A general pass is more than a saving of money; it gives train officials an exalted notion of the holder’s importance, and it permits him to jump off anywhere on the spur of the moment. Yet for many miles south I saw nothing worthy of a stop. When one has already visited La Plata, capital of the Province of Buenos Aires, a short hour below the metropolis and noted for its university and its rows of venerable eucalyptus trees, there remains little to attract the eye in the flat expanse of that province as it unrolls hour after hour on any of the lines of the “Great Southern.” Several dairies, which maintain their own lecherías throughout the federal capital, punctuate the first miles; otherwise the landscape is a mere reminder of our own western prairies. Here is the same scanty grass and clumps of bushes resembling sagebrush, the same flat plain with its horizon barely rising and falling perceptibly with the motion of the train. The only unfamiliar note is the ostrich, scattered groups of which go scuttling away like huge ungainly chickens as the express disturbs them at their feeding. At least we should call this Argentine curiosity an ostrich, though science distinguishes it from a similar species in the Old World under the name of rhea darwini, and to the natives it is a ñandú. Time was when tawny horsemen pursued these great birds across the pampas, entangling their legs in the bolas, two or three ropes ending in as many heavy balls, which they swung over their heads as they rode; but that is seen no more. Even the waving plains of grass, across which the nomadic Indian roamed and the gaucho careered lassooing wild cattle, are gone. Wheat fields, bare with the finished harvest in this autumn season, alternate with short brown grass, cropped by the cattle which everywhere dot the landscape for hour after monotonous hour.
The gaucho, with his long, sharp facón stuck through his belt, who lighted his fogón out on the open pampa to prepare his asado con cuero, his beef roasted in the hide, who killed a steer for his morning beefsteak or slaughtered a lamb for a pair of chops, who rolled up in his saddle-blanket wherever night overtook him, with his daytime leather seat as pillow, has degenerated into the “hired man,” the mere peon, usually from Spain or Italy, who would be dismayed at the thought of a night without shelter or a day without prepared food. Only a scattered remnant of the real cowboys of the pampas are left, just enough to show the present domesticated generation the stuff of which their forerunners were forged; and even these are usually far away in the remotest corners of the country.
Yet the newcomers take on gradually something of the gaucho’s look, a hardiness, an air of abstraction, as if through gazing long at monotonous nothingness they come to concentrate their attention inwardly and become meditative of soul, with that solemn, self-reliant manner of men who never turn the leaves of any book but nature’s. The countrymen of Nevada or Arizona have the same weathered appearance as the groups gathered about the rare stations at which the through train momentarily halts; the saddled horses tied to wooden rails before the more pretentious buildings among the little clusters of houses set out on the unsheltered open prairie might easily be mistaken for Texas mustangs. In these groups one begins to see suggestions of Indian blood, mestizos with the yellowish-brown skin and thick black hair of the aborigines, yet with a stronger hint of European origin.
Ordinarily this region is swirling with dust, but this year the rains had been early and excessive, and the monotonous brown prairie was often flooded, the dismal houses dripping; the wide public roads were knee-deep sloughs along which tramping would indeed have been an experience. Clusters of farm buildings, generally new, stood here and there in groves of trees, planted trees, which in the Argentine are a sign of opulence, a sort of seigneurial luxury, like diamonds or liveried footmen. The trees native to the pampas being rare and scrubby, it is chiefly the imported eucalyptus standing in little clumps, English sparrows noisily gossiping among them, or rising in broken lines from the frequent lakes of mirage or shallow reality. Boisterous hackmen, sprinkled to the ears with mud, attacked in force the descending passengers at every station serving a town of size and bore them away in clumsy bespattered coaches. Huge two-wheeled carts reminiscent of England here and there labored along the bottomless road from station to town under incoming freight or outgoing country produce. Town after town was monotonously alike, the houses built of crude bricks, with an unfinished air suggesting that they were at most mere temporary stopping-places of men ready to pursue fortune elsewhere on a moment’s notice.
The chief characteristic of Argentine towns is their roominess. The space they cover is several times that of Andean cities of equal population. Though the houses often toe the street in the Arab-Spanish fashion, they are frequently far apart and the streets are wider than even Buenos Aires would care to have in her most congested section. No doubt each hamlet has a secret hint that it is soon to become a great city, and lays its plans accordingly. Next to their spaciousness and the dreary plainness of their architecture, these towns of the pampas strike the experienced South American traveler by the scarcity of their churches. The largest of them seldom shows more than a single steeple; many seem to have no places of worship whatever. Nowhere is there that suggestion common to the atmosphere of the languid cities of the Andes of a present world so unpromising that life can most advantageously be spent in preparation for the next.
The “Great Southern” carried me so far into the south that only by straining my neck could I see the Southern Cross, a tilted, less striking constellation now than when I had first made it out in far-off Central America by standing on tiptoe and peering over the horizon. The journey might almost better be made by night than by day, for Argentine sleeping-cars are comfortable and the dreary, unfurnished landscape is almost oppressive. The only natural features to arouse a flicker of interest are some rock hills near Tandil, duplicated farther on in another little rocky range known as the Sierra de la Ventana. In the first of these Buenos Aires quarries some of the stone for its building and paving, the rest being brought across the Plata from Uruguay. Few large countries have been more neglected than the Argentine in the matter of natural resources, other than agricultural. Its rare deposits of stone are far distant from where the material is needed, it has no precious minerals, almost no forests, even the coal used on its railroads must be brought from abroad. Yet it would gladly be rid of some of its stone. Through much of the south it is hampered by a tosca, a shelf of limestone a few feet below the surface, which neither water nor the long roots of the alfalfa can penetrate. In the more tropical north, particularly along the Paraná, the alfalfales produce luxuriantly for twenty years and more without renewal. In the south the calerous soil makes vigorous pastures on which fatten succulent beef and mutton, highly prized by the frigorí ficos; but the frequent droughts are disastrous in the thin soil regions, and at such times endless trains carry the sheep and “horned cattle,” as the local distinction has it, a thousand miles north to feed in the Córdoba hills.
The plain which seems never to have an end converges at last, like all the railroads to the south, in Bahía Blanca. This bustling port and considerable city, with its immense grain elevators and its facilities for transferring half the produce of the Argentine from trains to ships, is the work of a generation. It is nearly a century now since the federal government sent soldiers to establish in the vicinity of this great bay a line of defense against the Indians of Patagonia, but the town itself took on importance only toward the end of the last century. From a cluster of huts among the sand-dunes it sprang to the size of Duluth, to which it bears a resemblance in occupation, point of view, and paucity of historical background. The Argentine is third or fourth among the wheat producing countries of the world, and of later years Bahía Blanca, natural focal point of all the great southern pampas, has outstripped even Buenos Aires as a grain port, to say nothing of the frozen meat from its immense frigorí ficos. Of all the cities of the Argentine it is the most nearly autonomous, for though La Plata remains the provincial capital, the overwhelming commercial importance of Bahía Blanca has given it a self-assertiveness that threatens some day to make it the capital of a newly formed province.
A long vestibuled train carried us on into northern Patagonia, better known now in the Argentine as the territories of Rio Negro, Chubut, and Santa Cruz. I say “us” because I had been joined by a former assistant secretary of agriculture of our own land, recently attached as an adviser to the similar Argentine bureau. He was as profoundly ignorant of Spanish as I of agricultural matters, and our companionship proved of mutual advantage. All that night we rumbled south and west, halting now and then at little pampa stations, if we were to believe the time-table. For we were both snugly ensconced in our berths, the ex-secretary doubly so, since nature had provided him with a more than imposing bulk—until the breaking of a rail over a wash-out bounced us out of them. Sleeping-cars are as customary in the Argentine as in our own land of long distances, and more comfortable. At the height of the season at Mar del Plata as many as a hundred sleepers a night make the journey between that watering-place and Buenos Aires. The normal Argentine railroad gauge is nearly ten inches wider than our own, which is one of the reasons why the dormitorios seem so much more roomy than a Pullman. As in the international expresses of Europe, these have a corridor along one side of the car, from which open two-berth staterooms, with doors that lock and individual toilet facilities. The cross-car berths, one soon discovers, are easier to sleep in than our lengthwise couches, and the dormitorios do away with what Latin-Americans consider, not entirely without reason, our “shockingly indecent” system of forcing strangers, of either sex, to sleep in the same compartment, shielded only by a curtain.
The unconvertible cabins, preferable by night, become mere cells by day, however, and drive most of the passengers to sit in the dining cars. Here the waiters, like the dormitorio porters, are white, with king’s-bed-chamber manners; and the six course meals are moderate in price and usually excellent—except the dessert, the ubiquitous, unfailing, never-varying dulce de membrillo, a stone-hard quince jelly which brings to a sad end virtually every public repast in the Argentine. The trains are not heated; instead there are thick doormats under each seat, and it is a rare traveler in the south between April and October who does not carry with him a blanket bound with a shawl-strap.
The mud-bespattered countrymen at the stations that appeared with the dull autumn daylight seemed to be largely Spanish in origin, some still wearing boínas and other reminders of Europe that looked out of keeping with the soil-caked saddle horses awaiting them behind the railroad buildings. Most of them appeared to have ridden in to buy lottery tickets, or to find which tickets had won in the latest drawing; the raucous-voiced train-boys sold more to these modern gauchos than on the train, especially the list of winning numbers at ten centavos. The thought came to us that even if there are no other reprehensible features to a national lottery, the habit it breeds among workmen of spending their time hoping for a prize a week, instead of pitching in and earning a weekly prize, is at least sufficient to condemn it.