up communication from Paraguay to Europe and gave Spain a seaport on the South Atlantic. Curiously enough, in the very year that Garay founded Santa Fé, the Spaniards from Peru founded Cordoba—the most eastward of the Andean settlements. Their hard riders had pushed on from Cordoba, reconnoitring as far as the Paraná and there ran across Garay's men. The two currents of Argentine settlements met almost at the beginning, though two centuries were to elapse before they completely coalesced.
Eight years later, Garay succeeded in founding Buenos Aires after Zarate, the third adelantado, had failed as badly as any of his predecessors. Garay, by sheer force of energy and fitness, became the real ruler of the settlements. Active, far-sighted, and able, he perceived that a purely military establishment at the mouth of the river was foredoomed to failure. To be permanent, the port and town must be self-sustaining, and therefore must be surrounded by farms and ranches and be accessible by land from the upper settlements. In the spring of 1580, the acting governor sent overland from Santa Fé two hundred families of Guarany Indians, accompanied by a thousand horses, two hundred cows, and fifty sheep, besides mares, carts, oxen, and other necessaries. The soldiers of the convoy were mostly creoles born in Paraguay. Boats carried down from Santa Fé arms, munitions, seed grain, tools, and whatever in those rude days was essential to a settlement. He, himself, went by land with forty soldiers, following the highland that skirts the west bank of the Paraná from Santa Fé to Buenos Aires.
The Plate estuary affords no proper harbours; the immense volume of water spreading over vast shallow beds chokes it with sand-bars, and the shores are so shelving that even small boats cannot approach the land. The north side is bolder, and at Montevideo and at the mouth of the Uruguay affords bays partly sheltered from the storms which sweep up over the level pampas and make anchorage in the river so unsafe. But the north bank was cut off from land communication with the existing Spanish towns by the mighty Uruguay and Paraná, and Garay desired that his new city should be always accessible from his older settlements on the right bank of the Paraná. His choice of the particular spot where the largest city of the southern hemisphere has since grown up, seems to have been determined by a few trifling circumstances. He kept as near the head of the estuary as possible, in order to shorten the land route from Santa Fé, and picked upon a slight rise of ground between two draws, which made the site defensible. The fact that a nearby creek—the Riachuelo—afforded a shelter for little boats, may also have been given weight in reaching a decision.
Though his settlers did not number five hundred, Garay laid out his city like a town-site boomer. The surrounding country was divided into ranches and the neighbouring Indians were distributed among the citizens of the new town. A "Cabildo," or city council, was named, with the full paraphernalia of a Spanish municipal government. The new town started off in the full enjoyment of all the guarantees known to immemorial Spanish constitutional law. Troubles broke out almost immediately between the creole settlers and the Spaniards who had been sent over by the adelantado to fill offices and get the best things in distributions of land and slaves. Garay had hardly left the town to look after the rest of the province than the creoles, indignant over unfair treatment, forcibly demanded an open Cabildo. This was an extraordinary popular assembly which, according to old Spanish custom, might be called at critical times, and was something like a town meeting. In theory, the property-owners and educated citizens were called together merely to give advice, but in practice, it was a tumultuous assemblage to overawe the office-holders. The Argentine creoles were doing nothing more than asserting their constitutional rights as vassals of the king of Castile. They compelled the Spanish office-holders to compromise.
Meanwhile, Garay was clinching his claim to immortality as the founder of the Spanish power on the Plate. He explored the pampas to the south and west of the new city, and reduced many of the tribes to slavery or vassalage. He found the plains already overrun with hundreds of thousands of horses—the descendants of the few abandoned there forty-five years before when the remnants of Mendoza's ill-starred expedition fled up the river. On his way back to Santa Fé this great Indian fighter was ambushed by Indians and stabbed while he slept.
His death was followed by outbreaks among the creoles, who resented the efforts of the adelantado's new representatives to establish a monopoly in horse-hair. Scarcely had they found a way to make a little money, by hunting wild horses for their hair, than the officials tried to absorb all the profit. The struggle between the repressive commercial policy of Spain, and the interests of the Plate colonists, began with the foundation of the colony of Buenos Aires and went on for more than two hundred years.
In 1588, the creoles obtained a foothold in the extreme north of the mesopotamian region by founding the city of Corrientes near the junction of the Paraná and Paraguay. All the new commonwealths south of Asuncion obtained a solid economic foundation in the herds of cattle and horses which covered the plains. In the regions adjacent to the Andes the Spaniards did not become so exclusively pastoral as their brethren of the pampas near the Plate. While they had more and better Indian slaves, their pasturage was not so good. Though apparently more isolated, their proximity to Upper Peru and the trade that went on with that great mining country—the goal of fortune-hunting Spaniards in those years—placed them more directly under the control of the viceregal authorities. Tucuman was a mere southern extension of the jurisdiction of the Audiencia at Charcas, and Cuyo was an integral part of Chile, but this did not prevent the early development of a strong sentiment in favour of local self-government and of hatred of the imported Spanish satraps.
By the year 1617 the settlements on the Lower Paraná had become of considerable importance. Buenos Aires was a town of three thousand people; the right bank of the river as far as Santa Fé was a grazing-ground for the herds of the creoles; towns and ranches were flourishing in Corrientes. In that year the Spanish crown abolished the office of adelantado and erected the lower settlements into a province separate from Paraguay. The new province included the territory that is now Uruguay, as well as the four actual Argentine provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fé, Entre Rios and Corrientes. Entre Rios and Uruguay were, however, as yet entirely unsettled.
While the creoles were thus firmly establishing themselves along the Lower Paraná and in the Andean provinces, the Jesuits were converting the Indians in the east of Paraguay, and early in the seventeenth century these indefatigable missionaries had penetrated to the Upper Paraná, crossed it, and were gathering the Indians by thousands into peaceful villages.
ARGENTINA
CHAPTER I
THE ARGENTINE LAND
South from where the great mass of the Bolivian Andes shoves a shoulder to the east, as if seeking to join the Brazilian mountain system, and from where a low ridge stretches out to form the watershed between the Madeira and the eastward-flowing affluents of the Paraguay, extends an immense flat plain. Two thousand miles from north to south, and nearly five hundred miles in breadth, hardly a hillock rises above its surface from the foothills of the Andes westward to the sea. In the tropical North its surface is partly covered with trees, but south of the Chaco the only woodlands are narrow belts following the streams. Everywhere stretch the grassy plains, without an obstruction or interruption. The soil is a fine alluvium, full of the right chemical elements, and admirably adapted to agriculture, wherever the rainfall is sufficient. As a pasture-ground it is the finest on the planet. Within recent geological times this plain was the bottom of a great shallow gulf which received the detritus washed down from the Andes on the one side and the Brazilian mountains on the other. The gradual uplifting of those youngest mountains—the Andes—raised their flanks until the adjacent floor of the gulf appeared dry land, a land all ready and prepared for