The city owes its importance to its port Ensenada, about five miles distant and to which is dug a basin where ships laden with grain and canned meats sail for North America and European ports. From here also in order to avoid the congestion in the Darsenas and in the Riacheulo at Buenos Aires, passenger ships sail, notably the Lamport & Holt Line, which keeps up a direct passenger service between Buenos Aires and New York. On this basin are two large beef-packing establishments, that of Armour and that of Swift.

CHAPTER III
SAN LUIS

The average stranger coming to the United States to see the country very seldom pays a visit to an obscure state capital. The very contrary to this is what I did after I had been but little over a week in Buenos Aires, as I maintain that the only way to see a foreign country properly is to avoid the show places and get out among the people in the smaller cities. Knowing that San Luis was but a short distance from the main line of the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway between Buenos Aires and Mendoza, and is reached by one through train daily in each direction, I decided to stop off there.

I left Buenos Aires at three o'clock one afternoon when the thermometer registered 100.4° Fahrenheit and was soon traversing the flat landscape remindful of the valley of the River Po. The white, cream-colored tile-roofed houses, the small vineyards and vegetable gardens, the long rows of Lombardy poplars, and the oxen hitched to the wagons on the country roads presented a picture that could just as well be that of northern Italy as that of the Province of Buenos Aires. Nearly everywhere in eastern Argentina where the country is well settled, the landscape is decidedly Italian, due largely to the presence of the trees indigenous to the Po Valley, originally brought there by immigrants from that part of Europe.

Plaza San Martin, Mercedes

The train I was on was a very poor one, the first-class compartments being no better than third-class ones in Germany. Thirty-four miles out of Buenos Aires, we reached the town of Pilar, which lies a short distance north of the railroad. Its station is the terminus of the Buenos Aires suburban trains. Eight miles farther on is seen on the crest of a rise of ground to the south, the insane asylum of Open Door, a model of its kind. The method employed for the treatment of the patients is freedom from restraint, with the privilege to do what they please as long as they keep within bounds. The originator of this method of handling the insane believes that by allowing them to follow out their whims, they will eventually become tired of them, and that the confinement of the demented prisoners tends to aggravate their condition. This theory which he put into practice has had good results.

Mercedes, seventy miles from Buenos Aires, with a population of thirty thousand inhabitants, is the junction of three railroads, the Central of Buenos Aires, the Western, and the Buenos Aires Pacific. It is one of the oldest cities in the republic and is the stamping ground of Irish settlers who drifted in here a few generations ago and have become rich. Unlike most Argentine cities, its streets are numbered. Chacabuco, one hundred and thirty-one miles from the capital, was reached about 7.30 P.M. It is a stock-breeding center and is in the midst of a rich agricultural district. One hundred and seventy-nine miles from Buenos Aires is Junin, an important small town from which leads a branch of the Central Argentina Railway to Pergamino and Rosario. The place was formerly called Fuerte Federacion from a fort on the Salado River. As late as 1876 it was attacked by Indians, the last attack having been made on December 10th of that year under the leadership of Pincen. The Indians were badly defeated and fled, leaving behind all the stock they had stolen on the way. A man from Junin who sat directly across the table from me in the dining car informed me that farm lands in the neighborhood of his city were selling at as high as three hundred pesos a hectare. That would make common prairie land worth there fifty dollars an acre. During the night we crossed a corner of the Province of Santa Fé at Rufino where the dining car was taken off. The train then traversed the southern part of the Province of Córdoba and entered the Province of San Luis in the early morning.