whole square, is one of the most beautiful in the world. There is none
in New York or Chicago, or any of our cities, to compare with it. It is
of French design and built of stone, and the interior is finished in
white marble, gold-bronze ornamentations and rich red drapery and
upholstery. It is not quite as large as the Metropolitan in New York,
but, as in the Metropolitan, the two lower tiers of boxes are occupied
by the families of the “Four Hundred,” for their _grand_ opera down
there is just as much of a social function with them as it is with the
smart set in our greatest city; and, as their season is in July and
August—winter months with them—not a few of the singers that are heard
at the Metropolitan later on are heard there in their season. Above the
boxes are two balconies and a gallery where the gods congregate and howl
for _encores_ for all the world like our own. It appears that they are
not very fond of Wagner and the German music, these Bonarenses, but are
keen for the Italian and French; so, aside from _the_ opera, competent
French and Italian companies are brought over every year for long
engagements at other theaters. Also there are French opera comique,
Italian farce, and English musical comedy companies, French _café
chantant_, English music hall and our own vaudeville entertainers
without end, and dramas, even Shakespearean occasionally, and the other
classes of performances, following each other at the many theaters
continually.
Club life is one of the most attractive features. The Britishers (the
heaviest investors of foreign capital), of course, have their inevitable
cricket, polo, and races—at Hurlingham, near the city—and have erected a
substantial country clubhouse, devoted largely to the ritualistic five
o’clock tea. The scene on the broad verandas and well-kept lawns is
brilliant in the afternoon, with the white lace gowns of the women and
the white flannel and broadside panamas of the men. As the guest looks
on at the leisurely game of cricket and tea—for these rites are
solemnized together by the comfortable Briton—he can easily imagine
himself at Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, or Cape Town, where the same
function is taking place at the same hour of the day, on club grounds
almost identically the same, and to the accompaniment of the same
elaborate conversation: “Well played, old chap.” The Germans, Italians,
and Spanish also have luxurious clubhouses, and for the transient
visitor the _Club de Residentes Estranjeros_ affords a delightful
retreat. There is even a big, handsome building for the Y.M.C.A.
Among the fifty or more social organizations in Buenos Aires, the Jockey
Club is the Argentine _cercle par excellence_. Its home on Calle Florida
is of a splendor unsurpassed in clubdom. The guest who is fortunate
enough to enjoy its courtesies will be impressed by the perfect taste
and sumptuousness of its appointments; the superb marble stairway, the
banquet hall, and the famous pictures and sculptures are equaled in but
few of the palaces of Europe. Its wealth, derived from an initiation fee
of $4000 and annual dues of $1500 for each member, and a “rake-off” of
ten per cent. of the amounts wagered at its racetrack, together with
gate receipts, accumulate so rapidly that it is a source of genuine
embarrassment to the governing board.
A short time ago the club voted to devote its surplus to the purchase of
a dozen blocks in the heart of the city, the idea being to transform the
tract into a beautiful boulevard. It would have cost nearly $14,000,000
in our money. The project was abandoned, not because of the cost, but on
the ground of impracticability. During the racing season, held under the
auspices of the Club at Palermo Park, the _Porteño_ is seen at his best.
Paris gowns and picture hats are displayed in profusion in the
grandstand, lawns, and luxurious victorias and automobiles that line the
course, and with the correct dress and animation of the men, and the
prodigality everywhere in evidence (last season $25,000,000 was placed
on the horses), the scene takes on an aspect truly Parisian.
As might be expected in such a vigorously modern city, the severest of
the restrictions on social intercourse familiar in Latin capitals are
here impatiently thrust aside. In the five o’clock parade of the
fashionables that wends its way toward the beautiful Palermo Park on
Sundays, there are no closed carriages or dark mantillas to conceal the
allurements of the señoritas, although many may still huddle demurely at
the sides of their dueñas while they distribute the most decorous of
smiles among their eager acquaintances of the opposite sex. Here
palm-bordered Sarmiento Avenue is crowded with carriages and motor cars
six, often eight, rows deep, two stationary in the center and two moving
on either side, in which ride as smartly gowned women as may be seen
anywhere in America. In the same throng glimpses may be caught of
reigning music-hall favorites, at whose sides are usually to be found
care-free horsemen just in from the Camp, mounted on superb stallions
heavy with silver trappings, and generally with an air of somewhat less
sophisticated enjoyment of the event.
[Illustration: JOCKEY CLUB’S GRANDSTAND AT THE RACE TRACK.]
There is a prodigality about the _Porteño_ in his pleasures that
staggers the visitor from the North. Backed by an almost limitless
wealth from cattle ranch or plantation, he scatters his _pesos_ with a
princely hand. And, of course, there is the obverse of the picture.
There is the under world here, peopled largely by immigration from the
centers of European unrest, in which there is to be found an extreme of
destitution. This is the breeding place of anarchistic ideas, that
frequently find expression in violence and that are surely becoming one
of the city’s most serious problems.
The zest for amusement among all classes finds many outlets. Strolling
along the Calle Florida, or the Calles Cangallo, Esmeralda, Cuyo, Maipó,
and other well-paved, brilliantly illuminated streets of the theater
district, after the fever of the business day has subsided, one drops in
at the “English Bar,” the “Bierhalle,” “Confiteria,” or “Café Parisien,”
and is sure to find a compatriot to join him in the refreshment of his
predilection. Or, for the more solid enjoyment of dinner, the visitor,
whether French, North American, Briton, or Turk, can find his favorite
national dishes excellently served—at the Restaurant Charpentier, where
an orchestra, really good, will for the moment take the homesick
Parisian back to his native boulevards; or at the “Sportsman,” where the
North American is beguiled from his nostalgia by Sousa’s marches,
perhaps, or by biograph pictures of steeple-chasers and Oriental
dancers; or at Monsch’s Restaurant, which specializes in the Briton’s
needs—where, with a look of acute understanding, the head waiter will
permit the guest to select his own English mutton chop or steak from the
glass-doored ice chest.
The outdoor café life is not as well known, so narrow are the streets;
even Calle Florida, which is the essentially fashionable shopping street
of the central town, is lamentably narrow. With the exception of the
Avenida de Mayo, which runs from the plaza containing the Cathedral and
President’s palace to the new chambers of Congress, and divides the city
into its northern and southern sections, and the Avenida Alvear, which
leads from the main part of the city to Palermo Park, flanked with
costly homes and interspersed with gardens and plazas that lend a wealth
of verdure and flowers to the broad avenue, the streets are so narrow
that in the business section vehicles are required by city ordinances to
move in the same direction, down one street and up the next. But in this
splendid, stately Avenida de Mayo of hers, which, except in appearance,
has the characteristics of the business part of New York’s Fifth Avenue
from Madison Square to the Park, Buenos Aires has a thoroughfare that
rivals Rio’s Avenida Central in beauty, and, with its finer hotels and
cafés and French architecture, possesses even more of the attractions of
a Parisian boulevard.
Buenos Aires is not a city that calls for the usual precautions taken by
travelers. All the creature comforts may be had here, although, it must
be confessed, at a cost greatly in excess of prices familiar to North
Americans. There are good physicians and dentists, and no less than
sixteen hospitals—one of which, the British Hospital, is a magnificently
equipped institution, and the one patronized by the American colony.
There are electric street cars (which carried 125,000,000 passengers
last year), splendid trains that carry passengers in thoroughly modern
and well-served coaches to almost every part of the settled country,
first-class carriages, taxicabs, hotels, department stores, and shops of
every description.
II
Leaving the capital for a general tour through Argentina, the visitor
will soon come to appreciate the _Porteño’s_ division of the republic
into the two parts: Buenos Aires and _El Campo_. For the greater part,
the Camp is a vast plain, covering five hundred million acres of flat,
fertile soil, with scarcely a natural hillock higher than those thrown
up by the ants, and no depression more marked than those which the
cartwheels have plowed—stretching from horizon to horizon, north, west,
and south—vast, silent, and awe-inspiring in the majesty of its enormous
extent and productiveness—the calm, inexhaustible bosom which suckles
the prodigious infant on the Plata.
These pampas are the homes of the _estancieros_, the name given to the
masters of the great breeding ranches and plantations. Some possess
_estancias_ that are really feudal in extent; one, in Patagonia, is as
large as the State of Rhode Island. Their homes and outbuildings are
about the only objects that give a human touch to the mile upon mile of
cattle ranges, of green maize and golden wheat, of purple alfalfa and
vivid blue linseed flower, unless one comes upon the black mud hut of
the _colono_, or small farmer who works the field on shares. An
occasional clump of man-planted trees may also be met with, and on the
fringe of the pampas are a few widely scattered Indian settlements; but
there is little to modify the metaphor of the ocean so universally used
to describe these almost limitless plains. Even the seagulls sweep
inland for hundreds of miles to add to its effectiveness. When the very
heart of the country is reached, the traveler may scan the horizon from
every point of the compass and know that in every direction what lies
beyond is exactly the same.
The seasons, which are much like our own, although exactly the reverse
in their occurrence, bring their appropriate activities. During the busy
harvest period the Camp takes on an aspect of bustle which convinces the
traveler that this great business republic has cast the word “_mañana_”
(to-morrow) forever from its “bright lexicon of youth.” Harvesting
machines cutting a swath, not four or six, but fourteen feet in width
through the wheat fields, threshers with powerful blasts that pile the
straw in great stacks, and on the ranches the great armies of horned
cattle add the convincing touch to the scene of prosperity.
“A recent census,” says the Bulletin of the Pan American Union (July,
1911), “shows that in Argentina there are over 29,000,000 bovine cattle,
7,500,000 horses, about 500,000 mules and 300,000 asses, over 67,000,000
sheep, almost 4,000,000 goats and 1,403,591 pigs, with a total value of
about $700,000,000, gold.... It is an interesting fact that all the
animal food so abundantly supplied by this country is the result of
stocking this incomparably rich land with animals introduced from
European sources. In pre-Columbian times the only domestic animals
possessed by the natives were the alpaca and llama. The alpaca was grown
for its flesh and its fleece, while the llama was used as a beast of
burden. In 1535 the Spaniards brought in horses and asses, and, shortly
afterward, bovine cattle were taken to Asunción (Paraguay) by a
Portuguese. In 1569 four thousand head were distributed along the
regions of the Rio de la Plata. Sheep came later. At one time, when the
natives were exceedingly hostile, a few horses and asses were abandoned
on the pampas, and from that stock have descended the innumerable herds
which to-day cover the almost limitless plains; ... but during recent
years Argentina has imported the best animals obtainable and has bred
with the direct intention of improving the stock as much as possible.”
[Illustration: PRIZE WINNERS FROM “THE CAMP.”]
With the cattle rides the _gaucho_, the cowboy of the pampas. Dressed in
smart _poncho_ (a sort of cape, with a hole for the head to go through),
and bright-hued _zombachos_, or wide Turkish trousers, tight-fitting
boots, and _sombrero_, and sitting astride his saddle, richly ornamented
with silver, he presents a sight worth seeing. To the _gaucho_ the Camp
is indebted for its only romance and picturesqueness; he has given to it
its songs and tales of adventure, its tragedies and the brightness of
its life. Lithe and graceful, he is a consummate horseman and rivals his
Texan counterpart in feats of horsemanship and skill with the lasso. He
is proud, simple-minded, and faithful in his friendships, but when
aroused to anger by a slight or by deceit, he is as elemental in his
vengefulness—for there is a strain of the old fierce Tupi-Guarany in the
blood of most of them—as the early types of his race who ranged the
pampas during the so-called mediæval period of Argentine history.
Needless to say, he has contributed his quota in the wars of the
republic and has furnished the inspiration for many a stirring drama in
the literature of the country.
The story of the pampas and the life and habits of their workers and of
the denizens nature has sent to share in their richness, has been told
by many writers of our day, notably by W. H. Koebel, an Englishman, in
his recently published “Modern Argentina.” It is the story of a great
country and a great business enterprise that is fast spreading its
activity farther and farther north, west, and south—to the north, toward
the still savage Chaco country and the mountainous provinces of Jujuy,
Salta, and Catamarca; to the west, toward the Andean uplands, and
southward to the federal territories in the region that was once
referred to on the maps as Patagonia. Gradually the cattle ranch is
being pushed farther afield to give way to agriculture, while the
ranchmen in their turn are penetrating the field of the timber industry.
There is practically no village life in Argentina; there is no middle
class between the lordly _estanciero_ and the laborer. The very
necessary element of the small farmer, working his own independent
property, is gradually being introduced, as the owners of the great
estates are beginning to subdivide their holdings. When this new element
shall have been thoroughly absorbed into the commonwealth, and the
nation shall have acquired a “_volk_,” the prosperity of Argentina will
be assured for all time. The development of the country is still in its
infancy; for years to come there will be room for an increasing influx
of capital and men who can take part in the most modern and greatest
wealth-producing enterprise on the globe. So far the English and Germans
are the chief among the foreign capitalists who have sought out this
present-day Eldorado. The better acquaintance with Argentina and the
other countries to the south of us, so intelligently and industriously
fostered by the Pan American Union at Washington, will, it is to be
hoped, induce a North American financial invasion of Argentina, an
invasion that will be more than welcomed by the “_Yankis_” of the South.
The traveler who takes the seven-hundred-mile journey westward through
the Camp, luxuriously housed in the coaches of the Great Western
Railroad, comes upon a different scene and a different life when he
reaches the ancient city of Mendoza in the foothills of the Andes. Here
it was that San Martín recruited and organized his Army of Liberation,
the army with which, emerging suddenly from its isolated hiding place,
he startled the world by his crossing of the Andes to fall upon the
unsuspecting Spanish. Mendoza is now the center of the wine and fruit
industry. It is a thriving, well-supplied little city, with a population
of between thirty and forty thousand, comfortable hotels, a theater, and
a broad boulevard of its own, overhung with trees and named for the
great revolutionary leader, where they have their band concerts and
afternoon carriage parade just as they do in Buenos Aires. Only here, in
their rather more dusky complexions, lots of the raven-haired,
black-eyed occupants of the carriages show traces of Indian descent.
The development of the wine trade is in keeping with the phenomenal
progress of the rest of the country. Although the great bulk of the
product is not of the highest quality, the presses turn out each year
enormous quantities that bear the labels of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Moselle,
and Muscatel, produced from the very best imported vines. Other fruits
have been found to grow equally well in this section: peaches, pears,
and plums reach a high state of culture, while apples, quinces, and
cherries do very well. It is the boast of the Argentino that his country
is capable of producing every conceivable kind of fruit, and it is not
an idle boast.
At this point—Mendoza—a change of car is made to the less comfortable
narrow-gauge road that takes the traveler through the fastnesses of the
Andes. The route leads first through the peach orchards and vineyards,
with the snow peaks easily distinguishable in the background. The
Mendoza River, fed by the melting snows on the mountain tops, tumbles
along its way and is crossed and re-crossed many times en route. Distant
about one hundred miles, one comes to the Puente del Inca, the famous
natural bridge spanning a chasm one hundred and fifty feet in width,
about which are many native legends of Incarial times, for the bridge
formed part of the great system of roads built by the Incas. A little
farther on, mounting to a still higher altitude, the station of Las
Cuevas is reached, the last stop in Argentine territory, and the
entrance to the tunnel through the mountain, half a mile below the
Uspallata Pass—an engineering feat deserving of a chapter by itself. The
elevation here is in excess of ten thousand feet, and the scene one of
impressive grandeur, fascinating in the kaleidoscope of color that
floods the gorges and the giant peaks.
[Illustration: THE USPALLATA PASS.]
Above, at the Cumbre, as the pass at the top is called, if one forsakes
the comforts of the passenger coach for mule-back, he can view the now
world-famous “Christ of the Andes,” a bronze figure of the Prince of
Peace rising to a height of twenty-six feet above its massive granite
pedestal. It was erected to commemorate the peace treaty that brought to
an end the long-continued differences between Chile and Argentina.
Growing out of the boundary dispute, this controversy had become more
and more acute as the long-neglected Patagonian territory increased in
promise. The boundary, finally fixed in 1902, by Sir Thomas Holdich’s
commission, runs along the summit of the Andean ridge. On the base of
the monument a tablet bears the words: “Sooner shall these mountains
crumble to dust than the people of Argentina and Chile break the peace
to which they have pledged themselves at the feet of Christ the
Redeemer.”
From Carácoles, the Chilean terminus of the tunnel, the
Transandino-Chileno carries the traveler to the station of Los Andes.
From here to the port city of Valparaiso, Chile, the route is over the
Chilean State Railroad, which is of standard gauge and passes through
some rich and fertile valleys on its way toward the Pacific.
III
To the east of the Cordilleras, and south of the river Negro, stretches
the territory long known as Patagonia, first in swelling plateaux and
then flattening out into a continuation of the upper level pampas. This
is now the scene of Argentina’s advancing sheep industry. For Patagonia,
east of the Andean summits, and the east half of Tierra del Fuego were
awarded to Argentina by the boundary arbitrator, King Edward VII,
following the report of Sir Thomas Holdich’s commission, and is now
divided into the Federal Territories of Rio Negro, Chubut, and Santa
Cruz. The land of Patagonia, so named by the early explorers from the
big feet (_pata goas_) of the Tehuelche Indians, is now reached by
steamer to Punta Arenas in Magellan Strait, the southernmost city on the
globe, for the railways of Argentina have not yet penetrated this
country to any considerable extent. In climate it ranges from the
temperate to extreme cold, like that of northern Michigan in the winter
months. From the time of Darwin, who first took the country out of the
category of _terras incognitas_, Patagonia has lost most of its mystery
and is now being settled by the diverted immigration from Buenos Aires.
The Scots, English, and Germans have taken up large allotments of land,
and many New Zealand sheep men have come over to add their skill to the
leading industry. There are also colonies of Boers and Jews.
The Fuegian Archipelago, at the southern extremity of South America,
covers a territory as large as Nebraska. A tortuous, wind-swept
labyrinth of waterways separates the hundreds of islands that constitute
this group. The largest is Tierra del Fuego, half as large as Illinois.
It is divided longitudinally between Chile and Argentina, by far the
larger and more valuable portion having been awarded to the former by
the Royal Arbitrator. The name was given to the archipelago by Magellan,
when he saw the trails of smoke from the signal fires of the natives who
followed his epoch-making course through the strait that now bears his
name. Very little of the Fuegian country is under cultivation, although
thousands of sheep graze over its rich valleys and verdant plains. The
southernmost point, Cape Horn (in Chilean territory), is a monster rock,
bleak and forbidding, against which the antarctic storms beat with such
terrific force that, in the old days of sailing vessels, it was called
the headstone of the mariners’ most populous graveyard.
A vastly different scene awaits the traveler who penetrates into the
tropical wilds of the northern territories of Argentina. Going aboard
one of the fine steamers of Nicholas Mihanovitch—the kings of the
river traffic—at Buenos Aires, the traveler follows the course of the
Paraná, which is the main water highway of Argentina. The trip will
take him through the richest provinces of the Camp, past the busy
miniature Buenos Aires, the city of Rosario, which is the port of
shipment for the grain of this region, and up into the tropical
scenery and mystery of the Chaco and Misiones territories, opening up
vistas of prodigious natural growths and riotous beauty, differing in
every way from the somber majesty of the Fuegian country. The Chaco
and the territory of Formosa, adjoining it on the north, are still
almost wholly occupied by uncivilized Indians. Up to the present time
this region has been exploited chiefly for the wood of the _quebracho_
(_qui-bra-hacha_—axe-breaker) tree, which yields the best quality of
tannin and timber for railroad ties; it is richer in the former
product than any other tree yet discovered.
[Illustration: IGUAZÚ FALLS, WHERE BRAZIL, PARAGUAY, AND ARGENTINA
MEET.]