My companion was making the trip for the purpose of studying the soil. A splendid chance he had to do so with most of it under water! The distribution of rain seems to be poorly managed in the Argentine. If the country is not suffering from drought, it is apt to be complaining of floods, or, in the warmer and more fertile north, of the locusts, which sometimes sweep in from the wilderness of the Chaco in such clouds that the project has seriously been considered of erecting an enormous net, supported perhaps by balloons, to stop them.
We brought up late that afternoon in the frontier town of Neuquén, in the national territory of the same name. A garçon corseted into a tuxedo served us dinner, for so they dared call it, in a rambling one-story wooden hotel scattered over the block nearest the station, the only thing worth considering on the bill of fare being “bife” (beefee) or, as the waiter more exactly put it, “asado de vaca,” requiring the teeth of a stone-crusher and the digestion of a ñandú. There is something of the atmosphere of our own frontier towns in those of the Argentine, but not the same studied roughness of character, no display of shooting-irons. The tamest of our western cowboys would probably have shot on sight those prancing, tuxedoed waiters and sent the proprietor to join them for the atrociousness of his meals. Just what would have been his reaction to the beds to which we were afterward assigned—sky blue and pink landscapes so gorgeously painted on foot and headboards that we thought it was dawn every time we woke up—is more than I can guess.
The line which the “Great Southern” hopes soon to push over the Andes to join the railways of Chile in the vicinity of Temuco ran no trains beyond Neuquén on the Sunday which finally dawned in earnest over our picturesque beds, but as pass-holders we had no great difficulty in foisting ourselves upon a young English superintendent westward bound on an inspection tour. In his track automobile we screamed away across the bleak pampas of Patagonia, a hundred and twenty miles and back to Zapala, the vast monotonous plain steadily rising to an elevation of seven thousand feet and bringing us almost to the foot of the great snow-bound range of the Andes forming the Chilean border. The air was cool, dry, and bracing even down at Neuquén; at Zapala the winter-and-mountain cold was so penetrating as to cause us not only to wonder at but to protest volubly against the strange strain of puritanism which had invaded even this distant corner of the Argentine and made it a felony for the frontier shopkeeper to sell anything stronger than beer on Sundays. Forty years ago all this region was an unproductive waste across which roamed half-naked Indians, boleando the ñandúes for their sustenance and living in toldos, easily transportable skin tents like those of certain tribes of Arab Bedouins. To-day we were not even armed. Nowhere was there a remnant of those “Patagones,” people of footprints so large that the southern end of South America was named for them. The young Argentine general who was once assigned the task of clearing northern Patagonia of the nomadic, bandit-like aborigines had done his work with such Spanish thoroughness that the entire tribe was annihilated, their chiefs dying as prisoners on the island of Martín García. The government paid the expenses of this expedition by dividing among the officers (not, be it noted, the soldiers) the hundred million acres of land it added to the national domain, and by selling the rest of it in enormous tracts at such magnificent prices as three cents an acre. To-day intelligent argentinos are figuratively kicking themselves that they did not issue government bonds instead and save this immense territory for the homesteaders who would now gladly settle upon it.
To tell the truth the region did not look like one for which men would die of home-sickness,—dry and bushy, like parts of Texas or northern Mexico, with chaparral and bristling clumps of stunted growth bunched out here and there across a plain that struck one as essentially arid for all the pools of water left by the unprecedented rain. My authoritative companion assured us, however, that it had every sign of great fertility, though requiring irrigation on a large scale, a beginning of which has already been made in the vicinity of the Rio Negro. Yet only a rude and solitary nature surrounded us on all the journey, the same flat monotony, dotted here and there with flocks of sheep guarded by lonely half-Indian or Gallego shepherds, which stretches all the way to the Straits of Magellan.
Flocks of pheasants flew up every little while as we screamed past them; the hoarse cry of the chajás, a species of wild turkey, alternated with the piercing call of the little teru-teru. Only at rare intervals did a scattered flock of sheep or an isolated makeshift rancho with a saddled horse behind it give a human touch to the monotonous desolation. Where the foothills of the Andes began to send us undulating over great smooth ridges, like a bark rocked by a distant storm at sea, there appeared wagon caravans bound for Chile, still days away over the lofty pass ahead. Gradually the great snow-thatched wall of the Andes, endless to the north and south, rose to shut off all the horizon before us, wind-rent clouds dashing themselves to shreds against it. Yet here in the temperate south the snow and ice-fields seemed less striking, much less beautiful than when towering above the sun-flooded tropics.
On our return to Buenos Aires we stopped at an agricultural station near the town of Rio Negro, where irrigation was already showing results. Baled alfalfa lay in quantities at the stations; large vineyards, much as they looked out of place in this landscape-less region, were producing well. There being no passenger train to rescue us, we got telegraphic permission to take the first east-bound freight. Before the delay became unduly monotonous a train rose over the flat horizon and rolled in upon us. We made our way along the thirty-odd cars loaded with sheep to what in our own land would have been a comfortable caboose—and climbed into an ordinary box-car that had all too evidently been recently and often used for the transportation of coal. There was not even an improvised seat in it; trainmen and the sheep care-takers sat on the bare floor with their backs against the sooty wall and bumped along like penniless and unresourceful hoboes. I would have given several pesos to have heard the remarks of an American brakeman who could have looked in upon his Argentine fellows as we jolted across the apparently level plains with the bitter chill of the pampas settling down upon us.
We gladly dropped off at Darwin, where we hired next morning what the argentino calls a “soolkee” and drove to the island of Choele-Choel, with the assistance of a cumbersome government ferry. This thirteen square leagues of fertile loam soil between two branches of the Rio Negro is one of the most prosperous communities in southern Argentine, with half a dozen villages, roads sometimes passable even in the wet season, and noted for the variety of immigration with which it has been peopled. My companion, weary perhaps of talking through an interpreter, was particularly eager to see what remnants remained of a Welsh colony once established here. We drove zigzagging along the wide checkerboard earth roads between endless wire fences behind which many men were plowing with oxen and a few with up-to-date riding gang-plows. Once we paused to talk with one Villanova, political boss of the island, but when my companion brought up the subject nearest his heart, the man instantly showed opposition to the establishment of agricultural schools.
A rural policeman of the Argentine
