My travels in Patagonia were by rail and in what the Argentino calls a “soolky”.
A typical “boliche” town of the Argentine pampa, and some of its inhabitants
A family of Santiago del Estero
“We have no middle class in the Argentine,” he explained, “and we do not want one. We want only absentee landlords—or at least we have no way of getting rid of them—and laborers, men who actually work and produce. Agricultural schools would give us a class too proud of their schooling to work, and at the same time without property. The distinction between the man who toils and the man who owns is wide in the Argentine, but it would be no improvement to fill in the gulf with a lot of haughty, penniless drones.”
My companion had all but given up hope of using his native tongue directly when there was pointed out to us a farm said to be owned by a Welshman. But only his lanky daughter of sixteen was at home. The ex-secretary addressed her eagerly; here at last he would get first-hand information. The girl shifted from one undeveloped shank to the other, backed away toward the unpainted frame farmhouse from which she had emerged, struggling to answer a question in English, then turning to me, she burst forth, all suggestion of embarrassment gone, in rapid-fire Spanish:
“You see I was born in the Chubut, and English is only my third tongue, for Spanish is my native language and father and mother always speak Welsh at home and I almost never hear English and ...”
My companion bowed his head in resignation and turned our weary horse back across the island toward the ferry.
The chill of autumn gradually disappeared from the air as the fastest train in South America dashed in less than five hours, with only one three-minute stop to change engines, from Buenos Aires to Rosario, two hundred miles northwest of the federal capital. The rich-green immensity of the well cultivated fields bordering the River Paraná were a contrast to the bleak, bare, brown prairies of the south, and the gang-plow, up-to-date methods of our great West were everywhere in evidence. In the seat behind me two men were assuring each other that “the lands of this region are worth ten times those of the interior,” and it was easy to believe them. The rich black loam soil that came to light behind the plows is said to produce two crops of splendid potatoes annually without the use of fertilizer and with no change in crops for twenty years. Though the day was warm and sunny, the cars remained hermetically sealed throughout the journey, for the argentino is true to type in his dread of a breath of fresh air. Scarcely a glimpse of the River Paraná did we catch, though we skirted it all the way to Rosario.