It was gaucho land through which we were travelling. Every man in it was born to the saddle. We saw tiny boys not only riding but performing all the duties of full-grown men in guiding loose herds or pack-animals. No less characteristic than these daredevil horsemen were the lines of great two-wheeled carts, each dragged by five mules, three in the lead, with two wheelers, or else perhaps drawn by four or six oxen. For the most part these carts were carrying wool or hides. Occasionally we came on great pastures surrounded by wire fences. Elsewhere the stony, desolate land lay as it had lain from time immemorial. We saw many flocks of sheep, and many herds of horses, among which piebald horses were unusually plentiful. There were a good many cattle, too, and on two or three occasions we saw flocks of goats. It was a wild, rough country, and in such a country life is hard for both man and beast. Everywhere along the trail were the skeletons and dried carcasses of cattle, and occasionally horses. Yet there were almost no carrion birds, no ravens or crows, no small vultures, although once very high up in the air we saw a great condor. Indeed, wild life was not plentiful, although we saw ostriches—the South American rhea—and there was an occasional guanaco, or wild llama. Foxes were certainly abundant, because at the squalid little country stores there were hundreds of their skins and also many skunk skins.
Now and then we passed ranch-houses. There might be two or three fairly close together, then again we might travel for twenty miles without a sign of a habitation or a human being. In one place there was a cluster of buildings and a little schoolhouse. We stopped to shake hands with the teacher. Some of the ranch-houses were cleanly built and neatly kept, shade-trees being planted round about—the only trees we saw during the entire motor journey. Other houses were slovenly huts of mud and thatch, with a brush corral near by. Around the houses of this type the bare dirt surface was filthy and unkempt, and covered with a litter of the skulls and bones of sheep and oxen, fragments of skin and hide, and odds and ends of all kinds, foul to every sense.
Every now and then along the road we came to a solitary little store. If it was very poor and squalid, it was called a pulpería; if it was large, it was called an almacén. Inside there was a rough floor of dirt or boards, and a counter ran round it. At one end of the counter was the bar, at which drinks were sold. Over the rest of the counter the business of the store proper was done. Hats, blankets, horse-gear, rude articles of clothing, and the like were on the shelves or hung from rings in the ceiling. Sometimes we saw gauchos drinking at these bars—rough, wild-looking men, some of them more than three parts Indian, others blond, hairy creatures with the northern blood showing obviously. Although they are dangerous men when angered, they are generally polite, and we, of course, had no trouble with them. Hides, fox skins, and the like are brought by them for sale or for barter.
Order is kept by the mounted territorial police, an excellent body, much like the Canadian mounted police and the Pennsylvania constabulary. These men are alert and soldierly, with fine horses, well-kept arms, and smart uniforms. Many of them were obviously mainly, and most of them were partly, of Indian blood. I think that Indian blood is on the whole a distinct addition to the race stock when the ancestral Indian tribe is of the right kind. The acting president of the Argentine during my visit, the vice-president, a very able and forceful man, wealthy, well educated, a thorough statesman and man of the world, and a delightful companion, had a strong strain of Indian blood in him.
The ordinary people we met used "Indian" and "Christian" as opposite terms, having cultural rather than theological or racial significance, this being customary in the border regions of temperate South America. In one place where we stopped four Indians came in to see us. The chief or head man looked like a thorough Indian. He might have been a Sioux or a Comanche. One of his companions was apparently a half-breed, showing strong Indian features, however. A third had a full beard, and, though he certainly did not look quite like a white man, no less certainly he did not look like an Indian. The fourth was considerably more white than Indian. He had a long beard, being dressed, as were the others, in shabby white man's garb. He looked much more like one of the poorer class of Boers than like any Indian I have ever seen. I noticed this man talking to two of the mounted police. They were smart, well-set-up men, thoroughly identified with the rest of the population, and regarding themselves and being regarded by others as on the same level with their fellow citizens. Yet they were obviously far more Indian in blood than was the unkempt, bearded white man to whom they were talking, and whom they and their fellows spoke of as an Indian, while they spoke of themselves, and were spoken of by others, as "Christians." "Indian" was the term reserved for the Indians who were still pagans and who still kept up a certain tribal relation. Whenever an Indian adopted Christianity in the excessively primitive form known to the gauchos, came out to live with the whites, and followed the ordinary occupations, he seemed to be promptly accepted as a white man, no different from any one else. The Indians, by the way, now have property, and are well treated. Nevertheless, the pure stock is dying out, and those that survive are being absorbed in the rest of the population.
The various accidents we met with during the forenoon delayed us, and we did not take breakfast—or, as we at home would call it, lunch—until about three o'clock in the afternoon. We had then halted at a big group of buildings which included a store and a government telegraph office. The store was a long, whitewashed, one-story house, the bedrooms in the rear, and all kinds of outbuildings round about. In some corrals near by a thousand sheep were being sheared. Breakfast had been long deferred, and we were hungry. But it was a feast when it did come, for two young sheep or big lambs were roasted whole before a fire in the open, and were then set before us; the open-air cook was evidently of almost pure Indian blood.
On we went with the cars, with no further accidents and no trouble except once in crossing a sand belt. The landscape was parched and barren. Yet its look of almost inconceivable desolation was not entirely warranted, for in the flats and valleys water could evidently be obtained a few feet below the surface, and where it was pumped up anything could be grown on the soil.
But, unless thus artificially supplied, water was too scarce to permit any luxuriance of growth. Here and there were stretches of fairly good grass, but on the whole the country was covered with dry scrub a foot or two high, rising in clumps out of the earth or gravel or sand. The hills were stony and bare, sometimes with flat, sheer-sided tops, and the herds of half-wild horses and of cattle and sheep, and the even wilder riders we met, and the squalid little ranch-houses, all combined to give the landscape a peculiar touch.
As evening drew on, the harsh, raw sunlight softened. The hills assumed a myriad tints as the sun sank. The long gleaming followed. The young moon hung overhead, well toward the west, and just on the edge of the horizon the Southern Cross stood upside down. Then clouds gathered, boding a storm. The night grew black, and on we went through the darkness, the motormen clutching the steering-wheels and peering anxiously forward as they strove to make out the ruts and faint road-marks in the shifting glare of the headlights. The play of the lightning and the rolling of the thunder came near and nearer. We were evidently in for a storm, which would probably have brought us to a complete halt, and we looked out for a house to stop at. At 10.15 we caught a glimpse of a long white building on one side of the road. It was one of the stores of which I have spoken. With some effort we roused the people, and after arranging the motor-cars we went inside. They were good people. They got us eggs and coffee, and, as we had a cold pig, we fared well. Then we lay down on the floor of the store and on the counters and slept for four hours.
At three I waked the sleepers with the cry that in bygone days on the Western cattle plains had so often roused me from the heavy slumber of the men of the round-up. It was the short November night of high southern latitudes. Dawn came early. We started as soon as the faint gray enabled us to see the road. The stars paled and vanished. The sunrise was glorious. We came out from among the hills on to vast barren plains. Hour after hour, all day long, we drove at speed over them. The sun set in red and angry splendor amid gathering clouds. When we reached the Rio Negro the light was dying from the sky, and a heavy storm was rolling toward us. The guardians of the rope ferry feared to try the river, with the storm rising through the black night; but we forced them to put off, and we reached the other shore just before the wind smote us, and the rushing rain drove in our faces.