It is half-jokingly asserted that after a few months in the mines it is not safe to open a bottle or a “jack-pot” in the presence of a minister’s son. Unfortunately the jest seems to have serious basis in fact. The tighter the lines that bound their youth, the more completely do the newcomers cast them off when removed from the influence of home ties and neighborly opinion. Small wonder the Latin races accuse the Anglo-Saxon of hypocrisy. The Americans who live and mine up and down the Sierra have convinced Peruvians that every living American drinks quarts of whiskey neat every day, and squanders his substance in gambling, or if luck runs his way, in the “stews” of Lima. This is not to say that all gringos in Morococha and Cerro de Pasco fall into an evil manner of life, or that there are not many more who perform their tasks fully and efficiently, in spite of an occasional debauch. Those who bring with them very strong wills, or some equivalent for them, retain the tautness of their moral fiber, for all the altitude. The percentage of men who go astray is such, however, that it becomes almost a subject for congratulation to see a well-kept frame and a wholesome, unlined face in these Andean communities, where dissipated countenances are rather the rule than the exception. Then, too, often arriving as youths, with little experience of life except the half-cloistered one of our colleges, the younger seem to feel it necessary to prove themselves “men,” and to keep up the local reputation for what a missionary referred to as “those rough mining fellows” by assuming a bold, gruff, even vulgar exterior. All question of “morality” aside, the mere materialistic problem of keeping up the efficiency of their force would seem to make some curtailment of the prevailing customs worth the trouble of the mine-owners. But even those sent down to assume charge too often fall victims to that false philosophy of “a short life and a merry one.”
Gringo employees of higher rank command generous salaries and are well housed, with all the comforts that can conveniently be transported to this lofty region. Coming, for the most part, directly from England or the United States, they take naturally to the artificial heat which the natives rarely adopt. Before the fireplace at the club the conversation jumps from “bridge” to tetrahydrite ore, and back again to poker with, to the layman, a vertiginous speed, amid the rattle of glasses and bottles and the strains of a tireless phonograph. A considerable portion of the talk might frankly be called gossip; for South America has this in common with small towns, that every gringo up and down the continent knows every other, at least by hearsay, his private character and his domestic difficulties.
The traveler through South America is frequently struck by the fact that large enterprises, even British in ownership, are more often than not actually and practically in charge of Americans. The manager and most of the office force may be English, but the actual motive power, the man who makes the ore fly or sets the trains to running, is apt to be a youthful superintendent or engineer but a few years out of one of our technical colleges. This is no argument for or against the mentality or ability of either nationality. These are their natural spheres of action, purely the result of environment. The American, coming from a land where precedent is given short shrift, and accustomed to furnish his own initiative, is best fitted for pushing the pioneer work, for attacking unprecedented problems and carrying the enterprise on to the point where it is established and running smoothly. The Englishman, product of an older and more settled society, is more easily content to continue an established undertaking, to “stick on the job,” while the American moves on to attack new and unfamiliar problems.
The bleak mining town of Morococha, more than 16,000 feet above sea-level. Though but twelve degrees south of the equator, dawn often finds the place completely covered with snow, and ice forms on the edges of the chain of lakes, the outlet from which is to the Amazon
The American miners of Morococha live in comfort for all the altitude and bleakness of their surroundings. In spite of their example, however, the natives still shiver through the day and huddle through the night without artificial heat
I visited the chief mines of Morococha with the youthful American superintendent. They presented nothing unusual to one acquainted with those of Mexico, than which they were slightly more crude and undeveloped in their methods. Some details of life were different; the peons wore plenty of clothing, ragged and extremely bedraggled, hats, and even footwear, for it was little less cold down in the mine galleries than in the crisp, wintry mountain air and the brilliant yet chill sunshine that flooded the glacier-draped valley and the indigo-blue lakes above. We climbed and crawled and dragged ourselves by elbows, knees, shoulders, hands and feet through ancient and modern “stopes,” by slippery ladders, crude stairways, or slimy ropes, in an eternal darkness made barely visible by our torches. The Indian miners, some of them but half-grown boys, each and all had a cheek puffed out by a quid of coca. They took a half-hour “coca-time” each afternoon, as religiously as an Englishman does for his tea. Those who shoveled away the mountain of ore in the sunshine outside earned seventy cents a day; in the Natividad mine, where water poured incessantly and required oilskins, the workmen nearly doubled this wage. The practical gringo miners of to-day had somewhat different views of the ancient Peruvian civilization than its historians, and considered the stories of Inca wealth vastly exaggerated. Many a time, to be sure, a vein that promised rich reward was soon found to have been “stoped out” by the Incas or colonial Spaniards; but these neither knew enough about effective mining, nor went deep enough to get any such quantity of gold as tradition ascribes to them. Moreover, copper is the chief ore of Peru, and even silver owes its importance here almost entirely to the fact that the copper is highly argentiferous.
Beyond Oroya the railways of central Peru spread out in a Y, at the right-hand end of which is Huancayo, something more than two hundred miles from Lima, as is Cerro de Pasco on the other branch. Some time after the hour set, an engine was found somewhere in or about the junction, and toward noon we drifted away down a gorge into which portly, dry hills thrust themselves alternately from either side. Country women were washing their clothes in the scanty river; here and there, at the base of amphitheatrical bluffs, wheat was being threshed under the hoofs of circling horses. There were several dust-blown stations, but no signs of towns, nor, indeed, a patch on which one might have existed, except the one mud village of Llocllapampa in mid-afternoon, familiar with its old Andean red-tile roofs. In the first-class car was a crowd almost exclusively Peruvian, huge scarfs and shawls about their throats, and many in overcoats; for not only had Americans in their leather leggings disappeared, but even the outward evidence of gringo influence; and I was once more swallowed up in the purely native life of the Sierra. At length the gorge closed in, squeezed us through three tunnels, and there opened out an interandean valley, spreading far away north and south, cloud-shadows flecking its surface, two snowclad peaks contemplating us with a lofty disdain from over the crest of the enclosing wall. The train turned crab-wise toward the nearer end of the valley, and set us down within walking distance of Jauja.
The famous “Xauxa” of Prescott is rather colorless in its personality and barren in its setting. The bells of llama trains, followed by their as soft-footed, coca-chewing drivers, jangled by my window and died away down the street. A considerable proportion of the population was constantly struggling about the hydrant in the center of the plaza; the rest were either simple Indians with coca- and pisco-brutalized faces, or the haughty keepers of glorified peanut-stands. Smoke there was none, of course, neither of industry nor of domestic comfort, and in contrast to the bitter cold nights and the ice-box frigidity of every shade and shadow, the uncovered sun was burning. Not even the murmur of open sewers broke the languorous Andean silence, and in nothing but a few slight details was the monotony of all towns of the Sierra broken. I was back once more in the kingdom of candles, with its dreary, interminable, read-less evenings.