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THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC

BY PIERRE DENIS

BRAZIL

Translated, and with an Historical Chapter by Bernard Miall. With a Supplementary Chapter by Dawson A. Vindin, a Map and 36 Illustrations

Cloth, 15/- net. Third Impression

"Altogether the book is full of information, which shows the author to have made a most careful study of the country."—Westminster Gazette.

T. Fisher Unwin Ltd London

THE FALLS OF THE YGUASSU

Thirteen miles above the confluence with the Paraná. Like the Paraná 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.

[ Click to view larger image.]

THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC · ITS DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS

By PIERRE DENIS, D. es L.

Agrégé d'Histoire et de Géographie

Translated by JOSEPH McCABE

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

First published in English in 1922

(All rights reserved)

[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 Fé—Forestry-industries of the Chaco Santiagueño—Bañados of the Rio Dulce—Salta—Jujuy—Sierra de la Lumbrera.

November-December 1912: Tucumán—Valley of Tapi—Santa Maria to the west of Aconcagua—Cafayate (Valley of Calchaqui).

December 1912-January 1913: Catamarca—Andalgala—Valley of Pucara—Córdoba—Villa Maria.

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

March 1913: Corrientes—Posadas—Asunción—Forest-industries of the Chaco of Santa Fé.

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 Tucumán (Pierre Denis, Modern Argentina: Chapters of Economic Geography. Publications of the University during the Centenary of the Congress of Tucumán of 1816. Buenos Aires, 1916).[1]

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 immigracióninmigración despues después 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]

  • [INTRODUCTION]
  • [ILLUSTRATIONS]
  • [MAPS]
  • [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.
  • [CHAPTER II]
    THE OASES OF THE NORTH-WEST
  • 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]
    TUCUMÁN AND MENDOZA
  • Tucumán 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
  • Manual labour on the obrajes—The land of the bañados and the agricultural cantons of Corrientes—The timber-yards of the Chaco and the tannic-acid works of the Paraná—The exploitation of the maté—The forestry industry and colonization.

  • [CHAPTER V]
    PATAGONIA AND SHEEP-REARING
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • The use of the river before steam navigation—Floods—The river plain—The bed of the Paraná and its changes—The estuary and its shoals—Maritime navigation—The boats on the Paraná.
  • [CHAPTER IX]
    THE POPULATION
  • 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]
  • [NOTES]
  • [INDEX]

[ILLUSTRATIONS]

[MAPS]

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° 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 Paraná, 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 Paraná and the Uruguay, which Argentinians call "Mesopotamia." While æolian clays form the soil of the Pampa on the right bank of the Paraná, fluvial deposits—sands and gravel, in which it is impossible to distinguish the contribution of the Uruguay from that of the Paraná—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 Paraná 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 Paraná, 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 Paraná, 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 æolian 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 Córdoba to the Paraná. 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 Bahía 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]

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.

[ Click to view larger image.]

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.

[ Click to view larger image.]

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° 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 Bahía 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]

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]

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 Bahía 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 Bahía 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 Córdoba. The lands of the lower Rio Cuarto were not occupied. About 1860 (Martin de Moussy) the farthest establishments in this sector were S. José 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]

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 Fé, at Sunchales, Soledad, and San Javier, they protected the direct route from Santa Fé to Santiago del Estero. These outposts were abandoned during the revolutionary period, and the Indians advanced as far as the suburbs of Santa Fé. The roads both to Santiago and, by the Quebracho Herrado, to Córdoba were cut.[7] Urquiza reorganized the Santa Fé frontier, first as far as San Javier, then below 29° S. lat. between Arroyo del Rey on the Paraná 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]

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 Fé, was a valuable rampart, in the shelter of which a fairly large population had established itself round Concepción del Tio.

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]

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.

[Click to view larger image.]

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 Córdoba, Tucumán, 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 Córdoba, two hundred miles away from the Paraná, while those who came from the Rio de la Plata founded the town of Santa Fé on the banks of that river."[12]

Tucumán 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 Córdoba 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]

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, Tucumán, 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:

18501851185218531854
Imports into the Province of Catamarca:
From the Pacific across the Cordillera (in millions of piastres)7250714012
From the Atlantic (Buenos Aires or Rosario)1172064116[15]

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 Tucumán 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 Tucumán 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 Bahía 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 maté. 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 Tucumán and Mendoza. All the other important towns of Argentina belong themselves to the region of the Pampas. Tucumán 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 Córdoba to Salta, a distance of about 250 miles, the wood is cut for the fuel of the sugar-works of Tucumán. 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 Tucumán, now sell their beasts to the butchers of Tucumán. The wines of San Juan find their best customers at Tucumán. Even the nearest portions of the plain of the Pampas, to the north-east of Santa Fé and the south of San Luis, supply maize and wheat to Tucumán 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 (Tucumán). 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 Tucumán, 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 Tucumán. While large industrial enterprises develop at Mendoza and Tucumán, 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° S. latitude on the northern frontier of Argentina, a width of about 250 miles. This breadth steadily contracts southward as far as 28° 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.

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.

[ Click to view larger image.]

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 Föhn 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.

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. José, 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 (montañas 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 montañas 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.

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 Paraná, 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.

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.

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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.

[Click to view larger image]

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, Bahía, 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 maté 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).

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.

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 Córdoba 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 Córdoba dealers at Buenos Aires, Santa Fé, and Corrientes, reared at Córdoba, and then sent to Salta, where they were sold in their third year to mule-dealers from Peru.

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 Fé and Córdoba 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 Córdoba 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 Fé 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 Paraná, to the Santa Fé ranches. The Santa Fé 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, Córdoba, Santa Fé, Santiago, and Salta kept the mules for two or three years before sending them to Peru. Córdoba 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.

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 Tucumán, Jujuy (sugar-cane), Mendoza, and San Juan (vines), and they supply the Buenos Aires market.

[Click to view larger image.]

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.

19101911191219131914
Export of Cattle:
To Bolivia3,6006,6006,2006,3004,800 
To Chile61,20087,50068,40058,80028,300 
Export of Mules:
To Bolivia2,7004,6007,9008,3002,500 
To Chile2,3003,2005,0002,6003,500 
Export of Asses:
To Bolivia9,00010,50015,00015,60014,400[27]

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'Escoïpe. 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 Antofágasta 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 Córdoba 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 Marieños 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.

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.

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 Marieños 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 Córdoba, Mendoza, and Tucumán.

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 Salteño, 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 Tucumán 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.

DRY SCRUB OF THE CENTRAL CHACO.

On the Añatuya 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.

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MARSHES (ESTEROS OR CAÑADAS) OF THE EASTERN CHACO.

On the Tartagal line (province of Santa Fé). 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.

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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 Embarcación 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.

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 Chañar and Puntá 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 Salteño. 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—agüitas, 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.

The economy of the Llanos is less simple than that of the Chaco Salteño. 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 bañados: 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 bañados. 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 bañados, 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 4½ to 5½ 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 bañados. 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 Córdoba. 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 bañados 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]
TUCUMÁN AND MENDOZA THE GREAT INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES

Tucumán 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 Tucumán 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 Tucumán and Mendoza, and were maintained until the last generation. Nevertheless, if one compares Tucumán 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 Tucumán. The neighbouring cantons of the scrub—Trancas, Burruyacu, and Graneros—sent cattle and mules to Peru and Chile, like the other Argentine plains. But Tucumán 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 Tucumán 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 Tucumán, and the merchants of the town took in exchange Bolivian ore for export. Thus the road built up a nucleus of available capital at Tucumán. 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, Tucumán 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.

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.

[Click to view larger image.]

THE OASIS OF ANDALGALA.

At the western foot of Aconcagua, the snowy crest of which can be seen.

Photograph by the Author.

Plate VI.

[Click to view larger image.]

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 Tucumán. 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]

The sugar district of Tucumán 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 Tucumán. The rainfall approaches 974 millimetres at Tucumán. 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 Tucumán, 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 Tucumán 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 Tucumán 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 Tucumán. The Sali is an irregular torrent which rises in the sub-Andean depression to the north and Tucumán, and, after squeezing Aguadita between the north-eastern extremity of Aconcagua and the sub-Andean chain of Burruyacu, enters the plain at Tucumán. 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 Tucumán 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 Córdoba Railway, which passes along the right bank of the Sali south of Tucumán, 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 Tucumán (1888-90) and Madria upon the Central Córdoba 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 Tucumán 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, Concepción, 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.

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 Córdoba 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 Tucumán is the maintenance of a class of independent cultivators, the cañeros, 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 Tucumán, 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.

The interests of the factory (ingenio) and the farmers (cañeros) 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 cañeros, 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 cañeros 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 Tucumán 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 Córdoba and the old local line bought by the Central Córdoba.

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 cañeros 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 cañero the manufacturers advance money to him, in proportion to their difficulty in getting cane.

Cañeros 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 Córdoba—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 Tucumán 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 Tucumán 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 Tucumán 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 Tucumán 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 Tucumán, 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 Tucumán, 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 Tucumán, 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 Tucumán. 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 Tucumán, 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 Embarcación, 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 Tucumán in many ways. In the province of Cuyo, as at Tucumán, 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 Tucumán, the present period is characterized by a rapid expansion of cultivation and a rapid growth of population. But, whereas at Tucumán 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 Fé, and more than for the province of Córdoba. 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.

The prosperity of Mendoza to-day depends upon the cultivation of the vine, just as that of Tucumán 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 Paraná. 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 Rafaël, 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 Rafaël 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 Rafaël, has two streams of water to feed it. The Mendoza and the Tunuyan at Mendoza, and the Diamante and the Atuel at San Rafaël, 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 Rafaël.

The oases of San Juan and San Rafaël 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 meetmelt, 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 EesteroEstero, 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.

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.

[Click to view larger image.]

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.