Birdseye Views of Far Lands

by James T. Nichols

This city also has the greatest race tracks in any land and the weekly races are generally attended by from thirty to fifty thousand people. The money bet on a single day's races often runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the Jockey Club that owns the race tracks is so rich that it is embarrassing to get its money spent.

Of all the cemeteries the writer ever visited, the aristocratic burying ground in Buenos Aires caps the climax. To be laid away in this ground costs a fortune. The tombs, many of them, are above the ground and nearly every family tomb is a little chapel. Here the living friends gather on certain days, visit, drink tea, and smoke cigarettes with coffins all around them. In many of these tombs chairs are always in order with flowers arranged, kept so by the servants of the tomb.

There are thirty-six public markets in the city, some of which are very large. The wool market alone covers thirty acres of ground and the iron and steel building cost four million dollars. In it are seventy-two cranes and elevators and fifty million pounds of wool can be stored at one time. Not far from this building is another almost as large where the sheep are killed. The arrangements are so complete and the men so skilled that it is said a single man has killed as many as six thousand sheep in a day.

Buenos Aires is a city of locked doors. People never think of leaving their homes even for a few moments without locking the doors. If a business house or hotel has a rug at the door on which to wipe the shoes it will be chained fast. Stealing and pilfering is carried on extensively all over the city. Shippers claim that there is an international organization for stealing at the port cities all along the coast and it is hard to get at. In one shipment of thirty automobiles twenty-nine of the boxes had been opened and the set of tools taken. It is the custom at that factory to pack the set of tools in a certain corner of the case. A hole was cut exactly in the right place and the set of tools neatly taken out. In two instances that I was told about a drygoods firm had shipments opened and ten thousand dollars worth of silks and velvets taken.

Near the city is said to be the largest dairy in the world. They milk seven thousand cows and this is done with the latest and most up-to-date machinery. At an annual stock show recently the crowds were so dense that men paid five dollars each to get near enough to the judges to see them do their work. The sale at the close was attended by five thousand people. The champion shorthorn bull sold for more than forty thousand dollars of American money. The champion Hereford sold for $32,737.00 and a two-year-old bull sold for $23,643.00. One ram sold for more than four thousand dollars.

The Argentine could be made a great sugar producing country, but for some reason this industry is not being developed very rapidly. During the war special inducements were offered but the 1919 crop was but little more than that of 1913. There are only forty-three mills and refineries in the whole country and the surplus for exportation for 1919 was only three hundred thousand tons and that is insignificant when one thinks of the possibilities of this great industry.

But one can hardly think of Argentina without thinking of cattle ranches and wheat fields. It is in these industries that she shines. She now has thirty million head of cattle, but strange as it may seem she had as many ten years ago. She has thirty million sheep which makes her the greatest wool producing country on earth except Australia and if I am correctly informed she is not far behind that country.

In Argentina the country is called "Elcampo" and the large farms "Estancias." These great estancias often consist of thousands of acres. A single one of them is said to be as large as the state of Rhode Island. The owners generally have good houses but do not live in them much of the time. They are in Buenos Aires, or traveling in Europe, and their children are in the colleges and universities. A number of overseers look after the farm but the work is largely done by foreigners, mostly Italians. Their lives are far from easy.

The homes of these workers are generally made of mud. The floors are often nothing but the bare ground. These people are generally called colonists and work the soil on shares. They are in debt to start on; the overseers generally manipulate things so that they often never do get out of debt. The poor man's children do not have much in common with those of the rich. They are generally kept entirely separate from each other.