THROUGH GUATEMALA ON FOOT AND BY RAIL
My entrance into Central America was rather amusing. I had fallen in
with two other Americans, and after a night spent at Mariscal on the
border, we started to walk across a wooden bridge into Guatemala. The
rails of the “Pan American” line ran across it—but the trains did not!
We had scarcely set foot on the bridge when we heard a great shrieking
across the river. Three very ragged Guatemalan soldiers, barefooted and
wearing calico uniforms and straw hats, had run out of a palm-leaf hut
and were waving three weapons. One was a very aged musket, another a
rusty bayonet, and the third a piece of wire that looked like a ramrod.
These “three musketeers” had one whole gun among them, though probably
no cartridges.
“Don’t cross the bridge!” they yelled. “No one is allowed to cross the
bridge!”
“Why not?” we shouted back. “We are not very heavy!”
“You must come across in a boat!” they ordered. “The Pope himself cannot
cross that bridge; Guatemala does not wish it!”
[Illustration:
The central _plaza_ of a Guatemalan village—just bare ground with palm
trees here and there.
]
By this time they themselves had nearly crossed it in running toward us.
As we turned back to find a boat, the guard sought again the shelter of
their palm-leaf hut. A very ancient and leaky rowboat soon carried us
across to the southern bank of the shallow Suchiate River. A dozen
childish-looking shabby soldiers surrounded us and led us to the
_comandancia_. There an officer whose dignity and uniform were worthy of
a general got out a big ledger and wrote down in it answers to all sorts
of questions. Name, birthplace, business, religion, reason for coming to
Guatemala, and a great many other points that seemed even less
important, interested him. At that time Guatemala had a stern dictator,
Estrada Cabrera, who required his officials to keep close track of all
foreigners entering the country. Since then political conditions in
Guatemala have become much more stable.
[Illustration:
Down in Central America there is usually no better transportation than
crude two-wheeled oxcarts. Spanish-speaking people always fasten the
yoke to the top of the oxen’s horns.
]
The little baggage we carried having been carefully examined, we swung
it over our shoulders and set out to walk to a railroad station nearly
fifty miles away. There was a little narrow-gauge railway from the sandy
jungle town of Ayutla, just beyond where we landed, but no train would
run on it that day. The sun was blazing hot, and when we were not
ankle-deep in sand we were wading rivers or pushing through tunnel-like
openings in the dense jungle. My companions fell behind but I went on
and at night I reached Coatepeque, where I found a hotel run by an
American. The place was hardly up to the level of, let us say, the
Waldorf-Astoria, yet my bill for lodging and breakfast was fifteen
dollars—or, to use the Spanish term, fifteen _pesos_.
However, do not let this keep you away from Guatemala. One can often get
sixty Guatemalan dollars for one American dollar. The two Americans who
crossed the border with me had only three American dollars with them
then, yet next morning when they arrived at Coatepeque they had more
than a hundred dollars left! Meanwhile they had paid five dollars to
ride all night in a two-wheeled bullock cart that made them feel as if
they had been through a threshing machine.
The owners of big estates often send a peon a hundred miles or more to
some town where there is a bank, to get the money for paying off
workmen. The peon, carrying a grain sack full of the ragged, dirty paper
money, walks back all the way alone. At night he tosses the sack into a
corner of the hut where he is to sleep, and no one ever seems to think
of robbing him.
Where Coffee Grows
Guatemala is a land of volcanoes, some of them still active. All over
the country great sharp-pointed peaks, cinder-colored, reach into the
sky. In a way the volcanoes of Central America are a blessing, for if
their eruptions sometimes bring along an earthquake and shake down a
city, the lava dust makes the soil very rich, and a few good coffee
crops usually pay for all the damage.
The two principal products of Central America, at least so far as
concerns the rest of the world, are coffee and bananas. Some of the
largest coffee plantations in Guatemala are along the road we followed
after leaving Coatepeque. Coffee bushes, about as high as a man’s head
and so compact that they look almost like little green haystacks, grow
best at about two thousand feet above sea level in tropical countries.
The coast lands are too hot and moist for coffee, and highlands like the
Mexican plateau are too cold and dry. Plantations, made up of long
parallel rows of bushes, may be found in most of the foothills of
Central America, and because coffee requires some protection from the
blazing tropical sun it is planted in the shade of banana groves or thin
forests.
Coffee bushes are covered with bright red berries. Inside the red skin
of each berry we find two white beans, each having a flat and a rounded
side. The flat sides face each other. Indian women and girls pick the
berries, putting them into baskets and then into sacks, which men carry
to the center of the estate. There, among the buildings where the owner
or manager and nearly all the plantation people live, the sacks are
emptied upon outdoor floors. The berries are shoveled over and over in
the hot sunshine and old women hull them in the shade of their huts.
When the separated berries are well dried they are ready for market but
they must be roasted and ground before they are in a form to use for
making the coffee we drink.
Many of the plantations belong to Germans, and most of the others to
rich Guatemalans, who perhaps live in Paris or New York and never see
their estates. The Indians who do the work, picking or shoveling or
carrying coffee from daylight until dark, with only an hour or two off
for food and perhaps a short nap, are paid less than ten cents a day in
our money, though they receive a monthly allowance of fifty pounds of
corn and beans and half a pound of salt.
Guatemalan Indians
[Illustration:
An Indian boy of Guatemala carrying his small brother on top of a
heavy load he is taking to market.
]
We met thousands of Indian carriers. Most of the trails of Guatemala are
so poor that the best way to carry goods over them is on men’s backs.
Our road being a little better, we met some oxcarts. The yokes were so
tightly strapped to their horns that the oxen could not even shake off
the flies. There were donkeys under huge packs, men riding mules, even
an occasional automobile where the road was especially good. But the
procession of Indians loaded with freight was almost continuous—not only
strong young men, but old men, boys, women and even little girls who
early learn to carry big earthenware jars of water. In the evening we
passed groups of these carriers squatting around little fires cooking
their suppers.
The Indians of Guatemala are short but very sturdy. There are so many of
them that Guatemala might almost be called an Indian republic. Clothed
in their ancient costumes, homespun and colored with crude dyes, they
look picturesque and very interesting at first sight. On closer view
they appear rather stupid. Perhaps that is not their fault. They have
been much abused ever since Alvarado, a cruel lieutenant of Cortés,
conquered Guatemala four hundred years ago. Even now they are forced to
accept a job from anyone who will pay them low wages, though no one can
require them to carry more than a hundred pounds or go more than two
days’ walk away from home.
Only one-third of the people of Guatemala claim to have any European
ancestors. Six out of ten persons are pure Indian, and eighteen or
twenty different tribes are said to be represented among them. Many are
probably descendants of the Toltecs who, between the seventh and twelfth
centuries, were driven out of Mexico by the Aztecs. Many more are Mayas,
of the tribe that left splendid ruins in Yucatan, Guatemala, Salvador
and Honduras. Is it not sad to think that these people now are unable to
build anything better than a thatched _adobe_ hut unless someone tells
them how?
[Illustration:
Panama Mail Steamship Co., San Francisco
These blanket venders of Guatemala offer a fine study in the more
intelligent type of Indian found in that part of Central America.
]
One very dark-skinned tribe, who worry little about clothes, build their
homes in palm trees, on platforms thirty feet above the ground. Since
such platforms can be reached only by climbing the notched tree trunks
that serve as ladders, the children learn to walk up and down tree
trunks almost before they learn to walk on the ground. The natives’
large toes are very much overdeveloped by constant climbing. Members of
this tribe use bows and arrows.
[Illustration:
Panama Mail Steamship Co., San Francisco
A picturesque group of Guatemalan pottery venders.
]
Most of the Guatemala Indians are very docile, obeying even a white
child. They are small in stature, the men averaging hardly five feet in
height, and the women being even shorter. However, an American who could
carry for an hour on a good level road what these Indians can carry all
day, and day after day, over steep and difficult mountain trails, would
be considered a wonderful athlete. Carrying heavy loads gives them very
erect soldierly bodies, but often their complexions are bad because they
eat a yellow earth mixed with sulphur, which they think will cure
disease. Some of the men have thin beards, in contrast to the naturally
smooth faces common among American Indians.
Queer clothes in bright colors are so much liked that a group of
Guatemalans resemble an opera chorus. The women wear no hats, but have
three garments—a loose waist, a thick cloth skirt, and a gaudy sash.
They wear as much jewelry as they can get, especially necklaces of
silver coins. They are very expert at such handicrafts as weaving cloth
for garments and making ropes and hammocks of maguey fiber or cactus
hemp.
We Reach the Capital
We had hoped to reach Retalhuleu by the end of our second day of walking
and to take a train for Guatemala City at six the next morning. But the
trail was so bad that we finally stopped at a little thatched village,
ate a supper of native bread, cheese and coffee, and stretched out for a
few hours’ sleep. I got up again at two in the morning and for six miles
stumbled along the trail through the darkness. Bands of dogs dashed out
at me from every hut, barking savagely; fortunately their bark was worse
than their bite. By trotting the last few miles, I just caught my train.
It is barely a hundred and thirty miles from Retalhuleu to the capital,
but the train took twelve hours for the journey. We made a large number
of stops. Many of the passengers were yellow and listless with fever,
and did not seem to enjoy life much in this land of perpetual summer.
[Illustration:
Panama Mail Steamship Co., San Francisco
Mount Agua, Guatemala, one of the volcanoes which has caused so much
trouble near the country’s capital.
]
About noon, at Escuintla, our train turned eastward and began climbing
from the coffee-growing Pacific slope to the pine-tree heights of
central Guatemala. We spent an hour winding along the shores of
beautiful blue Lake Amatitlán, then crossed part of it on a stone
causeway. There are several such gem-like lakes of sparkling blue water
in settings of towering mountains. On the larger ones are steamers, as
well as the Indians’ dugout canoes. Most of the steamers—like the hotels
and the sugar, cacao, and coffee plantations of Guatemala—are owned by
Germans.
We passed close to two cone-shaped volcanoes that can be seen from
almost any part of the country. It was getting dark when the first
houses of Guatemala City began to appear among the trees, and half an
hour later we dragged into the station. A barefooted policeman in a
straw hat had already gone through the train writing down facts about
the passengers, so we were free to make our way through a shouting mob
and try to find supper and lodging.