CHILEAN LANDSCAPES
Santiago rises late. I had wandered a long hour before I found a café
open, and when I dropped in for coffee the man who spent half an hour
preparing it grumbled, “Eight-thirty is very early in Santiago.” My
second discovery was that the Chilean capital was squalid. Landing at
the most northern of her three railroad stations—which turned out to be
no worse than the other two—had been like dropping into Whitechapel; and
the electric sign toward which I headed had brought me to the lowest
type of slum hotel. Had I come down the West Coast and been familiar
with nothing better than Lima, Santiago would perhaps have seemed less
oppressive, for it is a trifle more modern and only a few degrees more
shabby in appearance than the City of the Kings. The change from the
Argentine, however, or, more specifically, from Buenos Aires, was like
that from the best section of New York to the lower East Side.
This contrast, I was soon to discover, is to a large extent true of all
Chile. The _roto_ who makes up the bulk of the population, in or out of
the capital, always looks like a very low-paid brakeman on a coal-train,
who has just come in from an all-night run through a waterless country.
With this class as a basis, Santiago was dirty, unkempt, down at heel.
The cobbled streets were in many cases only half paved, full of dusty
holes with loose cobblestones kicking about in them; the very house
fronts were covered with dust; nothing seemed to have been cleaned or
repainted since the last century; the city looked as if the civic
feather-duster had been lost—though there was no lack of ragged vendors
of this implement making the day hideous with their cries. The great
difficulty seemed to be that few could afford them, for it was another
shock to find that prices were almost as lofty in Santiago as in Buenos
Aires.
The region was, to be sure, suffering for lack of the rain that eastern
Argentine had received in such superabundance, but this did not wholly
account for the general appearance of disrepair, suggesting a place once
of great importance that had lost all ambition to keep its social
standing in the world. The huge checkerboard town, with immense blocks
of those straight, though narrow, streets required of his colonial
builders by Charles V of Spain—perhaps because he had grown weary of
losing himself in the Bostonese labyrinths of Spanish cities—contained
an extraordinary percentage of slums. Miles upon miles of _cités_ or
_conventillos_, ground-floor tenements of single rooms opening off blind
alleys, stretched away in every direction from the central plaza, giving
off the odor which emanates from cheap lodging-houses and overcrowded,
unwashed families. It was the squalor of cities, too, as distinguished
from the comparatively agreeable uncleanliness of the country.
The main business section of Santiago is relatively small, with the more
important stores, banks, and offices within a few squares of the Plaza
de Armas. Even this was considerably down at heel. The building material
being chiefly mud plastered upon wooden slabs, there are many
half-ruined buildings near the center of town, while “way out there
where the devil lost his poncho,” as the Chilean calls the far
outskirts, some of the conditions were incredible. Unlike the capitals
of Argentine and Brazil, Santiago has never been made over and
modernized by the federal government, for all its abundance of
“saltpeter money,” and, as elsewhere on the West Coast, there is no
distinctly residential section. Some parts are a trifle more fashionable
than others, but the uniformity of the town is on the whole monotonous,
doubly so because there are few buildings of interest either
architecturally or otherwise. A square surrounded by the chief public
structures; the capitol, covering an entire block behind the cathedral;
the more distant Museum and Art Gallery, make up almost the entire list
of imposing buildings. Long _galerías_, roofed passages that are
virtually public streets, are almost the only unusual feature. Though
its architecture is what might be called modernized Spanish, with
sometimes more decorative street-toeing façades and more roomy patios
than in Spain, it lacks some of the attractiveness of Spanish buildings,
and at the same time makes little provision for plumbing, and none
whatever for artificial heat. In Chile, to all appearances, the social
standing of soap and water has not yet been recognized. The River
Mapocho runs through town in a cobble-paved channel, but like those of
all the west-coast capitals, it is insignificant either as a stream or a
laundry and bath. Even boarding-schools and colleges take no account of
that strange modern habit of “washing the body all over”; it is a rare
house of even the “proud old families” that has a bathroom.
Of late years many of these old families have found that they can
materially augment their ever less adequate incomes by renting the lower
stories of their “palaces” as shops, with the result that the always
slight line of demarcation between business and residence has now been
almost wholly obliterated. Under the _portales_ of a palatial, red-brick
building covering one whole side of the main plaza, its upper stories
once the “Hotel de France,” but now a dingy vacancy, are dozens of petty
little shops, fly-swarming fruit and peanut and sweetmeat stands,
uncleanly male and female vendors of newspapers. As elsewhere in the
Andes, there are many little cloth-shops run by “Turks,” as South
America calls the Syrians. Street after street is crowded with dingy
little hole-in-the-wall merchants; street stands abound in which are
sold the favorite dishes of the _gente de medio pelo_, the ragged
masses,—_mote molido_ (boiled and mashed ripe corn); _mote con
huesillos_ (the same with scraps of bones and meat thrown in), and the
thick, greasy soup known as _cazuela_. The half-trained tailors, to whom
no doubt is due the fact that few men of Santiago are in any sense
well-dressed, squat in little one-room dens, gazing out upon the passing
throng like the craftsmen of Damascus. To make matters worse, the women
commonly seen on the street are almost exclusively _mujeres de manto_,
dressed in crow-black from heels to the fold of cloth wrapped about
their heads, leaving only the front of the face visible, the lack of
color adding to the general gloom of the town.
In contrast there is much sartorial display by the small well-to-do
class, and at the other end of the social scale there are many hints of
the picturesque. Each morning heavily laden ox-carts of country produce,
drawn by four, and even six, oxen, led rather than driven by men walking
ahead and prodding them over their shoulders with long, sharp, often
gaily painted goads squawk into town and almost to the central plaza.
The wielders of the goads wear the short, ragged ponchos, sometimes of
velvety vicuña cloth, the invariably soiled felt hats, and the
_alpargatas_, or, more likely, the simple leather sandals called
_hojotas_ common to the _roto_ class. Some of these countrymen come
riding in on horseback, their half-bare feet thrust into large wooden
closed stirrups, and adorned with immensely rowelled spurs, frequently
with a woman sitting sidewise on the crupper behind them. Milkmen—who
are often mere boys—use what we call a police whistle, and make the
morning hideous with their deliveries.
It is only from Santa Lucía that the Chilean capital gives a suspicion
of its great extent. This crowning glory of Santiago, a tree-clad rocky
hill rising abruptly in the center of the flat city, a sort of
perpendicular park of several stories, is the only place in which it may
be seen in anything like its entirety. There, four hundred feet above
the housetops, one realizes for the first time that it may, after all,
have four hundred thousand inhabitants. To climb any of the zigzag
rock-cut stairs leading upward from the imposing main entrance is to
behold an ever spreading vista of the city, stretching far away in every
direction, monotonously flat and low except for several bulking old
churches of the colonial Spanish style. The chief charm of the town, if
that word can be used of a city that has little of it, is its proximity
to the Andes. It lies well up in the lap of a plain more than two
thousand feet high, at the northern end of the great central valley of
Chile in which most of its population is gathered, with large hills in
the far distance cutting it off from the Pacific, and, so close at hand
as to seem almost above it, the everywhere dominating background of the
main Cordillera of the Andes. But for this great white overhanging
horizon, Santiago would be commonplace indeed; with it, its most dismal
scenes have the advantage of a splendid setting. It is never
uncomfortably hot; its brilliant winter days are magnificent, chilly
rather than cold, even in the mornings and evenings. Except for a few
kerosene heaters in the more luxurious homes, where foreign travel has
broken the ice of _costumbre_, artificial heat is unknown. The wealthier
classes keep warm from June to August by wearing overcoats and wraps
indoors or out, at the theater or at their own dinner tables; the great
ragged masses accomplish the same end by crowding together in their
single-room dwellings, tightly closing all windows—and succumbing early
and often to tuberculosis.
Santiago is the only city in South America in which there is any
noticeable “smoke nuisance”; the belching of this from many factory
chimneys, from the trains of the government railroad, with its smudgy,
soft Australian coal, adds greatly to what seems to be a natural
haziness of the atmosphere. But one may forget this in a score of quiet
shaded nooks of Santa Lucía. Among its several curiosities are a
drinking fountain—the only public acknowledgment that water is required
by the human system that I recall having run across in South
America—and, along with the statue of Valdivia, who here fortified
himself against the Indians, and of an odd bishop or two, the tiny
Protestant cemetery over which Vicuña-Mackenna, Chile’s chief literary
light and a member of one of her oldest and proudest families, caused to
be erected the inscription, “To the memory of those exiled from both
Heaven and Earth.” Chile has never taken its Catholicism in homeopathic
doses. It is only recently that even Protestant missionaries could be
married by anyone but a Catholic priest; up to a bare decade ago the
wicked heretics might not be buried in cemeteries, but were stuck away
in any hole in the darkest hours of the night, to be dug up next day by
prowling dogs. Largely through the efforts of American missionaries
there is now a civil cemetery and a civil marriage law. Only a few
months before my arrival a case had come up under the law against having
a saloon next door to a church, and the Supreme Court rendered the, to
the clericals “sacrilegious and unprecedented,” decision that a
Protestant church _is_ a church, even in Chile.
Not far from Santa Lucía, nearer the edge of the town, is a much larger
hill made of the loose shale common to the southern Andes and of much
the same appearance as the one of the same name overlooking Lima. San
Cristóbal belongs entirely to a group of priests. On top of it is a
gigantic statue of the particular saint of their order, with an immense
sheet-iron halo on which is squandered much electricity; but this is
offset by the income from an enormous sign just below it advertising
“Dulcinea Tea.” The Lick Observatory has a station on San Cristóbal, and
as the priests have begun selling the mountain as a stone quarry, they
wrung money for a long time out of the American scientists by
threatening to dig the hill away from under them. Now the observatory is
protected by an injunction, and there are other indications that Chile
is gradually recovering from her medieval fanaticism.
Santiago has an imposing public library, one which was not only actually
open but, strange indeed in Latin-America, one from which books could be
taken—if one had several sponsors and could deposit the full price of
the volume. One’s attention is usually first drawn to it by a statue of
two famous Chileans, not so much because of the artistic merit of the
monument as for the terror inspired by the situation of the two
immortals. For they stand some thirty feet above the pavement on a
pillar-like pedestal so slender that a single step backward or forward,
the slightest jostling of each other, would infallibly plunge one or
both of them to certain death, and the tender-hearted beholder, glancing
at their constant peril, can only hurry by with averted face. Under the
glass dome of the reading-room, beyond which most books never pass,
readers wore their hats and smoked when they chose. There were, of
course, no female readers. It is still considered unseemly in Chile for
a lady to be seen reading anything but her prayer-book. Here I heard a
lecture one evening under the auspices of the Geographical and
Historical Society of Chile, graced by some two hundred of the
_intellectuales_ of Santiago. The lecturer, in solemn frock coat,
lighting his cigarette after every other sentence and letting it go out
after each puff, with an appalling consumption of matches, read a long
and laborious dissertation on the burning question as to whether the
great Chilean national hero had been entitled to change his name from
Higgins to O’Higgins. The speaker contended that this was proper; any
other conclusion would have made him an outcast among his
fellow-_intellectuales_, for it would have been attacking one of their
most cherished illusions. But the long hour and a half during which he
argued that the hero in question came of noble stock in Ireland and was
not the descendent of Irish peasants, as commonly claimed, left the
unprejudiced hearer unconvinced and secretly giving the oblivious object
of their solicitude the far greater credit of having climbed to eminence
from the more humble origin.
There is a saying in Chile that the population is made up of _futres_,
_bomberos_, and _rotos_. The first are well-dressed street-corner
loafers; the _bomberos_ are volunteer firemen, and the _rotos_ form the
ragged working class that makes up the bulk of the population. The
latter, said never to be without the _corvo_, an ugly curved knife, with
which they are quick to _tripear_, to bring to light the “tripe,” of an
adversary by an upward slash at his abdomen, are not merely conspicuous,
but omnipresent. Everywhere this class is struggling for its livelihood.
Great streams of men and boys, kaleidoscopes of rags, come racing out of
the _Mercurio_ office with pink copies of “Ultimas Noticias” and scatter
to the four corners of the flat city—but there seem to be more sellers
than buyers. Poor, hopeless old tramps wander up and down the over-named
Alameda de las Delicias with baskets of grapes covered with dust and
almost turned to raisins, vainly trying to sell them. Slatterns and
slouches are the rule among the female division of the _roto_ class, and
Indian blood is almost always present in greater or less degree. In the
Argentine some eighty per cent. of the population is said to be foreign
born; in Chile, certainly in Santiago, not one person in ten suggests
such an origin. Very strict immigration laws forbid negroes, Chinamen,
and most Orientals to enter Chile, but though the country usually
welcomes white foreigners with open arms, they are not greatly in
evidence. The inhabitants of all classes have the west-coast
characteristics, indefinable but unmistakable, which distinguishes them
decidedly from the people of eastern South America.
Santiago has been called the “City of a Hundred Families.” These, still
noted for their Spanish exclusiveness and aristocratic pride, powerful
owners of most of the country, form an oligarchy of government in which
the ostensibly free-voting _roto_ has little real hand. The “best
families” oligarchy virtually tells the working class how to vote, and
in the main it does as it is bidden, out of apathy, to be obliging, or
from pure ignorance. Balloting is not really secret and there is
frequent corruption, such as the recent notorious case of half the
ballot-boxes in Santiago being carried down into the cellar of a public
building and stuffed with a new set of votes. According to law, the
voter must be able to read and write, and any _roto_ whom the landlords
do not wish to vote is denied the suffrage on this elastic ground. On
the whole, however, the oligarchy seems to work better than the more
common Latin-American rule of a dictator or a group of irresponsible
politicians. Its great fault is the stone wall it builds against rising
from the ranks, that and the opportunity it gives the powerful to cast
upon weaker shoulders the burden of taxation. The unfair advantages
given descendants of the favored “best families” is shown in the
frequent recurrence of the same name in Chilean biographies and
histories. The expression, “an education according to his rank,” is
often heard, and sounds strangely out of place in an ostensibly
democratic country. The dawn of industrialism is suggested, however, in
the strikes which are more and more breaking in upon the aristocratic
patriarchal life. One cannot imagine any other Indian of the Andes
striking, but his Araucanian blood has made the _roto_ not only free of
speech, sometimes insolent, ever ready with his _corvo_, but ready to
fight for himself in more modern ways.
“Some day,” said a Chilean man of letters, “our great land owners will
be taxed as they should be; but that will probably require a revolution.
The big absentee landlords exploit our natural resources and spend their
incomes in Paris, leaving nothing for the advancement of the country.
You have something of that problem in the United States, but the
proportion of your idle rich who spend their money abroad is negligible
compared with ours, and here there is no middle class as a depository of
the real culture and sense and moral brawn of the nation.”
Some of the old families of Santiago have lost their wealth, yet still
retain their pride and outward aristocracy. It is the custom of all the
upper class to go away for the summer, not so much because Santiago
grows a bit warm and rather dusty, as because it is the thing to do. One
of the standing stories of the capital is of poor but aristocratic
families who, unable to afford such an outing, shut themselves tight up
in the back of their houses for two months or more, living on what their
trusted servants can sneak in to them. Men who had every appearance of
being trustworthy assured me that this tale was far from being a fable.
One of them asserted that he had been invited the preceding February to
the “home-coming party” of a family whom he knew had not been outside
Santiago in a decade.
History is continually proving that unearned wealth takes away the
energy and initiative of a nation as of an individual, and Chile is no
exception to the rule. In the far north of the country, where it has not
rained in thousands of years, are deposits which give Chile almost a
world monopoly of nitrate, or _salitre_, as the Chilean calls it, the
only large source of public wealth in the country. The high export duty
on this gives the government four-fifths of its revenue, most of which
is spent in Santiago or falls into the pockets of politicians. If some
town in the far south needs a new school, or a pavement, or a tin hero
to set up in its central plaza, it appeals to Santiago for some of the
“saltpeter money”; and if its influence is strong enough, or the
treasury is not for the moment empty and praying for a new war, the
request is granted in much the same spirit with which our congressmen
deliver “pork” to their constituents. Naturally this destroys civic
pride of achievement and municipal team-work. Instead of spending the
greater part of her revenue from nitrates to develop some industry to
take their place when they are exhausted, “we are like a silly wanton,
who squanders her easy winnings for gewgaws without recognizing that the
time is close at hand when her only source of income will disappear,”
insisted one far-sighted Chilean. “Once our saltpeter gives out and
Europe stops lending us money, we’ll go to the devil.”
The fertile southern half of the ribbon-shaped country is excellent for
agriculture; her population, smaller but far more dense than that of the
Argentine, is already utilizing nearly all her resources above or under
ground; in the past century Chile has had only one revolution serious
enough to have echoed in the outside world, but that gives a misleading
impression of her law-abiding qualities. Indeed, all such blanket
statements give rather a false impression, for the country is assured no
such prosperous future as they seem to suggest. Though he is superior to
the Ecuadorian, and perhaps to the Peruvian, it would be easy to get an
exaggerated notion of the Chilean. He is interested only in to-day; he,
and especially his wife and children, are much given to show and
artificial makeshifts: if he is not exactly lazy he is at least far less
active and has less initiative than the more European _argentino_.
Chile is the home of fires and the dread of insurance companies. The
latter are said to demand higher rates than anywhere else on earth, and
the agent of an important foreign one assured me that all his clan live
in fear and trembling toward the end of each month and particularly at
the end of the year, when their clients are balancing their books,
because of the epidemic of arson which results from attempts to recoup
fortunes. This short-cut to solvency is constantly referred to in
newspapers, plays, and conversation; nor, if we are to believe the older
native novels, is it anything new. Chilean law requires the immediate
arrest of the owner and the occupant of a burning building, it being the
contention that either the one or the other is almost sure to be the
instigator of the fire. Nor is it up to the government to prove that the
suspect started the conflagration, but the task of the latter to show
that he did not, which is a horse of quite a different color. The
country is lined with blackened ruins, from mere _ranchos_ to modern
several-story buildings in which lives have frequently been lost. I saw
more burned buildings in Chile than in all the rest of South America,
and far too many to be accounted for merely by the somewhat greater
prevalence of wooden structures.
The fires themselves would be serious enough, were there not the
_bomberos_ to make them doubly so. There are no professional fire
departments in Chile. The glorious honor of fighting the flames is
appropriated by the élite, much as certain regiments and squadrons are
open only to a certain caste in our largest cities. The youthful males
of Santiago’s “best families” become _bomberos_ because it is considered
one of their aristocratic privileges to parade before their enamored
ladies in fancy uniforms and glistening brass helmets. As often as a
fire bell rings, all upper-class functions are temporarily suspended and
all the young bloods run—to the fire? Certainly not! They hasten home to
don their splendid _bombero_ uniforms, without which, naturally, it
would be highly improper to attack the flames. The newspapers always
include in their report of a fire the assertion that “the _bomberos_
arrived with their customary promptitude,” which has the advantage of
being both true and courteous.
There being no National Guard in Chile, gilded youth has no other
convenient way of showing off in uniform than to join the _bomberos_.
The regular army would be too serious an undertaking for them, even if
it were not below their dignity. Moreover, this is founded on
conscription, with a year’s service for those who “draw unlucky,” and as
the influence of caste is powerful in manipulating the drawings, the
ranks are filled almost entirely with _rotos_ or the poorer classes. The
Chilean army is German in tone and uniform, even to the big gray
Prussian capes of the officers, many of whom, as well as the
commander-in-chief, were of that nationality up to the outbreak of the
World War. The army is much in evidence and its splendor is in great
contrast to the shoddy, ragged dress of the bulk of the civilian
population. Its immediate neighbors credit Chile with a strong Prussian
temperament, and it, in turn, sends officers to train the troops of its
more distant neighbors. Those who should know maintain that it is only
the army that saves the oligarchy in power from the revolutions that are
frequently on the point of breaking out, but of which the outside world
seldom hears. Chile has no conscription for her navy, and for the first
time outside my own land I found placards picturing the ideal life
recruiting officers would have us believe is led on warships. As the
Chilean on his narrow strip of beach is almost English in his feeling
for the sea, there seems to be no great difficulty in manning the best,
or at least the second best, navy in South America.
Chileans themselves frequently refer to the prevalence of thieving among
their national characteristics, and explain it by saying that the
Araucanian Indians, who make up the basis of the population, had
communal ownership and still have little conception of the line between
mine and thine. Half the nation is by its own official admission of
illegitimate birth. In various parts of Santiago there are doors fitted
with a _turno_, known among the English-speaking residents as a “bastard
barrel,” softly upholstered, into which a baby may be dropped, the
_turno_ given a half turn and a bell beside it rung, when nuns or their
agents on the inside take charge of the mite without asking questions.
Thousands of “orphans,” whose parents are still running about town, are
housed by charity, and long troops of them may be seen any fine day
taking an airing in the streets. This condition is by no means entirely
the fault of the _roto_ class. None but the civil marriage is now legal
in Chile, whether by priest, minister, missionary, or rabbi; but the
poor man must take a day or more off and disentangle much red tape to
get married, only to be informed by his priest that in the eyes of the
church he is not married at all, until he produces a handful of pesos to
have the union religiously sanctioned. As throughout Latin-America, he
is apt to conclude that the ceremony is a mere waste of time and money.
Small as is the foreign population of Chile, the church is largely in
the hands of foreigners, so that “a Chilean cannot be born or married or
die without the permission of a Spanish, Italian, or French priest.”
German monks and nuns are also numerous, yet Chileans are not admitted
to most of the monasteries and convents. The foreign priest not only
makes the native pay high for his confessions and other formalities, but
frequently refuses him a pass through purgatory unless he leaves the
church a large legacy to cover his unquestionably numerous sins. Though
this property is ostensibly used to aid Chile with schools and the like,
even devout Chileans assert that their foreign priests send most of the
proceeds to the “Capital of the Christian World.” Complaints against
these conditions are legion, but the Chilean, like most Latin-Americans,
is more noted for criticism than for effective action.
Though Santiago rises late, and usually takes a siesta from twelve until
two, it retires early. Being the social and fashionable, as well as the
political, center of the republic, it has, of course, its elaborate
“functions,” and it is still near enough to the colonial days to retain
the weekly plaza promenade. On gala occasions this is worth seeing.
Santiago is one of the countless cities which claim to have the most
beautiful women in the world, and some of the claimants to this
distinction are comely even under their deluges of rice powder. Chilean
women of the better class, with their pale, oval faces and their velvety
black eyes, have a vague sort of melancholy in their manner, as if they
were thinking of the great world on the other side of the tropics, or at
least over the wall of the Andes. But evening entertainments are scarce
and poor in Santiago, and by ten at night the streets are commonly
deserted, except by the stolid _pacos_ wrapped in their heavy black
uniforms, and all doors are closed save those of a few cafés that drag
on until midnight. Half a dozen cinemas unroll their nightly rubbish,
usually fantastic and volcanic dramas from Italian film houses, woven
around the eternal triangle; now and then a _zarzuela_ company succeeds
in making a passable season of it. The favorite zarzuelas are such gems
as “La Señora no Quiere Comer Sola” (Madam does not wish to eat alone),
or “No Hagas Llorar á Mamá” (Do not make Mama weep), the surest way to
avoid which would seem to be to keep her away from the histrionic
efforts of the Chilean capital. Yet the élite of Santiago attend these
mishaps in considerable force and fancy garb, including overcoats or
wraps in the unheated buildings, all laboring under the delusion that
they are being entertained. There is opera for a month or two in the
winter; on rare occasions a really good dramatic company, rather Italian
than Spanish, makes a brief stay—and generally loses money, since, as a
Chilean novelist puts it, “the artistic taste of our public is better
suited to the slap-stick of short plays or the immaturity of some circus
of wild animals.” But the audiences which these entertainments turn out
toward midnight quickly fade away and leave the streets to solitude.
Among the poorer classes the _zamacueca_, the native dance of Chile,
popularly called a “’cueca,” is a principal diversion. A man and woman,
each waving a large gay handkerchief, move back and forth, as if
alternately repelling and inciting each other, to the tune of a harp and
a guitar and the clapping of many hands, while a big pitcher of _chicha
de manzana_ or _de uva_, which roughly correspond to our cider and
grape-juice respectively, passes from mouth to mouth. The better-dressed
class has certain simple pastimes in which both sexes join, though not
often and never without an awe-inspiring display of chaperons on the
side lines. There is, for instance, the “whistling game.” A man in
competition with several of his spatted fellows runs four hundred
meters, stops in front of a lady and whistles a tune, the name of which
she hands him on a slip of paper, the first one to finish the tune
without error and to return to the starting-point, being adjudged the
winner. On the whole, the Spanish spoken by this class of Chileans is
better than that heard in the Argentine, though there are many
“chilenismos,” expressions peculiar to the country. Chile usually gives
the “ll” its full sound, rather than reducing it to a poor “j,” but the
“s” is largely suppressed. In spelling the country has certain rules of
its own, the most noticeable being the use of “j” in many places where
Spaniards use “g,” a legacy left by the Venezuelan, Andrés Bello, first
president of the University of Chile.
I had looked forward with some interest to that far-famed feature of
Santiago, her female street-car conductors. Familiar as they have since
become, Chilean women led the world in this particular, the custom
dating back to the war with Peru, a long generation ago. The street-cars
of Chile are of two stories. Most of them are operated by a woman and a
boy, about half the force being female and few of the rest grown to
man’s estate. The boy is the _conductor_, which in Spanish means the
motorman, and the woman _cobrador_, or collector. Far from inspiring the
protection of wealthy rakes or causing enamored youths to squander their
income riding back and forth in the car presided over by some
unrelenting Dulcinea, however, most of the latter excite such repugnance
that the more squeamish prefer to suffer a slight financial loss to
accepting change from their unsoaped hands. On the back platform of the
dingy electric double-deckers usually stands as un-entrancing a member
of the fair sex as could be found by long search, her dismal appearance
enhanced by the mournful, raven-black costume she wears. She is sure to
be part Indian, her coarse hair tied in an ugly knob at the back of her
head, high on top of which sits a hat of polished black, with a long pin
stuck through it to add to the perils of life. In short, Chile’s female
conductors are not giddy young girls, but stolid women of the
working-class, very intent on their duties and only rarely whiling away
an odd moment in harmless gossip with the youthful motorman of the car
behind. Some romancer has written that the beautiful members of the clan
are quickly recruited to more romantic service. Perhaps they are, for
they certainly are not on the cars.
Street-car fares are absurdly cheap in Chile, so cheap, in fact, that
the service cannot but be poor and dirty. Inside the cars riders pay ten
centavos; up on the _impériale_ they pay five, which at the commonly
prevailing rate of exchange is less than two and one cents respectively.
Not the least amusing thing about Santiago is the street-car caste, or
the line of demarcation between the upstairs and downstairs riders. The
white-collar, non-laboring class will stand packed like cordwood in the
closed car rather than go up on the _impériale_, which is not only
preferable in every way but cheaper. It is this latter detail that makes
the upper story forbidden ground for the _gente decente_. As a
Chilean-born business man of English parents, educated in London and
widely traveled, put it in criticizing my “bad habit” of riding on top:
“I would much rather ride up there, too; it is airy, cleaner than
inside, you can see the sights, and the weather is generally fine in
Santiago. But if I did, my friends would look up from the sidewalk,
nudge one another, and say, ‘Hullo, by Jove! There’s Johnny Edwards up
there with the _rotos_. What’s the matter; can’t he afford a penny to
ride inside? I’d better collect that little debt he owes me before he
goes bankrupt,’—and within a day or two my creditors would be down upon
me in droves.”
The Chilean _peso_ is a mere rag of paper, originally engraved in New
York and more nearly resembling our own bills than those of most South
American countries. Theoretically worth a French franc, it is as
doubtful of value as legibility, being unredeemable either in gold or
silver and waking up each morning to find itself different from the day
before. On the face of the few bills that still have visible words runs
the statement, “The government of Chile recognizes this as a _peso
fuerte_,” which is by no means the same thing as promising to pay a
“strong peso” to the holder upon demand. The congress of Chile has
decreed that the peso shall be worth ten English pence; but there is
nothing quite so incorrigible in disobeying the laws of a country as its
national currency, particularly one in which it is the custom, when in
need of money, to go to a printing office instead of to a bank. No
wonder there is no national lottery in Chile; playing the exchange is
gambling enough to suit anyone.
With the exception of a few private, narrow-gauge lines in the nitrate
and coal fields, the railroads of Chile are government owned. A state
line now runs the length of the country, connecting its southernmost
port on the mainland with its most northern province, and even with the
capital of Bolivia. In the fertile, well-inhabited southern half of the
country the railroads, like the more important ones of the Argentine,
have the broad Spanish gauge, and down to where the population begins to
thin out the trains are long and frequent. The “Longitudinal,” running
for hundreds of miles northward from the latitude of the _transandino_
through dreary deserts a bare meter wide, carries neither through
passengers nor freight. The former would probably die of monotony or
thirst on the way; the latter would be valuable indeed after paying the
breath-taking freight rates. It is far quicker, more pleasant, and
cheaper to take, or to send by, the steamers along the coast, and the
real raison d’être of the “Longitudinal” is Chile’s determination to
keep the two provinces she took from Peru.
On the whole, the railroads of Chile are a sad commentary on government
ownership. There are probably more employees to the mile on Chilean
railroads than on any other system in the world, not because the Chilean
is a particularly poor workman, but because politicians foist upon the
helpless public carriers so many needy but influential constituents. Yet
both roadbeds and rolling stock of this overmanned system are
astonishingly _descuidado_,—uncared for, dust-covered, unwashed, loose,
broken, out of order, inadequate, with whole train-loads of perishable
goods rotting in transit, and frequent wrecks. It is common rumor that
the government pays twice the market price for all railway supplies,
thanks to the carelessness and the grafting tendencies of the personnel,
while every year finds the railroads with a million or more deficit. How
carelessly the trains are operated is suggested, too, by the
extraordinary prevalence of missing legs in Chile. It seemed as if one
could scarcely look out a train window without seeing someone crutching
along beside the track, to say nothing of those entirely legless, as if
the railroad habitually ran amuck among the population.
Started by Meiggs, the fleeing Californian who carried the locomotive to
the highlands of Peru, and continued by a deserter from an American
sailing ship, the Chilean railroads were built chiefly by American
capital, as well as by American engineers. They still bear many
reminders of that origin. The passenger-trains have comfortable American
day coaches, made in St. Louis; the sleeping-cars are real Pullmans;
even the freight-cars closely resemble our own. The engines, though
supplied with bells, are more often of British or German origin, or from
the government shops near Valparaiso. There are three classes, or, more
exactly, five, for the prices and service on the express trains are
different from the corresponding ones on the _mixtos_. Except that in
the former one is more certain of having an entire seat to oneself,
there is little difference between first and second class. Fares are
comparatively low even in these; on the lengthwise wooden benches of
third class they are cheaper than hoboing. Trunks, however, pay almost
as high as their weight in passenger, there being no free-baggage
allowance. The assertion is frequently heard in Chile that third class
is a disadvantage to the country, because the low price makes it too
easy for the _roto_ masses to move about. A rule that might not be amiss
in our own land is that the engineer who jerks a train either in coming
into or leaving a station is subject to a fine, if not to dismissal—but
of course the Brotherhood would never permit any such interference with
their long-established privileges. The trainboy nuisance, here known as
a _cantinero_, with the accent on the beer, is in full evidence. Though
the night trains carry Pullmans, there are no diners, because
concessions have been given at various stations to men of political
influence to run dining-rooms and the trains must stop there long enough
to contribute the customary rake-off. The monopolists are less given to
brigandage than they might be, however, and of late there has been
inaugurated a system of sealed lunches at three pesos, including a
half-bottle of wine. Moreover, it is a rare station that does not have a
crowd of female food-vendors, especially well-stocked with fruit in the
autumn season.
[Illustration: The street cars of Chile are of two stories and have
women conductors]
[Illustration: Talcahuano, the second harbor of Chile, is only a bit
less picturesque than Valparaiso]
[Illustration: The central plaza of Concepción, third city of Chile]
[Illustration: Valdivia, in far southern Chile, is one of the few South
American cities built of wood, even the streets being paved with planks]
The eight o’clock express from Santiago sets one down in Valparaiso, one
hundred and twenty miles away, at noon. From the Mapocho station the
train climbs out of the central valley of Chile, squirming its way
through many tunnels and over mountain torrents, with frequent
magnificent views of the rich, flat plain which gradually spreads out
hundreds of feet below. Then the valley narrowed and we came to
Llaillai, the junction of the line up to Los Andes and over into the
Argentine. Curving around the higher mountains, the other branch coasts
leisurely downward, passing here a long vineyard, there pastures
bordered by rows of Lombardy poplars and dotted with cattle, now a great
estate belonging to a man living in Paris, the stone mansion of his
administrator near at hand, the mountains forming the background of
every vista. At Calera the “Longitudinal” sets out into the arid north,
the fertile part of Chile quickly coming to an end in this direction and
turning into the dreary desert which is at present the country’s chief
source of wealth and fame. Then all at once the Pacific I had seen but
once since entering South America two years before burst out in full
ocean-blue expanse, without even an island to break up the unprotected
bay in which the winds often raise havoc. Below Viña del Mar, Chile’s
most fashionable watering-place, the precipitous hills come down so
close to the sea that there is barely room for the highway, railroad,
and tram line to squeeze their way past into the commercial metropolis
and second city of the country.
Valparaiso, the greatest port not only of Chile but of the West Coast of
South America, is the “Vale of Paradise” only comparatively. Built in
layers or strata up the steep sides of the barren, shale coast-hills, it
stretches for miles along the amphitheater of low mountains that
surround a large semicircular bay, behind which one can see jumbled
masses of houses sprawling away over the many ridges until these have
climbed out of sight. There is so little shore at Valparaiso that there
is room in most places only for two or three narrow streets following
the curve of the bay, and for only one the entire length of the town,
under the edge of the cliffs, much of it occupied by the dingy,
two-story, female-“conducted” street-cars. In the central part of town a
small space of flat ground has been filled in across one of the scallops
of the bay, and on this made land are cramped the principal business
houses and the central Plaza Arturo Prat. It is here that the
earthquakes do their most appalling damage. The rest of the city climbs
steeply up the shale hills overhanging the business section, in a jumble
of buildings which give the town its only picturesque and unique
feature. To get “top side,” where the majority of the Vale of Paradise
dwellers live, there are escalators, or, more properly, “lifts,” since
the majority of the largest foreign colony on the West Coast are
English. That is, every little way along the cliff are two cars at
opposite ends of a cable, which climb the slopes at precarious angles,
though they are level inside, in about two minutes at a cost of ten
centavos. For those who lack the requisite two cents, and for cautious
persons who will not risk their lives on the escalators, several
stairway streets rise in zigzag above row after row of sheet-iron roofs
to the upper stories of the town. During this ascent the whole city
spreads out below, all the panorama of Valparaiso and its semicircular
bay, the latter speckled with hundreds of steamers, “wind-jammers,” and
small craft, each far enough from the others to be ready to dash
unhampered into the safety of the open sea when the wild southwest gales
sweep in upon them. The Chileans formed some time ago the courageous
project of having an English company protect this great open roadstead
with a huge breakwater; but thousands of mammoth concrete blocks have so
far been dropped into the seemingly bottomless harbor, leaving no
visible trace, and now there are floated out hollow concrete structures
of 150-foot dimensions. Once on top there are other street-cars, and
more climbing to do, if one wishes to go anywhere in particular, though
nothing as steep as the face of the cliff itself. Here may be seen Viña
del Mar, a broad expanse of the Pacific, the aërial best residences of
Valparaiso, and a picturesque tangle of poorer houses stringing away up
the backs of the many verdureless ridges into the arid, uninhabited
country.
The earth, like the sea, casts up on its beaches much human driftwood.
Valparaiso is no exception to this rule, and here may be found
wanderers, beachcombers, and roustabouts of all nationalities. Primitive
landing facilities give its rascally boatmen the whip-hand over arriving
or departing travelers. Many languages are spoken, English not the least
important among them. Along the docks the _roto_ stevedore works
barefoot and bare-legged even in the winter season; over all the town
rests a pall of aggressive, rather conscienceless commerce which offsets
its scenic beauties. The Chilean is not a particularly pleasant fellow
at best; down at his principal seaport he is even below the average in
this respect. Impudent and grasping, unpleasantly blasé from his contact
with the lower strata of the outside world—but all this one forgets in
watching the red sun sink into the Pacific from the impériale of a
street-car winding close along the edge of the sea, or when the lights
of the town, piled into the lower sky, fade away as the traveler turns
inland and climbs back up into the Andes.
From the squalid Alameda Station of Santiago another express sped
southward through rows of those slender Lombardy poplars that are a
feature of any landscape of lower Chile. The broad central valley,
distinct from the arid northern section and growing more and more
fertile from the capital southward, with ever more frequent streams
pouring down from the range on the east to add to its productiveness,
stretches almost floor-flat for more than five hundred miles to where
the narrow country breaks up into islands. In this autumn season
vineyards and cornfields stood sear and shriveled. The slightly rolling
country had an indistinct brown tint under a gray, yet illuminated sky,
the valley reaching from the all but invisible Pacific hills to the
jagged, snow-capped Andean wall, like an irregular dull-white line
painted along the canvas of the sky some little distance above the
horizon. San Bernardo, a summer colony, was now a large cluster of
closed houses surrounded by brown vineyards touched here and there with
a deep red, as of poison ivy. A few bushy trees, some still green, the
rest yellow, were half-visible on the left; now and then an evergreen
grove broke the prevailing color with the verdant emerald of firs,
shading away through all the tints of green to late-autumn saffron, a
hazy world spreading away on either hand and rising beyond to the
Cordillera lying dim-white under a new fall of snow.
Paralleling the railroad were good highways, sometimes with high banks,
more often lined with hedges, which added a suggestion of England to the
general atmosphere of California in November. Along these roads were
many ox-carts, the drivers walking ahead and punching back over their
shoulders at the animals with sharp goads. There was color in the
ponchos, often in the other clothing of the lower classes here,
especially among the _huasos_, as the _gaucho_ is known in Chile, and
this color seemed to be in exact ratio to the Indian blood, not of the
individual, but of a given locality. Dust was everywhere. We passed
numerous large corrals bearing the sign “Ferias Rejionales,” some with
cattle in them, all surrounded by an elevated promenade from which
prospective buyers could examine the stock. Horses and cattle shipped
north in freight trains all had pasted on their rumps a paper bearing
their destination. Towns were frequent and sometimes large, and there
was much freight as well as passenger traffic, no doubt because Chile is
like Egypt in that there is but one route up and down the country, here
following the elevated central valley between the Andes and the sea.
At every station of any size groups of women and girls offered for sale
fruit, bread, sweetmeats, and the like. They were particularly well
stocked with grapes; native apples were plentiful, Chile being the only
land in South America which grows them; not a few sold the pretty red
_copihüe_, the national flower of Chile, a long bell-shaped blossom
growing on a climbing plant of deep roots. The movements of these women
were lively and vivacious compared with those of the higher Andes of
more northern west-coast countries. Each wore a white dressing-gown over
many layers of dark clothes, and most of them were decorated with
earrings or necklaces of the red-and-black beans called _guayruros_ with
which I had grown familiar in tropical Bolivia. These berries are
supposed to bring luck, or at least a man, and the Chilean woman of the
ignorant class will sell her only possession for a few of them. Apple
and cherry orchards flanked the track here and there, many of them
bordered by blackberry hedges stripped now of their fruit. Rather drab
farmhouses, hung with withered rose vines, alternated with curiously
un-American wheat or straw stacks. Gradually cultivation and villages
decreased, and an Arizona-like country wormed its way into the plain in
arid patches. Here grapes were still offered for sale, but one might
easily have mistaken them for raisins.
We passed several branch lines leading off toward the Pacific, and a few
shorter ones climbing a little way up the flanks of the Andes. I dropped
off at the fourth of these junctions, in Talca, a large town with far
too many churches and the concomitant squalor, poverty, and ignorance.
The plaster was beginning to peel off in places from the adobe façade of
the big, ostensibly cut-stone building facing the central plaza. Here,
as in all Chile, one was struck again by society’s waste of its
resources,—robust men in the prime of life scurrying about with baskets
of fruit or newspapers for sale, much potential energy frittering away
its time for want of occupation. “Los Boi Escouts” of Talca were
announcing a benefit performance that evening, but as this did not
promise sufficient interest to make up for spending a night in so dismal
a place, I went on to the considerable town of Chillan. Here it had been
raining and the unpaved streets were full of miniature ponds through
which I picked my way to a hotel where I paid three dollars for a
bed—and not much of a bed at that.
In stories I had heard Chile was noted for its low prices. If ever it
had that particular charm it has now disappeared, at least for the
traveler. The hard little apples sold at the stations cost as much as
good ones in New York; diminutive loaves of bread were nearly as high as
a whole loaf at home. Establishments masquerading under the name of
“hotels” are plentiful: if there were one-fourth as many clean, honest,
and well conducted it would be a decided improvement. To pay an average
of twenty pesos a day in the squalor of most Chilean hotels would be
mishap enough; the doctoring to which one’s bill is invariably subjected
makes the experience all the more painful. Though the daily rate
purports to cover all service, morning coffee and rolls are always
charged for as an extra. So also is fruit, at twenty times what it sells
for in the market around the corner. Baths, which are so slow in being
prepared as to wear out the patience of most foreign guests, cost
several pesos each time they are ordered, whether they are taken or not.
The crowning trick is to make out the bill by separate items, if one has
had the audacity to ask for the daily rate in advance, thus doubling it;
or, if one protests against this system, the next one is to contend that
the day begins at a certain fixed hour, which is always on the opposite
side of the clock from that at which the traveler arrives, and that the
first and last meal each constitute a full day, with the result that the
man who is continually traveling pays for sixty days a month in hotels
even though he spends some half of his time on trains.
It was wet and sloppy and all the world was drowned in a dense fog when
I set off again at dawn. Everyone who owned them wore heavy overcoats
and neck-scarfs, keeping even their noses covered. One would have
fancied a demand that trains be heated would be in order in such a
climate, but if the lack of artificial heat is at times unpleasant it is
healthful, and the traveler in South America is likely to return with a
prejudice against it. At San Rosendo I caught a branch line along the
shining Bio-Bio, the largest river of Chile, and followed it
northwestward to the coast, the sun at last breaking through and
suddenly flooding all the scene as the train took to rounding many
rolling hills covered with scrub growth. The _huaso_ was everywhere busy
with his fall plowing, his ox-drawn wooden implement as primitive as
those of Peru, except for its iron point. Here there was considerable
eucalyptus, the foster child of the Andean tree world, though the poplar
was more in evidence and the weeping willow frequent.
I spent a day in Concepción, third city of Chile, a brisk and mildly
pretty town scattered over a hillside, center of a large grain district
with coal fields near, hence the site of many factories, flour-mills,
even sugar refineries, which import their crude product from Peru.
Though it is the scene of considerable modern industry, and has the
usual two-story, be-skirted tramcars, brilliant ponchos and gaunt oxen
dragging clumsy, creaking carts are to be seen in its main streets. A
splendid view of the town may be had from the Cerro Caracol, crowning
point of a long ridge of rolling hills of reddish soil, yet covered with
grass, so rare in South America, and much of it with a thick fir forest.
A “snail” roadway winds upward, and immediately at the climber’s feet
spreads out the entire city, flat and low for the most part, with the
plethora of bulking churches common to all Chilean towns. There are many
Germans in Concepción, south of which they grow ever more numerous.
Along the Avenue Pedro de Valdivia, squeezed between the river and the
hills in the outskirts, live scores of men of this nationality who came
out less than half a century ago as simple clerks and who now have
sumptuous mansions and large estates—_quintas_ they are called in
Chile—a single row of them eighteen blocks long on this one avenue
boasting such names as “Thuringia” and “Die Lorelei” and the top-heavy
architecture which goes with them. In Arauco province, a bit to the
south, with a private railroad running into Concepción, are some of the
few coal mines in South America, Chile being virtually the only country
on that continent not entirely dependent on Newcastle or Australia for
this sinew of industry. It seems to be a soft surface coal, mainly
productive of smoke, great clouds of which frequently wipe out the
beauties of the landscape in this vicinity.
Talcahuano, six miles farther northwest, is on Concepción Bay, national
naval rendezvous and the best harbor in Chile, being seven miles across
and bottled up by the island Quiriquina. The town, thrown around the
inner bay like a wrap about a throat, with pretty residential hills
climbing up close behind the modest central plaza, the outskirts
scattered far and wide over a rolling, verdant country, has considerable
shipping, but the Pacific is seen from it only through the rifts of
islands and promontories. Forty years ago American whalers often entered
this harbor, and some of the wealthy families of the vicinity to-day are
descended from the deserting sailors they left behind.
In Talcahuano I found an American consul who had been there for decades,
evidently long since forgotten by the authorities at home. Of the many
tales he had to tell the most picturesque were those of his early days
as a guano digger on the west coast, but he was more filled with the
alleged rascality of the Germans in Chile. There were in Concepción, he
asserted, forty German business houses as against four English and no
American—or perhaps I should say “North American,” for the Chilean grows
more enraged than any of his neighbors at our assumption of a term to
which he considers himself equally entitled. The consul was greatly
grieved to see the Germans steadily taking away the little trade
Americans once had, driving out even our stoves and agricultural
machinery from what had formerly been a United States stronghold. But
the Germans were more apt to make things to fit local tastes, or the
customer seldom had any fixed notion of what he wanted and fell easy
prey to the clever and unscrupulous German salesman. The consul had
recently discovered a German house secretly sending to the Fatherland a
binder and a reaper which it had imported from New York, evidently
because direct importation would have called official attention to the
plan of copying the machines for the South American trade. He had
recently bought what purported to be a reputable implement made in the
United States and known by the trademark “Eureka.” It worked badly,
however, and the parts broke so easily, that he finally examined it more
closely and found that it was really a “Hureka,” made in Germany. Though
Americans and English are hard to assimilate, clannish, little inclined
to take Chilean wives, the Germans marry freely with the natives and
gain much commercial and political advantage from such alliances. The
Chilean-born children of Germans are legally Chileans, but at heart,
according to the consul, they are still Germans. The Teutons have driven
the natives out of all important business, except in the case of wealthy
landowners, and these usually live in Paris and intrust their holdings
to a German or other foreign manager. Our forsaken representative was
also highly incensed at “the nonsense of American business men running
down to South America in droves, making themselves laughing-stocks among
the natives by their geographical ignorance, their manners and public
drinking, and only stirring up the Germans to greater underground
efforts.”
Though all Chile below Santiago is noted for its agriculture, its
fertility increases with every degree southward. South Chile, which may
be reckoned as beginning at the Bio-Bio River, where the vineyards end,
is an almost virgin land, only a fraction of which is as yet under the
plow. The Bio-Bio marks the point below which the Spaniards were never
able to make a permanent conquest, for the region below it was the home
of the most valiant Indians of South America, a race much more like our
own untamable red-skins than the slinking tribes farther to the north.
The river was finally agreed upon as the southern limits of Spain’s
authority, and such it remained until that had wholly disappeared from
the American continent. After the independence of Chile the republican
government confirmed the valiant Mapuches, as the Araucanians call
themselves, in their claim to regard the Bio-Bio as a frontier. It was
not until forty years ago, when at last the white man’s fire-water had
done what the Spaniards were never able to do, that the Araucanians were
at last pushed back into limited reservations and Araucania formally
taken under the rule of Santiago. The land was divided up among white
settlers, and when the Indians objected the central government “sent out
soldiers to shoot down the rebels, following just the same policy as you
did in the United States,” as a Chilean told me in a naïve,
matter-of-fact way.
The “first-class” coach in which I crossed the Bio-Bio, not so long
before a proud product of St. Louis, was a rattling old wreck, the floor
so sloppy and wet one needed rubbers, its window panes either broken or
missing entirely, some of them pasted over with paper, the seats more
worn and dirty than those on a backwoods branch line in the United
States. As the weather had grown steadily colder from Talca southward,
everyone on board was wrapped and overcoated beyond recognition. We
moved slowly through a woodless, brown, rolling country almost invisible
for the rain. In the early afternoon the train crept cautiously across a
bridge far up above a small but powerful stream, amid green hills of
plump, indistinct outline. The reason for the caution soon appeared.
Just north of the city of Victoria we were suddenly routed out into a
cold rain flung against us by a roaring wind like the spray from an
angry sea, and found ourselves at the edge of a mighty chasm. At the
bottom, in and about the stream which raged through it far below, lay
the wreckage of a freight train that had dropped with the bridge a month
before, killing the crew. Across this chasm swung a narrow,
wire-suspended foot-bridge a furlong in length, which swayed drunkenly
back and forth as the stream of wet and shivering passengers, a few
women and aged, infirm men among them, crept fearfully across it,
followed by all the boys and ragamuffins of the vicinity carrying the
hand baggage—no white-collar Chilean of course, would carry his own even
in case of wreck. We were bedraggled indeed when we climbed out of the
mud and rain into another train, and another good hour was lost in
transferring the mails and the heavier, fare-paying baggage before we
were off again.
I found Temuco, up to the present generation the capital of the land
from which the sturdy Araucanians were at length dispossessed, the most
interesting town in Chile. It was more nearly like the cities of the
Andean highlands, with something Mexican about it also, thanks to its
mixture of dirt, poverty, and the “picturesqueness” of which the tourist
rants. The Mapuche Indians are thick-set, the women especially so,
broad-faced, with a reddish tinge showing through a light copper skin,
due perhaps to the colder climate of their temperate homeland. Some of
the women were comfortably fat; they wore their coarse hair in two
braids, a band of colored cloth or silver coins about their round heads,
this sometimes securing a gay head-kerchief flying in the wind. The
mantos about their shoulders were usually a dull red, their skirts a
true “hobble,” being a simple strip of cloth wrapped tightly around the
waist and tucked in, with the raw edge down one leg. Their feet were
bare, chubby, and by no means clean, though more nearly so than those of
the typical Andean Indian. The children ran about bare-legged for all
the wintry air. The older Indians of both sexes had rather dissipated
features, as if the white man’s fire-water were still doing its work
among them. The men wore a mildly gay short poncho, some still
home-woven, most of them made in Germany, flannel drawers, a black or
near-black skirt brought together between the legs, shapeless felt hats,
and black leather boots of light material. The more poverty-stricken
wore a rude moccasin and any head-gear available, even the cast off
stiff straw hats of the summer-time _futres_ of Temuco; and May is not
the month for straw hats in southern Chile. The nearest Indian
settlement is but half an hour’s ride from Temuco, and some of the
Indian women rode into town on horses decorated with as many trappings
and large silver ornaments as themselves; others carried baskets on
their backs, with the leather band supporting it drawn tightly across
chest or forehead. Babies were not carried on the mothers’ backs, that
custom having disappeared where I turned eastward from the Andes across
tropical Bolivia.
The modern Araucanian’s land is secured to him, and an official of the
Chilean Government, known as “Protector of the Indians,” sees to it that
the acreage he owns to-day is not alienated. But the tribe is dying,
like all Indians in contact with European civilization, and the time is
not many generations distant when the rest of his land will go to the
white man. To all appearances the Araucanian has lost most of the
warlike courage for which his ancestors were famous, though he has by no
means degenerated to the cringing creature one finds in Quito or Cuzco.
As in those cities, shopkeepers are obliged to learn the tongue of their
most numerous customers, and Araucanian was heard on every hand, among
whites as well as Indians. Some of the latter could speak nothing else,
though now and then a familiar Spanish word broke out of the jumble of
sound. The Mapuches had some of the superstition of the Quichuas and
Aymarás toward the “little magic box with one eye,” and for the first
time in months I was forced to resort to simple trickery to catch my
chosen pictures.
Rain was almost incessant in Temuco, and the mud so deep that the
better-to-do used _suecos_, wooden clogs on which were nailed imitation
patent-leather uppers in any of the little shops devoted to that
industry. The next most familiar sight was that of oxen pulling solid
wooden wheeled wagons, straining laboriously through the sloughs called
streets until one fancied the animals, with the yoke across their brows
all day, must end each night with a raging headache.
Below Temuco the train crossed several considerable rivers. Long
stretches of stumps and scattered wooden shacks suggested the days of
Lincoln and Daniel Boone. Much rough lumber was piled at the flooded
stations, which served ugly frontier hamlets tucked away among rolling
hills once thick wooded and still so in places. Curiously enough this
more southern section of Chile is an older country, in the settler’s
sense, than that about Temuco. Seventy years ago, long before it was
able to force the stronghold of the central valley of Araucania, the
Chilean Government made an entry far to the south, catching the Indians
in the rear and settling with foreign immigrants wide areas of what are
now the provinces of Valdivia and Llanquihüe. The town of Valdivia and
several other strategic points, chiefly on the coast, where the
Spaniards had erected forts and established small precarious
settlements, were moribund when Santiago turned its attention to the
region in the middle of the last century. The coming of European
colonists has given the district new life and considerable prosperity.
The methods of Chile in settling this wilderness of the south were
simple. An agent in Germany sought colonists; an agent in Chile was sent
to Valdivia to receive them when they landed. The first-comers were
placed on the Isla de la Teja, where they would be secure against
possible attack by the Indians on the mainland. There are still a number
of German factories on that island, the inevitable brewery among them.
When the colonial agent was forced to look farther to the unknown south
for more land, he found nothing but matted forest. A trusted renegade
Indian named Pichi-Juan was given thirty _pesos fuertes_ (in those days
nearly fifteen dollars) to burn this primeval woodland. Smoke clouds,
visible from Valdivia, rose for three months, and at the end of that
time a strip forty-five miles long and fifteen wide, from Chan-Chan to
the Andes, was ready for the colonists.
All the way to Valdivia the product of the saw was in evidence,—rivers
of planks, seas of squared logs. New little towns, built entirely of
wood, and visibly growing, dotted the line of the railroad; in small
clearings, about shacks as rough as those of our Tennessee mountains,
the soil that had been turned up was rich black loam; the scattered
inhabitants had the hardy, self-sufficient, hopeful air of all
frontiersmen. Then great damp forests, strangely like those of the far
north, grew almost continuous on either hand. I stood for half the
afternoon on the back platform of our wreck of a first-class car,
watching the cold, wet world race away into the north, and the temperate
zone night, so different from that of the tropics, settle slowly down.
In the darkness we came to a little station called Valdivia, but it was
merely the landing-place for the small steamer to the town of that name,
which lay twelve miles up the river. It is named for Pedro de Valdivia,
a companion of Pizarro in Peru and afterward conqueror of Chile—with
reservations; for he had no such luck against the Araucanians as against
the docile Quichuas farther north and finally lost his life in his
efforts to subdue them. But Valdivia is Spanish only in name; in nearly
all else it is extremely Germanic, so different from the typical South
American town that one seems suddenly transported to another continent.
Well built, two stories high, new and clean, without a suggestion of
luxury, yet comfortable as a town of the north temperate zone, it might
easily have been mistaken for one in the newer sections of Washington or
Oregon. Most remarkable of all, at least to a man who had been traveling
for years in lands of adobe, brick, or stone, it was made entirely of
wood.
Saw-mill whistles awoke me at dawn. The sun, after a long struggle with
the dense clouds rising from the unseen sea not far to the west, won the
day, and every living thing was visibly grateful for its benign
countenance, for continual rain is the customary lot of this part of
Chile at this season. For once the weather was fine—except underfoot.
The streets and roads of Valdivia were literally impassable, with the
exception of those that were laid with plank floors, planks which would
have been worth almost their weight in silver in most of the continent.
Heavy rains bring thick forests, however, and here wood served every
possible purpose. Wooden fences were everywhere, wooden sidewalks
drummed under my heels with an almost forgotten sound; houses were
covered with a rough species of clapboarding; even the few buildings
that seemed at a distance to be of stone turned out to be made of wood
tinned over, the roofs covered with lumber rather than shingles, either
because Valdivia does not know how to make the latter or because boards
are cheaper than labor. The unfloored streets were incredible sloughs of
mud. One was named the Calle Intrépido, and the man would have been
intrepid indeed who ventured out into it. A few aged hacks, smeared with
mud to their wooden roofs, plied along the few principal streets between
the Germanized plaza and the rather wide river which the town faces. To
enter almost any shop was to be suddenly transported to the little towns
of the Harz or the Black Forest, though the shopkeeper was likely to
address a stranger in Spanish, usually with more or less foreign accent.
Isolated for a considerable period after their first arrival in southern
Chile, the Germans began to move northward as the Chileans moved south,
and the hostile Indians were squeezed between them. With the advent of
the railroad, which reached Temuco a short generation ago and Valdivia
some time later, the Chileanizing of the immigrants and the territory
advanced rapidly, and even before the World War direct relations between
these settlers of Teutonic blood and the Fatherland seem to have been
rare. Yet the harsh German speech echoes everywhere through the trains
and hotels of South Chile to-day, though the German-Chilean speaks
Spanish as well as he does the tongue of his grandfather colonist,
exercises all the rights of Chilean citizenship, and frequently marries
into Chilean families. His ways are somewhat enigmatical, sometimes
ludicrous, to the Latin-sired native, however, and for all his industry,
he is to a certain degree the butt of the older society. What we know as
an “Irish bull” is called in Chile a _cuento alemán_—a “German yarn.”
Below Valdivia lies a great potato-growing country, occupying the site
of the burned forest, now a rich, rolling agricultural section.
Blackberries were thick along the railroad. The centers of this uncouth,
wood-built, prosperous region are the large German towns of La Unión and
Osorno, towns in which German was the language of the schools and almost
all the local officials bore Teutonic names. From Temuco southward the
railroad had been running out like a dying stream, with ever decreasing
traffic. I left Osorno by the daily freight, which dragged behind it one
passenger car with two long upholstered seats along its sides serving
also as a caboose and densely packed with well-dressed men entirely
European in origin. Several young men were plainly of German parentage,
yet they spoke Castilian together, and one such pair was wondering how
they could escape the year of compulsory military service in Chile,
“since our fathers came out here largely to avoid such slavery.” Rail
fences, rude cabins in rough little clearings, rolling hills scratched
over with wooden plows, countrymen in ever thicker ponchos and with but
rare traces of Indian blood, burned woods covered with charred stumps
and grazing cattle, lined the way on this journey. The railroad, here
only a few months old, faded to a little grass-grown track. Then the
land opened out, flattening away to the edge of Lake Llanquihüe, and I
came to the end of railroading and mainland in Chile.
Puerto Montt, more than a thousand kilometers south of Santiago, and
capital of the province of Llanquihüe, below which Chile breaks up into
islands terminating in Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, was founded by
Germans in the middle of the last century. It is a quiet hamlet of three
or four thousand inhabitants, built of planks or wooden bricks, in a
style reminiscent of Switzerland or Westphalia, on the edge of an
immense harbor which hopes some day to serve as a station of a partly
overland route between Australia and Europe. The commerce of the region
is almost wholly in German hands, there being but two Chilean merchants,
while the native population is miserable and poverty-stricken.
Barefooted women, ragged gamins, not a few beggars, are to be seen in
the streets, and there are far too many shopkeepers in proportion to
producers. Here, too, may be seen women on horseback, wearing heavy
ponchos and wide brimmed felt hats which give them a suggestion of
misplaced “cow girls.” A short steamer trip from the town lies the large
island of Chiloé, said to be the original home of the potato and still
producing it in great quantities. Many of the neat, well-managed farms
of Chiloé are owned by Boers who refused to endure British rule after
the South African War, though a majority of the Chilotes are of old
Spanish stock with a considerable strain of Indian blood.
I had come more and more to regret that I had not reached this wet and
shivering corner of the world in the brilliant summer-time of Christmas
and New Year’s. The regret was all the keener because it was coupled
with the necessity of altering long-laid plans and retracing my steps,
always an abhorrence. From Puerto Montt I might in summer have crossed
the two Chilean lakes of Llanquihüe and Esmeraldas, Laguna Fría in the
Argentine, and finally famous Nahuel-Haupi, and, with ten days’ tramping
across the pampas, have come back to Buenos Aires by Neuquen and the
“Great Southern.” But at this season such a journey was impossible and,
having no taste for polar explorations, I let Puerto Montt, in a
latitude similar to that of Boston, stand as my “farthest south,” and
turned tail and fled back into the warmer north.
At Temuco I wired ahead for a berth on the night train to Santiago. The
precaution was hardly necessary. At the end of the train waiting in San
Rosendo were two brand new cars stencilled “Pullman Company, Chicago,”
which had not yet had time to go to rack and ruin. There were but few
passengers in the first of them; in the second I found myself entirely
alone. The conductor bowed low over my pass with, “Will you have a berth
or a stateroom?” The porter was a ragged _roto_ such as might have been
picked up at any station, but he lost no time in making up my private
parlor. Just how much the huge yearly deficit of the government railways
of Chile is due to the hauling back and forth of empty first-class cars,
and the ease with which general passes are granted, is of course a
question for financiers rather than a random wanderer. Before I turned
in, I impressed upon the melancholy porter the necessity of calling me
in time to get off at Rancagua, station for a famous American copper
mine up the mountainside to the eastward. He was vociferous in his
advice to me to “lose care.”
Unfortunately I did so. By and by I was disturbed by a thumping on my
door that finally brought me back to consciousness. I sprang up and—and
heard the irresponsible half-Indian masquerading as porter say in a
mellifluous voice:
“You wished to get off at Rancagua, señor? Well, you must hurry, for I
overslept and we are just pulling out of there.” No doubt, being a
Chilean _roto_, it had never occurred to him that his “gringo” charge
had taken off his clothes to sleep. By the time I might have had them on
again we were miles beyond, and I had gone back to bed. From Santiago I
hurried back to the Argentine so fast that I paid in cash the
breath-taking fare between my two railroad passes. I was just in time;
for the very next train was forced to back down to Los Andes again, and
the transandean pass remained snowed in until the following September.