The enlargements of the frontier were sometimes due to expansive movements of colonization, the breeders occupying new land beyond the line of forts and demanding protection, and sometimes to the arbitrary action of a Government which was eager to extend its territory, though it was still without the means of exploiting it. Roca has well shown the defects of this system of premature military occupation. "To go far away from the populated districts in acquiring new territory is, in my opinion, only an aggravation of the inconveniences of defensive war, and it places a desert between the new lines and the settled regions.... Invasions occur at once."[10] We should therefore be likely to make serious mistakes if we were to identify the history of colonization with that of military occupation. Moreover, the garrisons of the forts did not take a very active part in the exploitation of the soil. The plan which D'Azara proposed, of making blandengues (lancers) colonists and rooting them to the soil by distributing it amongst them, seems to have been purely Utopian. His description of the frontier shows clearly how slight a hold the early colonization had on the Pampa, where the only relatively industrious element was represented by the groups of civilians (paisanos) who gathered about the works and moats of the forts. It was different on the Santiago del Estero frontier, where there was agriculture as well as breeding. Here the fort was identical with the village, and each soldier had his plot of wheat, maize, or water-melons.[11]

MAP I.—ARGENTINA. THE NATURAL REGIONS.

The map shows the distribution of the natural regions—the dry Andes in the north-west, with irrigated cultivation; the monte, or brush, which is still used for extensive breeding; and the Pampa, with its great areas of cereals and lucerne. The line marking the frontier of 1875 shows the speed at which colonization has developed in the western half of the plain of the Pampas. The only regions not given on the map are the plateau of Misiones, with its tropical forests, and the wet Andes of Patagonia.

[Click to view larger image.]

The provinces which were to combine in forming the Argentine Republic had no economic unity. They were really two countries, two separate worlds, the coast regions and the mountain regions (de arriba), joined together, but not blended, by the main road from Buenos Aires to Peru, by way of Córdoba, Tucumán, and Salta. They represented two different branches of Spanish colonization. "Two human streams," says Mitre, "contributed to the peopling of the vice-royalty.... The first came directly from Spain, the mother country. It occupied and peopled the banks in the basin of the Rio de la Plata, in the name of the right of discovery and conquest, and fertilized them by its labour. The other stream came from the ancient empire of the Incas, already subdued by the Spanish armies. This spread toward the interior of the country as it passed from the Pacific to the Atlantic, occupied the land in virtue of the same rights, and exploited it by means of a feudal system.... The same year, 1535, saw the foundation of the two towns, Buenos Aires and Lima, and was the centre of these two cycles of discoveries and conquests. Thirty-eight years later, in the same year, 1573, the Conquistadores who came from Peru founded the town of Córdoba, two hundred miles away from the Paraná, while those who came from the Rio de la Plata founded the town of Santa Fé on the banks of that river."[12]

Tucumán and Salta were established by conquerors from Peru, while San Juan and Mendoza were built by the Chilean Spaniards. The line of demarcation between the two zones of colonization crosses the immense desert plains of the interior, not the elevated tablelands of the Andes.

The two types of Argentinians differed in every respect, in blood as well as in environment. The indigenous race, which was eliminated on the coast, mingled intimately with the conquering race in the interior.

The establishments on the Rio de la Plata had originally been merely stages on the road to Peru, and had no value of themselves. The elevated tablelands of the Andes long remained the economic centre of Spanish America, and the provinces of the interior, which sold them cattle and mules, depended very closely upon them. The end of the eighteenth century was marked by more rapid progress in the region of the Pampas. The vice-royalty of La Plata was created.