The history of forestry and colonization is one of the most diversified chapters in the general economic history of modern Argentina. Round the region of the Pampas, the first point where agricultural colonization came into touch with the forest belt is the district of the older colonies of Santa Fé. There it found the forestry industry already long established, on the banks both of the Salado and of the Paraná. The export of timber and charcoal to Buenos Aires and the lime-kilns of Entre Rios was at this time one of the few elements of economic life which Santa Fé had preserved. The colonists did not enter the forest, and did not mingle with the charcoal-burners, but they profited indirectly from their presence by selling them maize. Later, agricultural work spread over the Central Pampa and the province of Córdoba, as far as the edge of the scrub in all parts of the prairie. Wood-cutting is carried on there, on a small scale, everywhere, at Toay as well as at Villa Mercedes and Villa Maria. The price of the wood he sells is a small supplementary income to the farmer, and clearing the soil helps to fill up his time during the dead season for agriculture. The lands covered with brushwood remained for a long time at a lower price than cleared land. They thus formed a sort of reserve which partly escaped the speculations in land, and on which small owners can find a footing more easily than on the Pampa. There is to-day a movement of Santa Fecinos eastward and southward in the belt of scrub to the south of Mar Chiquita along the line from Lehmann to Dean Funes.

The forest area of the Chaco, in northern Argentina, between the Andes and the Paraná, seems on the other hand to be intended for pastoral colonization. In point of fact, the forest of the Chaco, as well as the lighter scrub which is its southern extension, can be used for breeding without preliminary labour. The Indians have fed cattle and horses on it since the seventeenth century. The herds find food on every side, both in the very numerous clearings (abras) which cross the forest and in the forest itself, where the underwood and the herbaceous carpet grow fairly thick beneath the scanty foliage of the mimosas and quebrachasquebrachos.

Over a good deal of the western Chaco pastoral colonization is earlier than the forestry. In the district of Santiago del Estero the farmers had advanced far beyond the wood-cutter and the railway; beyond the Salado, almost as far as the existing line from Añatuya to Tintina, where there are sheets and wells of fresh water. The old ranches go as far as Alhuampa. The old pastoral population has taken very little part in the forestry industry. It has been content to profit by it by renting the scrub to the obrajes. It was a sheer gift to them, as the felling of a few trees does not in the least lower the value of the pasture. The forestry has not entailed any change in the ownership of the land or in the breeding methods. The obrajes are merely passing guests whose traces are quickly obliterated.

In the eastern Chaco, however, the wood-cutters are real pioneers. It is they who have made the conquest of the forest, often in direct touch with the Indians, and the ownership of the land fell to them. They have themselves played an essential part in the actual development of breeding.

Leaving the river and travelling toward the forest on the west, one first crosses a narrow belt of estates which form an almost unbroken line from San Javier to Resistencia. These are old colonies, mostly founded about 1870, at the same time as the first colonies in the centre of Santa Fé. They had the advantage of being within reach of the river-route, the network of railways that serves the colonies of Sante Santa Fé not being constructed until after 1880. They have not shown the same capacity for extension as the colonies on the prairie, but they are firmly rooted, on high and well-drained land, very different from the clays of the Chaco, where the alluvial beds of the Paraná alternate with stuff that seems to come from the left bank. They grow flax, earth-nuts, sugar cane, and cotton. Behind this slight agricultural façade are the large estates of the factories. In the division of the land the industrial firms sought the districts which were richest in quebracho. Buyers of land who had no industrial plans—foreign capitalists and Porteños—and who obtained large concessions in little-known regions, sold back to the factories the plots where there was plenty of wood, after they had taken stock of their property. They converted the remainder into estancias (ranches). The district to the north of the Central Norte Railway, from San Cristobal to Tostado, where the forest, which will presently yield to the plain, breaks into patches and looks like a park, includes a number of these modern estancias, in which lucerne is beginning to replace the grasses of the natural vegetation.

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