Panama to Patagonia

WAYFARING IN BOLIVIA.—THE CENTRAL PLATEAU

A Hill-broken Table-land—By Rail along the Cordillera of the Friars—Challapata and Lake Poöpo—Smelters—Spanish Ear-marks in Oruro—By Stage to La Paz—Fellow-passengers—Misadventures—Indian Tombs at Caracollo—Sicasica a High-up Town, 14,000 Feet—Meeting-place of Quichuas and Aymarás—First Sight of the Famed Illimani Peaks—Characteristics of the Indian Life—Responsibility of the Priesthood—Position of the Women—Panorama of La Paz from the Heights—The Capital in Fact—Cosmopolitan Society.

THE Altiplanicie, or Great Central Plateau, because of its mineral riches, was called by the geographer Raimondi a gold table with silver legs. Once the bed of a vast inland sea, the table-land now forms the Titicaca basin and lies between the Oriental and the Occidental Cordilleras. Its surface is broken by many conical hills and small sierras, supposedly the result of volcanic eruptions, yet it comes within the definition of level country as level country is understood in the Andine regions. The southern zone of the Altiplanicie has been aptly described as a solid cape of salt.

From Uyuni, in the lower corner of the great plain, the railway skirts along the mountain range known as the Cordillera of the Friars. The road crosses the salt pampas and winds among the foothills and along the Marques River into agricultural lands, chiefly grazing, with pasturage for some cattle, donkeys, and llamas, and many sheep. There are a number of villages, always with a little church in the centre. The September day on which I took the trip the people were making a romeria, or pilgrimage, from hamlet to hamlet, to celebrate one of the numerous religious holidays.

During the first three hours weather changes were swift and sharp,—heavy clouds, thunder, the first rain I had experienced for weeks, a whirling dust-storm, thunder again with looped lightning, pelting hail, and finally blinding snow. My fellow-passengers were Bolivian business men and their families, and English and German mining superintendents. An excellent breakfast was served in the station at Sevaruyo.

The principal town on the line is Challapata, near the borders of Lake Poöpo. Challapata is a starting-point for Sucre. Sucre is the old capital of Bolivia,—an historic city and a very rich one, lying in a fertile valley but very remote from the highways of travel. Few foreigners or natives in Bolivia know how to find it. The most confusing directions are given in regard to reaching it. A trail or cart-road of a very hard kind to travel runs from Tupiza to Sucre, and in La Paz I was gravely told that to get there I would have to go to Tupiza. Other directions are as vague. The shortest way from either La Paz or from the coast is to proceed to Challapata and then procure mules to Sucre, though for two days the journey may be followed by means of a stage or similar vehicle.

Lake Poöpo is a teacup beside a soup-tureen in comparison with Lake Titicaca; yet it receives the waters of that lake, which is not an evaporating pan, through the Desaguadero River, and then loses them in the Laca-Amra, a disappearing and reappearing stream. Only one gallon in a hundred of the water drained into Lake Poöpo by the Desaguadero is carried off by other streams. The Titicaca current is 23.73 metres per minute, and the volume of the Desaguadero is 4,822.5 cubic metres per minute.

From Poöpo on to Oruro I noted a succession of smoke-stacks from the smelters, and very apparent evidences of the mining industry. After that it was all mine sights and mine talk. There is a large foreign colony, which includes Yankees, Englishmen, Germans, and Chileans. The town is a bare sort of place, with the shafts gaping from the mountains all around. It has a population of 10,000, a newspaper, two banks, and some extensive commercial establishments.

Oruro is an old town, and still shows many Spanish ear-marks. The Jesuit chronicles say that in the height of the mining fever, in the seventeenth century, it had 70,000 inhabitants. The streets are narrow, and the buildings have balconies and overhanging eaves. The local administration is progressive, and the plaza is an evidence of local public spirit. It has a fountain in the centre, and some effort at adornment has been made by fencing in the flower-plats. The pilgrimage of women and children to and from the fountain with their water-jars is an endless one. There is a military garrison and a Cabildo, or municipal headquarters. In the market are the women venders, decked out in their brilliant petticoats, selling onions, fruits, fish, rock salt, and the other commodities of humble life. Here, as in Uyuni, I observed many kindly and intelligent faces among them, and they seemed to me superior to the men. The latter are the cargadores, or burden-bearers. They travel around with their backs bent, pedler fashion, even when they have no burden.

Oruro’s climate cannot be made a subject of local pride. It is raw and rainy, with snow in the morning which melts quickly under the sun. The mean average temperature as I gleaned from the local records is 43° Fahrenheit, but in the month of November the extremes are 68° and 34°. An ordinary year has 54 days of rain, 8 days of heavy snow, and 52 days of sleety winds. The mineral resources of the sub-Andine region, of which Oruro is the centre, compensate for its lack of genial temperature. The most important of the mines is the San José, which produces both tin and silver.

La Paz by the stage route is 160 miles from Oruro. When the railroad is completed, the distance will be shortened a little, though the same general course will be followed. I left Oruro one September morning in the diligencia. The transportation had been controlled by a pair of Scotchmen, and it was generally praised for the service, but they turned it over to local management and then there was nothing to praise. We had a dozen passengers, though only room for ten. They included a Peruvian gentleman and his Chilean wife; two Chilean rotos, or rough-and-ready workers who were going to La Paz to take jobs; a party of Italian pedestrians who walked in this manner; a German drummer; a native merchant, and myself. The route followed the pampa along the edge of the mountain range, and as there had been local snow-storms the regular line of white silhouettes glistening in the sunlight presented a most exquisite sight. But the road was very heavy, and our six mules had difficulty in pulling the stage from one mud hole to another.

At noon we were mired. It rained and hailed throughout the afternoon. One of the Italians, after a long parley with the driver and the Indian postilion, took a mule from the traces and started for the hamlet, which lay eight miles farther on, to see if means could not be found for transferring us.

About nine o’clock through the darkness we heard shouts, and found that a carreta, or two-wheeled cart, with four mules had been sent to our rescue. No promise was held out to us of reaching the village, but the stage was so uncomfortably crowded that some of us felt bound to make room for those who preferred to remain. We clambered out, and the outrider took us on his shoulders and waded through the mud till he was able to drop us into the cart. He had been picked up somewhere along the way. Without him we would have had to pass the hours till morning in the open carreta. The wind was biting, and though wrapped in heavy overcoats and blankets, we could not keep the chill from our marrow-bones.

The night was so black that nothing could be seen ahead except the moving silhouette of the Indian guide. I learned on this occasion of the endurance of this class of natives. Our postilion was barefoot, clad only in thin cotton trousers and some kind of shirt, yet he plunged through the ponds, waded the creeks, and marked out a course for the mules, urged by their hoarse, screeching driver, to follow. When they got mired, he was at their heads or at their heels, yelling at them in the Aymará tongue with the heartiness that a muleteer on the Western frontier will put into his coaxing of the same animals. After seeing him set the pace, I could readily understand how these men could travel all day on foot and keep the animals going at a good pace. Two or three times we thought we were hopelessly lost, but at last he brought us into the village of Caracollo and to the tambo, or inn. The breakfast had been waiting since eleven o’clock in the morning. We sat down to it at a quarter of an hour before midnight. After enjoying the repast we went to bed commiserating our companions who were huddled together in the stage somewhere back on the pampa.

The next morning I made a little study of native life as seen at Caracollo, chiefly in the plaza, which was more in the nature of a market-place. It was under water, but the Indian women were squatted about selling their wares with stoical indifference to personal comfort. The priest was fat, good-natured, and more intelligent than others of his class whom I met. He told us that the Indian tombs or tomb dwellings which we saw on the edge of the village were at least four centuries old and were still venerated by the natives. I strolled up the hillside to have a closer view of them, and found that they are now put to baser uses. The veneration of the natives apparently is shown by finding the shady side in order to take a snooze at mid-day. Half a score of the Indians were enjoying their siestas.

The tombs are oblong in form, from six to twelve feet high, and are hollow. Some are open at the top, but more are closed and have a kind of arched roof. All that I noticed opened or faced toward the east. Some have openings on each side. The straw and mortar seemed to be so fresh that it was hard to conceive of these monuments of the past being centuries old, but of the fact there is no question.

The stage managed to pull itself out of the mud and reach Caracollo at noon. We set off at once. At Villa Villa, a dreary spot, the eating-house had nothing ready for us because we were running off schedule time. Yet the Frenchman and his wife who kept it managed to provide us a mouthful. They were from Marseilles. “How did you get away off here?” I incautiously asked him. He shrugged his shoulders.

We reached Pandura at nightfall to find that the stage coming from La Paz, also running off schedule time on account of the rains and the bad roads, had arrived there ahead of us. Pandura, which consists of three or four mud structures, by squeezing itself could just shelter one set of passengers. There was no possibility of accommodations for us, nothing we could do except to continue our journey over dangerous roads. The more fortunate passengers, however, were very considerate. We could not ask them to give up their beds, but they themselves volunteered to forego their dinner. It had been ordered before our arrival and would be ready in an hour. Since they had the whole night before them, they could wait for another dinner to be prepared. We accepted their offer, and after the meal had been eaten with gluttonous appetites, we plunged off in the darkness. The animals were utterly worthless and could barely drag us along. Where fresh mules were in waiting they were already blown, and the local tambo-keepers refused to let us have the animals which were reserved for the government mail. Usually after alternate threatening and cajoling we would get the post mules, sometimes taking them forcibly, and then proceed a little better. But it was a nightmare of a journey.

In the morning we reached Sicasica. Sicasica is a town of consequence and the centre of a silver-mining district. It is one of the highest inhabited places in Bolivia, the altitude being 14,000 feet. It has an old Jesuit church, built in 1622, notable for the fantastic carving on the lava stone exterior and for some passable paintings on the interior walls as well as a fine altar.

Sicasica is notable in another way. It is the meeting-place, as it were, where the two distinct Indian races, the Aymarás and the Quichuas, come front to front. Heretofore in southern Bolivia it was the Quichua race I had met and their language I had heard, but from Sicasica on the Aymarás were my study. Both these Indian idioms are spoken, and neither race learns the tongue of the other, nor do they have a common medium in Spanish. The local innkeeper told me that few of them knew any Spanish, and that the little intercourse they had with one another was more sign language than anything else. Aymará was predominant, and its barking sounds were heard in sharp contrast to the softer accents of the Quichua. I wandered into a girls’ school, where the little maids were seated on vicuña skins and, rocking forward and backward, were conning their lessons aloud while the woman teacher accompanied their sing-song, standing. There was neither bench nor desk of any kind. The primer was in Aymará, and seemed to correspond to Noah Webster’s spelling-book.

In the afternoon we reached Ayoayo, where a small garrison of soldiers is maintained. Ayoayo is historic for an uprising which was instigated by the priests against foreigners. It resulted in a massacre. The place also was the headquarters of a stubborn Indian uprising against the authority of the Bolivian government. That was many years back, and I do not know that the maintenance of a garrison at this time has anything to do with past history. The officers were bright, fine-appearing men; the soldiers were stolid-looking, but apparently were under excellent discipline. There are Indian tombs in the neighborhood of Ayoayo, though not so many as at Caracollo.

After leaving Ayoayo is the sublime sight of the peerless Illimani,—a vision to my mind equal to that of the famed Sorata seen from Lake Titicaca, and unsurpassed among the many glorious panoramas of mountain grandeur which the Bolivian Andes afford.

The Continental Andes fork northwest of Lake Titicaca in latitude 14°. The Occidental Cordilleras trend south to the Pacific coast. The Oriental Cordilleras extend in a general direction from northwest to southeast. They are marked by three series of peaks,—the Cololo, which is in Peru; the Illampu; and the Quisma Cruz, or Three Crosses. The greatest of these are the Illampu, which begin with the towering glacier peak of Sorata and end with the grouped pinnacles of the Illimani. The heights of the summits according to the best estimates vary from 21,200 feet to 21,700 feet. It is this region which entitles Bolivia to be called the roof of the world fully as much as Thibet.

On the Illimani the snows of yesterday are the snows of to-morrow. Their sublimity cannot be grasped at close view. It is necessary to see them at a distance such as that afforded after leaving Ayoayo in order fully to appreciate their magnificence, for from this point the lower flanks, brown and barren, are not visible. A great wall of marble whiteness, with turrets and minarets surmounting it, stretches along the horizon. When the turn in the road is made and the sloping sides are in sight, the view is grand enough, but nothing like the first vision. The chain extends more than a hundred miles. The cold from the Illimani is felt very sensibly, yet it is a clear and crisp cold and is not disagreeable.

The night was spent at Calamarca, where we found an unusually good tambo with the rarest of innovations—two or three camp bedsteads—and excellent food, well cooked by the wife of the innkeeper, a very intelligent chola.

We left Calamarca on the fourth day, though we should have been in La Paz at the end of the second day. The approach to the capital is across a great meseta, or mountain plain. It swarms with Indian life. All the region between Oruro and La Paz seems to be as thickly populated as the land will sustain. The stage road not only passes through many villages, but there are more of these to the right and to the left a short distance from the highway. Some of them are not unattractive collections of adobe huts, and several of the groups are rendered picturesque by the big oval ovens or kilns almost as large as the cabins themselves.

The life is a primitive, pastoral one. Sheep and some cattle, alpacas, llamas, and burros are raised and graze on the plain and in the valley. Maize, or Indian corn, and a little wheat are grown along with barley, and the native cereal known as quinua, which is like millet. The crops appear scanty, and the vegetation at this height is not exuberant.

The native existence, while not a joyous one, does not appear to be too sombre. The religious festivals are celebrated with undeviating punctuality. No matter how small the collection of huts, somewhere among them is a church, and each group of cabins has its own curé. I remarked everywhere the grass cross over the dwellings. It was very rare to find a hut without this symbolism. It seemed to indicate great devoutness, but what I had already seen of the curés and their flocks made me doubt whether this was the correct explanation. The cross, I was told, was blessed by the priest, and then it kept out the rain, which at times is very heavy. One old man, who, after pretending that he knew nothing but the Aymará tongue, had talked very well in Spanish, was asked if the crosses really did keep out the rain. He replied gravely, “Yes, if the roof is a good one.”

Whether the orthodoxy of the Indians is more than a crust of superstition I do not profess to know, but I have the conviction that a true missionary priesthood would work a vast improvement in their condition, and would produce the evidences of genuine belief in the doctrines of the Church which is demonstrated by the practice of those doctrines. They have had Roman Catholicism for four hundred years, and another form of worship would be meaningless to them; but what they need is the vital principles of the Catholic worship, and not the abuses of unfaithful servants of the Church.

I had heard that the Indians in the depths of their natures preserved the old traditions, and that they still secretly worshipped the White Spirit of the Illimani. Several persons whom I asked replied that they knew nothing of this belief. One of them, a Peruvian who had spent much time among the Indians, said the only spirit they worshipped was the spirit of alcohol.

Among the native population the cholos are easily distinguished. They are the migratory classes who live in the larger towns and some of whom work in the mines. Many of them are freighters. They have charge of the pack trains to and from the mines. They have a distinctive dress,—the loose cotton trouser, widening below the knee and with a V-strip of different cloth in either side. They are a political power, for, while they take little part in the elections, they are not unready to share in a disturbance.

The aboriginal native yet preserves many customs distinct from the cholo. He wears a cap, or gorro, which was worn in the time of the Incas, and he contents himself with a blanket instead of trousers if he cannot afford the latter. The pure-blood Indians are the best for the freight caravans where the llamas are employed, for they can manage those whimsical beasts of burden as no one else can. The llama feeds as it goes along, and a born manager of animals is needed to handle a tropa, or drove, of them, and keep them moving in regular order. The life of the freighter is a hard one, tramping all day and at night sleeping in the corral with the beasts.

The Indian woman in Bolivia occupies a plane on an equality with the man. She has no lord and master, as has the American Indian woman in the noble red man of the West. She works, but he also must work. She accompanies him with the pack trains, all the while that she is trudging along twirling her spools and winding the wool into yarn. It is rare to see an Indian woman without her spools unless she is weaving at the loom. Walking and talking, gossiping and scolding, shouting at the llamas, tramping over the sharpest mountain-pass or plunging down into the gorges, she manages to keep the spool always twirling. It is a most peculiar process, and would drive a small boy who has a notion of spinning a top on the end of his finger wild with emulation, though he hardly would be able to imitate the process.

Marriage bonds among these Indians are not loose ties. In all the settled communities where the little church has been planted, the priest sees that the ceremony is performed, for it means a fee to him. But when the man wanders away for work and is gone for years, as sometimes happens, it is no interruption to the family bond that on his return a brood of children greet him. He resumes the matrimonial relation and accepts the children without question.

There is a prevalent delusion that in these altitudes the birth rate is very low, and, moreover, that many of the children come into the world deaf or lose the sense of hearing soon after birth. While the families are not so large as in the tropics or lower altitudes, they are numerous enough, and I was not surprised to be told that the report about deafness and the excessive rate of infant mortality does not bear the scrutiny of scientific investigation.

To reach La Paz from Calamarca it is necessary to cross several quebradas, or wide ravines. Then the gravelly plain spreads out and stretches to the precipice of the circular basin in which lies the city. La Paz spreads along the inner sides of a rocky amphitheatre, a panorama of red roofs, blended blue and white buildings, church towers, and parks of willow and eucalyptus trees. The greenest and most refreshing spot in the mountain bowl, the one which gladdens the eye and rests the mind while filling it with pleasing anticipations, is the cemetery. But from the Heights no one guesses that this oasis is a graveyard.

A splendid highway leads down to the city, which is 1,400 feet below the level of the great plain. At first it is a straight slanting road at an angle of 45 degrees. Then it winds and becomes very crooked and abrupt. This is the coachman’s hour of triumph. He sends the mules at a full gallop, and if a spill does not happen the plaza is reached in half an hour. In passing, there is a blurred impression of steep mountain-sides with burros, llamas, and men and women slowly climbing the precipitous paths. This vision becomes more substantial when the level is reached and it is possible to look back and see what appear to be countless processions of two-legged and four-legged ants losing themselves on the ridges and steep slopes.

La Paz has a plaza and an alameda and two or three smaller parks which are not uninviting. The Chuquiyupu, or La Paz, River winds through the town. The hillsides on which the buildings are located are very steep. The Plaza Murillo is a sort of terrace or level between the river and the ridge. There is an old cathedral,—one of the few in South America about which I know nothing, for I did not even enter it. The market-place in front affords the best examples of native life. La Paz, notwithstanding it is the commercial centre and has the largest Spanish and foreign element, is still the home of the native race. The town has a population of 60,000, of whom 40,000 are said to be Aymarás, 10,000 cholos, and the remainder of European, chiefly Spanish, origin. The cholos learn to speak Spanish, but the Aymarás will not.

Though no act of Congress has formally made effective the provision of the Constitution which allows the capital to be shifted, Sucre no longer is the seat of government. The President has his residence in La Paz, it is the headquarters of the army, the national custom-house is there, and the Congress meets there. When Sucre was the actual capital, it was isolated from the rest of the country. The foreign ministers lived at La Paz. Some of them during their term of office never visited Sucre, but contented themselves by sending their credentials by messenger or through the mails.

La Paz is notable for the international character of its society. At a dinner at the home of Minister Sorsby I met a Bavarian mining capitalist and his wife, an English railway manager married to an Argentine lady, the wife of a Greek mining engineer who had come out from Constantinople on her bridal trip, a French financier, a Spanish merchant, two or three Peruvian gentlemen, as many Americans, and a Brazilian. This is the cosmopolitanism of a mining country in any part of the world. Mr. Mathieu, the Chilean Minister, I had known in Washington when he was Secretary of the Legation. Mr. Ignacio Calderon, afterwards Bolivian Minister to the United States, at the time of my visit was the Secretary of the Treasury. A pleasant incident was a breakfast with his family and a talk of home affairs, for his wife was a Baltimore lady.

A resting-place after weeks of wayfaring, a vantage point for digesting information and maturing impressions of the imprisoned country and her people, a preparation place for further wayfaring,—all these La Paz was for me.