This internal trade, once of so much importance to the people of the intermediate provinces, was annihilated in the struggle for establishing the independency of the Republic; for, Bolivia remaining to the last in the hands of the Spaniards, of course all commercial intercourse was prohibited with the provinces of La Plata, which had thrown off the yoke of the mother-country. To this may be ascribed in great measure the extreme poverty and backwardness of many of those provinces at the present day. Salta, Tucuman, Cordova, Santa Fé, and Paraguay, lost the best markets for their native produce; whilst the people, dragged from their pastoral and agricultural pursuits in the first instance to fight against their old masters, and afterwards to destroy one another in support of the ephemeral authorities which succeeded them, naturally contracted such unsettled and disorderly habits as it will require many a year of domestic peace and better government to wean them from. To time, and a continuance of those blessings, as I have elsewhere said, we must, I believe, look for the remedy of these evils, and for any material improvement in the condition of the interior provinces of the republic.
HORSES AND CATTLE.
In connexion with what I have said upon the trade of Buenos Ayres, a brief notice of the origin and extraordinary increase of the vast herds of horses and cattle which at present constitute so large a portion of the riches of Buenos Ayres, may perhaps be not uninteresting to some of my readers.
America is indebted to Europe for these animals, which were unknown to the people of the New World before its discovery by the Spaniards. Of the two it will easily be understood that the horses, which formed so important a feature in the military equipment of the conquerors, were the first introduced. In 1535, the Adelantado Mendoza, who was the first to effect a landing at Buenos Ayres, took seventy with him on board the expedition which accompanied him from Spain, of which perhaps half were lost on the voyage, if we may judge from the small number of cavalry—one author says twelve, another thirty—which he was able to muster in his first battle with the Indians. The few that survived, when his followers were shortly afterwards driven out of that part of the country by the warlike natives, were turned loose into the pampas, where they multiplied exceedingly, and were found in great numbers forty years afterwards by De Garay, when he re-established the Spanish settlement at Buenos Ayres.
It was in that expedition (in 1580) that De Garay carried from Paraguay the first horned cattle ever seen in the pampas. How the stock had previously reached Paraguay is thus told by Dean Funes, the native historian. He says, "In 1555 there arrived at Assumption, from San Francisco, on the coast of Brazil, a few straggling emigrants, amongst whom were two Portuguese gentlemen, brothers, of the name of Goa, having with them a bull and eight cows, the origin of that mighty stock of cattle which now forms the wonder of the provinces of La Plata." The Portuguese servant intrusted with the important charge of these animals in their long over-land journey from the coast, whose name was Gaete, was rewarded for his care of them with one of the cows, a payment thought so much of at the time, that it gave rise to a saying still in use in those parts—"Es mas caro que las vacas de Gaete" ("Dearer than Gaete's cows").
But the value then set upon all European animals carried to America was enormous, as well it might be when the difficulties are considered of safely transporting them in the crazy and inconvenient shipping of those days. In Peru, in the same year (1555), so highly were horses prized, that it was thought worth recording in the public archives of Cuzco that 10,000 dollars had been refused for one offered for sale;—in that city a boar and sow, about the same time, were sold for 1600 dollars, and European sheep and goats fetched prices nearly as high.
Of the cattle carried by De Garay to Buenos Ayres it was not long before some escaped into the territory of the Indians, where they increased and multiplied, as the horses had done before. The settlers were too few, in the first instance, to domesticate more than were necessary for their own immediate wants, neither was the extent of their lands, for some time, adequate to the maintenance of any considerable stock; the cattle, therefore, ranged at liberty in the Pampas, and, though occasionally hunted down by the Spaniards for the hides, or by the Indians for food, the destruction was as nothing compared with the prodigious increase which went on:—they also found their way into the Banda Oriental, probably from Paraguay, where they multiplied even faster than in the Pampas, from the better quality of the pasturage and the more constant supply of water; and here it was that the illicit trade established by the Portuguese appears first to have awakened the Spaniards to a notion of the future importance of these animals.