Working North from Patagonia / Being the Narrative of a Journey, Earned on the Way, Through Southern and Eastern South America

by Harry Alverson Franck

This second city of the republic has been called the Chicago of the Argentine. It is more nearly the Omaha or Atlanta, not merely in size but in the material prosperity, and the appearance and point of view that go with it, which its position as a river port open to large ocean steamers and as the natural outlet of all the fertile provinces of northern Argentine has given it. Like Buenos Aires it has almost no factory chimneys to emphasize its air of activity, which concentrates in the vicinity of the wharves. A stroll through its busy, citified streets is worth the exertion, or, better still, a round of its electric car lines; but one would no more expect to find the picturesque and the legendary past in Rosario than in Newark. Large and prosperous as it has grown, it is not the capital of its province, much to the disgust of its energetic citizens, but is ruled from Santa Fé, a languid little town of several times the age but scarcely one eighth the population of the bustling provincial metropolis. There are advantages in being a capital in the Argentine which we of the north would hardly suspect.

I slipped on up the Paraná to have a look at this capital which the Rosarians so universally tongue-lash. A splendidly fertile, softly rolling, velvety-green country, with dark-red cattle standing in groups here and there to give contrast, was the chief impression left by a journey of several hundred kilometers through the province of Santa Fé. Yet for some reason the city of the same name, though barely a hundred miles north of Rosario, was humidly hot and swarming with flies, its atmosphere that of an ambitionless town of the tropics content to dawdle through life on what the frequent influxes of politicians bring it. Far across the river, which here spreads out into an immense lagoon, lay hazy white on a distant knoll the city of Paraná, capital of the province of Entre Rios, between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, which unite at length to form the Plata.

Another floor-flat, fertile plain, with many ranchos and villages, with “soolkees” jogging along the broad earth roads between wheat and alfalfa fields and pastures dotted with fat cattle and plump sheep until the eyes tired of seeing them, marked the trip westward from Santa Fé. Here, to all appearances, was the best farming land imaginable, though one could easily imagine better farming. Crowds of shaggy yet prosperous-looking countrymen gathered at every station. The alfalfales were still deep-green, though it was already becoming late autumn; golden ears of corn of a size that even Kansas would envy were being husked from the standing stalks and heaped to overflowing into huge trojes, stack-shaped bins made of split palm-trunks or other open-work material.

I came at length to one of the oldest and most famous of Argentine towns, a yellow-white city in a shallow valley, with an almost Oriental aspect, and backed by hills—and hills alone are noteworthy enough to bring a city fame in the Argentine. In fact, Córdoba sits in the only rugged section of the country, except where the Andes begin to climb out of it to the west. Among these ranges, sometimes called, with the exaggeration natural to young nations, the “Argentine Switzerland,” are many summer hotels and colonies, strange as it may seem to go north for the summer in the south temperate zone.

Córdoba, the geographical center of the Argentine Republic, is centuries old, with more traditions, more respect for age, than Buenos Aires, with many reminders of old Spain and of the conservative, time-marked towns of the Andes. In Córdoba it is easy to imagine the atmosphere of the federal capital of a century ago. There is still a considerable “colonial” atmosphere; respect for old customs still survives; age counts, which is rare in the Argentine, a country like our own full of youth and confidence in the future, and the corresponding impatience with the past, with precedent. Peru had already been conquered and settled when Córdoba was made a halfway station between the unimportant river-landing called Buenos Aires and the gold mines of the former Inca Empire, and it was founded by Spanish nobles of a better class than the adventurers who followed Pizarro on his bloody expedition. Many of the families of Córdoba boast themselves descendants of those hidalgos, though to most argentinos ancestry seems as unimportant, compared with the present, as it does to the average American. The Córdobans, like the ancient families of the Andes, look down upon newly won wealth as something infinitely inferior to shabby gentility, though the latter has been refurbished of late years by increasing incomes from the neighboring estates. The Porteño has little sympathy for the Córdoban attitude toward life. He pokes fun at the conservative old city, calling it the “Mecca” of the Argentine because of the pilgrims who come at certain seasons of the year to worship its bejeweled saints; he asserts that its ostensibly “high-brow” people “buy books but do not read them.” The Córdoban retaliates by rating Córdoba, and perhaps Salta, the only “aristocratic” towns in the Argentine, and has kept the old Spanish disdain of commerce, which is naturally a disdain of Buenos Aires.

The conservative old families do not, of course, accept newcomers easily. There is a strong race, as well as class, prejudice. Up to half a century ago no student was admitted to the university unless he could show irrefutable proof of “pure” blood, that is, of unbroken European ancestry. That rule might be in force to this day but for the strong hand of the federal government. The famous university, founded in 1605 by the Jesuits, and ranking with that of Lima as the oldest in America, is outwardly an inconspicuous two-story building, though there are artistic old paintings and cedar-of-Tucumán carvings inside that are worth seeing. The students who attend it are, however, by no means unobtrusive, though they do not seem to give quite such exclusive attention to the color of their gloves and the brand of their perfumes as do their prototypes in the federal capital. It is natural, too, that such a community should retain an air of piety. Its ancient moss-grown cathedral, likewise of Jesuit construction, with a far-famed tower, is but one of some thirty churches in a town of a scant thirty thousand inhabitants. Priests and monks give it by their number and conspicuousness an atmosphere quite unlike Buenos Aires, with its scarcely noticeable low Grecian cathedral, its lack of church towers, and its rare priests. In Córdoba there are even beggar monks who make regular tours of the province, reminiscent of medieval Spain. The church and its functionaries own many fine estancias, for pilgrims have always come in numbers, and society is pious to the point of fanaticism. If one may believe the Porteño, the conservatism and fanaticism of Córdoba would be worse than it is had not the central government sent to the university a number of German Protestant professors, who have had some influence on the community, not so much in Germanizing as in breaking down ancient prejudices.

Among the amusing old customs that remain are some that lend a touch of the picturesque to offset a certain tendency toward the modern. Cows are still driven through the streets, attended by their calves, and are milked before each client’s door; the conservative Córdoban will have none of this new-fangled notion of having his milk brought in bottles, in which there may be a percentage of water. Here there is still the weekly band concert and plaza promenade, with the two sexes marching in opposite directions; here the duenna is in her glory and prospective husbands whisper their assertions through iron-grilled windows. The gente del pueblo, or rank-and-file citizens, nearly all with a considerable proportion of that Indian blood almost unknown in Buenos Aires, live in adobe thatched houses in the outskirts and have the appearance, as well as repute, of little industry, with the Andean tendency to work only a few days a week since foreign industry has raised their wages to a point where frequent vacations are possible. Cactus and donkeys add a suggestion of Andean aridity in the outskirt section, over which floats now and then a subtle breath of the tropics.

Córdoba in its shallow valley, veiled by thick banks of white mist, was more beautiful on the morning I left than when more plainly seen. As our train rose above it to the vast level pampa the city disappeared, but all along the western horizon lay its famous mountains, a long ridge, saw-like in places, turning indigo blue when the sun went down on a brilliant day. On the other side of the train still lay the monotonous, flat, low Argentine pampa, without hedges, ditches, almost without trees, the roads mere wide spaces reserved for travel. The law requires that federal roads be fifty meters broad, but in this land of unlimited space and little stone no law can keep them from being impassable sloughs in the rainy season and rivers of dust in the dry. Even here were many enormous estancias, single estates of half a million acres, which the train took hours to cross, though they are small compared with some in the frontier country of the south. Here are estancieros who have the impression that the sun rises and sets on their property—which is not without its influence on their characters and especially on those of their children. In the “good old days,” which were not so long ago in the Argentine, persons with money, political influence, or a military record could acquire vast tracts of territory at trifling cost, and up to the present generation these landed proprietors, among them most of the old families of Córdoba, were virtually monarchs of all they surveyed. Now the government, once so prodigal with its land, is beginning to see the error of its ways, and is forming the habit of talking in terms of square kilometers instead of square leagues, as well as favoring bona fide settlers, though it still does not require those who buy public lands at a song to settle upon and improve them.

Perhaps once each half hour did a more pretentious estancia house, surrounded by its thin grove of precious eucalyptus, break the monotony of flat plain and makeshift ranchos. It is the scarcity of trees no doubt that makes birds so rare in the Argentine. The two-compartment, oven-shaped mud nests of the hornero on the crosspieces of the telegraph poles were almost the only signs of them, except of course the occasional ñandúes loping away across the pampa. The more and more open-work reed shacks began to suggest almost perpetual summer. Then all at once I ceased feeling the increasing heat, suddenly put down my window, and a moment later was hurrying into a sweater. For a pampero had blown up from the south, and seemed bent on penetrating to the marrow of my bones.

When I peered out of my sleeping-car cabin next morning, a considerable change of landscape met the eye. The “rápido” was crawling into Santiago del Estero, and I seemed to have been transported overnight from the rich green fields of the Paraná back to the dreary Andes, or, more exactly, to the coastlands of Peru or Bolivia. Founded in the middle of the sixteenth century, on the bank of a river that becomes salty a little farther on, and forms in the rainy season large esteros, or brackish backwaters and lagoons, “St. James of the Swamp” still suffers intensely for lack of water. It is unfortunate that nature does not divide her rains more evenly in the Argentine. Farther south only the tops of the fence posts were protruding from the flood in some places; here the country seemed to be habitually dying of thirst.