses and fields. The ancient village of Loreto was evacuated
after a flood, and is now merely a mass of deserted ruins. Round the
naked trunks of the _algarrobas_, killed by excessive deposits of
sand or salt, are uniform colonies of plants of the same age and the
same species, which invade the area where the adult scrub has been
destroyed. The mill has been rebuilt less than a mile away, and has not
lost its customers, who have raised their _ranchos_ some distance away.
The insecurity of the plots has prevented the development of small
ownership. The farmers are tenants of the ranches, which stretch from
the river to a considerable distance in the interior.

The use of _banados_ for agriculture is of long standing. It probably
goes back to the pre-Columbian period. Father Dobritzhoffer, who
is the first to refer clearly to it, compares the Rio Dulce to the
Nile[44]; and in point of fact, the _banados_ have some resemblance
to farming in Pharaonic Egypt, while there is nothing like them in
the irrigated zones of the Andean valleys. The _banados_ were then
devoted to the cultivation of wheat and pumpkins. The pumpkin, which
is of American origin, had not yet been eliminated by wheat, which
was introduced by the Spaniards. The wheat produced in the _banados_
maintained a fairly active export trade at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, and the _banados_ were at times called, with some
exaggeration, the "granary of the Vice-royalty." It is difficult to
trace accurately the movements of the population of the _banados_
because of the constant changes of the administrative areas in the
province of Santiago. The total population of the province is not now
more than three per cent. of the total population of Argentina, but its
comparative importance was much greater in the middle of the nineteenth
century (nearly eight per cent. at the census of 1861). The departments
of Loreto, Atamisqui, and Salavina on the Rio Dulce, which live mainly
on the estates of the _banados_, comprised 46,000 inhabitants in 1861,
and only 43,000 in 1895. The Woodbine Parish map and Hutchinson's
description clearly give one an impression of a dense population in the
area of the _banados_. I refer elsewhere to the antiquity and constancy
of the streams of temporary immigration which spread the population of
the _banados_ over a large part of the territory of Argentina.[45] The
temporary emigration of the Santiaguenos is distributed amongst most
of the provinces of central and northern Argentina, but it is chiefly
of interest in connection with the frontier region. The Santiagueno is
a woodman above all else, and the forest area has the advantage over
the other labour-markets of wanting workers at all seasons, summer or
winter, whereas the sugar-cane harvest at Tucuman and the harvest in
the south only last a few months. They emigrate from the _banados_
to Tucuman in May; to Cordoba and Santa Fe in October, November and
December; but to the forests of the Chaco all the year round.

[44] _Historia de Abiponibus._

[45] See the chapter on population.

[Illustration: THE LAND OF THE BANADOS.
_On the Rio Dulce, near Loreto, in the dry season. Its actual bed,
excavated at a recent date by a flood in soft clay, is not yet
stable._
Photograph by the Author.]

[Illustration: LORETO: FARMING BY INUNDATION.
_In the zone of the scrub, where the floods of the Rio Dulce spread.
The interior delta of the Rio Dulce is one of the earliest centres of
population in Argentina._ Photograph by the Author.
PLATE IX. To face p. 100.]

Apart from the _banados_ of the Dulce and the Salado, the province of
Corrientes contains the main reservoir from which the timber industry
drew its manual workers. Just as at Santiago del Estero, one finds
at Corrientes also the opposition between agricultural and breeding
districts which is so common in the older colonized regions of South
America. The _estancieros_ (ranchers), who are breeders, are the
masters of Corrientes, but the line of low hills of sand and red
clay, punctuated by lagoons, which crosses the north-western corner
of the province, is not subject to their domination. There the land
is subdivided; there are once more fields. Tobacco was an article of
export for this fraction of Corrientes, especially after the political
isolation of Paraguay, the chief producer of tobacco in the nineteenth
century. During the whole of the first half of the nineteenth century
the tobacco-buyers travelled all over Corrientes after the harvest, in
January and February. The fertile soil, moreover, with a mild climate
in which tropical plants flourish as well as those of the temperate
zone, provides the elements of a local comfort which is complete in
itself. Here again agricultural colonization has created a relatively
dense nucleus of population, capable of great increase. Although the
administrative divisions do not exactly correspond with the natural
divisions, the unequal distribution of the population in Corrientes
is made plain by the figures given in the census of 1895. The density
rises in the agricultural areas to eight inhabitants per square
kilometre, in the department of Bellavista; ten at San Cosma; fourteen
at Lomas; thirty at San Roque. It is only between one and two in the
purely pastoral departments (Concepcion and Mercedes).

Corrientes also has its forests, and in these we find most of the
species of the forests of the Chaco, in straight lines, along the
water-courses, and in somewhat larger patches on the tablelands which
separate the lower valleys near the Parana. They at first supplied the
Curupai bark which was used in the Corrientes tanneries. The yards for
the construction of river-boats emigrated from Paraguay to Corrientes
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at the same time and for
the same reasons as the tobacco trade. The exploiting of the red
_quebracho_ did not begin until about 1850. In 1887 Virasoro relates
that fifty ships are engaged in loading with Nandubai timber on the
banks of the Rio Corrientes and transporting it to Rosario.[46] Born on
the left bank of the Parana, the forestry industry emigrated toward the
end of the century to the right bank, whither the workers of Corrientes
followed it.

[46] Val. Virasoro, "Los esteros y lagunas del Ibera" in _Bol.
Instit. Geog. Argent._ (vi. 1887; pp. 305-31).

We find the same movement further north, on the Paraguay. The
exploitation of the woods is in that case a very old industry on
the tributaries of the left bank. D'Azara draws attention to its
importance.[47] Robertson found, when he went from Corrientes to
Asuncion in 1814, a population of wood-cutters in the marshy belt near
the river. During floods they took refuge in the agricultural cantons
of the frontier on high ground, where they were well received. It
seems, then, that wood-cutting was already a seasonal industry at this
time. The exploitation of the forests is now rapidly invading the right
bank, which was long abandoned to the wild Indians.

[47] _Diario de la navegacion y reconocimiento del Rio
Tibicuari_ (Coll. de Angelis, vol. ii.).

* * * * *

The Santiaguenos and Correntinos do not mix. The two zones of expansion
and of forestry, of which they are the pioneers, are independent of
each other. The _quechua_, which is the language of the _banados_ of
the Rio Dulce, is spoken in the timber-yards of the Chaco de Santiago;
the _guarani_, the language of Corrientes and the Paraguay, is most
common along the river, in the Chaco de Santa Fe. Their respective
spheres will not come into touch with each other until the Quimili
branch of the Central Norte Railway, which comes from the Santiago
province, joins the line of penetration at Resistencia, on the Parana,
in the west.

The forestry industry of the interior and that of the river-districts
differ not only in the character of the workers, but in their
organization and their market. The variety of red _quebracho_ which
is exploited in the west is not quite the same as the variety that is
found in the east. Each has a name of its own--_quebracho santiagueno_
and _quebracho chaqueno_. The former contains ten per cent. of tannin,
the latter thirty per cent. The former is cut down for timber, the
latter in order to extract the tannic acid. The one is sold in
Argentina, and the other sent abroad.

The working of the timber at Santiago has remained in the hands of a
number of small capitalists and contractors who do not own the land
and do not work there. They are content to buy in small amounts and
according to the demand at the moment, the right to exploit the forests
(_derecho de monte or derecho de lena_). The trunks of exceptionally
large _quebracho_ provide logs that are sold by cubic measurement, but
the district of the _quebracho santiagueno_ mainly exports sleepers.
_Quebracho_ sleepers have been used in constructing the railways, both
narrow and broad gauge, during the last twenty years on the Pampa.
Tall and thin trees make telegraph posts; the smaller branches make
stakes for wire fences. In parts of the bush where there is no red
_quebracho_, the _retamo_ is used, to make posts for enclosures, and
also the white _quebracho_, which is sold in round logs. Finally,
the forests provide wood for fuel. The works at Tucuman, and the
locomotives over a good part of the land, use wood-fuel. The wood of
the red _quebracho_, if left for some years in the yards where the
sleepers are made and is rid of the sap-wood, which rots and falls
out--the _lena campana_--is excellent fuel. Charcoal is cheaper to
transport than the wood, and can therefore be sent farther over the
whole prairie district. It is made in the _monte_, along all the
railways, and especially in the thinner forests on the edge of the
prairie.

The forestry of the interior is unstable as well as scattered and
primitive. The equipment--saws that are easily taken down and set
up--is not costly, and does not require much capital. When one canton
of the forest has been exhausted, the saws are taken down and removed.
The cuttings are not made in such a way as to allow the forest to
recover, and so permit a continuous exploitation. Everything of any
value is taken. The _quebracho_ is, moreover, a tree of slow growth.
The forestry industry has at times returned, after an interval, to land
that had been stripped, but that is not because they had planted a new
generation of trees. It is because it became profitable, as the state
of the market and the cost of transport changed, to cut down the small
trees which had not been considered good enough on the earlier occasion.

When the master _obrajero_ removes, he is followed by the greater part
of the workers. But to induce them to emigrate, or to recruit cutters
in the _banados_ who will agree to work in remote or new districts,
he has to be liberal and offer higher wages. Hence the conditions
of work and the rate of wage are not the same in every part of the
forest. The oldest area of working, which is crossed by the Central
Cordoba, between the provinces of Catamarca and Santiago del Estero,
has a surplus of good workers. On the other hand, the _obrajeros_ of
the valley from San Francisco to Jujuy, where the exploitation is more
recent, have only a moderate amount of labour at their command. The
returns are not higher there than in the south, though the forests
are incomparably denser and richer. It has been very expensive to
bring about a continuous stream of immigration toward the main region
of forest work, which is now called the Chaco, along the railway that
starts from Anatuya and goes about 130 miles further north. As the
worker is on piece-work, the price per sleeper when the work was begun
on the Chaco had to be double, on the Anatuya line, what was paid in
the older line from Santiago to Frias, close to the _banados_.

The work is profitable only within a short distance from the railways.
Waggon transport raises the price rapidly. Moreover, the forestry
industry is just as dependent on the railways for provisions as it is
for the carriage of its wood. The _obraje_ has no source of food-supply
on the spot. The marshy estates which begin to spread in the area of
irrigation-canals at Banda, eastward of Santiago del Estero, supply
only their customers at Anatuya and the Chaco line. Sometimes the
railway has to bring water as well as food. Over a great part of the
Chaco de Santiago there is no running water, and the underground sheets
are little known, or inaccessible, or salty. The _obraje_ is a land of
thirst. In order to meet the demand for water they dig reservoirs like
the _represas_ on the ranches, which are filled by the rains. But as
soon as the dry season sets in they become stagnant green pools, and
the men have to rely on waggon-cisterns.

While the Chaco de Santiago is now a democracy of small _obrajeros_ and
contractors, the eastern Chaco, along the Parana, has quite a different
type of society. It is entirely in the hands of the big tannic-acid
factories, where the _quebracho_ trunks are stripped and boiled, and
their sap is concentrated in a viscous resin. The lofty chimneys of
these works rise above the forest at intervals. Here the work assumes
a capitalistic and industrial character which it has not in other
places. It is controlled by pow

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