The region of the Montaña lies chiefly in the Amazon plain, where the rubber trees and hardwoods of commerce grow in abundance, though on its western and southern border it extends to the slope of the Cordilleras, covering a territory rich in agricultural production. The northern provinces of Puno and Cuzco and the eastern provinces of Junín and Huánuco, as well as the entire Departments of San Martin, Amazonas, and Loreto, belong to the region of the Montaña. Much of this vast territory has never been cultivated, and a great deal of it remains to be explored. It is richer in natural resources than any other part of Peru, and, with the exception of the lower wooded region of the rubber country, where malaria and anemia prevail, the climate is healthful.

The Montaña really comprises two separate regions, the high woodlands of the eastern Andean slopes and the level lands that stretch away from their base to the northeastern boundary of the republic. The high woodlands have a mild cool climate, similar to that of southern Europe, and their altitude renders them free from the diseases usually prevalent in a tropical country. This part of the Montaña is a veritable paradise, luxuriant in vegetation and marvellously productive. The chief drawback to its industrial development has hitherto been the difficulty of transporting its products to market, owing to the lack of railway facilities. Now that this obstacle is rapidly being removed, there is every reason to expect a greatly increased development of the agricultural wealth of the Montaña, which is an especially promising field for immigration.

The natural resources of the Montaña include many plants, fruits, and herbs not found in other countries. In the warm valleys and on the eastern slopes of the Cordilleras, at an altitude of from two thousand to five thousand feet above sea level, the coca plant grows in abundance. It is a native of Peru and Bolivia and has not been cultivated successfully in any other part of the world, except to a small extent in Ecuador and Colombia. From this plant is manufactured the well-known drug, cocaine, used so generally for medicinal and surgical purposes. Its leaves are the Indian’s most cherished consolation; he will perform wonderful feats of endurance if provided with a small sack of these, which he chews as the Oriental does the betel, mixing them with a kind of lime which greatly increases the stimulating effect.

The Peruvian Indian eats little and yet, by chewing coca leaves, he is able to make long journeys on foot or to do hard work in the fields and in the mines without fatigue. The effect of the excessive use of this stimulant is very harmful, dulling the mental faculties and, in extreme cases, causing paralysis. Used in moderation, it seems to produce no bad effects, and has even been recommended for soldiers on the march, who are exposed to fatigue and all kinds of weather. When taken as a hot tea, coca excites perspiration; and it acts as a sedative in asthmatic attacks. The leaves are used for cataplasms in relieving rheumatic pains. The curative effects following the use of this drug are so numerous that it is regarded by the Indians as a panacea for all ills. When the Spaniards first arrived in Peru, they were unable to account for the wonderful properties of the coca plant, and in superstitious fear they prohibited its cultivation, believing it to be an instrument of the devil.

The best locality for the growth of the coca plant is in warm valleys, not more than five thousand feet above the sea, where the average temperature is between fifty and eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and the land is clayey, abundant in iron, and without the presence of salts of any kind; the ground must be soft and loose, and is best on the hillside, where the water of the rains is quickly carried off and does not leave the soil too damp, though frequent rains are desirable to promote rapid and leafy growth. The first harvest is gathered eighteen months after planting, and great care is required in collecting the leaves, so that the shrub may not be injured. Each leaf is picked separately and dropped on a cloth, spread on the ground for the purpose, only the top leaves being left on the plant to prevent its dying off. As a rule, three or four crops are harvested every year, the most productive coca plantations being in the Departments of Cuzco, Huánuco, Junín, and the inter-Andean valleys of La Libertad. The province of Urubamba, in the Department of Cuzco, is famous for the abundance and fine quality of its coca, the plant growing here to a maximum height of about six feet. The only coca plantations of importance on the coast slope of the Cordilleras are those of the province of Yauyos, in the Department of Lima.

A Peruvian scientist, Dr. Hipólito Unánue, was the first to make a thorough study of the constituent properties of the coca leaf; and, in 1859, an Austrian chemist, Albert Niemann, extracted from coca leaves the alkaloid known as cocaine, which is now manufactured in Peru, as well as in other countries. A great deal of the coca produced on the various plantations is consumed in the country, the average Indian chewing from fifteen to twenty grammes daily. In the native factories, each pound of leaves yields from three to four grammes of cocaine. The exportation of coca leaves amounts annually to upwards of three million pounds, and that of the manufactured product, cocaine, to about fifteen thousand pounds. The leaves are employed, in Europe and the United States, not only for the manufacture of cocaine, cocaidine, and other alkaloids, but in the making of wines, tonics, and refreshing drinks of various kinds.

Another product of the Peruvian Montaña, cacao, promises to be an important source of revenue when the industry is better developed. The cacao trees of Cuzco produce a chocolate of exceptional quality and a delicious cocoa, the fruit being especially rich and possessing the properties required in chocolate of the best taste and finest aroma. But none of the Cuzco cacao ever gets into the foreign market, as it is all consumed in Peru. The cacao tree grows spontaneously in many districts of the Montaña, and requires little cultivation to make it yield in abundance. Wherever cacao orchards have been planted, the results have been eminently satisfactory, and every year sees an increase of cacao plantations, chiefly in the region of Chanchamayo, in the province of Jaen, Department of Cajamarca, and in the lower provinces of Amazonas and San Martin. The future of the cacao industry is particularly promising, and no other enterprise offers greater reward for the slight labor invested, as the trees, once planted, continue to bear for a hundred years, requiring no other labor than the gathering of the harvest.

The largest coffee plantations of Peru are cultivated in the region of the Montaña, though the coffees of Pacasmayo, on the coast, and of Choquisongo, in the sierra, are of excellent quality. Carabaya, in the Department of Puno, produces some of the best coffee known, the Carabaya bean being particularly rich in caffeine. Chanchamayo is also an important coffee-producing centre, more than five million trees growing on the haciendas of this district, in the province of Tarma, Department of Junín. In one colony alone are thirty-five coffee plantations, covering seventeen hundred acres, on which two million trees are cultivated. The plantations are being improved every year, and there is, apparently, no reason why Peru should not be among the leading coffee-growing countries of the world. At present, a little more than a thousand tons are exported annually, after the home market is supplied, as Peru imports no coffee of any kind.

All the agricultural products that flourish on the coast, and many of those that are cultivated on the sierra, may be grown with success in the Montaña. Sugar, rice, tobacco, maize, and even wheat, barley, and potatoes, thrive in some of the provinces of Cuzco, Junín, and other interior departments. Tobacco is grown in all the provinces of the Montaña, including those of the Department of Loreto, which lies almost entirely in the Amazon plain. The cultivation of tobacco is carried on in the most primitive fashion, and the plantations do not yield what they are capable of producing under more scientific methods.

The most important industry of the lower Montaña is rubber-gathering, the forests of the vast Amazon plain abounding in these trees of ever-increasing commercial value. The jebe, or seringa, as it is called in Brazil, known abroad as Pará rubber, grows best in the low lands of Loreto, where the altitude does not exceed three hundred feet, and where abundant rains and an equatorial climate cause the warm humidity necessary to the production of the latex, or milk, of the rubber tree. The jebe grows to an average height of seventy-five feet, the leaves forming a tuft of green at the top; the trunk is of cylindrical shape, often measuring six or seven feet in diameter near the base. The quality of the latex is known by its color, the best being of a violet grey hue while the inferior latex is much lighter. The rubber trees grow sometimes in groups of eight or ten together, and again singly, at intervals of from sixty to two hundred feet apart. A jebe property is usually defined by estradas, or paths, leading past a number of rubber trees, the average estrada embracing an area of a hundred acres, more or less, in which are from a hundred to a hundred and fifty trees, yielding rubber. One man is usually employed on each estrada, and his day’s work consists in tapping the trees in the early morning by notching a place with a hatchet and fixing in it a tichela, or little tin cup, to receive the latex, as it oozes out of the cut. When he has made his round, he returns to collect the latex, emptying the contents of the tichela into a pail, which he carries to his camp to be smoked in preparation for its shipment. The process of “smoking,” or coagulation, consists in twirling the latex around a ladle that is held over the smoke of burning wood, the hard wood known as vegetable marble being best suited to this purpose. The seringuero, as this class of rubber gatherer is called, collects upward of twenty-five pounds of rubber a year from each tree in the forests of Loreto, northern Cuzco and the region of the Madre de Dios.

Besides the jebe, or Pará rubber, the forests of the Montaña yield great quantities of the variety called caucho, which is gathered in regions where the heat and humidity are not so great as in the seringa lands. The cauchero works on a plan different from that of the seringuero; if he is collecting caucho in planchas, or slabs, he fells the tree near a hole made for the purpose of receiving the latex as it flows, and then he mixes this fluid with common soap, or an infusion of vetilla, to bring about coagulation; if he wishes to extract the sernambi de caucho, which is of greater value than the plancha, his method is to bleed the tree by cutting deep gashes in it with his machete, or hatchet, and leaving the milk to flow in little canals, artificially prepared to conduct the latex, which becomes coagulated on exposure to the air and forms ribbons of rubber, that are rolled into balls and shipped in this form. Each tree furnishes, on an average, about fifty pounds of caucho. A moderate duty is levied on the exportation of all rubber, jebe paying a cent and a half, gold, a pound, and caucho a cent a pound; this rate is only about one-fifth of the export duty charged in Brazil, and one-half that in Bolivia.

Foreign enterprise has done a great deal in developing the rubber industry in Peru, the government making liberal concessions to those who purchase rubber lands for exploitation. Tracts of virgin woodland in the Montaña are sold at the rate of a dollar an acre, and grants are made under liberal conditions; a number of acres of land, supposed to contain rubber trees, or a number of estradas, may be rented by paying one dollar for every hundred pounds of rubber extracted, the destruction of the trees being forbidden. The Inca Rubber Company is one of the most important foreign enterprises in the Montaña. This company was the outgrowth of a concession granted by the Peruvian government to Chester W. Brown, of the Inca Mining Company, for certain lands located in the Montaña, in the Department of Puno. The government ceded to the company eight thousand acres of land for every mile of road opened to public traffic between the Santo Domingo mine and the Madre de Dios River, or a navigable point on the Tambopata, the road to be approximately seven feet wide, with a maximum grade of ten per cent and to afford all the conditions necessary for the safe and comfortable transportation of passengers and freight. Not only has the road been completed through the rich rubber lands between the Inambari and Tambopata Rivers to the head of navigation at Astillero station, but a steamer, the Inca, has been built to connect this port with Riberalta and, by means of the San Antonio railway—now under construction in accordance with the Acre treaty between Bolivia and Brazil—with the Madeira and Amazon to the Atlantic Ocean. The completion of the Inca Rubber Company’s road ensures an outlet to the Atlantic by a short route from the Pacific, as the Southern railway connects the Pacific port of Mollendo with the station of Tirapata, whence the road is built to Santo Domingo, Puerto Candamo, and Astillero. From Tirapata to Astillero, the distance is two hundred and eighty miles through a rich rubber country. Over this long distance, the steamer Inca was brought in pieces, carried on the backs of Indians, to the company’s shipyard, for which the port is named, “Astillero” meaning “shipyard.” Here it was built and launched on the Tambopata. A telephone connects Astillero with Santo Domingo and Tirapata, and electricity is used in lighting the town. Explorations have been made in this region by Mr. Brown and Professor Baily, of Harvard University, and the Wilson River was discovered by an explorer sent out at the Inca Rubber Company’s expense.

The success of the Inca Rubber Company has attracted other investors to the Montaña, and, within the past two years, several similar enterprises have been inaugurated. The Inambari Pará Rubber States Company, Limited, was formed a year ago with a capital of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds, to exploit the rubber of the province of Carabaya; the Paucartambo Rubber Company, Limited, has started an enterprise in the Madre de Dios region; the Compañia Gomera Alto Marañon recently began the development of the rubber industry in the Department of Amazonas, and the Sociedad Madre de Dios has begun to work the forests of the eastern rubber district. With the increased output of rubber promised by the successful exploitation of these properties, the annual revenue derived from this source will undoubtedly show rapid gain. The financial crisis which affected the North American market in 1907 was severely felt in the rubber trade of the Amazon region, the shipments of this product being cut down to an alarmingly low quantity. The new enterprises felt the disastrous conditions most keenly, though all the rubber establishments of the Amazon country suffered greatly. The loss was heavy also to those merchants who depend on the success of the rubber trade for their prosperity. In Iquitos, as well as in the ports of the lower Amazon, the whole business atmosphere was pervaded with gloom for a time; though it was understood that the depression could only be temporary, as the demand for rubber is constantly increasing, and the purposes for which it may be employed appear to be of an almost unlimited variety. A passing money crisis is not sufficient to imperil the interests of a trade which is of world wide importance; and the steamers and launches of the Amazon tributaries are already as busy as ever fulfilling the requirements of the rubber shippers in this vast region. The exports of rubber now amount annually to thousands of tons, valued at upward of five million dollars, nearly all of which passes through the ports of Mollendo and Iquitos, the latter the capital of the great rubber-producing territory of Loreto.