When I replied he quietly sat down by the fire, helping himself to the roasted corn I had prepared in the hot ashes. A few days later when we came to the head of a rapid I was busy sketching-in my topographic map and did not hear his twice repeated request to leave the boat while the party reconnoitered the rapid. Watching his opportunity he came alongside from the rear—he was steersman—and, turning just as he was leaving the boat, gave me a whack in the forehead with his open palm. La Sama saw the motion and protested. The surly answer was:
“I twice asked him to get out and he didn’t move. What does he think we run the canoe to the bank for?”
To him the making of a map was inexplicable; I was merely a stupid white person who didn’t know enough to get out of a canoe when told!
The plateau Indian has been kicked about so long that all his independence has been destroyed. His goods have been stolen, his services demanded without recompense, in many places he has no right to land, and his few real rights are abused beyond belief. The difference between him and the forest Indian is due quite largely to differences of environment. The plateau Indian is agricultural, the forest Indian nomadic and in a hunting stage of development; the unforested plateau offers no means for concealment of person or property, the forest offers hidden and difficult paths, easy means for concealment, for ambush, and for wide dispersal of an afflicted tribe. The brutal white of the plateau follows altogether different methods when he finds himself in the Indian country, far from military assistance, surrounded by fearless savages. He may cheat but he does not steal, and his brutality is always carefully suited to both time and place.
The Machigangas are now confined to the forest, but the limits of their territory were once farther upstream, where they were in frequent conflict with the plateau Indians. As late as 1835, according to General Miller,[4] they occupied the land as far upstream as the “Encuentro” (junction) of the Urubamba and the Yanatili ([Fig. 53]). Miller likewise notes that the Chuntaguirus, “a superior race of Indians” who lived “toward the Marañon,” came up the river “200 leagues” to barter with the people thereabouts.
“They bring parrots and other birds, monkeys, cotton robes white and painted, wax balsams, feet of the gran bestia, feather ornaments for the head, and tiger and other skins, which they exchange for hatchets, knives, scissors, needles, buttons, and any sort of glittering bauble.”
On their yearly excursions they traveled in a band numbering from 200 to 300, since at the mouth of the Paucartambo (Yavero) they were generally set upon by the Pucapacures. The journey upstream required three months; with the current they returned home in fifteen days.
Their place of meeting at the mouth of the Yanatili was a response to a long strip of grassland that extends down the deep and dry Urubamba Valley, as shown in Figs. 53-B and 55. The wet forests, in which the Machigangas live, cover the hills back of the valley plantations; the belt of dry grassland terminates far within the general limits of the red man’s domain and only 2,000 feet above the sea. It is in this strip of low grassland that on the one hand the highland and valley dwellers, and on the other the Indians of the hot forested valleys and the adjacent lowland found a convenient place for barter. The same physiographic features are repeated in adjacent valleys of large size that drain the eastern aspect of the Peruvian Andes, and in each case they have given rise to the periodic excursions of the trader.
These annual journeys are no longer made. The planters have crept down valley. The two best playas below Rosalina are now being cleared. Only a little space remains between the lowest valley plantations and the highest rubber stations. Furthermore, the Indians have been enslaved by the rubber men from the Ucayali. The Machigangas, many of whom are runaway peons, will no longer take cargoes down valley for fear of recapture. They have the cautious spirit of fugitives except in their remote valleys. There they are secure and now and then reassert their old spirit when a lawless trader tries to browbeat them into an unprofitable trade. Also, they are yielding to the alluring call of the planter. At Santo Anato they are clearing a playa in exchange for ammunition, machetes, brandy, and baubles. They no longer make annual excursions to get these things. They have only to call at the nearest plantation. There is always a wolf before the door of the planter—the lack of labor. Yet, as on every frontier, he turns wolf himself when the lambs come, and without shame takes a week’s work for a penny mirror, or, worse still, supplies them with firewater, for that will surely bring them back to him. Since this is expensive they return to their tribal haunts with nothing except a debauched spirit and an appetite from which they cannot run away as they did from their task masters in the rubber forest. Hence the vicious circle: more brandy, more labor; more labor, more cleared land; more cleared land, more brandy; more brandy, less Indian. But by that time the planter has a large sugar estate. Then he can begin to buy the more expensive plateau labor, and in turn debauch it.
Nature as well as man works against the scattered tribes of Machigangas and their forest kinsmen. Their country is exceedingly broken by ramifying mountain spurs and valleys overhung with cliffs or bordered by bold, wet, fern-clad slopes. It is useless to try to cut your way by a direct route from one point to another. The country is mantled with heavy forest. You must follow the valleys, the ancient trails of the people. The larger valleys offer smooth sand-bars along the border of which canoes may be towed upstream, and there are little cultivated places for camps. But only a few of the tribes live along them, for they are also more accessible to the rubbermen. The smaller valleys, difficult of access, are more secure and there the tribal remnants live today. While the broken country thus offers a refuge to fugitive bands it is the broken country and its forest cover that combine to break up the population into small groups and keep them in an isolated and quarrelsome state. Chronic quarreling is not only the product of mere lack of contact. It is due to many causes, among which is a union of the habit of migration and divergent tribal speech. Every tribe has its own peculiar words in addition to those common to the group of tribes to which it belongs. Moreover each group of a tribe has its distinctive words. I have seen and used carefully prepared vocabularies—no two of which are alike throughout. They serve for communication with only a limited number of families. These peculiarities increase as experiences vary and new situations call for additions to or changes in their vocabularies, and when migrating tribes meet their speech may be so unlike as to make communication difficult. Thus arise suspicion, misunderstanding, plunder, and chronic war. Had they been a united people their defense of their rough country might have been successful. The tribes have been divided and now and again, to get firearms and ammunition with which to raid a neighbor, a tribe has joined its fortunes to those of vagrant rubber pickers only to find in time that its women were debased, its members decimated by strange and deadly diseases, and its old morality undermined by an insatiable desire for strong drink.[5] The Indian loses whether with the white or against him.