does man encounter fewer obstacles to his freedom of movement or find it easier to procure his food supply than on the pampa—the characteristic topographical feature of the political division of South America known as Argentina.
Skirting the ridge on the east and draining the vast slopes of the Brazilian mountains of their tropical rainfall, is the great river Paraná. In latitude 27° it turns abruptly to the west, as if about to cross the pampa, but a hundred miles farther on it resumes its southward course. At this last turn the Paraná flows into a river which comes straight down from the north, draining the bed of the old inland sea that used to divide South America. This junction of the Paraná and the Paraguay forms the second largest river in the world—a river without obstructions to navigation, but which is so immense that it cannot be bridged. In latitude 32° it turns back to the south-east, soon receives the Uruguay—a swifter stream, that drains the southern part of the Atlantic highlands—and then opens out into the great shallow estuary known as the River Plate. Between the Uruguay and the Paraná is the Argentine Mesopotamia—a flat region where the low-lying plains, covered with luscious grasses, intersected with streams, and interspersed with timber, gradually rise up-stream into the highlands of the Missions.
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To the west the pampa is bounded by the foothills of the Andes and the parallel chains with which that great mountain system reinforces its flanks. At the Bolivian frontier, the great outward-jutting shoulder of the Andes looms up among a series of subordinate chains. South of them, for a thousand miles, is a belt of broken country averaging two hundred miles in width. The pampa creeps up to the very foot of the mountain ranges and where it is watered blossoms like a garden. A quarter of the population of the Republic lives in the irrigated valleys of these Andean provinces.
A comparatively narrow, arid, belt stretches diagonally across the South American continent from the Pacific, in Northern Chile, to the Atlantic in Northern Patagonia. Consequently, from north to south, and from the Atlantic back toward the north-east border of this arid belt, the rainfall of Argentina decreases. On the north-eastern frontier it is about 80 inches a year; at Rosario, 40; at Cordoba, 30; at Buenos Aires, 35. In the Andean provinces it decreases from over forty, near the Bolivian frontier, to five or six at San Juan in the latitude of Santa Fé and Cordoba. In the eastern part of the great pampa the rainfall is ample for cereal crops; in the western half the rains are periodical and the region is better adapted to grazing than to agriculture, and there the grass lands are intersected with tracts of desert which grow larger towards the south. In the Andes the eastern ranges, catching the rain-laden upper currents, send down ample water to irrigate the valleys and adjacent plains.
The mesopotamian region and the country directly south of the Plate estuary have, of course, an ample rainfall. South of the latitude of Buenos Aires the rainfall of the Andean region, which has grown steadily less from the northern boundary, begins again to increase. The eastern slopes of the mountains south for an indeterminate distance are well watered, while the Patagonian plains to their east are dry and desolate.
The climate varies from tropical, on the northern frontier, to arctic in Tierra del Fuego. The southern pampa and the Andean provinces are temperate or subtropical, and admirably adapted for habitation by men of European descent. Tucuman is the hottest of these provinces. There the average temperature of the coldest month is 53°; at Buenos Aires it is 50°; at Cordoba 47°. The average temperatures in these localities for the whole year are, respectively, 63°, 61°, and 63°.
When Columbus landed in the West Indies, this vast territory was occupied by two separate sets of aborigines. The Andean provinces were a part of the great Inca Empire. South as far as Mendoza, the Andean valleys were filled with a vigorous yet peaceful population who had brought the art of irrigation to a high degree of perfection. Plantations of corn, mandioc, and potatoes flourished on the terraced hillsides and in the fertile valleys. The lower and hotter plains furnished cotton. Constant communication, both commercial and governmental, was kept up with the centre of the Inca power in Cuzco, along roads that followed the easiest routes along the valleys and up over the passes to the Bolivian plateau, and thence to the central provinces of the Empire. Chile, on the other side of the Cordillera, was a sister province, and the passes over the great range were well known and constantly used. The population was greater than it is at the present day. While the political solidity of the Inca Empire is doubtless exaggerated, it is certain that the same civilisation extended from Ecuador to Mendoza and Santiago de Chile, and that the Cordilleran region was the home of twenty millions of people, organised into vigorous, progressive, and expanding communities.
The Andean civilisation never showed any tendency to expand over the tropical plains of the great central depressions. The Incas themselves never cared to penetrate far down the wooded and steaming slopes of the Andes lying directly to the east of their own capital. Their dependent states bordering on the Argentine pampa did not cross the desert plains, where irrigating ditches could not reach. So far as we now know, the Andean Indians had never penetrated to the Atlantic.
East of the pampas, in the hilly woods of Paraguay and Brazil, tribes vastly inferior in intelligence, political organisation, and civilisation, maintained a precarious existence. Many of those who belonged to the great Guarany family lived in palisaded villages and cultivated the soil, but none had advanced far on the road toward a reasonably efficient social and military organisation. The procuring of food for their daily wants was their chief occupation; the tribes were too small to make effective warfare on a large scale; there was no prospect of any development into a higher culture. Certain tribes, inferior to the Guaranies, had spread from the wooded regions over the mesopotamian provinces and into the adjacent pampa, and the districts on both sides of the estuary, but they never ventured far from the water-supply. Though brave and intractable, these people showed no real fighting capacity until after white men had taught them the use of horses. With this knowledge, however, they were able to offer a very effective resistance, which was not completely overcome until twenty years ago.
The area of the whole Republic is 1,212,600 square miles. The mesopotamian region contains 81,000 square miles, being larger than England and even more uniformly fertile. The pampa suitable for grain production, including the semi-forested Chaco plain in the north, has an area of not less than 350,000 square miles. The Andean provinces contain nearly 300,000, and Patagonia 316,000. The grazing pampa is partly included in the Andean provinces; its boundaries to the south and toward the Atlantic are not capable of exact definition, but it includes perhaps half the territory of the Republic. Except the higher mountains, and the so-called deserts of the centre, the whole territory is productive.
The description of the white man's spread over this immense country—the largest, except Brazil, of the South American states, and of all these the most immediately and unquestionably suitable for maintaining a large population of European blood—is tedious when told in detail. But it is a story fraught with significance for the future of the world. On the plains of Argentina the descendants of the Spanish conquerors have fought out among themselves all the perplexing questions arising from the adaptation of Spanish absolutism and ancient burgh law to a new country and to personal freedom. After more than half a century of civil war, constitutional equilibrium has been attained. The country ought to be interesting where there has grown up within a few decades the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, and the largest Latin city, except Paris, in the world. The growth of Buenos Aires has been as dizzying as that of Chicago, and the world has never seen a more rapid and easy multiplication of wealth than that which took place in Argentina between the years of 1870 and 1890. Interesting, too, is Argentina as the scene of the most extensive experiment in the mixture of races now going on anywhere in the world except in the United States. In forty years more