The dust increased, and we were glad enough to be hauled over these dry pampas of Santa Fé and Santiago del Estero in a night, instead of being obliged to spend a fortnight on them following a slow-moving Spanish caravan.
When we looked out of the car window the next morning all was changed. Sugar-cane fields waving attractively in the sunlight, big wheeled carts lumbering noisily along drawn by oxen or mules, lithe horsemen riding strong little ponies through thickets of dry scrub, had transformed the scene from the everlasting prairies of the pampas into the highlands of the northwest. The hills beyond the fields of cane were covered with a scrubby growth. To the north-west and north arose green mountains that seemed to be forested to their tops. Some of the trees were in bloom with brilliant yellow flowers.
The contrast between the dry, barren pampas and the green cane-fields of Tucuman is so striking that Argentine writers have been accustomed to speak of the latter in terms of the most extravagant praise. Even the well-travelled Sarmiento called it the “Eden of America,” “where nature had displayed its greatest pomp!” As a matter of fact Tucuman is admirably situated in a very fertile and highly cultivated plain, and is the centre of the most important sugar-growing region in Argentina. In its immediate vicinity we counted a dozen tall chimneys of sugar factories.
We reached the city about ten o’clock.
It was founded about the time that Sir Walter Raleigh was looking for Eldorado. Here in 1816, the Argentine Congress passed their Declaration of Independence. Here Belgrano won a great victory over the Spanish armies that had descended from Peru to crush the Argentine patriots.
The Tucuman station, a large modern affair, was chiefly interesting because of the picturesque character of the luggage that was lying about the platforms. Chairs and cots, pots and pans, spring mattresses, and hen-coops, all bore evidence to the fact that this is still a young country into which new settlers are coming, and that the Railroad Company has the good sense to make it easy for people to travel with all their possessions. Everything was checked and went in the luggage-van, as a matter of course, instead of being handed over to “slow-freight” or rapacious express companies, as with us.
Most of the immigrants were Italians from Genoa and the north of Italy. A few came from Galicia, the home of Spain’s most sturdy peasantry. Neither immigrants nor residents wore picturesque costumes. Even the Gauchos are dressed in civilized raiment and bear little resemblance to the South American Indian of our dreams. It is too progressive a country to allow its clothes to get in its way.
The facts relating to Buenos Aires and Argentina are at every one’s elbow so it is all the more astonishing how ignorant the average American is regarding the great metropolis of the southern hemisphere. We are very fond of telling stories of our English cousins who imagine that our western states are overrun with wild Indians and desperadoes. And we think it inexcusable in them to judge from the frequent press reports of lynchings and “hold-ups” that we are an uncivilized, lawless people. Yet we judge the Argentino just as hastily. Not only are we quite ignorant of his material progress, we also frequently slander him for having an “unstable government.” “Revolutions” or struggles for governmental control occur, it is true, but they do not amount to much and hardly deserve the exaggerated reports of them which are published abroad. In a country that has been bound together by such a network of railroads as Argentina, making it possible for the government in power to send its troops rapidly wheresoever it will, the habit of playing with revolutions is sure to die out. In the old days when transportation was slow and difficult, it was possible for a popular leader to gather a considerable band of followers and prepare to march on the capital before the government knew of his existence. Such uprisings, however, are necessarily the work of days or weeks, and it is becoming more and more difficult to bring them to a successful issue. As an evidence of the more stable condition of the government and as showing how Argentina has recovered from the setback which it got at the time of the failure of the Baring Brothers, it is well to note that in the ten years between 1895 and 1905, the foreign trade of Buenos Aires more than doubled, growing to more than half a billion dollars annually.
CHAPTER VI
THROUGH THE ARGENTINE HIGHLANDS
At Tucuman we left the broad gauge of the British-built Buenos Aires and Rosario R. R. for the metre gauge of the North Central Railway, an Argentine Government line, that runs to Jujuy and has recently been continued northward to La Quiaca, on the Bolivian frontier. The distance from Buenos Aires to La Quiaca is 1150 miles. Of this we had done 700 miles in the first twenty-four hours. The last 450 miles required another twenty-four hours, divided into two daylight periods, as sleeping-cars are not run on the North Central R. R. In this stretch the elevation rises from thirteen hundred feet to twelve thousand feet, and the journey lies entirely in the Argentine Highlands.
Our train was mixed passenger and freight. The locomotive was a “Baldwin” and the cars were made in Wilmington, Del. We had, besides, an excellent dining-car that seated sixteen people and provided a table d’hôte meal served in the usual Spanish style. The third-class passengers, however, patronized the enterprising women who sold flat loaves of bread, hard-boiled eggs, and native drinks at the stations where we stopped.
Not long after leaving Tucuman, we passed through a tunnel, the first one in eight hundred miles. Rather a different experience from my journey in Venezuela, from Caracas to Valencia, where in the course of an hour we passed through sixty-five tunnels, one every minute!
With many windings we climbed up into the hills. Grass became scarcer and cactus and mimosa trees more common. We passed a small flock of goats. Dust and sand came into the train in clouds. Occasionally we passed lofty whirlwinds, but none of them troubled us. The humidity to-day was very much less, being under forty per cent. The streams seemed to be very low. We saw a few locusts.
At many of the stations were carts drawn by mules harnessed three abreast, with a loose rope-tackle that is characteristic of this hilly region. The houses of some of the more well-to-do were built of corrugated iron and wood, but most were made of mud. As it was the dry season, the cots were usually out of doors.
The evidences of prosperity at Ruis de los Llanos consisted of new stucco buildings of attractive construction with arcades in front and courtyards in the interior, a modern application of old Spanish architectural ideas. Other buildings were nearing completion, to accommodate the bakers and grocers who supply the quebracho cutters. There are great forests of quebracho on the plains of the Gran Chaco to the east and northeast. The wood is extremely hard and very serviceable for railway-ties. Owing to the difficulty that is experienced in cutting it, it has earned for itself the sobriquet of “axe-breaker.” It is the chief article of export from this region. The bark is shipped to tanneries as far away as California.
At Matan, another important station, there was a new hotel, the “Cosmopolita,” a clean-looking Spanish inn, near the railway station. Near by lay huge logs of quebracho awaiting shipment. The hills were well wooded, and we saw a number of agave plants and mimosa trees. Firewood is shipped from here to the treeless Pampas. Here we noticed, for the first time, riding-boots of a curious fashion, so very corrugated that we dubbed them “concertinas.” They are much in vogue also in southern Bolivia.
At Rio Piedras, where a dozen of our third-class passengers alighted with many baskets and bundles, we heard the familiar hum of a sawmill. Near the track were more quebracho logs. A burly passenger who had joined us at Tucuman, ready dressed and prepared for a long horseback ride, left us here. With a large broad-brimmed hat, loose white jumper, large baggy white cotton trousers, and “concertinas,” he came very near being picturesque. Throwing over his shoulder a pair of cotton saddle-bags well stocked with interesting little bundles, he walked slowly away from the train with that curious shuffling gait common to those who spend most of their lives in the saddle.
Not far away we saw some newly arrived American farm machinery, a