The last forestry centre in modern Argentina is in the province of Misiones on the upper Paraná. Posadas is its chief station, and protects its southern outlet. Its influence extends beyond the Argentine frontier, over a small part of Brazil and Paraguay. In Misiones there are two types of forest, which differ a good deal from each other, while neither resembles the quebracho forest. One is the forest of araucarias (pinos) which covers the elevated tablelands at a height above 2,000 feet. The other is the tropical forest, rich in essences and of perennial vegetation, which fills the bottoms and slopes of the valleys. The pine, which is also much worked on the Brazilian tableland, yields an excellent white wood, suitable instead of the northern pine. It would find a ready market at Buenos Aires, but it has never been worked on Argentine territory because of the great distance of the woods from a navigable river. On account of its position on the tableland the araucaria has to wait for the railways of some future date.[49] As to the leafy tropical forest it includes a number of useful varieties (timbo, lapacho, etc.), but the most esteemed of all is the cedar. Its wood is rose-coloured, scented, and fine-grained, and very suitable for furniture. At the time of D'Orbigny's travels the inhabitants of Corrientes were looking out for cedars from the mountains brought down the river when in flood. The obrajes of cedar-wood now extend twenty miles or so on the Argentine bank, and forty miles in the Paraguay bank, which is more even and better for transport. The trunks are floated in rafts down to Posadas; as the cedar, which is less dense than the quebracho, not only floats, but is improved by parting with sap in the water. At Posadas the rafts are taken to pieces, and the trunks are delivered to the saw-mills.
But timber is not the chief forest industry in Misiones, as it is on the Chaco. Beside the obraje in the forest there is the yerbal, a works for dealing with the maté (Ilex paraguayensis). It is well known that an infusion of maté (a kind of tea) is an important element in the food of the western States of South America. Gathering the leaves of the maté has been a profitable occupation for centuries: a unique instance, perhaps, in the forest industries of South America. It has never been interrupted, though it has often changed its locality.
The plantations made by the Jesuits were abandoned when the missionaries were dispersed. After the close of the eighteenth century Paraguay became the chief area of production. Villa Rica seems to have been the most prolific centre of the yerba. After that date, however, the Jujuy basin, further north, was exploited, and the yerbateros, who came from Curuguati, advanced eastward as far as the Falls of the Guayra on the Paraná. In the nineteenth century the trade in Paraguay maté seems to have suffered less than the tobacco trade from the policy of isolation adopted by the Dictators of Paraguay. The descriptions given by Mariano Molas, Demersay, and others, show that the business continued fairly actively. It even extended northward, and reached as far as the Rio Apa. Villa Concepción became a rival yerba market to Villa Rica. The monopoly exercised by the Paraguay Government, however, and the restrictions put upon the navigation of the river, led to the development of the yerba industry in the eastern Misiones on the left bank of the Uruguay. Itaquy served as port of embarkation. In the last third of the nineteenth century the yards moved from the left to the right bank of the Uruguay. Since 1870 the Paraná has supplanted the Uruguay, and the yerba trade has concentrated at Candelaria. This meant the resurrection of Misiones. In 1880 San Javier, on the Uruguay, worked up 800 tons of yerba, and Candelaria more than 1,000 tons. The yerbales round San Javier began to run out, and the yerbateros had to go further and further up the Uruguay, toward the yerbales of the tableland of Fracan and San Pedro. Candelaria was mainly fed by the yerbales of the right bank of the Paraná, on Paraguayan territory. Posadas has now succeeded Candelaria, and the yerbales that depend upon it are scattered over both banks up the Paraná.
The yerbales of Misiones lie outside the tropical forest proper. They are on the lower fringe of the pine-forest, and begin at some distance from the river, with which they are connected by muddy and difficult mule-tracks. Maté can bear a cost of transport that would be fatal to timber. At the point where these tracks reach the river, the river-steamers stop at the foot of a shed that is almost hidden in the foliage. These are the "ladders" of the yerbales.
Work in the yerbales lasts six months out of the twelve. The pruners who collect the bunches of leaves and bring them to the furnaces, where they are dried, include Brazilians, Paraguayans and Argentinians. The Brazilians go to the yerbal to offer their services. The Paraguayans and Argentinians, nearly all from the province of Corrientes, are recruited at Posadas and the sister-town of Encarnación, which is opposite to it on the Paraguay bank.
The hiring at Posadas is done according to a traditional custom that does not seem to have changed for more than a century. The description given by D'Azara is not yet out of date. "The people of Villa Rica," he says, "depend mainly on being hired for the yerbales. The yerba industry is sometimes profitable to the masters, but never to the natives, who work cruelly without any profit. Not only are they paid in goods for the yerba they gather, but the goods are put at so high a price that it is terrible. They have even to pay for the hire of a bill for cutting the maté.... The natives contract as much debt as they can before they start for the yerbales, and as soon as they have done a little work, they say good-bye to the yerbatero, who loses his money. And the yerbatero in turn is exploited by the merchants who control him." Before he starts for the yerbal, says Robertson, the contractor (habilitado) gets an advance of four or five thousand piastres. With this he hires about fifty workers, supplies their needs, and gives them two or three months' pay in advance. The three essential and inseparable elements of the maté business are the yerbal in the forest, a shop at Posadas for hiring and paying wages in advance, and a yerba mill at Rosario or Buenos Aires.
The forestry industry in its various forms is not a definite occupation of the soil by man. After having stripped the forest, it leaves, and the land is open for colonization. Nearly everywhere there is a complete separation between forestry and permanent colonization. They do not employ the same workers; the wood-cutter (hachador) and the charcoal-burner are not the men who clear the soil. The clearing away of the stumps, which must precede agricultural work, is not their business, but the work of diggers. At Tucumán, where most of the workers in the cane-fields are Santiagueños, Italians and Spaniards are used for clearing the soil. The gangs of Mendocinos who go to cut props crops in the bush round Villa Mercedes will not sign on for clearing the ground in order to plant lucerne.
LORETO. THE RIO PINTO IN THE DRY SEASON.