The Argentine Republic: Its Development and Progress

On the other hand, colonization has kept the land won in the district of the middle Salado, and it extends in a sporadic way toward the south-west and west. (Nueve de Julio, 252 square kilometres of wheat and 400 of maize: Veinte Cinco de Mayo, 84 square kilometres of wheat and 218 of maize: Junin, 197 square kilometres of wheat and 204 of maize in 1895). It has been maintained ever since, with slow progress, but without being ousted by breeding. This is one of the regions of the Pampa where the most different types of rural exploitation are mingled together. Agricultural colonization has been carried on both by small proprietors and farmers or tenants. Wheat and maize seem to be permanently associated, and the climate is equally good for both; the maize crop being the better if the summer is wet, and the wheat crop when the summer is dry. The two cereals follow each other on the same land, in rotation, the wheat being helped by the constant weeding and clearing which the maize requires. The colonists use oxen in the work, and fatten them afterwards.100

Agricultural colonization in the lucerne region dates from 1895 to 1905:

I have shown how this was bound up with the development of the lucerne farms themselves. The extreme west of the lucerne belt (Pedernera department and San Luis) is the only place where the cultivated area was reduced. The contracts by which the ranchers entrust their lands to the colonists, on condition of returning them sown with lucerne, were gradually modified as the stream of colonization developed. The land was at first left to the colonist rent free, the rancher being paid by the creation of the lucerne fields. But in proportion to the increasing volume of the stream of immigrants, and the keener competition of the colonists, the rancher asked better terms. There are similar contracts in regard to the restoration of lucerne fields which have been worn out by pasturage, so that the land has to be ploughed up periodically. The men who clear the land in the lucerne belt have mostly been recruited in the district of the old colonies of Santa Fé, where the new generation had begun to feel the pinch. The crops which they raise during the four or five years of their lease are chosen without any idea of sparing lands which they are not to keep. Wheat succeeds wheat, and the first and last crop is often flax. The proportion of flax is lower only in the southern part of the lucerne belt. In the Buenos Aires province the colonist grows lucerne on his own account, either to sell as dry fodder or for breeding or fattening.

Colonization does not in these parts correspond with the division of property. Not only does the farmer not become the owner of the soil, but he does not live on it permanently; he is a veritable nomad. His house has a temporary look that strikes one at the first glance. The area cultivated is almost stable, if the region is considered as a whole. But cultivation passes periodically from one section to another, and its removals cause sudden alterations or crises in the railway traffic and the development of the urban centres.

The lucerne belt has been peopled by Santafecinos, and it has in turn sent colonists to the western agricultural belt at the foot of the Sierras de San Luis and de Córdoba. They have less suitable climatological conditions, but they have the advantage of greater stability, as the breeders do not dispute the land with them.

While agricultural colonization has been an aid to pastoral colonization in the north-west of Buenos Aires, it tends to displace breeding, or restrict its sphere, in the north-east and the south. Maize-growing started on the banks of the Paraná, where it was already paramount in 1889, between Campana (north of Buenos Aires) and San Nicolas. In 1895 it advanced up the Paraná as far as the Santa Fé province (Constitución) and spread over the interior for some sixty miles in the Salto department. In the next few years it made rapid progress toward the west and north-west, covering the departments of Pergamino, Rojas, and Colon, and part of General Lopez, San Lorenzo, and Constitución in the province of Santa Fé.

Export of Argentine maize on a large scale began in 1895. Flax-growing was not added to maize until 1900.

The heavy land requires a good deal of harrowing, and the weeding and harvesting of the maize give employment to a comparatively large staff. The estates are of moderate size, often only 50 hectares. Ownership was not divided at the period of colonization, the land, thanks to the breeders, having already acquired so high a value that the colonists could not buy it. On the lands which have been farmed out there has developed a rural, and often far from docile, proletariat. It is in the maize region that the worst agricultural strikes have taken place. The struggles of the owners and the colonists are the more prolonged because the sowing of the maize can be put back to the end of the spring without much harm being done. The adjoining zone of the Paraná produced some of the maiseros who have scattered over the north-west. But the modern colonies include, in addition, a large proportion of immigrants who have recently landed from Italy and Spain. The maize growers do not mix with the wheat-growers. Each group has its own area.

The increase of wheat-growing in the south dates only from 1898:

Wheat first spread along the line from Buenos Aires to Bahía Blanca, west of the Sierra de la Ventana, then in the coastal district, east of Bahía Blanca. These two wheat-areas became connected after 1904, when the opening of the direct line from Olavarria to Buenos Aires facilitated the development of the intermediate region (Pringles-Laprida). From Bahía Blanca it spread to the west and north-west along the Toay line, and southward as far as Colorado on the coast. In the whole area of the Central Pampa it is still possible to distinguish two strata of immigrants, of different dates, one superimposed upon the other: the sheep-breeders and the farmers. Round Toay the contrast between the two elements of the population is even more striking, because the first pastoral colonization, which dates from 1890, was to a great extent the work of creole puntanos (from the San Luis province). The actual agricultural colonies, on the other hand, include recent European immigrants and colonists from other parts of the provinces of Buenos Aires and Entre Rios.

The yield of the wheat grows less and less as one goes westward. The harvest may be injured either by late frost or drought, or, especially, by hot winds which scorch the plants and blight the half-realized hopes of the farmers in the weeks just before the harvest. But the relative poorness of the return is compensated by the extent of the farms and the cheapness of labour. The harvest is often done with machines that peel and pack the wheat, and the workers are not compelled, as they are at Santa Fé, to wait for the threshing machine. The aridity does not permit flax-growing, but oats can be grown, especially between the Sierra de la Ventana and the Sierra de Tandil; and it is good to sow oats when the land has been impoverished by consecutive crops of wheat. Exports of oats through Bahía Blanca began in 1906.

The displacement of breeding by farming is less thorough than in the maize belt. Oats, sown about the beginning of autumn, serve for fodder. The animals are kept in the fields during the winter, and the oats are cut and put into the mill, without being threshed, as a reserve fodder. Moreover, the wheat farmers have themselves taken to rearing sheep, and the sheep feed in the stubble and fallow.

From this short account of the history of colonization we draw certain important conclusions. At the time when agricultural colonization began, it was admitted that farming was the best way to exploit the soil, and that the Pampa would sooner or later pass from the pastoral to the agricultural cycle; or, to use the local phraseology, that the "colony" would replace the ranch everywhere. This idea was wrong. The only area in which the facts seem to give it any support is the corn belt. The general rule is, on the contrary, that in its progress colonization develops a mixed type of exploitation, combining farming and breeding; either one alternates with the other in a sort of periodic rotation, as in the lucerne area, or both proceed together, the farmers including breeding amongst their occupations, as in the district of the Santa Fé colonies or in the wheat area in the south of the Buenos Aires province.

It seems, moreover, that the development of colonization depends not only upon physical conditions, but upon factors of a purely economic or social character, which the geographer must not overlook. It will be enough here to indicate the chief of these.

We have seen the part that has been played in the exploitation of the soil by groups of colonists who swarm from one area to another. Whether we think of the ranchers of the eastern part of Buenos Aires transplanting themselves to Córdoba or north of Santa Fé, the sheep-breeders moving westward, or the Santa Fé colonists settling in the lucerne area, they all take with them their own habits and methods of work, and they take time to adjust them to a new environment.

The colonist, whether breeder or farmer, is not left to himself. Colonization is sustained and directed by speculation in land, and is influenced by it. Speculation discounts the work of the colonist, and attaches to the land a value which is not based upon the revenue it has produced, but upon that which the speculator calculates that it may produce in the future. If the speculator is audacious, he does not let himself be discouraged by initial bad experiences; it takes repeated checks to exhaust his optimism. The colonist, even if his farming accounts do not show a profit, may nevertheless gain something if the value of his land goes up. The increase of his capital conceals from him the smallness of his returns, especially as he can easily get advances on the value of his property from the banks, and this enables him to draw upon his wealth every year.

Speculation is concerned with new lands on the fringe of the area already colonized, where the soil is, as a general rule, already in the hands of the exploiters themselves. The speculators, having paid a high price for these lands, try to organize the development of them. It is partly owing to their influence that colonization continuously enlarges its domain, instead of concentrating its labour in the older districts where it might sometimes be more productive. In fine, speculation in land has a profound influence on the conditions of colonization, making it more difficult for the colonist to buy the land he is developing. The owner who grants him the use of the land means to keep for himself any increment of its value. He rents, but he will not sell.

Thus the history of colonization cannot be separated from the traffic in land. The special features of this traffic in the Pampean region—its concentration at Buenos Aires; the creation of a land-market resembling a stock market; the practice of selling on the instalment plan, which enables small capitalists to enter the market; the repeated transfers of pieces of land which the buyers have never seen and which they know only from plans—are one of the most original aspects of modern Argentina. They are partly due to a fact of a geographical nature—the uniformity of the Pampean plain, on which every piece of land is worth about as much as the adjoining piece.

Colonization is easy and rapid in proportion as it requires less capital and labour. The expansion of breeding in the west between 1880 and 1890 was facilitated by the low market price of cattle at that time. Breeding has the advantage over farming of not needing so large a staff, but it requires a larger capital. Of the crops, assuming that the conditions of soil and climate are equally favourable, wheat is better than maize for colonization, because the preparing of the soil and the harvest can be done more speedily, and the same number of hands can plant a larger area with wheat than with maize.

The action of the Argentine Government and the provincial authorities has been restrained, apart from the earliest period of the establishment of the Santa Fé colonies, both as regards the securing of immigrants, the distribution of lands, and the administration of the colonies.101 Colonization has been, on the whole, a private affair. The work of organizing colonization has at times been undertaken by the proprietors themselves; they leased pieces of land and got a good price for them, at the same time increasing the surplus value of the plots they kept for themselves by promoting the increase of population. Sometimes it was undertaken by Colonization Companies, which bought land to divide and sell. More frequently it was undertaken by merchants who advanced credit to the colonists they settled, on condition that the colonists bought what they needed of the merchants, and entrusted them with the sale of their crops. The migration of the Santa Fé colonists was partly due to, and sustained by, a corresponding migration of merchants who had acquired wealth in the older colonies, and who thus got a larger body of customers. The merchant who organizes colonization often acts as the intermediary between the owner and the colonist, guaranteeing the owner a fixed rent for his land and receiving so much per cent. of his harvest from the farmer. This system is very widespread in the corn belt, but it is found all over the plain of the Pampas. It tends to disappear when the colony is older and deeper-rooted, as the colonist gradually earns his independence; he buys his lease, his equipment, and his furniture, and controls the sale of his own crops. In the districts where he has not become owner, the leases are generally variations of two types: farming leases, where the colonist has capital enough for working, and renting leases, where the capital is provided by the owner or the middleman.

Lastly, colonization can make no progress unless it finds markets on which it can put its produce. Up to the present western Europe has been the chief market for the wool, leather, meat, and cereals of the Pampean region; tropical America absorbs part of the output of the saladeros, flour, and dry fodder; and North America has recently begun to compete with Europe for wool, leather, and frozen meat. The facility with which the products of the Pampa have found their way into the world's markets, as is seen in the comparative stability of the returns, explains the continuous advance of colonization and the short duration of the crises which have disturbed it.

The home market, however, has had an importance in connection with colonization that must not be overlooked. When wheat-growing spread at Santa Fé the crop was at first devoted to supplying Buenos Aires, and as late as 1883 Zeballos thought that the essential result of agricultural colonization was the fact that Chilean flour was beaten off the Argentine market. Even to-day the districts on the outskirts of the cereal area depend upon the home market. The Villa Mercedes mill supplies Mendoza. Córdoba and Santa Fé send their flour to Tucumán. The price of cereals still shows slight fluctuations in these parts as compared with prices in Buenos Aires.

Pastoral colonization, again, has not been entirely independent of the home market. Martin de Moussy says, it is true, that the area which sent the products of breeding to Europe in 1865 extended as far as the Sierra de Córdoba. But this statement needs correction. The hides from the whole of this zone were, in point of fact, sent down to the ports on the Rio de la Plata, but live animals were sent to Chile from the whole of the north-west of the Pampean region. It was for the purpose of selling cattle to Chile that ranches were multiplied about 1860 in the neighbourhood of Villa Mercedes and lower down, on the Rio Quinto. Jegou's description shows that even in 1883 the breeders of the San Luis province devoted themselves exclusively to supplying the Chilean market.102 Buyers from Chile and the Andean provinces still visit Villa Mercedes, and until a recent date they came to Villa Maria, in the province of Córdoba. The Santa Fé ranches found their customers, until the opening of the Córdoba line (1870) amongst the troperos, who bought draught oxen for their waggons. The loss of these customers and the crisis that followed are one of the reasons why agricultural colonization met with so little resistance on the part of the breeders, and was able to take root so easily at Santa Fé. In the San Cristobal department the breeders who settled there after 1890 found their first market in the obrajes of the neighbouring forest. The opening of the railway to Tucumán afterwards enabled them to send their cattle to the provinces of the north-west. The Buenos Aires buyers were late in this remote canton of the Pampean plain. They did not arrive until 1911.

The importance of the Pampean region itself as a market of consumption grew in proportion to the increase of its population. The extent to which it absorbs the products of breeding and agriculture varies a good deal. For some of them it is paramount. Horse-breeding, for instance, which is still one of the great industries of the Pampa, has never contributed to the export trade. It is the same with regard to potatoes, which are concentrated in two strictly limited districts, round Rosario and north of the Sierra de Tandil. Only a small part of the dry fodder is exported. As regards cereals, a comparison of the statistics of production with the statistics of export shows that the home consumption is about one-third of the production. It is almost nil for flax, and nearly fifty per cent for wheat.

As the chief centres of consumption are the ports themselves, it follows that the commercial currents that have to supply them are confused with the currents which maintain the exports. The exchanges between the various regions of the Pampa are more interesting to the geographer. In their tendency to specialize, these regions have ceased to be self-contained, and they have to look to adjoining regions. The feeding of the mills necessitates the transport of wheat in different directions. The chief mills are at Buenos Aires, where they are suitably located to work both for the home market and for export; and the mills in the interior have some difficulty in competing with them. Some of these, however, are still active. They mix hard wheat, bought in the district of the Santa Fé colonies, with the soft wheat that is grown in the middle and south of Buenos Aires province.

But this inter-regional transport of cereals is a small thing in comparison with the transport of cattle. The extension of the lucerne farms has developed the fattening industry in many districts, while others still confine themselves to breeding in the ordinary sense, and they feed the other centres. The most specialized fattening district is that of Villa Mercedes and the western part of the lucerne belt, while the eastern part of the province of Buenos Aires and Entre Rios are still areas of production. The differentiation of the pastoral zones can be gathered from a study of the statistics. According to the 1908 Census, milch cows represent 53 per cent. of the whole of the cattle in all the departments which form the heart of the breeding area east of Buenos Aires, and only 45 per cent. in the departments of the north-west of Buenos Aires and south of Córdoba and in the Pedernera department of San Luis, where fattening is common.

According to the 1914 Census oxen are 24 per cent. of the herd in the same departments of eastern Buenos Aires; 24 per cent. also in Entre Rios; and the proportion rises to 31 per cent. in the lucerne area. Dolores department (eastern Buenos Aires) has 64 per cent. milch cows and 21 per cent. oxen. Pedernera department (San Luis, in the lucerne area) has 49 per cent. cows and 38 per cent. oxen. General Roca department (Córdoba) has 48 per cent. cows and 34 per cent. oxen. Arenales (Buenos Aires) has 39 per cent. cows and 46 per cent. oxen.103

Oxen intended for the refrigerators are bought either on the ranches or at Buenos Aires, where beasts in good condition are consigned to buyers, but oxen for fattening are bought at fairs which are held periodically in the towns of the interior. Another transaction at these fairs is the trade in pedigree breeders. The best known of them is held at Villa Mercedes (province of San Luis), where 8,000 oxen are sold every month. At the Mercedes fairs one may see Durham steers from the east of Buenos Aires which are to be fattened and sent back to the refrigerators or the slaughter-houses of Buenos Aires. There are also creole cattle from the north of the San Luis province and Rioja which will later be eaten in Mendoza or in Chile. There is, in fact, on the western frontier of the Pampa no line of demarcation corresponding to that set up in the north by the limit of the area contaminated by the garrapate, separating the district of creole breeding from that of selective breeding. There is free communication here between the two zones, and the lucerne fields for fattening at Villa Mercedes are used in common by the breeders of the Pampa and of the bush.104

CHAPTER VII
ROADS AND RAILWAYS

The chapter devoted to primitive breeding and the transport of cattle contains a sketch of the network of routes over the Andes. One cannot expect to find in the scheme of routes over the Argentine plains the stern and obvious influence of natural conditions. The surface of these plains is, as a whole, broadly open to traffic. Still, the map of the roads bears much evidence of geographical exigencies.

The hills which rise like islands out of the alluvial plain are not all incapable of being crossed, and the roads do not always skirt them. The road from Buenos Aires to Peru runs north of 30° 40′ S. lat. on the very axis of the granite peneplain which forms the northern part of the Sierra de Córdoba. The Dean Funes ridge, which begins with an altitude of 2,500 feet between the Sierra Chica and these tablelands, has always been used for communication between Córdoba and the north-western provinces. There the railway has taken the place of the primitive track. Another important track crosses the Sierra de Córdoba in the north of the Pampa de Achala, and used to join Córdoba with Villa Dolores and the north of the San Luis province. The southern part of the Sierra de Córdoba and the Sierra de San Luis are, on the other hand, an insurmountable obstacle, which diverts southward the high road to Chile via Achiras, San José, del Morro, and San Luis.

The sierras of the Buenos Aires province are not so high and extensive. They are, moreover, broken into isolated hills with the plain passing between them. As early as 1822 Colonel Garcia pointed out the importance, in connection with the migrations of the Indian tribes, of the passage between the Sierra Amarilla and the Sierra de Curaco, that is to say, the Olavarria ridge. It is there that the first railway between Buenos Aires and Bahía Blanca crosses the line of sierras. It then skirts the Sierra de la Ventana, to the north, by the Pigüe ridge, between the mass of Curumalan and the Puan hills. The dunes of the western Pampa also are an impediment to traffic, not so much because of their height as because of the looseness of the ground. The strip between General Acha and Toay was very trying for the stage-coaches. Travellers had to cross the dunes on foot during the winter season, when the horses were in a bad condition.105

Natural supplies of water increase in number as one gets away from the Andean zone toward the east. Still, the chief work, often the only work, to be done in making a road is the arrangement of permanent supplies of water. Martin de Moussy mentions the digging of wells on the new road from Córdoba to Rosario, which was opened about 1860. The aiguade was generally a represa, a reservoir, where the water accumulated behind a barrier of earth raised across the course of an intermittent stream. The upkeep of the represa is the chief duty of the post-master. The edge of the sierras and the opening point of the ravines which come down them is a good place for making represas, and the roads frequently keep to these (variant of the road from Córdoba to Tucumán via Totoral, Dormida, Rio Seco and Sumampa, on the eastern edge of the Sierra de Córdoba, etc.) Long stages with no water supplies, the travesías, are not found on the made roads, as a rule, except west of the meridian, of Córdoba. However, the direct road from Santa Fé to Santiago del Estero by the lagoon of Los Porongos, which was used in the eighteenth century, seems to have been abandoned afterwards, as much on account of the difficulty of supplying water as because it was exposed to attack from the Indians.

The only difficulty which the caravans encountered on the roads over the plain was the crossing of the rivers. They were forded. Fords with a muddy bottom on the lower course of the rivers, such as that on the Saladillo near the confluence of the Rio Tercero, were more difficult for wagons than the fords with sandy bottoms in the upper course, near the fringe of the mountains, such as those of the Rio Tercero on the Córdoba road, or of the Rio Cuarto on the road to Chile. After rain, certain parts of the plain are flooded and impassable. That is the case in the district to the south of the lower Salado, at the very spot where Père Cardiel notices the lack of water in the dry season (1747). The direct road from Buenos Aires to the sierras was at that point exposed, alternately, to drought and flood. The line of the Southern railway, which crosses this low district, is still cut periodically on both sides of Las Flores by floods. The lack of an organized network of streams, the irregularity of the rains, the difficulty of ascertaining the inclination, and the flow of the waters over a plain which seems to the eye to be perfectly level, have led to more than one miscalculation on the part of the railways, which were constructed hurriedly, and before the general survey of the Pampa was finished. Some lines, on the Pampa or on the Chaco, have had to be partially reconstructed, and raised higher, after a series of rainy years.106

The colonization of that part of the plain which actually constitutes the province of Buenos Aires was late. It belongs to the era of the railways. There is only one historic road crossing this area, which remained until the last third of the nineteenth century in the hands of the Indian tribes. This is the salt road. We do not know exactly when it began to be used. In the eighteenth century, in spite of the competition of salt from Cadiz and Patagonia, imported by sea, the Pampa salt was the main part of the supply of Buenos Aires. The salt road was not abandoned until after 1810. We still have the diary of several journeys from Buenos Aires to the salt-pits. They were military expeditions. Hundreds of wagons, with a strong escort, collected at Lujan and Chivilcoy, and they reached Atreuco, west of the Guamini and Carbuë lakes, after a fifteen to twenty-five days' march.

The itinerary was fixed in detail. In 1796 D'Azara noticed the wells sunk by the salters, north of the Palentelen lagoon (Bragado), when they found the lagoon dry. From Palentelen south-westward the salt road followed the track used by the Indians of the south-west in their expeditions against the ranches of the Buenos Aires frontier. Near Lake Epecuen, north of Carbuë, it was joined by another track which came from Olavarria, the stages of which were marked by the streams that came from the Sierra de Curumalan. The Carbuë district, the cross-roads of the tracks, was one of the places where the tribes collected. "This place," says the diary of the 1778 expedition, "is the first point where the hostile Indians meet and rest when they leave the Sierra and on returning from their invasions. They not only rest there, but have their winter pasture there" (in the dry season).107 Zeballos has described the Indian track, the rustrillada, between Epecuen, Atreuco and Traru Lauquen, where the travesia on the road to Chile began.108 It was not less than 1,000 feet in width. At the foot of the dunes there were deep parallel grooves made by the feet of the raided cattle, which were taken away by the "Chileños."

The two main roads of the colonial period are the roads to Chile and Peru. On leaving Buenos Aires there was one road for a distance of about 320 miles. The "trade road" passed through Lujan, Areco and Sauce, and reached the Carcaraña, or Rio Tercero, at Esquina. It therefore kept at some distance from the Paraná (32 to 16 miles), on the tableland, crossing the valleys which were embedded in it and represented so many bad parts. It then ascended the Tercero on the right bank as far as the Paso Fereira, at the spot where Villa Maria is to-day. At Esquina de Medrano (Villa Maria) the road to Chile branched off to the south-east, reached San Luis by following the Rio Cuarto, going through Achiras and San José del Morro, and, after a travesia seventy-eight miles in length, came to the Rio Tunuyan at La Paz, and ascended the river to Mendoza.109

From Esquina de Medrano the Peru road made for Córdoba in the north-west. From the tablelands which continue the Sierra de Córdoba northward it descended toward the Rio Dulce, which it reached west of Atamisqui, and which it followed as far as Santiago del Estero, where it crossed to the north bank. It crossed the Sali in the latitude of Tucumán, and, passing through Tracas and Metan, followed the depression which separates the Andes from the sub-Andean chains. From Salta it went north to Jujuy, and passed through the Quebrada de Humahuaca to reach the Puna.

The influence of rivers is not much seen in the scheme of the primitive roads. There were in the sixteenth century many routes from Peru to the Paraguay, across the Chaco, but not a permanent road in the strict sense. In the eighteenth century there was a direct road from Santa Fé to Tucumán, by the north of the Los Porongos lagoon and the course of the Rio Dulce. There was another from Santa Fé to Córdoba. These roads were not exclusively used for conveying cattle. The river route which they joined at Santa Fé provided them with a certain amount of traffic coming from the higher provinces. Paraguayan maté reached the Andean regions by this road, and in return the boatmen at Santa Fé loaded up with the wines and dried fruit of the Andean provinces to take to Asunciôn.

The question of joining the road on to a river was not of very great importance until the time when the Paraná began to be used for Argentine imports and exports, and to maintain the communication of the interior provinces with Europe. This question of connection with a river controls the history of the construction of the railway system. But the great importance of it can be seen from the first half of the nineteenth century. D'Orbigny had a presentiment of it. Speaking of the future of Santa Fé, he says: "When peace is restored, it is certain that the wares of Córdoba may, instead of going by land from that town to Buenos Aires, be sent to Santa Fé, where shipping them to the Argentine capital will reduce to one-third the journey by land, which is always more costly than going by water." Martin de Moussy, foreseeing the making of a road across the Chaco from Tucumán to the Paraná, in the latitude of Corrientes, calculates that Corrientes may later serve as port for part of the west and north of Argentina. At the date of the publication of his book, however, it was neither Santa Fé nor Corrientes, but the new town Rosario, that began to play the part of interior port, and led to the construction of a new system of roads. Traffic between Rosario and Córdoba at first followed the old road from Buenos Aires to Peru, which one struck after leaving Rosario and making a detour to the south-west, on the right bank of the Carcaraña (at Rio Tercero). But this itinerary was presently replaced by a direct road to the west-northwest, following the line which the railways would adopt.110

In the greater part of Argentina transport was by means of wagons before railways were constructed. The limit between the area of wagon-transport and the area in which goods were conveyed on the backs of animals is quite stable. It is still of some significance, in spite of the development of the railways; wagons and mules are used at each station to collect and distribute goods. The area of farming and of selective breeding on the Pampa, the sheep-area in Patagonia, and the timber belt on the Chaco, still make use of wagons; and goods are carried on the backs of mules in the Andean area. The Peru road was, broadly speaking, fit for wagons as far as Salta, but it is rough between Tucumán and Salta, and wagons that used it generally stopped at Salta. In this way wagons avoided the ford of the Sali, which was easier for mules. On the plain itself the water-sources were often so distant from each other, and the stages so long, that mules had to be used instead of wagons. Wagons could easily get to Mendoza by the road along which the Tunuyan runs at its driest section, but all the convoys from Córdoba to San Juan, or Rioja to Catamarca, were composed of mules. Hence Córdoba was, like Tucumán, a station for changing on the road from Buenos Aires to the north-west. Lastly, while the scrub presented no insuperable obstacle to wagons, they could not enter the humid tropical forest, where the soil never dries. On the fringe of the Misiones forest, the wagons that came from San Tome unloaded at San Javier, and mules took the goods on to the yerbales.

The two areas of different kinds of transport were not sharply distinct. The muleteers (arrieros) sometimes avoided the domain of the wagoners, and competed with them as far as the banks of the Paraná. In 1860 (Hutchinson) the muleteers carried about a fifth, in weight, of the goods from the interior to Rosario, and they got more than a third of the transport from Rosario to the interior. They had, however, to offer to carry goods at two-thirds the price charged by the wagoners. It appears that this invasion by the muleteers is connected with a transport-crisis in the Andean area, which left a number of the San Juan muleteers without work. It did not last. By 1862 mule-back transport between Rosario and the interior was almost over.

The wagons of the Argentine plain have often been described by travellers. They were heavy vehicles, carrying 150, sometimes 180, arrobes (1,725 to 2,070 kgs.), covered with a leather hood stretched on hoops. A long spur decorated with ostrich feathers was balanced on a ring fixed in the roof, and was used to guide the front pair of oxen. An earthenware pot containing water enough for each stage hung between the rear uprights. As a rule, three pair of oxen were yoked to it, one pair being in the shafts. At Corrientes it was necessary to cross the marshes and esteros, and a special type of wagon had been evolved. It had a sort of horizontal division forming an upper story, and the driver sat in this. Everywhere, on the Pampa as well as at Corrientes, the wheels were enormous; sometimes, as Darwin says, ten feet in diameter. They were, therefore, able to get through the bad parts. Mud was, as a matter of fact, the worst enemy of the convoys. The soil of the Pampa is clayey and soft in the districts near the river. As the road was not limited in width, the wagons turned to the right or the left when the ruts became too deep, and the track in time covered a broad belt of ground. This, however, could not be done in the vicinity of towns, where the traffic was concentrated. Buenos Aires came to be surrounded by formidable quagmires that dried up only in the summer. The paving of the streets and environs was becoming a problem of national importance when the construction of the railway began.

Wagons did not travel singly. The tropero, or contractor for transport, organized caravans. In peaceful districts, where no military escort was required, the convoys could be split up; they consisted, as a rule, of from fifteen to fifty wagons. Besides the six oxen yoked to the wagon, there had to be others for relief as well as horses for the staff. Usually they allowed ten oxen to each wagon; in exceptional cases twenty.111 The convoy to the salt-lakes in 1778 had no less than 12,000 oxen to 600 wagons. There was a driver to each wagon, but there had also to be drivers for the starting animals, and carpenters to make repairs. The leader of the caravan, the capataz, was generally a master-carpenter. He looked after the interests of the tropero. There were about three men to each wagon. The carreros were an original type, nomadic, and very different in costume and character from the gauchos (breeders) of the plain. At the close of the eighteenth century Buenos Aires had more than a thousand wagons employed in the traffic to Mendoza and Tucumán (Borrero).

The stages were rarely more than four or five leagues of five kilometres each (thirteen to sixteen miles). At this rate it took a convoy forty to fifty days to go from Buenos Aires to Mendoza, thirty days from Rosario to Tucumán, three months (with the necessary rests) from Buenos Aires to Salta.112 When water ran short, the journey might be greatly prolonged, as the animals could do less work, or not work at all if the aiguades had dried up. The season was a matter for consideration. In the Buenos Aires district the winter made the ground sodden and traffic difficult. Farther north, winter is the dry season, so that pasture was scarce, and it was difficult to feed the tropas. The summer had difficulties of its own. In January and February the floods of the Rio Dulce often made it impossible to cross the ford at Santiago. The carriers preferred to start from the northern provinces about the end of the summer, in April or May. The best season for leaving Buenos Aires was the spring, from August to November. In this way each tropa could make the double journey once a year.

There had been attempts to speed up the transport before the railways were made. The galera (diligence), with its swarm of horses harnessed with the cincha (saddle to which the lasso was attached), did not carry goods. It did not replace the convoy of wagons, but the tropilla of spare horses which travellers on the plain drove before them. The galeriagalera went from Rosario to Córdoba in three days and to Mendoza in ten days, and from Córdoba to Salta in fourteen days. About 1860 a quicker goods service was organized, light wagons drawn by mules replacing the ox-wagons. They made the journey from Rosario to Córdoba in six days. Similarly, on the Pampa, the ox-wagons had been replaced before 1889 by quicker wagons, drawn by horses, to convey wool from the ranches to the railway stations.

The cost of transport by wagon was, naturally, high. It also varied a good deal, but we cannot possibly go into these variations here. It will be enough to give, by way of illustration, the details which Hutchinson gives for the year 1862. The freightage was fixed either for a complete load of 150 arrobes (1,725 kgs.) or so much per arrobe (11½ kgs.). Conveying a load from Rosario to Córdoba cost forty to fifty piastres (eight to ten pounds). The cost of carrying an arrobe from Rosario to Mendoza was five to six reales (about two shillings to two-and-six); from Rosario to Tucuman nine reales (three shillings and fourpence); from Rosario to Salta eighteen reales (seven shillings and sixpence). The tropas were, therefore, quickly ousted by the railways. In a few places they made a very unequal fight against the railways. The Memoria del departemento de Ingenieros de la Nacion of 1876, quoted by Rebuelto, mentions the competition of the tropas with the Andino railway, opened from Villa Maria to the Rio Cuarto in 1873 and to Villa Mercedes in 1875. The merchants of San Juan and Mendoza continued to use them. The railway had to sign a contract with the troperos by which wagons were to bring goods as far as Villa Mercedes, where they could be entrained. The total freight was fifty Bolivian centavos (about two shillings) per arrobe from Mendoza to Rosario, and sixty centavos from San Juan. Of this the share of the railway was fifteen centavos.

The first Argentine railway was opened in 1859, between Buenos Aires and Maron, a distance of about thirteen miles.

In 1870 the Argentine railways formed two independent systems. The first radiated fan-wise from Buenos Aires (Western line, open as far as Chivilcoy in 1870, and Southern line, open as far as Chascomus in 1865). Farther north a line (the Central Argentine) started from Rosario, and reached Bellville in 1866 and Córdoba in 1870.