The highway over the Andes into Chile was filled with snow
A bit of the transandean highway in the wintry month of May
Farther west the country was somewhat drier, or at least more often above water. Here the vast pampa was divided by wire fences, producing the illusion of an immense cobweb, broken only rarely by a dense blue grove of eucalyptus trees planted about the central house of an enormous estancia, estates in most cases too large for the economic health of the country. Up to recent years the great mistake of the Argentine government was to grant mammoth tracts of land to men who quickly became so wealthy that they moved to private palaces in the capital, leaving little or nothing for the homesteads of what might be a host of productive freehold farmers. The railway company is striving to get these huge estates broken up, encouraging colonization by offering prizes for the best crops along its lines, as well as special inducements of transportation. For much of the region through which the “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” runs is so thinly populated that, as in some of our western states, the common carrier is forced to help produce something to carry. But the big landed proprietors have a Spanish pride in the size of their holdings, and with it an abhorrence not only of manual labor but even of living on their estates, from which the income is large enough for their comfort under the poorest systems of farming, or mere grazing, and it is not easy to induce them to sell even those portions lying wholly idle. The company has various ways of combatting this attitude. The most common is to build stations only where wealthy estancieros donate not merely the land needed for immediate use, but room for future railroad development and sometimes for the building of a village and the beginning of more intensive agriculture about it.
A few of these have developed into true frontier towns, with enormously wide mud streets and electric lights, stretching far out into the country, as if the inhabitants expected to wake up any morning and find the place trebled in population. They were like a country without a history,—prosperous, contented—and uninteresting. There being almost no stone or wood all the way from the Córdoba hills to Tierra del Fuego, it was not strange that the majority even of town houses were made of the only material at hand, mud, as the Esquimaux build of snow and ice; yet the most dismal of these structures were by no means the comfortless dens of the Indians and cholos of the Andes. It was Sunday, and especially on that day is it the custom in the smaller provincial towns to hacer el corso, to parade back and forth, at the station at train-time. Groups of comely girls, well dressed for such districts, powdered and perfumed, with flowers in their hair, their arms interlocked, were not content to display their charms to their rustic fellow-townsmen outside the station barriers, but invaded the platforms and strolled from end to end of the train as long as it remained. As attractive members of the fair sex are never without their attendant groups of admirers in South America, the latter increased the platform throng to a point where it was a lucky traveler who could find room to descend and make his way across it.
For long distances there were almost no signs of animate life except occasional flocks of ñandúes cantering away like awkward schoolgirls. About every boliche, country store and liquor shop, were groups of shaggy pampa ponies and their no less shaggy riders, the animals prevented from deserting their owners by rawhide thongs binding their front feet together. Bombachas, the bloomer-like nether garments of the pampas, were much in evidence among these modern gauchos. A few of these, no doubt, were independent farmers; the majority were plainly hired men whose greatest likeness to the hardy part-Indian cowboys of a generation ago is the ability to absorb some five pounds of meat a day, washing it down with copious draughts of boiling mate. Vegetables are as little grown in the Argentine as in most of South America, and the employees, only the mayordomos and the pen-driving class missing, who gather daily about the asado provided by the estanciero, still live almost entirely on meat, with occasionally a few hardtack galletas from these pampa stores. Boys of seven or eight, with true gaucho blood in their veins, who sat their horses as if they were part of them, galloped about some of these smaller towns, boleando cats and dogs with astonishing skill. At the more important crossings an old man or woman, sometimes a little girl, stood waving as solemnly as if the whole future of the railroad depended upon them the black-and-yellow flag that means “all safe” to Argentine trainmen. Country policemen were almost numerous, riding along the miserable roads or dismounted at the stations, covered with dust or mud and mingling with the hardy, independent countrymen. The rural Argentine police still have a far from enviable reputation, though they no longer tyrannize over the new style of argentino as they once did over the bold but unsophisticated gaucho of the “Martín Fierro” type. Yet on the whole they were not a body of men to inspire confidence. One felt at a glance that, far from trusting to their protection, it would be better to have someone else along in the more lonely sections of the country to protect one from the police.
Mendoza, metropolis of western Argentine and capital of the province of the same name, lies at the very base of the Andes, six hundred miles inland from Buenos Aires and barely one fourth as far from the Pacific, though with the mighty Andean wall intervening. Built on plentiful flat ground in what is sometimes called the “Argentine California,” the city is laid out in wide checkerboard streets, some of them shaded by rows of magnificent trees of abundant foliage. Each street is bordered with ditches made of mosaics of small cobbles, for the torrents that pour down from the Andes at certain seasons are worthy of man’s attention, and though the town is not tropical, banana, acacia, and mulberry trees bathe their feet in these intermittent streams and take on an extraordinary vigor. The central section has a number of modern business buildings, but the dwellings are nearly all still in the old Spanish style, often large houses, but capacious chiefly in depth, so that one only half suspects the several flowery patios they inclose. Few buildings are of more than one story, and even the stylish habitations, with columned façades and corredores paved with colored marble dalles, are made of mud baked with straw and lime. For Mendoza still remembers the days, sixty years ago, when an earthquake destroyed the entire town, burying nearly the whole population of ten thousand in the ruins. Nothing remains now of the old town except the ruins of a church or two that are preserved as historical souvenirs and warnings against high buildings, mere masses of bricks standing like monoliths on the summits of walls that seem ever ready to fall down and on which a bush or a plant has here and there taken root; yet the mendocinos are only beginning to put their faith in reinforced concrete. Many of the houses are smeared pink, saffron, blue, or other bright color, and when it rains the mud roofs run down over the façades, streaking the colors or washing them out to a leprous gray.
Being almost entirely a one-story town, and retaining the Moorish style of architecture, even the hotels of Mendoza have no windows on the streets, the only openings to the rooms being the door on the patio, so that the guest who needs a bit of light must disclose to servants and fellow-clients all his domestic activities; and to reach the bathroom, if there is one, means parading the entire length of the courtyard. Sidewalk cafés are thronged even on “winter” evenings; as elsewhere in the Argentine, every workingman’s restaurant has its cancha de bochas, a kind of earth-floored bowling-alley native to rural Italy. There are electric street-cars, and the electric lights, outdoors and in, outdo our own in size and brilliancy. While the English own the important Argentine railroads, Germans hold most of the concessions for electric light and power in the provincial towns, and Mendoza is no exception to this rule.
The modern argentino is not only a transplanted European, but in most cases has come over within the past century. Only Caucasian immigration is welcome, no negroes and none of the yellow races being admitted. As in Buenos Aires, there is in the capital of each province an immigration bureau, with attendants speaking the principal tongues of Europe, which strives to place the newcomer to his and the country’s advantage. Thus there is a decidedly European atmosphere even in towns as far back in the depths of America as Mendoza, one that all but obliterates the purely American aspect. The city retains a suggestion of Spanish colonial days, but the native bombachas are no more familiar sights than the Basque cap of the Pyrenees and the hemp-sole sandals, the short blouse with wide sash of contrasting color, and the clean-shaven features of the hardy Spanish peasant and arriero.
Like several of the more important cities far distant from the federal capital, Mendoza enjoys a certain local autonomy, though the prevailing political party in the Argentine advocates a strongly centralized government more nearly like that of France than that in the United States. The province prints its own small money, legal tender only within its limits, for the national currency not only becomes scarcer but more and more ragged and illegible in ratio to the distance from Buenos Aires. A not entirely unjustified fear of revolution, too, causes the province to maintain a large police force, for the Argentine has nothing like our National Guard. It is easy for the federal government, often looking for just such a chance, to intervene at the first suggestion of trouble in a province, and as such intervention means a suspended governor, a legislature forced out of office, and the loss of nearly all political patronage, the provincial authorities find it to their advantage to have a dependable police force. Persistent rumor has it that the police of Mendoza, however, are far from perfect, that they lose few opportunities to force bribes from, and otherwise tyrannize over, the population. Many fines may legally be imposed and collected directly by the police, and the story runs that it is particularly unfortunate to attract their attention toward the end of the month. They are then apt to be penniless, and are given to wandering the streets after dark, seeking whom they may run in and threaten to lock up if he does not at once pay the “fine” then and there levied by the police. If the victim asks for a receipt, rumor adds, he is instantly clapped into jail, or rather, is sent to stand all night or sit down in mud in the prison yard. Even important citizens of Mendoza hesitate to go out alone after dark at the end of the month.