All the way to Valdivia the product of the saw was in evidence,—rivers of planks, seas of squared logs. New little towns, built entirely of wood, and visibly growing, dotted the line of the railroad; in small clearings, about shacks as rough as those of our Tennessee mountains, the soil that had been turned up was rich black loam; the scattered inhabitants had the hardy, self-sufficient, hopeful air of all frontiersmen. Then great damp forests, strangely like those of the far north, grew almost continuous on either hand. I stood for half the afternoon on the back platform of our wreck of a first-class car, watching the cold, wet world race away into the north, and the temperate zone night, so different from that of the tropics, settle slowly down.
In the darkness we came to a little station called Valdivia, but it was merely the landing-place for the small steamer to the town of that name, which lay twelve miles up the river. It is named for Pedro de Valdivia, a companion of Pizarro in Peru and afterward conqueror of Chile—with reservations; for he had no such luck against the Araucanians as against the docile Quichuas farther north and finally lost his life in his efforts to subdue them. But Valdivia is Spanish only in name; in nearly all else it is extremely Germanic, so different from the typical South American town that one seems suddenly transported to another continent. Well built, two stories high, new and clean, without a suggestion of luxury, yet comfortable as a town of the north temperate zone, it might easily have been mistaken for one in the newer sections of Washington or Oregon. Most remarkable of all, at least to a man who had been traveling for years in lands of adobe, brick, or stone, it was made entirely of wood.
Saw-mill whistles awoke me at dawn. The sun, after a long struggle with the dense clouds rising from the unseen sea not far to the west, won the day, and every living thing was visibly grateful for its benign countenance, for continual rain is the customary lot of this part of Chile at this season. For once the weather was fine—except underfoot. The streets and roads of Valdivia were literally impassable, with the exception of those that were laid with plank floors, planks which would have been worth almost their weight in silver in most of the continent. Heavy rains bring thick forests, however, and here wood served every possible purpose. Wooden fences were everywhere, wooden sidewalks drummed under my heels with an almost forgotten sound; houses were covered with a rough species of clapboarding; even the few buildings that seemed at a distance to be of stone turned out to be made of wood tinned over, the roofs covered with lumber rather than shingles, either because Valdivia does not know how to make the latter or because boards are cheaper than labor. The unfloored streets were incredible sloughs of mud. One was named the Calle Intrépido, and the man would have been intrepid indeed who ventured out into it. A few aged hacks, smeared with mud to their wooden roofs, plied along the few principal streets between the Germanized plaza and the rather wide river which the town faces. To enter almost any shop was to be suddenly transported to the little towns of the Harz or the Black Forest, though the shopkeeper was likely to address a stranger in Spanish, usually with more or less foreign accent.
Isolated for a considerable period after their first arrival in southern Chile, the Germans began to move northward as the Chileans moved south, and the hostile Indians were squeezed between them. With the advent of the railroad, which reached Temuco a short generation ago and Valdivia some time later, the Chileanizing of the immigrants and the territory advanced rapidly, and even before the World War direct relations between these settlers of Teutonic blood and the Fatherland seem to have been rare. Yet the harsh German speech echoes everywhere through the trains and hotels of South Chile to-day, though the German-Chilean speaks Spanish as well as he does the tongue of his grandfather colonist, exercises all the rights of Chilean citizenship, and frequently marries into Chilean families. His ways are somewhat enigmatical, sometimes ludicrous, to the Latin-sired native, however, and for all his industry, he is to a certain degree the butt of the older society. What we know as an “Irish bull” is called in Chile a cuento alemán—a “German yarn.”
Below Valdivia lies a great potato-growing country, occupying the site of the burned forest, now a rich, rolling agricultural section. Blackberries were thick along the railroad. The centers of this uncouth, wood-built, prosperous region are the large German towns of La Unión and Osorno, towns in which German was the language of the schools and almost all the local officials bore Teutonic names. From Temuco southward the railroad had been running out like a dying stream, with ever decreasing traffic. I left Osorno by the daily freight, which dragged behind it one passenger car with two long upholstered seats along its sides serving also as a caboose and densely packed with well-dressed men entirely European in origin. Several young men were plainly of German parentage, yet they spoke Castilian together, and one such pair was wondering how they could escape the year of compulsory military service in Chile, “since our fathers came out here largely to avoid such slavery.” Rail fences, rude cabins in rough little clearings, rolling hills scratched over with wooden plows, countrymen in ever thicker ponchos and with but rare traces of Indian blood, burned woods covered with charred stumps and grazing cattle, lined the way on this journey. The railroad, here only a few months old, faded to a little grass-grown track. Then the land opened out, flattening away to the edge of Lake Llanquihüe, and I came to the end of railroading and mainland in Chile.
Puerto Montt, more than a thousand kilometers south of Santiago, and capital of the province of Llanquihüe, below which Chile breaks up into islands terminating in Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, was founded by Germans in the middle of the last century. It is a quiet hamlet of three or four thousand inhabitants, built of planks or wooden bricks, in a style reminiscent of Switzerland or Westphalia, on the edge of an immense harbor which hopes some day to serve as a station of a partly overland route between Australia and Europe. The commerce of the region is almost wholly in German hands, there being but two Chilean merchants, while the native population is miserable and poverty-stricken. Barefooted women, ragged gamins, not a few beggars, are to be seen in the streets, and there are far too many shopkeepers in proportion to producers. Here, too, may be seen women on horseback, wearing heavy ponchos and wide brimmed felt hats which give them a suggestion of misplaced “cow girls.” A short steamer trip from the town lies the large island of Chiloé, said to be the original home of the potato and still producing it in great quantities. Many of the neat, well-managed farms of Chiloé are owned by Boers who refused to endure British rule after the South African War, though a majority of the Chilotes are of old Spanish stock with a considerable strain of Indian blood.
I had come more and more to regret that I had not reached this wet and shivering corner of the world in the brilliant summer-time of Christmas and New Year’s. The regret was all the keener because it was coupled with the necessity of altering long-laid plans and retracing my steps, always an abhorrence. From Puerto Montt I might in summer have crossed the two Chilean lakes of Llanquihüe and Esmeraldas, Laguna Fría in the Argentine, and finally famous Nahuel-Haupi, and, with ten days’ tramping across the pampas, have come back to Buenos Aires by Neuquen and the “Great Southern.” But at this season such a journey was impossible and, having no taste for polar explorations, I let Puerto Montt, in a latitude similar to that of Boston, stand as my “farthest south,” and turned tail and fled back into the warmer north.
At Temuco I wired ahead for a berth on the night train to Santiago. The precaution was hardly necessary. At the end of the train waiting in San Rosendo were two brand new cars stencilled “Pullman Company, Chicago,” which had not yet had time to go to rack and ruin. There were but few passengers in the first of them; in the second I found myself entirely alone. The conductor bowed low over my pass with, “Will you have a berth or a stateroom?” The porter was a ragged roto such as might have been picked up at any station, but he lost no time in making up my private parlor. Just how much the huge yearly deficit of the government railways of Chile is due to the hauling back and forth of empty first-class cars, and the ease with which general passes are granted, is of course a question for financiers rather than a random wanderer. Before I turned in, I impressed upon the melancholy porter the necessity of calling me in time to get off at Rancagua, station for a famous American copper mine up the mountainside to the eastward. He was vociferous in his advice to me to “lose care.”
Unfortunately I did so. By and by I was disturbed by a thumping on my door that finally brought me back to consciousness. I sprang up and—and heard the irresponsible half-Indian masquerading as porter say in a mellifluous voice:
“You wished to get off at Rancagua, señor? Well, you must hurry, for I overslept and we are just pulling out of there.” No doubt, being a Chilean roto, it had never occurred to him that his “gringo” charge had taken off his clothes to sleep. By the time I might have had them on again we were miles beyond, and I had gone back to bed. From Santiago I hurried back to the Argentine so fast that I paid in cash the breath-taking fare between my two railroad passes. I was just in time; for the very next train was forced to back down to Los Andes again, and the transandean pass remained snowed in until the following September.