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Christmas having provided no thrills, Tegucigalpa looked forward to New Year’s. On that day Congress was to convene to choose a president. Whoever was chosen would probably be obliged to fight the other two candidates.
In the meantime, I hired a mule and rode out to see the American-owned Rosario mines at San Juancito, forty kilometers from the capital.
The trail was rugged, but it led through magnificent scenery, among pine-clad mountains, ascending a ridge seven thousand feet high, where the clouds formed a heavy wet blanket yet opened occasionally to permit a glimpse of wild tropical forest below.
Most mining properties are situated in barren, desolate regions. That of the Rosario Company, the largest silver mine in Central America, is situated in a glorious valley, and from its neat white buildings one looks down upon a misty wilderness that stretches away through countless lower valleys, with a silver ribbon of water curling through them toward the sea. Despite its isolation, and the one rough mule trail that connects the mine with the rest of the world, it roared with industry. There was a reverberating chorus of giant crushers, the rattle of cars on many miles of narrow-gauge track, the crash of ore-bearing rock dumped into the stamp-mills, the hum of massive machinery.
“We brought everything out in ox-cart or on muleback,” said the young-appearing superintendent. “We now have seventy miles of tunnel, and employ eight hundred men in Rosario—thirteen hundred indirectly. And less than thirty gringo bosses run the whole thing. We used to have twice the force, but we’ve cut it down. There’s efficiency, nowadays, even forty kilometers from a town in Honduras. We turned out two million ounces of silver this year.”
The gringo bosses were quiet, earnest young men, intent upon their work. There were none of the roistering adventurers that one looks for in the wilds of a Honduran jungle. They drank moderately—very moderately, it seemed to one who had worked in an Andean mining camp—and never carried revolvers, except when visiting the native town in the gulch below, which averaged two murders every Sunday. They spent most of their spare time in the club room—a comfortable room with a big fireplace, pool tables, piano and victrola, and a complete library.
The camp was at an altitude of five thousand feet. The night was cold. The blazing fire was agreeable.
“This is the tropics,” said one of them, “and I have to pay double life insurance rates for living here, when it’s much more healthy than any place in the United States.”
The superintendent drew me aside, and led me upstairs to hear his radio. The blare of jazz was as clear as though one listened in from New York.
“That’s Vincent Lopez, in the grill-room of the Pennsylvania. Wait a minute ’til I get Schenectady, and we’ll have a bed-time story.”
Out here in the wilderness, forty kilometers from the nearest town, and many hundred miles from a railway, gringo energy had produced all the comforts of home. And gringo industry was furnishing much of the wealth that flowed into the Honduran treasury.