House and raiment and food and wine.”
When contemplating the bountiful provisions of Nature in favor of the inhabitants of the tropics, as evinced in various species of food-producing palms, we are forcibly reminded of the statement of Linnæus that the first home of our race was somewhere in the tropics. “Man,” says this illustrious botanist, “dwells naturally within the tropics, and lives on food furnished by the palm tree; he exists in other parts of the world and subsists on flesh and cereals.”[2]
The llanos in places are quite level, and intersected by numerous caños and streams. Some of them are so large that they could easily be converted into navigable canals for small craft. In other places the plains are undulating and are ideal grazing lands during the rainy season. There is always an abundance of water, even in the dryest summer, and the numerous groves and clumps of trees suffice to furnish shade at all times for the largest herds.
A Traveler’s Lodge in the Llanos of Colombia.
We had not proceeded far when we met a large herd of cattle in care of herdsmen quietly reposing beneath some umbrageous moriche palm or singing some favorite Llanero song. Contrary to what we expected, the cattle were not so wild as those we had seen in Venezuela and, although we passed within a few yards of them, they barely noticed us. They were quite as tame as any one would find in the pasture lands of an Illinois farm.
But what a fine breed of cattle they were and in what splendid condition! They were as fat, sleek and large as any we had ever seen on the plains of Texas or Nebraska, and would, I am sure, command as high prices in the stockyards of Chicago.
We were deeply impressed with the future possibilities of the Venezuelan grazing lands, but we are now convinced that even a greater future awaits the llanos of Colombia when properly exploited. To extend the Cucuta railway so as to place Casanare and Villavicencio in connection with Lake Maracaibo would be a far less difficult and costly undertaking than many other railroad enterprises in South America that have been carried to a successful issue, and that, too, when the traffic hoped for was far less than it would be in this instance. Such an extension, which would not need to be more than two or three hundred miles in length, would put the Colombian llanos in direct communication with the chief ports of the United States and Europe. By using fast steamers, freight could then be carried from the heart of the llanos to Mobile or New York in a week. What an immense development of the cattle industry this would at once effect is beyond calculation. It would be a greater source of revenue to the Republic of Colombia than all its mines combined.
At the first blush this project may appear Utopian to those who are unfamiliar with the country or who have never given thought to the feasibility of the enterprise. Colombia, to most people in the United States, is little better known than the territory of the Congo. Even to the Colombians themselves, the llanos—la parte oriental, as they call it—is a terra incognita. Outside of the Llaneros—cattle men—who have interests there, it is rarely visited by any one connected with the administration of the government. To reach the llanos from Bogotá means a long and tiresome journey across the eastern Cordilleras, and few are willing to undertake such a trip out of curiosity or for the purpose of informing themselves about the resources of this distant and neglected part of their country.
And yet, far away as they may seem, the llanos are not half so distant from the United States as England is, and, with the steamship and railway facilities above indicated, they could be brought as near to New York in time as is London at the present.