Birdseye Views of Far Lands Part 12

The train ran almost on the dot. A hotbox delayed it thirty minutes on one occasion but it was carefully watched. At every stop for hours the train would hardly come to a standstill before a couple of men were at that box. The engines have no bells on them and the whistle is blown just before the train starts rather than before it stops as in our country. The train was largely made up of sleepers and a diner. The cars were quite comfortable. The berths are crosswise rather than lengthwise as in our sleepers. Everything on this train, however, from fare to eats was very expensive.

On many of the larger farms the better breeds of stock are being raised, agricultural schools are springing up and scientific farming is being talked about. The government is taking a hand along many lines. Some of the great estancias are being divided and subdivided. The Welch people have a large settlement where better methods are being introduced. The Jews have a large colony and even the Italians are looking forward to a better day. Men from this country are entering in small numbers but with ideas that will revolutionize things, and especially the school house.

An Englishman truly said: "Wherever the Germans go you find the a.r.s.enal; wherever the French go you find the railroad; wherever the British go you find the custom house, but wherever the Americans go you find the school house."

CHAPTER XXIII

YANKEEDOM OF SOUTH AMERICA--CHILE

On account of their energy and enterprise the people of Chile have been called the Yankees of South America. They are a quick tempered people but often show a disposition to be whiter than their skin would signify.

On a railroad train I saw a well-dressed young Chilean raise the car window. Behind him was an elderly man who did not like the wind blowing in and he evidently made some sign to the conductor, who simply put the window down.

This angered the young man who raised the window again. A little later the conductor came back and said something to the young man who lowered the window immediately. The old gentleman had moved by this time and I supposed that the incident was closed.

A little later the young man called the conductor and had him go and apologize to the old gentleman who came and sat down in the seat with the young man. Then they settled their differences, smoked and visited together like old friends. I felt a sort of admiration for these men that they would settle their difference on the spot and became friends.

Such a procedure is much better than carrying a grouch.

The country of Chile is a narrow strip of land from fifty to two hundred and fifty miles wide, but so long that if one end were placed at New Orleans the other end would reach to the Arctic Circle. The mighty ridge of the Andes mountains extends almost the entire distance. One of these peaks in Chile is nearly five miles high--the highest on the globe except Mount Everest.

In Chile there are many rich valleys yet much of the land is a desolate desert. One writer suggests regarding this awful silent region that the Desert of Sahara is a botanical garden in comparison with it. I traveled five hundred miles along this desert without seeing a tree or a blade of gra.s.s. This was in the northern part where it never rains. Much of the southern part is covered with water-soaked forests.

Yet this Chilean desert is almost as valuable as a gold mine. Here are the only large deposits of nitrate of soda in the world. While no plants of any kind grow in this desert yet from it is obtained the product that farmers all over the world use for fertilizer. Plants of all kinds must have food to make them grow and this Chilean desert alone furnishes this food in abundance and in suitable form.

Many millions are invested in establishments to get this nitrate, or saltpeter as it is often called, from the worthless material with which it is mixed and railroads to carry it to port. Little towns have sprung up along the seash.o.r.e where the nitrates make up cargoes of hundreds of s.h.i.+ps which carry this fertilizer to all parts of the world.

A gentleman who lives in Santiago told me how he could set out tomato plants in the best soil, take a little handful of nitrates that look like common salt, dissolve it in water and pour it on the soil and the difference it would make is almost unbelievable. But a spoonful dropped on the plant will kill it. It never rains on these nitrate beds--if it did they would be worthless.

Of course, the people who do the work in these deserts or in the little ports along the sh.o.r.e have a hard life. No green lawns or trees adorn their villages. The dust is irritable and the people are a hard-looking cla.s.s. In one of these towns which I saw, Antof.a.gasta by name, the water the people use is brought nearly two hundred miles. The people used to drink champagne mostly for it was cheaper than water.

Not far from Antof.a.gasta are the great salt plains, said to be large enough to supply the whole world with this commodity for generations.

The real nitrate beds are from fifteen to fifty miles from the ocean and at least three thousand feet above sea level. The largest beds are from four to five hundred miles in length so the supply is practically inexhaustible. When the nitrates are richest they are mixed with rock--about half and half. It is blasted out with dynamite, loaded on carts and dumped into great machines that grind it to a coa.r.s.e powder, then thrown into immense tanks of boiling water where it forms in crystals on the sides and bottom. The water is then drawn off, the white sparkling stuff shoveled onto drying boards and when thoroughly dry is sacked and s.h.i.+pped.

The liquid that is drawn off from these vats is made into iodine, which is so valuable that a cask of it is worth several hundred dollars. Chile owns about all the nitrate deposits yet discovered. She exports millions of tons of it annually, levies a tax on every ton of it and thus the government receives an immense income each year from this one industry.

In addition to the nitrate industry, Chile has immense stores of copper, tin and other metals. At one port where the s.h.i.+p stopped a small boat brought out a few sacks of copper ore. It took but a few minutes to put it on board but one of the officers said it was worth thirteen thousand dollars. At another Chilean port six hundred tons of tin were added to our cargo. Chile is about the only country in South America where coal is found in anything like large quant.i.ties.

Of course such a mountainous region is volcanic. There are many earthquakes but they seldom do much harm. My first night in Chile was spent in Los Andes and I had not been in bed five minutes until an earthquake shock made it tremble like a leaf. But the people are so used to it that they pay no attention whatever to these minor quakes. At the time San Francisco was ruined, Valparaiso was all but destroyed but you would never know it by a visit to the city now.

Chile includes a large part of the island of Tierra del Fuego. At the very southern tip of this is Cape Horn. This is a gigantic rock fourteen hundred feet high that juts out into the ocean and the great waves that continually lash against it make it perhaps the most dreaded spot by sailors in all the trade routes of the world. On all sides are wrecked vessels and this rock has been named the Giant Headstone in the Sailor's Graveyard.

It was the famous Magellan who discovered the water pa.s.sage above Cape Horn and it is called the Strait of Magellan. While safer than the route around Cape Horn, yet many are the stories of s.h.i.+pwreck, hunger and suffering told by those who went this way during the earlier days. Here are some of the names of places along the Strait: "Fury Island," "Famine Reach," "Desolation Harbor," "Fatal Bay," "Hope Inlet," and "Last Wreck Point."

No one lives down at this point but tribes of Indians. It was the signals and campfires of these Indians that caused Magellan to call the island "Tierra del Fuego." The name means "Land of Fire." These Indians are said to be one of the lowest cla.s.ses of human beings in existence today. Although the weather is very cold these savages wear but little clothing--in fact, they wore none until of later years they began getting cast off garments from wrecks and are now making some of their own clothing from the skins of animals.

On this strait is located Punta Arenas, which is the southernmost town in the world. It is directly south of Boston and farther south of the equator than Winnipeg is north of it. Only about a thousand people live here. Many of them are rough characters and live hard and comfortless lives. This town is the only port within a thousand miles.

Although cold and cheerless most of the time, yet millions of sheep are raised in this southern land and Punta Arenas is the s.h.i.+pping point. A kind of coa.r.s.e gra.s.s grows here that is nouris.h.i.+ng and sheep thrive and live for weeks alone on the open plains. Wool, hides and meat are brought to this port and s.h.i.+pped to the outside world. Of course all clothing, building material and machinery must be brought in for there are no factories in Punta Arenas.

Santiago, the capital of Chile, is located in a valley that has been called the "Garden of South America." This valley is seven hundred miles long, fifty or sixty miles wide and hundreds of feet above sea level. On the east are the snow-capped Andes and on the west the coast ranges. On the mountain slopes on either side are the great herds of cattle and sheep and lower down the rich fields of alfalfa and grain, fruit and flowers.

Strange to say the farming is nearly all done with oxen. I counted six yoke of oxen in a ten-acre field. Women as well as men work in the fields. The fences are made of stone but in many parts of the valley you never see a stone in the field. If they have any modern farm machinery I did not see it. All the fields are irrigated, as it seldom rains in this valley in the summer time.

Most of the best land is owned by wealthy men who live in the city.

Those who do the work are mostly Indians or half breeds, and they have but few of the comforts of life. Many of the farms are great tracts and there is a store where the worker can purchase what he needs but the prices are high and he is kept in debt. A country can never really prosper where the tillers of the soil are ignorant and have no say in the affairs of the government.

It is in this valley where most of the Chileans live. While in other parts of the country there are but two people to the square mile, here in this valley there are seventeen to the square mile. Here are most of the schools and colleges, cities, railways and manufacturing plants.

When about sixty per cent of the people are illiterate and this cla.s.s is almost entirely the laboring cla.s.s it does not look as if conditions would be changed very soon.

I saw more drinking in Chile than in any other South American country. A portion of the city of Valparaiso seems to be given over almost entirely to the liquor dealers and the people who throng that district are hard-looking folks. The f.a.g ends of civilization seem to have gathered here. This is the only city in South America where I was accosted by both men and women and they almost try to hold one up in the streets in broad daylight.

Nearly all the Chilean women dress in black. A black shawl is worn and you would think they are all dressed in mourning, but they are not. This black cloth is called a manto and all women, both rich and poor, wear them. The business portion of the city of Valparaiso is built on a narrow strip of land at the foot of a high hill.

All along there are elevators or lifts as they call them. For a couple of pennies you can step into one of these lifts and be taken up a hundred feet or more. While one lift goes up another comes down as they are always built in pairs. There are winding ways where horses and donkeys can walk up but no wheeled vehicle can be taken up or down for it is too steep.

For this reason the dairymen and venders all have donkeys or small horses. A dairyman will have a couple of large milk cans, one on either side of the beast, or perhaps a small barrel on the top of a frame or saddle. The man leads or drives the animal and they are so sure-footed that they can go up a place so steep that one not used to climbing could not make the ascent.

There are but few North Americans in Chile. I had breakfast (they call the noon meal breakfast) with the American Club. There were but twenty-five or thirty present, mostly business men. But few of these men are satisfied to stay long in Chile.

The American Y. M. C. A. is doing some good work in Valparaiso, as in all other South American cities. The rooms are well patronized and it was homelike to see the leading magazines of the United States upon the reading table. The Sunday afternoon program that I attended was well gotten up and very interesting.

While in Chile you see more to remind you of the United States than in any other South American country but I was not favorably impressed with the people. They will not compare in looks or actions with the people east of the Andes. Lack of education, culture and refinement are noticeable everywhere. Religion and morality are conspicuous by their absence and one cannot but pity those who live among them although one sees some good traits in many of them.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE SWITZERLAND OF SOUTH AMERICA--BOLIVIA

In the very heart of the South American continent there is a vast table-land nearly as large as the great Mississippi valley, that some t.i.tanic convulsion has boosted up nearly three miles in the air. This great plateau is hemmed in by mountains, the coast range on the west and the main range on the east.

These mountain peaks rise as high as twenty-two thousand feet. In these heights, two and one-half miles above sea level is Lake t.i.ticaca, which is one hundred and sixty miles long and thirty miles wide. This lake, which is the highest body of water in the western hemisphere, is fed by streams of water from the Andes and is so cold that ice is formed along the edge every night in the year although the lake itself is never frozen over. The lake has no outlet and the color of the water is a steely blue.

This lake forms the northwestern border of Bolivia. Situated as it is, including both mountains and table-land, Bolivia has been called the Switzerland of South America. It is more than twelve times as large as the state of Iowa and is the cradle of the ancient civilization that made up the world-famous Inca empire which existed many centuries ago.

The people of Bolivia today have the blood of this ancient race in their veins and they are an industrious people. Visiting a mission school in Buenos Aires I was much impressed by one young man who seemed to be the peer of the two hundred students in the school.

On talking to this young man I found that he was from Bolivia. How he heard about this mission school I have forgotten, but the story of how he tramped two hundred miles over the mountains and then across the great Argentine plains determined to reach this school and work his way through, could not be forgotten. On Sunday morning I went to the American church and this fellow was at the door as an usher and the friendly greeting and winning smile he had for everyone gave me great respect for him and his people as well.

Portions of this great Bolivian plateau are very beautiful. One noted naturalist coming from Paraguay said as he beheld this region, "If tradition has lost the records of the place where Paradise is located the traveler who visits these regions of Bolivia feels at once the impulse to exclaim: 'Here is Eden.'"

Here grows the famous chincona tree from which we get quinine. Also the coca plant from which we get cocaine. Perhaps when the dentist pulled your tooth he used cocaine that came from this country. The natives chew the coca leaf as a stimulant. It is actually said that by the use of this leaf a man can go for many hours without food and perform feats of endurance that seem to us impossible.