Rancagua, a somnolent little town lying about 70 miles from the Pacific, has no direct rail communication with the sea, and derives what liveliness it possesses from its position upon the main line to Santiago, its chief market, and as the terminus of the Braden Company’s electrically-operated line to El Teniente or rather to Sewell—which has an older name, Machalí. At times the activity resulting from the mine’s access to this town, and this town alone, is regarded without any pleasure by the townsfolk, for when strike trouble occurs there is likely to be a descent of discontented workmen and families. Such an occasion occurred at the time of the disorders at the end of 1919, when an army of expelled men with their families walked down the narrow track from Sewell to Rancagua, and although the journey of 72 kilometres occupied some three days, and the spirit of the strikers was reduced by their experiences, Rancagua was alarmed and embarrassed by their presence.
A curious mixture of workers finds its way to this and other mining camps of Chile. The bulk consists of the hardy Chilean himself, concerning whose good qualities no employer of intelligence and feeling has any doubts: he is strong, trustworthy, kindly—but can be roused by drink or anger to violence. Treated well, he is the best element among massed groups of workers. But side by side with the genuine and sound Chilean is not only the malcontent roaming from north to south, from camp to camp, according to his own will or the exigencies of the Ley de Residencia, but the “hard case” from half a score of different countries. The mines are refuges for every variety of man who is down and out: they offer fertile ground for the sowing of Bolshevik propaganda or the seed of the I. W. W. of California, whose flag has been seen more than once flaunted in Chilean streets. The curious artificial life of the camps, with its poor rewards, the lack of healthy recreation, of the sight of the horizon, of birds and fields and flowers, of any interest at all but that of daily toil, lends itself to the development of grievances.
From Rancagua to Coya the line is open to the public, the pleasant and famous Baths of Cauquenes lying in the deep green gorge of the Cachapoal River followed by the track. Casual visitors to the camp at Sewell are however not encouraged: there is a wary eye kept upon possible purveyors of such forbidden joys as alcoholic liquors. El Teniente is as “dry” as managerial care can make it, but the fact that 1200 to 2000 bottles of whisky and brandy are seized every year by the camp detectives without putting any end to the attempts of the guachucheros (bootleggers) appears to prove that enough liquor gets through to make the business pay. Despite this lack of welcome to the unintroduced stranger, however, Sewell is hospitable to the visitor, and any accredited person receives pleasant courtesies.
The rail automobile which takes such visitors from Rancagua to the camp offers by far the most agreeable form of travel; the bright green fields and sub-tropical verdure of the sheltered plain country gives way to deep folds of mountain spurs, and presently, rising into colder air, vegetation is reduced to a few hardy shrubs and mosses, and the violet and tawny shoulders of the Andes rise from the banks of the racing river. When I visited El Teniente the mountains were bare; their rocky sides, steep, incredibly scored and peaked, took on at sunset and dawn brilliant hues of rose and flame; but before I left the first snow fell, transforming the whole country in a single night. A thick blanket filled the crevices of the sheer rocks, black ridges and points alone emerging; the piled tenements of the miners, clinging like birds’ nests on the face of a cliff, were blanched, half-buried, pathless. Communication with the outer world, by the single line down the ravine to Rancagua, was actually not much more restricted, but with the blocking of even the few mountain tracks open in summertime the isolation of the camp was emphasised.
There are about 2800 miners engaged at El Teniente, but the total population of the camp, including the workmen’s families, the officials (chiefly North Americans), employés of railways, stores, etc., is usually over 12,000. All this artificial town hangs precariously on a steep slope immediately opposite to the jagged crater where the huge copper deposits are embedded. Formerly, rows of camp buildings were built on the mine’s lower slope, but avalanches of soil, rock and snow necessitated the removal of dwellings to the present site, at the 7000-foot level.
Scarcely a sign of mining operations is visible from across the mountain chasm, although work has been going on here for at least 200 years. Owing to the treacherous nature of the country rock and danger from snow slides during six months of each year, the ore bodies are now attacked from below; entrances to the intricate system of shafts and subterranean passages are lost in the rugged crenellations of the old volcano. Yet the place is honeycombed: one tunnel, starting from the more recently approached Fortuna side, runs all round the three-quarter-mile-wide crater; there are innumerable hoists, ore-passes, shafts, galleries and tunnels, that, with the railways and powerful machinery and gangs of workers, comprise an industrial town hidden in the mountains.
The second large copper property operated by the Guggenheim interests in Chile is at Chuquicamata, in the high deserts of the province of Antofagasta, at about 11,000 feet above sea level. The region has long been famous for its copper-ore deposits, and small, rich veins have been worked during and since colonial times.
Most of these high-grade ores have been exhausted near the surface, whatever may lie hidden in the heart of the region: the principle adopted by the Chile Copper Company, as that of the Braden, is to attack large bodies of low-grade ore upon a big scale and in a scientific manner. But “Chuqui” is an open-air mine situated on a tawny desert, in extraordinary contrast with El Teniente, and the actual processes employed are different because the two bodies of ores differ in composition.
Sewell (El Teniente Mine) in the Snows of June.