Argentina and Uruguay

by Gordon Ross

And this anywhere in the midst of what now is an arid desert, on which the only vegetation is sparse, stunted, scrubby, useless bush.

The reasons for this are that these eastern regions of the South have practically no rainfall at all and that all the water running from the Andes to the Sea has already found its way, farther west, into one or other of the great Rivers Colorado and Negro.

The huge irrigation scheme now being carried out will utilize an enormous natural hollow formerly known as the Cuenca Vidal, now rechristened Lago Pellegrini (after a once prominent Argentine statesman) as a natural storage reservoir. The surplus water from the lake and river system, which makes a network over the whole of the western part of the territories of Neuquen and the Rio Negro, at the base of the Andes, will be utilized for the irrigation of their eastern plains. This system is also destined to serve another necessary purpose: namely, to regulate the flow of the Rio Negro.

This is very necessary indeed; for this river, swollen by the melting of Andine snow and ice, which has in some years taken place in an exceptional degree, comes down suddenly with overpowering violence, headed by what is like a huge tidal wave, and sweeps everything within miles of its normal, deep-cut, banks before it.

Several times during the past fifty years have settlers been tempted by the rich alluvial soil, brought down by centuries of just such floodings, to establish themselves near enough to the actual river to irrigate by some one or other rough lift system, and remained there year in year out, in the false security enjoyed by peasants on the slopes of a volcano, till one day a thunderous roar has been the only warning of the immediate approach of a torrential flood. Lucky the man who could catch and mount his horse in time to gallop away and thus save his life. All the rest, cattle, house and crops, were swept away in a second by the great head wave and following floods of the river suddenly swollen by the simultaneous overflowing of its innumerable tributary lakes.

Now all this will be guarded against, and, incidentally, the Rio Negro may be rendered really navigable for a very considerable distance by other engineering works for the removal and control of its bar.

However, and when, this last may be, there can be no doubt about the magic change that the first partial irrigation of these present desert plains will quickly create. Trees will soon grow on the irrigated portions, and these trees and other vegetation will arrest the clouds which now fly on unheedingly to the superior attractions of the Andes or the southern hills of the Province of Buenos Aires. The very southernmost portion of that Province is now in the same sad case as the rest of the valley of the Rio Negro, of which it forms a part.

As the result, smiling verdure will replace arid desert; in a short space of time, because of the natural fertility of the soil on which the transformation will take place.

Already two dotted lines on the railway map, one between Bahia Blanca and Carmen de Patagones, near the mouth of the Rio Negro, and the other branching from it to San Blas, show where the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway intends to run its first two lines through the southernmost strip of the Province of Buenos Aires which lies between the Rios Colorado and Negro, and other two dotted lines, one running southwards from the township of Rio Colorado to the bay of San Antonio, in the San Matias Gulf, and the other from the centre of the first to a junction, near Choele Choel, with the main line to Neuquen, show the first intentions of the Buenos Aires Great Southern line towards that portion of the valley of the Rio Negro which falls within its agreed sphere of influence.

In agreeing to a division between them of the productive and prospectively productive areas of the southern parts of the Republic, these two great Railway Companies not only removed from their own paths the disastrous temptation to cut each other’s throats by tariff war, but also to a considerable extent precluded profitable competition by outside enterprise.