As hotels (every store was a hotel) the places were most unattractive; worse, for instance, than any I saw when The Sun sent me through the wilds of southern Mexico. In Mexico all of a party of travellers, men, women, children, and servants, would be lodged in a single room, with nothing but the tile floor or a bench to sleep on, but it was always a clean floor, while one could have a hammock under a veranda if he chose, and that was about the best kind of bed. Moreover, food was always abundant and good. At some Gallegos hotels one could not be certain of either quantity or quality of the food, while the blankets were neither washed nor aired nor changed.
However, there were exceptions to the rule, at least one exception. Doña Philomena, a rotund and jolly woman of middle age, with her son, a lad of about sixteen, kept a boarding-house in an adobe hut of one room, twelve by eighteen feet. She had a stove that smoked at every crevice on one side of the door, a rude table with benches at the other, a spare bed just beyond, and beyond this bed heaps and piles of boxes and bags and bundles, containing vegetables, groceries, clothing, Indian curios, saddles, and horse gear generally. There were three kinds of meat hanging from the rafters. There was but one tiny window, and that yielded light enough only for the table. In the extreme rear of the room all was concealed by impenetrable gloom. A Yankee wife would have said she never did see such a cluttered up place. Nevertheless, the mud walls had been whitewashed until they looked like the dried up bottom of a pool in an alkali desert. The mud floor was neatly swept. The spare bed had clean white sheets, and the blankets smelled sweet. The rude table was covered with a snowy cloth, and there was a stainless napkin at each plate. Doña Philomena wore a clean dress, with a bright-colored shawl over her shoulders. The picture of her as she worked over the stove in a thin halo of blue smoke, giving a stir to the potatoes frying in the pan or a peek at the mutton roasting in the oven, or cutting fresh bread, or opening Yankee condensed milk, while she smiled and joked and gossiped in a continuous flow of words, was something that the traveller would carry with him for a long time after. And when the meal was over and we all smoked and lingered over the coffee the boy got out an old guitar and played the tunes the Spanish lover plays to win a sweetheart—tunes that alternately swelled with importunate passion and faded into murmurs of hopeless longing, so that everybody stopped talking to stare into space and think of somebody else a long way off.
The Captain of the steamer introduced me to Gov. Edelmiro Mayer. The Governor lived in a large frame one-story building that had a glass-enclosed veranda overlooking the river. On the whole, this was a most remarkable home, considering the locality. Though like a mining-camp house, as the rest were in outward appearance, there were within Oriental rugs of great value on the floor; a grand piano of American make that cost $1500 in gold in New York stood in one corner of the parlor; a great organ such as professional musicians prefer was in another; a library of 5000 volumes, made up of standard works of science and literature, was in the glass-enclosed veranda, while the furniture and hangings and bric-à-brac were everything that a cultivated taste could ask for. So was the sideboard, with its old Kentucky whiskey. Having very little governing to do, the Governor devoted himself to literature and music, occupations in which he was ably assisted by his wife, a charming Argentina.
Gov. Mayer's name is not unknown to American history. Just for the love of adventure and free republican institutions he came to the United States to help during the war of the rebellion. He commanded a negro regiment with conspicuous success. Afterward, while down on the Rio Grande, he crossed over to help patriotic Mexicans overthrow Maximilian.
Although small in the number of its houses and its people, Gallegos is in full plumage as a territorial capital. A two-story frame building was in course of construction that will eventually be the White House of Santa Cruz territory. Besides the Governor, there was the usual list of other officials necessary for the dignity of such a place. As at Ushuaia, already described, no official had anything to do worth mention. Indeed, the Captain of Police, who in a United States territorial capital would need to be a man of nerve and muscle, was here a cripple who could neither sit on a horse nor walk unaided the length of the town's one street. Still, courts were held sometimes to decide conflicting claims of shepherds, and a gaucho who had slashed a comrade in a drunken brawl was arrested just before I arrived. Gallegos will be a favored stopping place for criminals when the country gets filled up, I guess, for it is very handy to the Chili line, and extradition treaties between two such countries as Chili and Argentine are of little value.
A peculiarity of the climate is the southwest wind of summer. It begins at 8 in the morning and increases in violence until after noon, when it occasionally blows hard enough to lift a man from the saddle. At 3 in the afternoon it moderates, and at 6 o'clock and thence on through the night there is usually a calm. This wind blows every day in spring and summer, and on many days it brings hail and sleet that no man can face. The winter season, though colder, is by far the most pleasant of the year. But in spite of wind and cold, Patagonia is pre-eminently a healthful region now. Every human being that I saw there carried the glow of health in his face and the spring of youth in his muscles. But there are zymotic diseases just as there are in Yankee villages, because of the juxtaposition of wells and cesspools, and these diseases will prevail wherever settlements are made, because of the utter indifference of Spanish-Americans to the rules of hygiene as applied in such matters.
To sum it all up, the settlements on the coast of Patagonia are small, the buildings are of the temporary or mine-camp class, and life in them is decidedly tranquil. The towns are new, and the bad name the country has borne in the matter of climate and sterility has kept foreigners away. "There has been no boom—just a slow, healthy growth," as the Kansas boomers' paper would put it, and in this case the statement is true. Santa Cruz territory now has 800,000 sheep. Its Governor expects to see 10,000,000 there in ten years more, besides some millions of horses and cattle. Settlements will very likely spring up in the interior, and the vast region over which the Tehuelche Indians held undisputed sway during the 350 years after the land was discovered by white men will become a peaceful, thinly populated pastoral land, whose people will grow comfortably rich supplying Europe and the United States with wool, hides, and tallow. But there are no indications worth mentioning that, as a whole, it will ever be anything else than this, and at present it is of interest to the Yankee nation chiefly as a region out of the way for tourists to visit.
After leaving Port Desire we had a variation in our meals on board ship. The sailors had gone fishing with a net, and with success. There were two kinds,—one rather like a Yankee smelt, only more slender, and the other somewhat like a Lake Erie pickerel. Both were excellent, but the little fellow boiled and made into a salad was particularly fine.
Then, too, a species of ducks had become very abundant. They were so dark above as to appear black, while the under parts were pure white. Their curiosity led them to hover about the ship in twos and threes, sometimes flying along, say fifty feet above the weather rail. On such occasions Captain Chwaites brought out a light shotgun. On the day we entered Santa Cruz he knocked so many down on deck that the passengers had roast duck for one course at dinner. In fact, for a citizen of South America, the captain was a remarkably fine sportsman. He never used a shotgun on a sitting bird. He could kill gulls at long range with a rifle when they were bobbing about on the waves. While we lay in Rio Gallegos he rode out on the table-land one day with a man living there and killed three guanacos, using the bolas Indian fashion to bring them down. The tourist who sails with Captain Chwaites can expect to have game at the table frequently during the voyage.