ACROSS THE ANDES AND NORTHERN PATAGONIA
As the great chain of the Andes stretches southward its altitude grows
less, and the mountain wall is here and there broken by passes. When the
time came for me to leave Chile I determined to cross the Andes by the
easiest and most accessible and one of the most beautiful of these
comparatively low passes. At the other end of the pass, on the Argentine
or Patagonian side, we were to be met by motor-cars, sent thither by my
considerate hosts, the governmental authorities of Argentina.
From Santiago we went south by rail to Puerto Varas. The railway passed
through the wide, rolling agricultural country of central Chile, a
country of farms and prosperous towns. As we went southward we found
ourselves in a land which was new in the sense that our own West is new.
Middle and southern Chile were in the hands of the Indians but a short
while since. We were met by fine-looking representatives of these
Araucanian Indians, all of them now peaceable farmers and stock-growers,
at a town of twenty or thirty thousand people where there was not a
single white man to be found a quarter of a century ago. Our party
included, among others, Major Shipton, U.S.A., the military aide to our
legation at Buenos Ayres, my son Kermit, and several kind Chilean
friends.
We reached our destination, Puerto Varas, early in the morning. It
stands on the shore of a lovely lake. There has been a considerable
German settlement in middle and southern Chile, and, as everywhere, the
Germans have made capital colonists. At Puerto Varas there are two
villages, mainly of Germans, one Protestant and the other Catholic. We
were made welcome and given breakfast in an inn which, with its signs
and pictures, might have come from the Fatherland. Among the guests at
the breakfast, in addition to the native Chilean Intendente, were three
or four normal-school teachers, all of them Germans--and evidently
uncommonly good teachers, too. There were school-children, there were
citizens of every kind. Many of the Germans born abroad could speak
nothing but German. The children, however, spoke Spanish, and in some
cases nothing but Spanish. Here, as so often in the addresses made to
me, special stress was laid upon the fact that my country represented
the cause of civil and religious liberty, of the absolute equality of
treatment of all men without regard to creed, and of social and
industrial justice; in short, the cause of orderly liberty in body,
soul, and mind, in things intellectual and spiritual no less than in
things industrial and political; the liberty that guarantees to each
free, bold spirit the right to search for truth without any check from
political or ecclesiastical tyranny, and that also guarantees to the
weak their bodily rights as against any man who would exploit or oppress
them.
We left Puerto Varas by steamer on the lake to begin our four days' trip
across the Andes and through northern Patagonia, which was to end when
we struck the Argentine Railway at Neuquen. This break in the Andes
makes an easy road, for the pass at its summit is but three thousand
feet high. The route followed leads between high mountains and across
lake after lake, and the scenery is as beautiful as any in the world.
The first lake was surrounded by a rugged, forest-clad mountain
wilderness, broken here and there by settlers' clearings. Wonderful
mountains rose near by; one was a snow-clad volcano with a broken cone
which not many years ago was in violent eruption. Another, even more
beautiful, was a lofty peak of virginal snow. At the farther end of the
lake we lunched at a clean little hotel. Then we took horses and rode
for a dozen miles to another lake, called Esmeralda or Los Santos.
Surely there can be no more beautiful lake anywhere than this! All
around it are high mountains, many of them volcanoes. One of these
mountains to the north, Punti Agudo, rises in sheer cliffs to its
soaring summit, so steep that snow will hardly lie on its sides. Another
to the southwest, called Tronador, the Thunderer, is capped with vast
fields of perpetual snow, from which the glaciers creep down to the
valleys. It gains its name of thunderer from the tremendous roaring of
the shattered ice masses when they fall. Out of a huge cave in one of
its glaciers a river rushes, full grown at birth. At the eastern end of
this lake stands a thoroughly comfortable hotel, which we reached at
sunset. Behind us in the evening lights, against the sunset, under the
still air, the lake was very beautiful. The peaks were golden in the
dying sunlight, and over them hung the crescent moon.
Next morning, before sunrise, we were riding eastward through the
valley. For two or three miles the ride suggested that through the
Yosemite, because of the abruptness with which the high mountain walls
rose on either hand, while the valley was flat, with glades and woods
alternating on its surface. Then we got into thick forest. The trees
were for the most part giant beeches, but with some conifers, including
a rather small species of sequoia. Here and there, in the glades and
open spaces, there were masses of many-hued wild flowers; conspicuous
among them were the fuchsias.
A dozen miles on we stopped at another little inn. Here we said good-by
to the kind Chilean friends who had accompanied us thus far, and were
greeted by no less kind Argentine friends, including Colonel Reybaud of
the Argentine army, and Doctor Moreno, the noted Argentine scientist,
explorer, and educator. Then we climbed through a wooded pass between
two mountains. Its summit, near which lies the boundary-line between
Chile and Argentina, is somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand
feet high; and this is the extreme height over which at this point it is
necessary to go in traversing what is elsewhere the mighty mountain wall
of the Andes. Here we met a tame guanaco (a kind of llama) in the road;
it strolled up to us, smelled the noses of the horses, which were rather
afraid of it, and then walked on by us. From the summit of the pass the
ground fell rapidly to a wonderfully beautiful little lake of lovely
green water. This little gem is hemmed in by sheer-sided mountains,
densely timbered save where the cliffs rise too boldly for even the
hardiest trees to take root. As with all these lakes, there are many
beautiful waterfalls. The rapid mountain brooks fling themselves over
precipices which are sometimes so high that the water reaches the foot
in sheets of wavering mist. Everywhere in the background rise the snow
peaks.
We crossed this little lake in a steam-launch, and on the other side
found the quaintest wooden railway, with a couple of rough handcars,
each dragged by an ox. In going down-hill the ox is put behind the car,
which he holds back with a rope tied to his horns. We piled our baggage
on one car, three or four members of the party got on the other, and the
rest of us walked for the two miles or so before we reached the last
lake we were to traverse--Nahuel Huapi. Here there happened one of those
incidents which show how the world is shrinking. Three travellers,
evidently Englishmen, were at the landing. One of them came up to me and
introduced himself, saying: "You won't remember me; when I last saw you,
you were romping with little Prince Sigurd, in Buckingham Palace at the
time of the King's funeral; I was in attendance on (naming an august
lady); my name is Herschel, Lord Herschel." I recalled the incident at
once. On returning from my African trip I had passed through western
Europe, and had been most courteously received. In one palace the son
and heir--whom I have called Sigurd, which was not his name--was a dear
little fellow, very manly and also very friendly; and he reminded me so
of my own children when they were small that I was unable to resist the
temptation of romping with him, just as I had romped with them. A month
later, when as special ambassador I was attending King Edward's funeral,
I called at Buckingham Palace to pay my respects, and was taken in to
see the august lady above alluded to. The visit lasted nearly an hour,
and toward the end I heard little squeaks and sounds in the hall
outside, for which I could not account. Finally I was dismissed, and, on
opening the door, there was little Sigurd, with his nurse, waiting for
me. He had heard that I was in the palace, and had refused to go down
to dinner until he had had a play with me; and he was patiently and
expectantly waiting outside the door for me to appear. I seized him,
tossed him up, while he shouted gleefully, caught him, and rolled him on
the floor, quite forgetting that any one was looking on; and then, in
the midst of the romp, happening to look up, I saw the lady on whom I
had been calling, watching the play with much interest, with her equally
interested two brothers, both of them sovereigns, and her
lords-in-waiting; she had come out to see what the little boy's laughter
meant. I straightened up, whereupon the little boy's face fell, and he
anxiously inquired: "But you're not going to stop the play, are you?" Of
all this my newfound friend reminded me. It was a far cry in space and
in surroundings, from where he and I had first met to the Andes that
border Patagonia. He was a man of knowledge and experience, and the
half-hour I spent with him was most pleasant.
At Nahuel Huapi we were met by a little lake steamer, on which we spent
the next four hours. The lake is of bold and irregular outline, with
many deep bays, and with mountain walls standing as promontories between
the bays. For a couple of hours the scenery was as beautiful as it had
been during any part of the two days, especially when we looked back at
the mass of snow-shrouded peaks. Then the lake opened, the shores became
clear of woods, the mountains lower, and near the eastern end, where
there were only low rolling hills, we came to the little village of
Bariloche.
Bariloche is a real frontier village. Forty years previously Doctor
Moreno had been captured by Indians at this very spot, had escaped from
them, and after days of extraordinary hardship had reached safety. He
showed us a strange, giant pine-tree, of a kind different from any of
our northern cone-bearers, near which the Indians had camped while he
was prisoner with them. He had persuaded the settlers to have this tree
preserved, and it is still protected, though slowly dying of old age.
The town is nearly four hundred miles from a railway, and the people are
of the vigorous, enterprising frontier type. It was like one of our
frontier towns in the old-time West as regards the diversity in ethnic
type and nationality among the citizens. The little houses stood well
away from one another on the broad, rough, faintly marked streets. In
one we might see a Spanish family, in another blond Germans or Swiss,
in yet another a family of gaucho stock looking more Indian than white.
All worked and lived on a footing of equality, and all showed the effect
of the wide-spread educational effort of the Argentine Government; an
effort as marked as in our own country, although in the Argentine it is
made by the nation instead of by the several states. We visited the
little public school. The two women teachers were, one of Argentine
descent, the other the daughter of an English father and an Argentine
mother--the girl herself spoke English only with difficulty. They told
us that the Germans had a school of their own, but that the Swiss and
the other immigrants sent their children to the government school with
the children of the native Argentines. Afterward I visited the German
school, where I was welcomed by a dozen of the German immigrants--men of
the same stamp as those whom I had so often seen, and whom I so much
admired and liked, in our own Western country. I was rather amused to
see in this school, together with a picture of the Kaiser, a very large
picture of Martin Luther, although about a third of the Germans were
Catholics; their feelings as Germans seemed in this instance to have
overcome any religious differences, and Martin Luther was simply
accepted as one of the great Germans whose memory they wished to
impress on the minds of their children. In this school there was a good
little library, all the books being, of course, German; it was the only
library in the town.
That night we had a very pleasant dinner. Our host was a German. Of the
two ladies who did the honors of the table, one was a Belgian, the wife
of the only doctor in Bariloche, and the other a Russian. In our own
party, aside from the four of us from the United States, there were
Colonel Reybaud, of the Argentine army, my aide, and a first-class
soldier; Doctor Moreno, who was as devoted a friend as if he had been my
aide; and three other Argentine gentlemen--the head of the Interior
Department, the governor of Neuquen, and the head of the Indian Service.
Among the other guests was a man originally from County Meath, and a
tall, blond, red-bearded Venetian, a carpenter by trade. After a while
we got talking of books, and it was fairly startling to see the way that
polyglot assemblage brightened when the subject was introduced, and the
extraordinary variety of its taste in good literature. The men began
eagerly to speak about and quote from their favorite authors--Cervantes,
Lope de Vega, Camoëns, Molière, Shakespeare, Virgil, and the Greek
dramatists. Our host quoted from the "Nibelungenlied" and from Homer,
and at least two-thirds of the men at the table seemed to have dozens of
authors at their tongues' ends. But it was the Italian carpenter who
capped the climax, for when we touched on Dante he became almost
inspired and repeated passage after passage, the majesty and sonorous
cadence of the lines thrilling him so that his listeners were almost as
much moved as he was. We sat thus for an hour--an unexpected type of
_Kaffee Klatsch_ for such an outpost of civilization.
Next morning at five we were off for our four-hundred-mile drive across
the Patagonian wastes to the railway at Neuquen. We had been through a
stretch of scenery as lovely as can be found anywhere in the world--a
stretch that in parts suggested the Swiss lakes and mountains, and in
other parts Yellowstone Park or the Yosemite or the mountains near Puget
Sound. In a couple of years the Argentines will have pushed their
railway system to Bariloche, and then all tourists who come to South
America should make a point of visiting this wonderfully beautiful
region. Doubtless in the end it will be developed for travellers much as
other regions of great scenic attraction are developed. Thanks to
Doctor Moreno, the Argentine end of it is already a national park; I
trust the Chilean end soon will be.
We left Bariloche in three motor-cars, knowing that we had a couple of
hard days ahead of us. After skirting the lake for a mile or two we
struck inland over flats and through valleys. We had to cross a rapid
river at a riffle where the motor-cars were just able to make it. The
road consisted only of the ruts made by the passage of the great bullock
carts, and often we had to go alongside it, or leave it entirely where
at some crossing of a small stream the ground looked too boggy for us to
venture in with the motor-cars. Three times in making such a crossing
one of the cars bogged down, and we had hard work in getting out. In one
case it caused us two hours' labor in building a stone causeway under
and in front of the wheels--repeating what I had helped do not many
months before in Arizona, when we struck a place where a cloudburst had
taken away the bridge across a stream and a good part of the road that
led up to it on either side.
In another place the leading car got into heavy sand and was unable to
move. A party of gauchos came loping up, and two of them tied their
ropes to the car and pulled it backward onto firm ground. These gauchos
were a most picturesque set. They were riding good horses, strong and
hardy and wild, and the men were consummate horsemen, utterly
indifferent to the sudden leaps and twists of the nervous beasts they
rode. Each wore a broad, silver-studded belt, with a long knife thrust
into it. Some had their trousers in boots, others wore baggy breeches
gathered in at the ankle. The saddles, unlike our cow saddles, had no
horns, and the rope when in use was attached to the girth ring. The
stirrups were the queerest of all. Often they were heavy flat disks, the
terminal part of the stirrup-leather being represented by a narrow
metal, or stiff leather, bar a foot in length. A slit was cut in the
heavy flat disk big enough to admit the toe of the foot, and with this
type of stirrup, which to me would have been almost as unsatisfactory as
no stirrup at all, they sat their bucking or jumping horses with
complete indifference.
It was gaucho land through which we were travelling. Every man in it was
born to the saddle. We saw tiny boys not only riding but performing all
the duties of full-grown men in guiding loose herds or pack-animals. No
less characteristic than these daredevil horsemen were the lines of
great two-wheeled carts, each dragged by five mules, three in the lead,
with two wheelers, or else perhaps drawn by four or six oxen. For the
most part these carts were carrying wool or hides. Occasionally we came
on great pastures surrounded by wire fences. Elsewhere the stony,
desolate land lay as it had lain from time immemorial. We saw many
flocks of sheep, and many herds of horses, among which piebald horses
were unusually plentiful. There were a good many cattle, too, and on two
or three occasions we saw flocks of goats. It was a wild, rough country,
and in such a country life is hard for both man and beast. Everywhere
along the trail were the skeletons and dried carcasses of cattle, and
occasionally horses. Yet there were almost no carrion birds, no ravens
or crows, no small vultures, although once very high up in the air we
saw a great condor. Indeed, wild life was not plentiful, although we saw
ostriches--the South American rhea--and there was an occasional guanaco,
or wild llama. Foxes were certainly abundant, because at the squalid
little country stores there were hundreds of their skins and also many
skunk skins.
Now and then we passed ranch-houses. There might be two or three fairly
close together, then again we might travel for twenty miles without a
sign of a habitation or a human being. In one place there was a cluster
of buildings and a little schoolhouse. We stopped to shake hands with
the teacher. Some of the ranch-houses were cleanly built and neatly
kept, shade-trees being planted round about--the only trees we saw
during the entire motor journey. Other houses were slovenly huts of mud
and thatch, with a brush corral near by. Around the houses of this type
the bare dirt surface was filthy and unkempt, and covered with a litter
of the skulls and bones of sheep and oxen, fragments of skin and hide,
and odds and ends of all kinds, foul to every sense.
Every now and then along the road we came to a solitary little store. If
it was very poor and squalid, it was called a _pulpería_; if it was
large, it was called an _almacén_. Inside there was a rough floor of
dirt or boards, and a counter ran round it. At one end of the counter
was the bar, at which drinks were sold. Over the rest of the counter the
business of the store proper was done. Hats, blankets, horse-gear, rude
articles of clothing, and the like were on the shelves or hung from
rings in the ceiling. Sometimes we saw gauchos drinking at these
bars--rough, wild-looking men, some of them more than three parts
Indian, others blond, hairy creatures with the northern blood showing
obviously. Although they are dangerous men when angered, they are
generally polite, and we, of course, had no trouble with them. Hides,
fox skins, and the like are brought by them for sale or for barter.
Order is kept by the mounted territorial police, an excellent body, much
like the Canadian mounted police and the Pennsylvania constabulary.
These men are alert and soldierly, with fine horses, well-kept arms, and
smart uniforms. Many of them were obviously mainly, and most of them
were partly, of Indian blood. I think that Indian blood is on the whole
a distinct addition to the race stock when the ancestral Indian tribe is
of the right kind. The acting president of the Argentine during my
visit, the vice-president, a very able and forceful man, wealthy, well
educated, a thorough statesman and man of the world, and a delightful
companion, had a strong strain of Indian blood in him.
The ordinary people we met used "Indian" and "Christian" as opposite
terms, having cultural rather than theological or racial significance,
this being customary in the border regions of temperate South America.
In one place where we stopped four Indians came in to see us. The chief
or head man looked like a thorough Indian. He might have been a Sioux or
a Comanche. One of his companions was apparently a half-breed, showing
strong Indian features, however. A third had a full beard, and, though
he certainly did not look quite like a white man, no less certainly he
did not look like an Indian. The fourth was considerably more white than
Indian. He had a long beard, being dressed, as were the others, in
shabby white man's garb. He looked much more like one of the poorer
class of Boers than like any Indian I have ever seen. I noticed this man
talking to two of the mounted police. They were smart, well-set-up men,
thoroughly identified with the rest of the population, and regarding
themselves and being regarded by others as on the same level with their
fellow citizens. Yet they were obviously far more Indian in blood than
was the unkempt, bearded white man to whom they were talking, and whom
they and their fellows spoke of as an Indian, while they spoke of
themselves, and were spoken of by others, as "Christians." "Indian" was
the term reserved for the Indians who were still pagans and who still
kept up a certain tribal relation. Whenever an Indian adopted
Christianity in the excessively primitive form known to the gauchos,
came out to live with the whites, and followed the ordinary occupations,
he seemed to be promptly accepted as a white man, no different from any
one else. The Indians, by the way, now have property, and are well
treated. Nevertheless, the pure stock is dying out, and those that
survive are being absorbed in the rest of the population.
The various accidents we met with during the forenoon delayed us, and we
did not take breakfast--or, as we at home would call it, lunch--until
about three o'clock in the afternoon. We had then halted at a big group
of buildings which included a store and a government telegraph office.
The store was a long, whitewashed, one-story house, the bedrooms in the
rear, and all kinds of outbuildings round about. In some corrals near by
a thousand sheep were being sheared. Breakfast had been long deferred,
and we were hungry. But it was a feast when it did come, for two young
sheep or big lambs were roasted whole before a fire in the open, and
were then set before us; the open-air cook was evidently of almost pure
Indian blood.
On we went with the cars, with no further accidents and no trouble
except once in crossing a sand belt. The landscape was parched and
barren. Yet its look of almost inconceivable desolation was not entirely
warranted, for in the flats and valleys water could evidently be
obtained a few feet below the surface, and where it was pumped up
anything could be grown on the soil.
But, unless thus artificially supplied, water was too scarce to permit
any luxuriance of growth. Here and there were stretches of fairly good
grass, but on the whole the country was covered with dry scrub a foot or
two high, rising in clumps out of the earth or gravel or sand. The hills
were stony and bare, sometimes with flat, sheer-sided tops, and the
herds of half-wild horses and of cattle and sheep, and the even wilder
riders we met, and the squalid little ranch-houses, all combined to give
the landscape a peculiar touch.
As evening drew on, the harsh, raw sunlight softened. The hills assumed
a myriad tints as the sun sank. The long gleaming followed. The young
moon hung overhead, well toward the west, and just on the edge of the
horizon the Southern Cross stood upside down. Then clouds gathered,
boding a storm. The night grew black, and on we went through the
darkness, the motormen clutching the steering-wheels and peering
anxiously forward as they strove to make out the ruts and faint
road-marks in the shifting glare of the headlights. The play of the
lightning and the rolling of the thunder came near and nearer. We were
evidently in for a storm, which would probably have brought us to a
complete halt, and we looked out for a house to stop at. At 10.15 we
caught a glimpse of a long white building on one side of the road. It
was one of the stores of which I have spoken. With some effort we roused
the people, and after arranging the motor-cars we went inside. They were
good people. They got us eggs and coffee, and, as we had a cold pig, we
fared well. Then we lay down on the floor of the store and on the
counters and slept for four hours.
At three I waked the sleepers with the cry that in bygone days on the
Western cattle plains had so often roused me from the heavy slumber of
the men of the round-up. It was the short November night of high
southern latitudes. Dawn came early. We started as soon as the faint
gray enabled us to see the road. The stars paled and vanished. The
sunrise was glorious. We came out from among the hills on to vast barren
plains. Hour after hour, all day long, we drove at speed over them. The
sun set in red and angry splendor amid gathering clouds. When we reached
the Rio Negro the light was dying from the sky, and a heavy storm was
rolling toward us. The guardians of the rope ferry feared to try the
river, with the storm rising through the black night; but we forced them
to put off, and we reached the other shore just before the wind smote
us, and the rushing rain drove in our faces.