“Don Cupertino,” chief adornment of eastern Bolivia, with his family and dependents. The man on the right is a German neighbor. The Indian at his side has leaves stuck on his temples to cure his headache
To my astonishment, all three turned out to be Americans. Henry Halsey, whose welcome was as genuine as any I received in South America, though less expressed in words than deeds, was owner of this wilderness estate; his employees were “Chris” and George Powell, younger brothers of the pair we had met in San José. Halsey was a Virginian whose career had ranged from teaching country school to mining in Zaruma and Cerro de Pasco. The altitude bothered him and he had drifted to Paraguay, only to find “too much government” and to push on into this wilderness as far from the world as a man can easily get. Not because the government of Bolivia is an improvement on that of Paraguay, but because its tentacles rarely reach so far into the wilds, he had prospered. He had all but come to grief at the outset, however. Barely had he chosen a knoll on which to build his hut, when he was bitten by a small viper that swelled one leg to thrice its natural size and left him half paralyzed. For four days he could not move from where he lay, and only by good fortune had he water within reach, for no other human being appeared until long after his recovery. Now, with a native wife and child, as well as his peons, he was in no danger of repeating the experience. With American energy he had cleared of the primeval, tropical forest a large space that now waved with corn-fields and sugar-cane, with bananas and productive ground-vines, and had built a large house in the native style and a distillery to turn his sugar-cane into value, while his cattle spread over a broad region in which he had no neighbor to dispute his sway. His chief problem was to get peons; for as often as a native was named subprefect of the district, he rounded up all the laborers for many miles around and forced them to work on his own estate. Thus Halsey was reduced to the intermittent assistance of “Chris” and George. These Bolivian-born sons of the Texan who didn’t “aim” to fight were as truly peons as the lowest of the natives. They were subject to the same “slavery” that prevails in all the region, hiring themselves out for an advance and getting ever more deeply into debt to their employer. “Chris” was just then “working out” a rifle, and his brother a saddle-steer. They had all the diffidence of the native peon, the same point of view, the same loose habits, spoke “English” only when forced to, lamely and without self-confidence, ending every sentence with an appealing, “Ain’t thet right, maw?” to their mother. The latter was strikingly typical of the erosion of customs, a “poor white” of our south grafted upon the life of tropical Bolivia. Completely illiterate, barefoot, bedraggled as any native woman, whom she went one better by incessantly chewing tobacco, she had wholly succumbed to her environment, and spoke fluently one of the most atrocious imitations of Spanish it has ever been my fortune to hear in a long experience with all grades of that tongue.
Here we made up royally for all the hungry days behind us. The products of Halsey’s exotic industry ranged all the way from fowls to milk—huge bowls of real, honest-to-goodness milk, unboiled, unspoiled in any Latin-American way—lacking only bread, which could not be had in these wilds at a dollar a nibble. Its rôle was filled by cold boiled squash, or plantains fried in lard. The craving for sweets I found was no personal weakness. Halsey ate huge quantities of sugar—which he refined by the primitive method of covering it with a layer of mud—sprinkling it on every possible dish and often munching it like candy. The longing for fats or grease, commonly supposed to be chiefly confined to the arctic regions, was also extraordinary in this climate. So great was the demand for lard that it sold at 50 cents a pound; the axle-grease supplied by the owners of bullock-carts was mixed with soap to prevent the peon drivers from eating it. Among the children of the region dirt-eating, due to some morbid condition of the stomach, is almost universal, frequently resulting in death unless the vigilance of parents is constant. The majority are chalky white, weak and sickly, with enormous, protruding bellies. One of Halsey’s sources of income was the carting of salt from the salinas, shallow lakes some days to the south, around the shores of which it gathers in large quantities, to the neighboring hamlet of San Juan, where it sold at 25 bolivianos a hundred-weight. The region was well stocked with deer; wild cattle belonged to whoever shot them; jaguars were not hard to find and antas were so numerous that he shot at least one a week to feed his hogs. This stout, bulky animal, largest of the South American fauna, known to us as the tapir, lives in the dense thickets near streams or water-holes, in which it bathes by moonlight or in the gray of dawn. The experienced hunter has little difficulty in waylaying the anta, since it always follows the same path to and from the water. The Bolivian variety is about the size of a yearling calf, with short legs and a long, flexible, porcine snout. Its skin, excellent for the making of harness, is so tough that it dashes with impunity through the densest spiny thickets, often tearing from its back by this means its chief enemy, the jaguar. Caught young, the anta becomes as tame as a puppy, following its master with marked devotion.
Four days I swung my hammock under a great tree before Halsey’s door, reading belated magazines of the light-weight order, the neurotic artificiality of which seemed particularly ridiculous against this background of primitive nature, as the complexity of life in great cities stood out by contrast to the simple ways of the region. Lounging in the tropical shade it was easy to understand why men so often settle down in the tropics and let the world drift on without them, easy to lose the feeling that life is short and fleeting, that one will be a long time dead, and must grasp existence as it passes. The day after our arrival Konanz had fallen victim to chills and fever. My regret was tempered by the memory of many a vain struggle to get him to take a daily dose of quinine. When he recovered, which did not promise to be soon, he planned to explore the region round about for a spot on which to settle. I took leave of my fellow-men on one of the last mornings of January and struck off alone.
That day’s experience emphasized the difference between trackless jungle and even the poorest of roads. Some twelve miles separated Halsey’s estate from the traveled trail. The faint path through wiry grasses and low brush, which he had pointed out to me, died out even sooner than I had feared. I pushed on in the direction I knew I must go,—south and a shade east. A wooded bluff standing above the jungle landscape, like the Irish coast from the sea, gave an objective point. It was on the summit of this that “Thompson” and his fellow-assassin had planted in vain their ill-gotten gold; in just such jungle as that about me they had wandered starved and choking for days; somewhere in this sea of vegetation lay the sun-bleached and vulture-picked bones of the more fortunate of the pair.
To keep a due course in the trackless wilderness is not so easy as to set it. I was soon among heavier undergrowth that cut down my progress like a head wind that of a “windjammer,” then in head-high jungle that made every step a struggle, then in full forest with the densest undergrowth snatching, clinging, tearing at me for all the world like living beings determined to stop my advance at any cost. Vines enwrapped me, head, chest, waist, and feet, at every step. Thorns and brambles gashed and tore my sweat-rotted clothing, leaves of wild pineapple laid bare my bleeding knees, the jungle reached forth and snatched a sleeve from my shirt, slashed my hands, broke my bootlaces, poured blinding sweat into my eyes, and treacherously tripped me up, so that I smashed headlong into masses of vegetation where who knew what might be sleeping or lurking. The scent of wild animals was pungent; now and then I fell into their recent lairs or signs of their passing. Every plunge left me so breathless from the incessant struggle that I was several minutes gathering strength to crawl to my feet and tear my way onward.
All day I fought nature hand to hand, with the growing conviction that I should still be struggling when night came upon me. The sun beat pitilessly down into the breathless tangle. Once, when thirst seemed no longer endurable, I had broken out upon a small swamp and thrown myself face-down to drink it half dry. From it radiated the paths of wild animals, and every inch of the wet sand was marked with their footprints, as fresh as if they had that moment passed. I recognized those of the deer, the anta, the cat-clawed jaguar; and those of at least a score of smaller species were plainly visible. Beyond the waist-deep swamp the waterless jungle was even thicker. The blue headland of Ypias had long since been lost to view, and I found that I was indeed going round in a circle, like the heroes of fiction, until I drew out my compass and insisted that nature let me through the way it indicated. Hunger was completely routed by a thirst like a raging furnace within me. Frequently I brought up against thorn-bristling thickets so dense that further progress seemed impossible, and must tear my way back and forth, as along some fortress wall, seeking a weak spot in the impregnable density.
Then all at once, toward sunset, when I had concluded I was hopelessly lost, I fell suddenly out of the jungle into a sandy road, fell indeed on hands and knees, for the way was worn several feet deep into the soft soil. An hour along it brought me to the pascana of Ypias, uninhabited, yet like all these rare natural clearings on the trans-Bolivian route, so important as to have its name solemnly engraved on the map of the republic. This was the scene of what “Thompson” had called “our stunt.” In a bit of space scolloped out of the jungle were the six weather-blackened wooden crosses of the victims, the largest crudely carved with the names of all, that of the German confederate with its cross-piece at a sharp angle, the natives of the region apparently resenting his claim to full Christian burial. Beyond the clear little stream that makes Ypias a favorite camping-ground, four ox-carts were preparing for the customary night journey after a day of rest and grazing. One of the barefoot drivers under command of a cholo astride a saddle-steer proved to be “Hughtie” Powell. I climbed into his wagon and stretched out on the great balls of rubber from the Beni with which it was loaded.
The tipoy, a single loose gown, constitutes the entire garb of most of the native women of tropical Bolivia