The South American Republics, Part 1 of 2

by Thomas Cleland Dawson

No permanent settlement was then made, but the reports of thousands of peaceable and wealthy Indians inhabiting irrigated valleys, and the accounts of the magnificent pastures which stretched away to the east, soon tempted the Spaniards to take permanent possession. Seven years after the first exploration a town was founded in latitude 27°, midway between the Andes and the Paraná. About the same time other adventurers came pouring over the Andes from northern Chile, and this current soon joined that from the north. The Spaniards established themselves as feudal lords, and the unhappy Indians were divided among them. In one district, forty-seven thousand Indians were divided among fifty-six grantees. In 1553, Santiago de Estero, for many years the capital of the province of Tucuman was founded.

In 1561, the governor of Chile sent from Santiago de Chile over the Andes an expedition which founded the city of Mendoza in a most beautiful region, where the vine flourishes in perfection, and where a wonderful system of irrigation, inherited from the Indians, still exists to attest the latters' engineering skill. Next year San Juan was founded, and these two towns were the centres for the settlement of the province of Cuyo, which remained a part of Chile for two hundred years. The immigrants from northern Chile and Bolivia established Tucuman in the tropical garden spot of the republic in 1565. From Santiago del Estero, in 1573, an expedition was sent two hundred and fifty miles to the south to a region of fertile valleys and plains at the foot of a beautiful mountain range. This was Cordoba, which at once became, and has since remained, the most populous of the interior provinces.

By the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish power was firmly established in settlements that have since become the Argentine provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Tucuman, Catamarca, Santiago, Rioja, and Cordoba. All these really formed a southern extension of Upper Peru. Their geographical, political, and commercial relations were with Charcas, Potosí, and Lima. The discovery, in 1545, of the great silver mines at Potosí at once made the high Bolivian plateau, then known as the Audiencia of Charcas, the most valuable and important province of all the Spanish monarch's South American empire. In 1571, the discovery of quicksilver mines in Peru vastly increased the output of precious metals; in 1575, the wonderful Oruro mines were opened, and before the end of the century the copper-pan amalgamation process was invented in Bolivia, revolutionising the production of silver.

MINING SCENE.
[Redrawn from Gottfriedt's Neuw Welt.]

The resulting prosperity of the mining regions of Bolivia stimulated the settlement of the north-western provinces of the Argentine. The miners needed provisions which could not well be raised in the neighbourhood of Potosí. There was a demand for cattle for beef, and for horses and mules for transportation. A solid economic foundation was thus provided for the plains settlements, and the enslavement of the Indians and the breeding of cattle went on apace. By the end of the sixteenth century north-western Argentine—the province of Tucuman, as it was then called—was the seat of many thriving settlements whose Spanish inhabitants were mostly pastoral. The Indians in the neighbourhood of each settlement had been reduced to slavery, and cultivated the fields that had been their fathers' for the benefit of their white masters. The Spanish proprietors lived like feudal lords, while the Spanish authorities left these remote regions largely to their own devices.

Conditions in Cuyo, the western province just across the Andes from Santiago de Chile, were substantially the same. A political dependency of Chile, the few external relations it had were with that captaincy-general. The Spanish grantees ruled their Indian slaves in patriarchal fashion; agriculture was the principal occupation; pastoral industry was not so profitable as in Tucuman, and the region was more isolated. In both Tucuman and Cuyo Spanish rule was superimposed upon a previously existing commercial and social structure. There was no attempt to expel or destroy the aborigines. On the contrary, they were the sole labourers and their exertions the chief source of the wealth of their conquerors. There began a process of approximation and mutual assimilation between the Spaniards and their semi-civilised subjects. While the former continued to be a privileged and ruling caste, the latter absorbed much European knowledge from them. The Indian language long held its own alongside of the Spanish and is still spoken in many parts of the region.

On the Atlantic side, among degraded peoples who had not progressed beyond the wandering and tribal stages of existence. Spanish settlement proceeded on entirely different lines. There existed no well-organised body politic, into whose control the conquerors could step with hardly an interruption to industry. Campaigns could not be made with the confident expectation of finding abundant accumulations of food en route. Expeditions among the squalid tribes were slow and dangerous and settlement stuck close to the rivers instead of following fearlessly across the plateau to the spots where the finest lands and the most flourishing Indian communities lay ready for the spoiler.

The beginnings of the coast provinces were painful and disastrous; the settlements were feeble; centuries elapsed before the natural advantages of the region were utilised, and before its accessibility and fertility drew a great immigration. The assimilation of Indian blood did not take place on a large scale, and the immigrants and their descendants became perforce horsemen and fighters.