I spent a day in Concepción, third city of Chile, a brisk and mildly pretty town scattered over a hillside, center of a large grain district with coal fields near, hence the site of many factories, flour-mills, even sugar refineries, which import their crude product from Peru. Though it is the scene of considerable modern industry, and has the usual two-story, be-skirted tramcars, brilliant ponchos and gaunt oxen dragging clumsy, creaking carts are to be seen in its main streets. A splendid view of the town may be had from the Cerro Caracol, crowning point of a long ridge of rolling hills of reddish soil, yet covered with grass, so rare in South America, and much of it with a thick fir forest. A “snail” roadway winds upward, and immediately at the climber’s feet spreads out the entire city, flat and low for the most part, with the plethora of bulking churches common to all Chilean towns. There are many Germans in Concepción, south of which they grow ever more numerous. Along the Avenue Pedro de Valdivia, squeezed between the river and the hills in the outskirts, live scores of men of this nationality who came out less than half a century ago as simple clerks and who now have sumptuous mansions and large estates—quintas they are called in Chile—a single row of them eighteen blocks long on this one avenue boasting such names as “Thuringia” and “Die Lorelei” and the top-heavy architecture which goes with them. In Arauco province, a bit to the south, with a private railroad running into Concepción, are some of the few coal mines in South America, Chile being virtually the only country on that continent not entirely dependent on Newcastle or Australia for this sinew of industry. It seems to be a soft surface coal, mainly productive of smoke, great clouds of which frequently wipe out the beauties of the landscape in this vicinity.
Talcahuano, six miles farther northwest, is on Concepción Bay, national naval rendezvous and the best harbor in Chile, being seven miles across and bottled up by the island Quiriquina. The town, thrown around the inner bay like a wrap about a throat, with pretty residential hills climbing up close behind the modest central plaza, the outskirts scattered far and wide over a rolling, verdant country, has considerable shipping, but the Pacific is seen from it only through the rifts of islands and promontories. Forty years ago American whalers often entered this harbor, and some of the wealthy families of the vicinity to-day are descended from the deserting sailors they left behind.
In Talcahuano I found an American consul who had been there for decades, evidently long since forgotten by the authorities at home. Of the many tales he had to tell the most picturesque were those of his early days as a guano digger on the west coast, but he was more filled with the alleged rascality of the Germans in Chile. There were in Concepción, he asserted, forty German business houses as against four English and no American—or perhaps I should say “North American,” for the Chilean grows more enraged than any of his neighbors at our assumption of a term to which he considers himself equally entitled. The consul was greatly grieved to see the Germans steadily taking away the little trade Americans once had, driving out even our stoves and agricultural machinery from what had formerly been a United States stronghold. But the Germans were more apt to make things to fit local tastes, or the customer seldom had any fixed notion of what he wanted and fell easy prey to the clever and unscrupulous German salesman. The consul had recently discovered a German house secretly sending to the Fatherland a binder and a reaper which it had imported from New York, evidently because direct importation would have called official attention to the plan of copying the machines for the South American trade. He had recently bought what purported to be a reputable implement made in the United States and known by the trademark “Eureka.” It worked badly, however, and the parts broke so easily, that he finally examined it more closely and found that it was really a “Hureka,” made in Germany. Though Americans and English are hard to assimilate, clannish, little inclined to take Chilean wives, the Germans marry freely with the natives and gain much commercial and political advantage from such alliances. The Chilean-born children of Germans are legally Chileans, but at heart, according to the consul, they are still Germans. The Teutons have driven the natives out of all important business, except in the case of wealthy landowners, and these usually live in Paris and intrust their holdings to a German or other foreign manager. Our forsaken representative was also highly incensed at “the nonsense of American business men running down to South America in droves, making themselves laughing-stocks among the natives by their geographical ignorance, their manners and public drinking, and only stirring up the Germans to greater underground efforts.”
Though all Chile below Santiago is noted for its agriculture, its fertility increases with every degree southward. South Chile, which may be reckoned as beginning at the Bio-Bio River, where the vineyards end, is an almost virgin land, only a fraction of which is as yet under the plow. The Bio-Bio marks the point below which the Spaniards were never able to make a permanent conquest, for the region below it was the home of the most valiant Indians of South America, a race much more like our own untamable red-skins than the slinking tribes farther to the north. The river was finally agreed upon as the southern limits of Spain’s authority, and such it remained until that had wholly disappeared from the American continent. After the independence of Chile the republican government confirmed the valiant Mapuches, as the Araucanians call themselves, in their claim to regard the Bio-Bio as a frontier. It was not until forty years ago, when at last the white man’s fire-water had done what the Spaniards were never able to do, that the Araucanians were at last pushed back into limited reservations and Araucania formally taken under the rule of Santiago. The land was divided up among white settlers, and when the Indians objected the central government “sent out soldiers to shoot down the rebels, following just the same policy as you did in the United States,” as a Chilean told me in a naïve, matter-of-fact way.
The “first-class” coach in which I crossed the Bio-Bio, not so long before a proud product of St. Louis, was a rattling old wreck, the floor so sloppy and wet one needed rubbers, its window panes either broken or missing entirely, some of them pasted over with paper, the seats more worn and dirty than those on a backwoods branch line in the United States. As the weather had grown steadily colder from Talca southward, everyone on board was wrapped and overcoated beyond recognition. We moved slowly through a woodless, brown, rolling country almost invisible for the rain. In the early afternoon the train crept cautiously across a bridge far up above a small but powerful stream, amid green hills of plump, indistinct outline. The reason for the caution soon appeared. Just north of the city of Victoria we were suddenly routed out into a cold rain flung against us by a roaring wind like the spray from an angry sea, and found ourselves at the edge of a mighty chasm. At the bottom, in and about the stream which raged through it far below, lay the wreckage of a freight train that had dropped with the bridge a month before, killing the crew. Across this chasm swung a narrow, wire-suspended foot-bridge a furlong in length, which swayed drunkenly back and forth as the stream of wet and shivering passengers, a few women and aged, infirm men among them, crept fearfully across it, followed by all the boys and ragamuffins of the vicinity carrying the hand baggage—no white-collar Chilean of course, would carry his own even in case of wreck. We were bedraggled indeed when we climbed out of the mud and rain into another train, and another good hour was lost in transferring the mails and the heavier, fare-paying baggage before we were off again.
I found Temuco, up to the present generation the capital of the land from which the sturdy Araucanians were at length dispossessed, the most interesting town in Chile. It was more nearly like the cities of the Andean highlands, with something Mexican about it also, thanks to its mixture of dirt, poverty, and the “picturesqueness” of which the tourist rants. The Mapuche Indians are thick-set, the women especially so, broad-faced, with a reddish tinge showing through a light copper skin, due perhaps to the colder climate of their temperate homeland. Some of the women were comfortably fat; they wore their coarse hair in two braids, a band of colored cloth or silver coins about their round heads, this sometimes securing a gay head-kerchief flying in the wind. The mantos about their shoulders were usually a dull red, their skirts a true “hobble,” being a simple strip of cloth wrapped tightly around the waist and tucked in, with the raw edge down one leg. Their feet were bare, chubby, and by no means clean, though more nearly so than those of the typical Andean Indian. The children ran about bare-legged for all the wintry air. The older Indians of both sexes had rather dissipated features, as if the white man’s fire-water were still doing its work among them. The men wore a mildly gay short poncho, some still home-woven, most of them made in Germany, flannel drawers, a black or near-black skirt brought together between the legs, shapeless felt hats, and black leather boots of light material. The more poverty-stricken wore a rude moccasin and any head-gear available, even the cast off stiff straw hats of the summer-time futres of Temuco; and May is not the month for straw hats in southern Chile. The nearest Indian settlement is but half an hour’s ride from Temuco, and some of the Indian women rode into town on horses decorated with as many trappings and large silver ornaments as themselves; others carried baskets on their backs, with the leather band supporting it drawn tightly across chest or forehead. Babies were not carried on the mothers’ backs, that custom having disappeared where I turned eastward from the Andes across tropical Bolivia.
The modern Araucanian’s land is secured to him, and an official of the Chilean Government, known as “Protector of the Indians,” sees to it that the acreage he owns to-day is not alienated. But the tribe is dying, like all Indians in contact with European civilization, and the time is not many generations distant when the rest of his land will go to the white man. To all appearances the Araucanian has lost most of the warlike courage for which his ancestors were famous, though he has by no means degenerated to the cringing creature one finds in Quito or Cuzco. As in those cities, shopkeepers are obliged to learn the tongue of their most numerous customers, and Araucanian was heard on every hand, among whites as well as Indians. Some of the latter could speak nothing else, though now and then a familiar Spanish word broke out of the jumble of sound. The Mapuches had some of the superstition of the Quichuas and Aymarás toward the “little magic box with one eye,” and for the first time in months I was forced to resort to simple trickery to catch my chosen pictures.
Rain was almost incessant in Temuco, and the mud so deep that the better-to-do used suecos, wooden clogs on which were nailed imitation patent-leather uppers in any of the little shops devoted to that industry. The next most familiar sight was that of oxen pulling solid wooden wheeled wagons, straining laboriously through the sloughs called streets until one fancied the animals, with the yoke across their brows all day, must end each night with a raging headache.
Below Temuco the train crossed several considerable rivers. Long stretches of stumps and scattered wooden shacks suggested the days of Lincoln and Daniel Boone. Much rough lumber was piled at the flooded stations, which served ugly frontier hamlets tucked away among rolling hills once thick wooded and still so in places. Curiously enough this more southern section of Chile is an older country, in the settler’s sense, than that about Temuco. Seventy years ago, long before it was able to force the stronghold of the central valley of Araucania, the Chilean Government made an entry far to the south, catching the Indians in the rear and settling with foreign immigrants wide areas of what are now the provinces of Valdivia and Llanquihüe. The town of Valdivia and several other strategic points, chiefly on the coast, where the Spaniards had erected forts and established small precarious settlements, were moribund when Santiago turned its attention to the region in the middle of the last century. The coming of European colonists has given the district new life and considerable prosperity.
The methods of Chile in settling this wilderness of the south were simple. An agent in Germany sought colonists; an agent in Chile was sent to Valdivia to receive them when they landed. The first-comers were placed on the Isla de la Teja, where they would be secure against possible attack by the Indians on the mainland. There are still a number of German factories on that island, the inevitable brewery among them. When the colonial agent was forced to look farther to the unknown south for more land, he found nothing but matted forest. A trusted renegade Indian named Pichi-Juan was given thirty pesos fuertes (in those days nearly fifteen dollars) to burn this primeval woodland. Smoke clouds, visible from Valdivia, rose for three months, and at the end of that time a strip forty-five miles long and fifteen wide, from Chan-Chan to the Andes, was ready for the colonists.