Photograph by the Author.

Plate IV.

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But of all the forms of traffic that have enlivened the valles the most constant, and the form that has had the most profound influence on their existence, is the movement of cattle. The cattle trade has been of fundamental importance in the history of the colonization of South America. Animals were the only goods that could be conveyed any great distance. At the beginning of the conquest the productive regions of the continent, which supplied the export trade with Europe, were very limited in extent. Pastoral colonization began at once, and spread over a very wide area. Herds of oxen, for meat or draught, horses, and mules, made their way toward the centres of consumption: towns like Lima, Bahía, and Rio, the Peruvian mines, and the sugar-refineries of the north-east of Brazil, and later toward the yerbales of Paraguay or the seaports of the Caribs and the Rio Grande do Sul, where the jerked meat industry developed. The cattle routes converge upon these centres.

The export of cattle and mules from the Argentine plains to Peru was fully established by the close of the sixteenth century, and it seems to have continued without interruption ever since. Upper Peru is, however, not the only market on which the Argentine breeders lived. At the end of the eighteenth century D'Azara demanded that they should permit the sale of horses and mules to Brazil, for use in the mines. The cattle traffic with Portuguese territory had not then assumed the form of a regular commerce, and the Brazilians made raids on the north-eastern provinces for the animals they needed—60,000 a year, D'Azara says.[21] The export of cattle to Paraguay and Misiones was, on the other hand, of substantial economic importance in the eighteenth century. Before the Revolution, Rengger says, as many as 200,000 head of cattle passed yearly from Corrientes to Paraguay, which paid for them in maté and tobacco.[22] This trade was kept up intermittently in the nineteenth century. The exports from Corrientes were especially important at the time when the Paraguay stock was reconstituted after the war (40,000 head of cattle in 1875).

Finally, the Chilean market was opened to the Argentine breeders about the middle of the nineteenth century. In the time of Martin de Moussy the convoys of cattle to Chile were so numerous that the lucerne fields of both slopes were stripped bare at the very beginning of the season; and they were rented at a high price.[23] Not only the mining provinces of the north, but central Chile also, bought Argentine cattle. The opening of the Chilean market was followed by a remarkable expansive movement in the pastoral colonization of Argentine territory. We can follow the progress of this not only in Martin de Moussy's book, but in all contemporary works of travel. Its chief theatres are the provinces of San Luis and of Santiago del Estero, north of the Rio Dulce, where Hutchinson, in particular, describes the activity of the ranches.[24] Finally, after the Pacific War (1880) the nitrate district, taken from Bolivia and Peru by Chile, received a great influx of population, and works sprang up in the midst of the desert. The nitrate fields, wholly barren and doomed, under their shroud of grey dust, to an unalterable desolation, became at once one of the chief centres of consumption for Argentine stock.

It is difficult to give accurate details of the volume of trade in cattle in colonial Argentine. However, the facts given by travellers (though they often merely borrow from each other) suffice to show how important this traffic was in the life of the country and the extent of the zone that was occupied with it. As early as the middle of the seventeenth century Córdoba seems to have exported to Peru as many as 28,000 to 30,000 mules annually.[25] At the close of the eighteenth century, we read in D'Azara, 60,000 mules were exported; and Helms gives the same figure.[26] The mules were bought young by Córdoba dealers at Buenos Aires, Santa Fé, and Corrientes, reared at Córdoba, and then sent to Salta, where they were sold in their third year to mule-dealers from Peru.