A long train of ants, disturbed in their march from one side of the path to the other, occasionally afford the intruder a bite through the stocking. He stops to change his clothes from winter to summer. Birds of most brilliant plumage sing all around him; some of them scream with joy as they fly across the mountain torrent; others are seated quietly in pairs on the branches, among the thick green foliage, as though admiring or making love to each other. The forest stretches down the side of the Madeira Plata. The woods are ornamental and dye; the cacao tree, from which the best chocolate is made, grows wild. Coffee, tobacco, cotton, with all the tropical fruits, and the coca plant, are cultivated.
In the beds of the streams grains of gold are found. Among the hills there are two species of the cinchona bark, the best in the world. The forest is common to all persons who choose to employ themselves in gathering bark, and the impression is that the value of the forest in this article of trade is annually decreasing. The bark taken from the trunk of the tree "tabla" is the best; that from the larger branches, "charque," second in quality; and that from the smaller or upper branches, "canulo," the least valuable. A man may cut two quintals per day, which makes one quintal (one hundred pounds) when dried ready for market. The woodman will sell it at the stump of the tree at from eight to ten dollars the quintal.
By law of Congress, all bark gathered in Bolivia must be sold to a company having the monopoly of this trade, who pay, according to law, the following prices to the Yungas woodsman for his cinchona bark, carried over the lofty Andes and delivered at the bank in La Paz: "tabla," sixty dollars per quintal; "charque," thirty-five dollars, and "canulo," thirty dollars. The company pay twenty-five dollars per quintal on "tabla," and eighteen dollars upon "charque" and "canulo," duty to the government.
The bark is put up in cotton bales, each weighing one hundred and fifty pounds, covered with raw hide. Two bales, or three hundred pounds, being a mule load over the Cordilleras to the sea-port of Arica, where it arrives in ten days from La Paz, paying a freight of twelve dollars per mule load, so that a quintal of "tabla" has cost the company eighty-nine dollars.
The price in Arica varies from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars per quintal, according to the demand for quinine in fever and ague countries. In 1851 it was worth one hundred and ten dollars the quintal; in May, 1852, it was as low as eighty dollars. At Arica it is shipped, and carried around Cape Horn, to the chemists in the United States and Europe, where it is manufactured, bottled, and some of it re-shipped and sold in the apothecary stores of La Paz to those who enter the province of Yungas, where the disease for which it is intended as a specific frequently prevails. The woodsman pays for one ounce of quinine the same price he sold one quintal of bark for at the tree.
Those who swallow quinine throughout the world are supposed to consume ten thousand quintals of cinchona bark per annum. We consider this a very low estimate.
The bank at La Paz has for some years past received as much as fourteen thousand quintals per annum, and the government of Bolivia issued a decree or proscription, forbidding the gathering of this bark from the 1st January, 1852, until the 1st January, 1854.
Gold was found in Yungas more than two centuries ago. The gold mines and washings of Tipuani are worked with some profit in the present day, but the wealth of the people engaged in gold hunting does not compare with that of former times. Hundreds of Indians were employed, turning the Tipuani stream from one side of its bed to the other in the dry season, and large quantities of gold were collected. Seven gold mines are at present worked in Yungas, and five hundred have been abandoned.
The roads to Tipuani are narrow, precipitous, and in an unimproved state, like most of the roads into Yungas. They require an annual expenditure of money, after the rainy season, to put them in order.
Merchants pay wages in advance to the Indians who consent to enter the mines, and provide them with provisions, which are carried in on mules. The expenses are very great in comparison to the yield of gold. The Indian is often sick, when his wages and the expense of feeding him are lost to the miner; many of them leave before their time, so that the work of the season is lost, the miner giving up poorer than he commenced.