A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open Part 3

As an example, take the case of these Hopi mesa towns, perched in such boldly picturesque fas.h.i.+on on high, sheer-walled rock ridges. Many good people wish to force the Hopis to desert these towns, and live in isolated families in nice tin-roofed houses on the plains below. I believe that this would be a mistake from the standpoint of the Indians--not to mention depriving our country of something as notable and as attractive as the castles that have helped make the Rhine beautiful and famous. Let the effort be to insist on cleanliness and sanitation in the villages as they are, and especially to train the Indians themselves to insist thereon; and to make it easier for them to get water. In insisting on cleanliness, remember that we preach a realizable ideal; our own ancestors lived in villages as filthy not three centuries ago. The breezy coolness of the rocky mesa top and the magnificent outlook would make it to me personally a far more attractive dwelling-place than the hot, dusty plains. Moreover, the present Hopi house, with its thick roof, is cooler and pleasanter than a tin-roofed house. I believe it would be far wiser gradually to develop the Hopi house itself, making it more commodious and convenient, rather than to abandon it and plant the Indian in a brand-new government-built house, precisely like some ten million other cheap houses. The Hopi architecture is a product of its own environment; it is as picturesque as anything of the kind which our art students travel to Spain in order to study. Therefore let us keep it. The Hopi architecture can be kept, adapted, and developed just as we have kept, adapted, and developed the Mission architecture of the Southwest--with the results seen in beautiful Leland Stanford University. The University of New Mexico is, most wisely, modelled on these pueblo buildings; and the architect has done admirable work of the kind by adapting Indian architectural ideas in some of his California houses. The Hopi is himself already thus developing his house; as I have said, he has put in gla.s.s windows and larger doors; he is furnis.h.i.+ng it; he is making it continually more livable. Give him a chance to utilize his own inherent sense of beauty in making over his own village for himself. Give him a chance to lead his own life as he ought to; and realize that he has something to teach us as well as to learn from us. The Hopi of the younger generation, at least in some of the towns, is changing rapidly; and it is safe to leave it to him to decide where he will build and keep his house.

I cannot so much as touch on the absorbingly interesting questions of the Hopi spiritual and religious life, and of the amount of deference that can properly be paid to one side of this life. The snake-dance and antelope-dance, which we had come to see, are not only interesting as relics of an almost inconceivably remote and savage past--a.n.a.logous to the past wherein our own ancestors once dwelt--but also represent a mystic symbolism which has in it elements that are enn.o.bling and not debasing. These dances are prayers or invocations for rain, the crowning blessing in this dry land. The rain is adored and invoked both as male and female; the gentle steady downpour is the female, the storm with lightning the male. The lightning-stick is "strong medicine," and is used in all these religious ceremonies. The snakes, the brothers of men, as are all living things in the Hopi creed, are besought to tell the beings of the underworld man's need of water.

As a former great chief at Was.h.i.+ngton I was admitted to the sacred room, or one-roomed house, the kiva, in which the chosen snake priests had for a fortnight been getting ready for the sacred dance. Very few white men have been thus admitted, and never unless it is known that they will treat with courtesy and respect what the Indians revere. Entrance to the house, which was sunk in the rock, was through a hole in the roof, down a ladder across whose top hung a cord from which fluttered three eagle plumes and dangled three small animal skins. Below was a room perhaps fifteen feet by twenty-five. One end of it, occupying perhaps a third of its length, was raised a foot above the rest, and the ladder led down to this raised part. Against the rear wall of this raised part or dais lay thirty odd rattlesnakes, most of them in a twined heap in one corner, but a dozen by themselves scattered along the wall. There was also a pot containing several striped ribbon-snakes, too lively to be left at large. Eight or ten priests, some old, some young, sat on the floor in the lower and larger two-thirds of the room, and greeted me with grave courtesy; they spread a blanket on the edge of the dais, and I sat down, with my back to the snakes and about eight feet from them; a little behind and to one side of me sat a priest with a kind of fan or brush made of two or three wing-plumes of an eagle, who kept quiet guard over his serpent wards. At the farther end of the room was the altar; the rude picture of a coyote was painted on the floor, and on the four sides of this coyote picture were paintings of snakes; on three sides it was hemmed in by lightning-sticks, or thunder-sticks, standing upright in little clay cups, and on the fourth side by eagle plumes held similarly erect. Some of the priests were smoking--for pleasure, not ceremonially--and they were working at parts of the ceremonial dress.

One had a cast rattlesnake skin which he was chewing, to limber it up, just as Sioux squaws used to chew buckskin. Another was fixing a leather ap.r.o.n with pendent thongs; he stood up and tried it on. All were scantily clad, in breech-clouts or short kilts or loin flaps; their naked, copper-red bodies, lithe and sinewy, shone, and each had been splashed in two or three places with a blotch or streak of white paint.

One spoke English and translated freely; I was careful not to betray too much curiosity or touch on any matter which they might be reluctant to discuss. The snakes behind me never rattled or showed any signs of anger; the translator volunteered the remark that they were peaceable because they had been given medicine--whatever that might mean, supposing the statement to be true according to the sense in which the words are accepted by plainsmen. But several of them were active in the sluggish rattlesnake fas.h.i.+on. One glided sinuously toward me; when he was a yard away, I pointed him out to the watcher with the eagle feathers; the watcher quietly extended the feathers and stroked and pushed the snake's head back, until it finally turned and crawled back to the wall. Half a dozen times different snakes thus crawled out toward me and were turned back, without their ever displaying a symptom of irritation. One snake got past the watcher and moved slowly past me about six inches away, whereupon the priest on my left leaned across me and checked its advance by throwing pinches of dust in its face until the watcher turned round with his feather sceptre. Every move was made without hurry and with quiet unconcern; neither snake nor man, at any time, showed a trace of worry or anger; all, human beings and reptiles, were in an atmosphere of quiet peacefulness. When I rose to say good-by, I thanked my hosts for their courtesy; they were pleased, and two or three shook hands with me.

On the afternoon of the following day, August 20, the antelope priests--the men of the antelope clan--held their dance. The snake priests took part. It was held in the middle of Walpi village, round a big, rugged column of rock, a dozen feet high, which juts out of the smooth surface. The antelope-dancers came in first, clad in kilts, with fox skins behind; otherwise naked, painted with white splashes and streaks, and their hair washed with the juice of the yucca root. Their leader's kilt was white; he wore a garland and anklets of cottonwood leaves, and sprinkled water from a sacred vessel to the four corners of heaven. Another leader carried the sacred bow and a bull-roarer, and they moved to its loud moaning sound. The snake priests were similarly clad, but their kirtles were of leather; eagle plumes were in their long hair, and under their knees they carried rattles made of tortoise-sh.e.l.l.

In two lines they danced opposite each other, keeping time to the rhythm of their monotonous chanting.

On the top of the column were half a dozen Hopi young men, clad in ordinary white man's clothing. Archie joined these, and entered into conversation with them. They spoke English; they had been at non-reservation schools; they were doing well as farmers and citizens.

One and all they a.s.serted that, in order to prosper in after life, it was necessary for the Indian to get away to a non-reservation school; that merely to go to an agency school was not enough in any community which was on the highroad of progress; and that they intended to send their own children for a couple of years to an agency school and then to a non-reservation school. They looked at the ceremonial religious dances of their fathers precisely as the whites did; they were in effect Christians, although not connected with any specific church. They represented substantial success in the effort to raise the Indian to the level of the white man. In their case it was not necessary to push them toward forgetfulness of their past. They were travelling away from it naturally, and of their own accord. As their type becomes dominant the snake-dance and antelope-dance will disappear, the Hopi religious myths will become memories, and the Hopis will live in villages on the mesa tops, or scattered out on the plains, as their several inclinations point, just as if they were so many white men. It is to be hoped that the art, the music, the poetry of their elders will be preserved during the change coming over the younger generation.

On my return from this dance I met two of the best Indian agents in the entire service. The first was Mr. Parquette, a Wisconsin man, himself part Indian by blood. The other was Mr. Shelton, who has done more for the Navajos than any other living man. He has sternly put down the criminal element exactly as he has toiled for and raised the decent Indians and protected them against criminal whites; moreover, he has actually reformed these Indian criminals, so that they are now themselves decent people and his fast friends; while the ma.s.s of the Indians recognize him as their leader who has rendered them incalculable services. He has got the Indians themselves to put an absolute stop to gambling, whiskey-drinking, and s.e.xual immorality. His annual agricultural fair is one of the features of Navajo life, and is of far-reaching educational value. Yet this exceptionally upright and efficient public servant, who has done such great and lasting good to the Indians, was for years the object of attack by certain Eastern philanthropic a.s.sociations, simply because he warred against Indian criminals who were no more ent.i.tled to sympathy than the members of the Whyo gang in New York City. Messrs. Shelton and Parquette explained to me the cruel wrong that would be done to the Navajos if their reservation was thrown open or cut down. It is desert country. It cannot be utilized in small tracts, for in many parts the water is so scanty that hundreds, and in places even thousands, of acres must go to the support of any family. The Indians need it all; they are steadily improving as agriculturists and stock-growers; few small settlers could come in even if the reservation were thrown open; the movement to open it, and to ruin the Indians, is merely in the interest of a few needy adventurers and of a few wealthy men who wish to increase their already large fortunes, and who have much political influence.

Mr. Robinson, the superintendent of irrigation, in protesting against opening the reservation, dwelt upon the vital need of getting from Congress sufficient money to enable the engineers to develop water by digging wells, preserving springs, and making flood reservoirs. The lack of water is the curse of this desert reservation. The welfare of the Indians depends on the further development of the water-supply.

That night fires flared from the villages on the top of the mesa. Before there was a hint of dawn we heard the voice of the crier summoning the runners to get ready for the snake-dance; and we rose and made our way to the mesa top. The "yellow line," as the Hopis call it, was in the east, and dawn was beautiful, as we stood on the summit and watched the women and children in their ceremonial finery, looking from the housetops and cliff edges for the return of the racers. On this occasion they dropped their civilized clothes. The children were painted and naked save for kilts; and they wore feathers and green corn leaves in their hair. The women wore the old-style clothing; many of them were in their white bridal dresses, which in this queer tribe are woven by the bridegroom and his male kinsfolk for the bride's trousseau. The returning racers ran at speed up the precipitous paths to the mesa, although it was the close of a six-mile run. Most of them, including the winner, wore only a breech-clout and were decked with feathers. I should like to have entered that easy-breathing winner in a Marathon contest!

Many of the little boys ran the concluding mile or so with them; and the little girls made a pretty spectacle as they received the little boys much as the women and elder girls greeted the men. Then came the corn-scramble, or mock-fight over the corn; and then in each house a feast was set, especially for the children.

At noon, thanks to Mr. Hubbell, and to the fact that I was an ex-President, we were admitted to the sacred kiva--the one-roomed temple-house which I had already visited--while the snake priests performed the ceremony of was.h.i.+ng the snakes. Very few white men have ever seen this ceremony. The sight was the most interesting of our entire trip.

There were twenty Indians in the kiva, all stripped to their breech-clouts; only about ten actually took part in handling the snakes, or in any of the ceremonies except the rhythmic chant, in which all joined. Eighty or a hundred snakes, half of them rattlers, the others bull-snakes or ribbon-snakes, lay singly or in tangled groups against the wall at the raised end of the room. They were quiet and in no way nervous or excited. Two men stood at this end of the room. Two more stood at the other end, where the altar was; there was some sand about the altar, and the eagle feathers we had previously seen there had been removed, but the upright thunder-sticks remained. The other Indians were squatted in the middle of the room, and half a dozen of them were in the immediate neighborhood of a very big, ornamented wooden bowl of water, placed on certain white-painted symbols on the floor. Two of these Indians held sacred rattles, and there was a small bowl of sacred meal beside them. There was some seemingly ceremonial pipe-smoking.

After some minutes of silence, one of the squatting priests, who seemed to be the leader, and who had already puffed smoke toward the bowl, began a low prayer, at the same time holding and manipulating in his fingers a pinch of the sacred meal. The others once and again during this prayer uttered in unison a single word or exclamation--a kind of selah or amen. At the end he threw the meal into the bowl of water; he had already put some in at the outset of the prayer. Then he began a rhythmic chant, in which all the others joined, the rattles being shaken and the hands moved in harmony with the rhythm. The chant consisted seemingly of a few words repeated over and over again. It was a strange scene, in the half-light of the ancient temple-room. The copper-red bodies of the priests swayed, and their strongly marked faces, hitherto changeless, gained a certain quiet intensity of emotion. The chanting grew in fervor; yet it remained curiously calm throughout (except for a moment at a time, about which I shall speak later). Then the two men who stood near the snakes stooped over, and each picked up a handful of them, these first handfuls being all rattlesnakes. It was done in tranquil, matter-of-fact fas.h.i.+on, and the snakes behaved with equally tranquil unconcern. All was quiet save for the chanting. The snakes were handed to two of the men squatting round the bowl, who received them as if they had been harmless, holding them by the middle of the body, or at least well away from the head. This was repeated until half a dozen of the squatting priests held each three or four poisonous serpents in his hands. The chanting continued, in strongly accented but monotonous rhythm, while the rattles were shaken, and the snakes moved up and down or shaken, in unison with it. Then suddenly the chant quickened and rose to a scream, and the snakes were all plunged into the great bowl of water, a writhing tangle of snakes and hands. Immediately afterward they were withdrawn, as suddenly as they had been plunged in, and were hurled half across the room, to the floor, on and around the altar. They were hurled from a distance of a dozen feet, with sufficient violence to overturn the erect thunder-sticks. That the snakes should have been quiet and inoffensive under the influence of the slow movements and atmosphere of calm that had hitherto obtained was understandable; but the unexpected violence of the bathing, and then of the way in which they were hurled to the floor, together with the sudden screaming intensity of the chant, ought to have upset the nerves of every snake there. However, it did not. The snakes woke to an interest in life, it is true, writhed themselves free of one another and of the upset lightning-sticks, and began to glide rapidly in every direction. But only one showed symptoms of anger, and these were not marked. The two standing Indians at this end of the room herded the snakes with their eagle feathers, gently brus.h.i.+ng and stroking them back as they squirmed toward us, or toward the singing, sitting priests.

The process was repeated until all the snakes, venomous and non-venomous alike, had been suddenly bathed and then hurled on the floor, filling the other end of the room with a wriggling, somewhat excited serpent population, which was actively, but not in any way nervously, shepherded by the two Indians stationed for that purpose. These men were, like the others, clad only in a breech-clout, but they moved about among the snakes, barelegged and barefooted, with no touch of concern. One or two of the rattlers became vicious under the strain, and coiled and struck.

I thought I saw one of the two shepherding watchers struck in the hand by a recalcitrant sidewinder which refused to be soothed by the feathers, and which he finally picked up; but, if so, the man gave no sign and his placidity remained unruffled. Most of the snakes showed no anger at all; it seemed to me extraordinary that they were not all of them maddened.

When the snakes had all been washed, the leading priest again prayed.

Afterward he once more scattered meal in the bowl, in lines east, west, north, and south, and twice diagonally. The chant was renewed; it grew slower; the rattles were rattled more slowly; then the singing stopped and all was over.

At the end of the ceremony I thanked my hosts and asked if there was anything I could do to show my appreciation of the courtesy they had shown me. They asked if I could send them some cowry sh.e.l.ls, which they use as decorations for the dance. I told them I would send them a sackful. They shook hands cordially with all of us, and we left. I have never seen a wilder or, in its way, more impressive spectacle than that of these chanting, swaying, red-skinned medicine-men, their lithe bodies naked, unconcernedly handling the death that glides and strikes, while they held their mystic wors.h.i.+p in the gray twilight of the kiva. The ritual and the soul-needs it met, and the symbolism and the dark savagery, were all relics of an ages-vanished past, survivals of an elder world.

The snake-dance itself took place in the afternoon at five o'clock.

There were many hundreds of onlookers, almost as many whites as Indians, and most of the Indian spectators were in white man's dress, in strong contrast to the dancers. The antelope priests entered first and ranged themselves by a tree-like bundle of cottonwood branches against the wall of buildings to one side of the open place where the dance takes place; the other side is the cliff edge. The snakes, in a bag, were stowed by the bundle of cottonwood branches. Young girls stood near the big pillar of stone with sacred meal to scatter at the foot of the pillar after the snakes had been thrown down there and taken away. Then the snake priests entered in their fringed leather kilts and eagle-plume head-dresses; fox skins hung at the backs of their girdles, their bodies were splashed and streaked with white, and on each of them the upper part of the face was painted black and the lower part white. Chanting, and stepping in rhythm to the chant, and on one particular stone slab stamping hard as a signal to the underworld, they circled the empty s.p.a.ce and for some minutes danced opposite the line of antelope priests. Then, in couples, one of each couple seizing and carrying in his mouth a snake, they began to circle the s.p.a.ce again. The leading couple consisted of one man who had his arm across the shoulder of another, while this second man held in his teeth, by the upper middle of its body, a rattlesnake four feet long, the flat, ace-of-clubs-shaped head and curving neck of the snake being almost against the man's face. Rattlesnakes, bull-snakes, ribbon-snakes, all were carried in the same way. One man carried at the same time two small sidewinder rattlesnakes in his mouth. After a while each snake was thrown on the rock and soon again picked up and held in the hand, while a new snake was held in the mouth. Finally, each man carried a bundle of snakes in his hand, all so held as to leave the head free, so that the snake could strike if it wished. Most of the snakes showed no anger or resentment. But occasionally one, usually a small sidewinder, half coiled or rattled when thrown down; and in picking these up much caution was shown, the Indian stroking the snake with his eagle feathers and trying to soothe it and get it to straighten out; and if it refused to be soothed, he did his best to grasp it just back of the head; and when he had it in his hand, he continued to stroke the body with the feathers, obviously to quiet it. But whether it were angry or not, he always in the end grasped and lifted it--besides keeping it from crawling among the spectators. Several times I saw the snakes strike at the men who were carrying them, and twice I was sure they struck home--once a man's wrist, once his finger. Neither man paid any attention or seemed to suffer in any way. I saw no man struck in the face; but several of my friends had at previous dances seen men so struck. In one case the man soon showed that he was in much pain, although he continued to dance, and he was badly sick for days; in the other cases no bad result whatever followed.

At last all the snakes were in the hands of the dancers. Then all were thrown at the foot of the natural stone pillar, and immediately, with a yell, the dancers leaped in, seized, each of them, several snakes, and rushed away, east, west, north, and south, das.h.i.+ng over the edge of the cliff and jumping like goats down the precipitous trails. At the foot of the cliff, or on the plain, they dropped the snakes, and then returned to purify themselves by drinking and was.h.i.+ng from pails of dark sacred water--medicine water--brought by the women. It was a strange and most interesting ceremony all through.

I do not think any adequate explanation of the immunity of the dancers has been advanced. Perhaps there are several explanations. These desert rattlesnakes are not nearly as poisonous as the huge diamond-backs of Florida and Texas; their poison is rarely fatal. The dancers are sometimes bitten; usually they show no effects, but, as above said, in one instance the bitten man was very sick for several days. It has been said that the fangs are extracted; but even in this case the poison would be loose in the snake's mouth and might get in the skin through the wounds made by the other teeth; and I noticed that when any snake, usually a small sidewinder, showed anger and either rattled or coiled, much caution was shown in handling it, and every effort made to avoid being bitten. It is also a.s.serted that the snakes show the quiet and placid indifference they do because they are drugged, and one priest told me they are given "medicine"; but I have no idea whether this is true. Nor do I know whether the priests themselves take medicine. I believe that one element in the matter is that the snake priests either naturally possess or develop the same calm power over these serpents that certain men have over bees; the latter power, the existence of which is so well known, has never received the attention and study it deserves. An occasional white man has such power with snakes. There was near my ranch on the Little Missouri, twenty-five years ago, a man who had this power. He was a rather s.h.i.+ftless, ignorant man, of a common frontier type, who failed at about everything, and I think he was himself surprised when he found that he could pick up and handle rattlesnakes with impunity. There was no deception about it. I would take him off on horseback, and when I found a rattler he would quietly pick it up by the thick part of the body and put it in a sack. He sometimes made movements with his hands before picking up a coiled rattler; but when he had several in a bag he would simply put his hand in, take hold of a snake anywhere, and draw it out. I can understand the snakes being soothed and quieted by the matter-of-fact calm and fearlessness of the priests for most of the time; but why the rattlers were not all maddened by the treatment they received at the was.h.i.+ng in the kiva, and again when thrown on the dance rock, I cannot understand.

That night we motored across the desert with Mr. Hubbell to his house and store at Ganado, sixty miles away, and from Ganado we motored to Gallup, and our holiday was at an end. Mr. Hubbell is an Indian trader.

His Ganado house, right out in the bare desert, is very comfortable and very attractive, and he treats all comers with an open-handed hospitality inherited from pioneer days. He has great influence among the Navajos, and his services to them have been of much value. Every ounce of his influence has been successfully exerted to put a stop to gambling and drinking; his business has been so managed as to be an important factor in the material and moral betterment of the Indians with whom he has dealt. And he has been the able champion of their rights wherever these rights have been menaced from any outside source.

Arizona and New Mexico hold a wealth of attraction for the archaeologist, the anthropologist, and the lover of what is strange and striking and beautiful in nature. More and more they will attract visitors and students and holiday-makers. That part of northern Arizona which we traversed is of such extraordinary interest that it should be made more accessible by means of a government-built motor road from Gallup to the Grand Canyon; a road from which branch roads, as good as those of Switzerland, would gradually be built to such points as the Hopi villages and the neighborhood of the Natural Bridge.

CHAPTER IV

THE RANCHLAND OF ARGENTINA AND SOUTHERN BRAZIL

In the fall of 1913 I enjoyed a glimpse of the ranch country of southern Brazil and of Argentina. It was only a glimpse; for I was bent on going northward into the vast wilderness of tropical South America. I had no time to halt in the grazing country of temperate South America, which is no longer a wilderness, but a land already feeling the sweep of the modern movement. It is a civilized land, already fairly well settled, which by leaps and bounds is becoming thickly settled; a region which at the present day is in essentials far more closely kin to the plains country, which in temperate North America stretches from Hudson Bay to the Gulf, than either land is kin to what each was even half a century ago. The main difference is that the great cow country, the plains country, of North America was peopled only by savages when the white pioneers entered it in the nineteenth century; whereas throughout temperate South America there were here and there oases of thin settlement, including even small, stagnant cities, already two or three centuries old. In these oases people wholly or partly of European blood had gradually developed a peculiar and backward, but real, semicivilization of their own. This quaint, distinctive social culture has been, or is now being, engulfed by the rising tide of intensely modern internationalized material development.

Among the many pleasant memories of my visit to Argentina, one of the most pleasant is that of a dinner at the house of the governor of the old provincial capital of Mendoza. Our distinguished host came of an old country family which for many centuries led the life of the great cattle-breeding ranch-owners, although his people were more and more turning their attention to agriculture, he himself being a successful farmer, as well as an invaluable public servant of advanced views. His father was at the dinner. He had retired as a general after forty-nine years' service in the Argentine army. The fine old fellow represented what was best in the Argentine type before the days of modern industrialism. A very vigorous and manly best it was, too. He wore the old Argentine uniform, which for his rank was the same as the uniform once worn by Napoleon's officers. He had served in the b.l.o.o.d.y Paraguayan War, when Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay joined to overthrow the inconceivably murderous dictators.h.i.+p of Lopez, and when the Paraguayans rallied with savage valor under the banner of the dictator, who tyrannized over them, but who nevertheless represented in their eyes the nation. This old general had served in many Indian wars, both in Patagonia and in the Grand Chaco, and had seen desperate fighting in the civil wars. He wore medals commemorating his services in the Paraguayan and Indian campaigns, but he would not wear any medals commemorating his services in the civil wars. Yet the only time he was wounded was in one of the battles in one of these civil wars. He was then shot twice and received a bayonet thrust, and was also stabbed with a lance. If he had not possessed a const.i.tution of iron he would never have survived. Our people in the United States often speak of these South American wars with the same ignorant lack of appreciation that used to be shown by European military men in speaking of our own Civil War and other contests. This att.i.tude is as foolish on our part in the one case as it was foolish on the part of the Europeans in question in the other case.

The South American Indian fighting was of the same hazardous character, and the Indian campaigns were fraught with the same wearing fatigue, and marked by the same risk and wild adventure, as in the case of our own Indian campaigns. In the Argentine civil wars, and in the Paraguayan War, as in the wars which the Chileans have waged, the fighting was, on the whole, rather more desperate than in any contest between the civilized nations of Europe from the close of the Napoleonic struggles to the opening of the present gigantic contest. There is no more formidable fighting material in the world than is afforded by certain elements in the populations of some of these Latin-American countries.

The general of whom I am speaking was himself a most interesting example of a vanis.h.i.+ng type. Lovers of good literature should read the sketches of old-time Argentine life in Hudson's "El Ombu." When they have done so, they will understand the strength and the ruthlessness which produced leaders of the stamp of the scarred and war-hardened veteran who in full general's uniform met us at dinner at the house of his son, the governor of Mendoza.

The old-time conditions of gaucho civilization that produced these wild and formidable fighting men, who fought as they lived, on the backs of their horses, have vanished as utterly as our own Far West of the days of Kit Carson. The Argentine country life has changed as completely as the Argentine city life. They are gone, those long years during which the gaucho rode over unfenced plains after gaunt cattle, and warred against the scarcely wilder Indians with whom he vied in horsemans.h.i.+p and plainscraft and hardihood and from whom he borrowed that strange weapon, the bolas. Even the southern Andes of what was once Patagonia are unexplored only in the sense that the Rockies of Alberta are not yet completely explored. Much of the former ranch country is now wheatland, where the workmen of foreign, especially Italian, origin far outnumber the men of old Hispano-Indian stock. Great cattle-ranches remain; but they are handled substantially like great modern ranches in our own Southwest, and the blooded horses and high-grade cattle are kept in large, fenced pastures. In most places the gaucho has changed as our own cowboy has changed. He is as bold and good a horseman as ever; but it is only in out-of-the-way places that he retains all his old-time wild and individual picturesqueness. Elsewhere he is now merely an unusually capable ranch-hand. His employer has changed even more. The big handsome ranch-houses are fitted with every modern comfort and luxury, and the owners belong in all ways to the internationalized upper cla.s.s of the world of to-day. The interest attaching to a visit to one of these civilized ranches is that which attaches to a visit to a fine modern stock-farm anywhere, whether in Hungary or Kentucky or Victoria.

But there is one vital point--_the_ vital point--in which the men and women of these ranch-houses, like those of the South America that I visited generally, are striking examples to us of the English-speaking countries both of North America and Australia. The families are large.

The women, charming and attractive, are good and fertile mothers in all cla.s.ses of society. There are no symptoms of that artificially self-produced dwindling of population which is by far the most threatening symptom in the social life of the United States, Canada, and the Australian commonwealths. The nineteenth century saw a prodigious growth of the English-speaking, relative to the Spanish-speaking, population of the new worlds west of the Atlantic and in the Southern Pacific. The end of the twentieth century will see this completely reversed unless the present ominous tendencies as regards the birth-rate are reversed. A race is worthless and contemptible if its men cease to be willing and able to work hard and, at need, to fight hard, and if its women cease to breed freely. I am not speaking of pauper families with excessive numbers of ill-nourished and badly brought up children; I am well aware that, like most wise and good principles, this which I advocate can be carried to a mischievous excess; but it nevertheless remains true that voluntary sterility among married men and women of good life is, even more than military or physical cowardice in the ordinary man, the capital sin of civilization, whether in France or Scandinavia, New England or New Zealand. If the best cla.s.ses do not reproduce themselves the nation will of course go down; for the real question is encouraging the fit, and discouraging the unfit, to survive.

When the ordinary decent man does not understand that to marry the woman he loves, as early as he can, is the most desirable of all goals, the most successful of all forms of life ent.i.tled to be called really successful; when the ordinary woman does not understand that all other forms of life are but makes.h.i.+ft and starveling subst.i.tutes for the life of the happy wife, the mother of a fair-sized family of healthy children; then the state is rotten at heart. The loss of a healthy, vigorous, natural s.e.xual instinct is fatal; and just as much so if the loss is by disuse and atrophy as if it is by abuse and perversion.

Whether the man, in the exercise of one form of selfishness, leads a life of easy self-indulgence and celibate profligacy; or whether in the exercise of a colder but no less repulsive selfishness, he sacrifices what is highest to some form of mere material achievement in accord with the base proverb that "he travels farthest who travels alone"; or whether the sacrifice is made in the name of the warped and diseased conscience of asceticism; the result is equally evil. So, likewise, with the woman. In many modern novels there is portrayed a type of cold, selfish, s.e.xless woman who plumes herself on being "respectable," but who is really a rather less desirable member of society than a prost.i.tute. Unfortunately the portrayal is true to life. The woman who shrinks from motherhood is as low a creature as a man of the professional pacificist, or poltroon, type, who s.h.i.+rks his duty as a soldier. The only full life for man or woman is led by those men and women who together, with hearts both gentle and valiant, face lives of love and duty, who see their children rise up to call them blessed and who leave behind them their seed to inherit the earth. Dealing with averages, it is the bare truth to say that no celibate life approaches such a life in point of usefulness, no matter what the motive for the celibacy--religious, philanthropic, political, or professional. The mother comes ahead of the nun--and also of the settlement or hospital worker; and if either man or woman must treat a profession as a subst.i.tute for, instead of as an addition to or basis for, marriage, then by all means the profession or other "career" should be abandoned.

It is of course not possible to lay down universal rules. There must be exceptions. But the rule must be as above given. In a community which is at peace there may be a few women or a few men who for good reasons do not marry, and who do excellent work nevertheless; just as in a community which is at war, there may be a few men who for good reasons do not go out as soldiers. But if the average woman does not marry and become the mother of enough healthy children to permit the increase of the race; and if the average man does not, above all other things, wish to marry in time of peace, and to do his full duty in war if the need arises, then the race is decadent, and should be swept aside to make room for one that is better. Only that nation has a future whose sons and daughters recognize and obey the primary laws of their racial being.

In these essentials Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil have far more to teach than to learn from the English-speaking countries which are so proud of their abounding material prosperity and of their wide-spread, but superficial, popular education and intelligence. In this same material prosperity, and in many other matters, Argentina much resembles our own country. Brazil is travelling a similar path, although much more slowly; and although its climate is not so good, its natural resources are vaster and will in the present century undergo an extraordinary development. Very much of the Brazilian country from So Paulo to the Uruguayan frontier is essentially like Argentina. The city life and the ranch life are advancing in much the same fas.h.i.+on; although of course there are sharp differences in culture and habits of thought and life between the great Spanish-speaking and great Portuguese-speaking republics which are such close, and not wholly friendly, neighbors.

One point of similarity is the number of immigrants in each country. In our journey southward from So Paulo we found both towns and stretches of ranchland in which Germans, Italians, and Catholic, Orthodox, or Uniate Slavs, were important, and sometimes preponderant, elements of the population. There were German Lutheran churches and also congregations of native Protestants started by American missionaries; for Brazil, like Argentina and the United States, enjoys genuine religious liberty.

This rich and beautiful country of southern Brazil is part of the last great stretch of country--south-temperate America--which remains in either temperate zone open to white settlement on a large scale; the last great stretch of scantily peopled land with a good climate and fertile soil to which white immigration can go in ma.s.s.

Of part of tropical Brazil I have written elsewhere, and I allude to it elsewhere in this book. Here I am speaking not of the tropical but of the temperate country.

Portions of temperate Brazil are open prairie, portions are forest. The climate is never very hot, nor is there ever severe cold. The colonists with whom I conversed had not found the insects specially troublesome; not much more, and in places rather less, troublesome than in Louisiana and Texas. There was no more sickness than in the early days in the West. The general effect in the forest country, while of course the species of plants are entirely different, reminds the observer of the Louisiana and Mississippi cane-brake lands and the country along the Nueces. The activities of the settlers in the open country are substantially those with which I was familiar thirty years ago in the cattle country of the West. In the forests one is reminded more of early days on the Ohio, the Yazoo, and the Red River of the South.

Certainly this is a country with a wonderful future. It offers fine opportunities for settlers who desire with the labor of their own hands to make homes for themselves and their children. This does not mean that all people who go there will prosper, or that success will come save at the price of labor and effort, of risk and hards.h.i.+p. If any Americans have forgotten how our own West in the pioneer days appealed to an observer who was friendly, but who had not the faintest glimmering of the pioneer spirit, let them read "Martin Chuzzlewit." d.i.c.kens represented the numerous men who foolishly hope to enjoy pioneer triumphs and yet escape pioneer risks and hards.h.i.+ps and the unlovely and wearing toil which is the essential prerequisite to the triumph; and every one should remember that in a new country, which opens a chance of success to the settler, there always goes with this the chance of heart-breaking failure. Brazil offers remarkable openings for settlers who have the toughness of the born pioneer, and for certain business men and engineers who have the mixture of daring enterprise and sound common sense needed by those who push the industrial development of new countries. Both cla.s.ses have great opportunities, and both need to be perpetually on their guard against the swindlers and the crack-brained enthusiasts who are always sure to turn up in connection with any country of large developmental possibilities. On the frontier, more than anywhere else, a man needs to be able to rely on himself and to remember that on every frontier there are innumerable failures.

No man can be guaranteed success. Men who are not prepared for labor and effort and rough living, for persistence and self-denial, are out of place in a new country; and foolish people who will probably fail anywhere are more certain to fail badly in a new country than anywhere else. During the whole period of the marvellous growth of the United States there has been a constant and uninterrupted stream of failure going side by side with the larger stream of success. Unless there is revolutionary disorder and anarchy, the future holds for southern Brazil much what half a century ago the future held for large portions of our country lying west of the Mississippi.

In southern Brazil the forest landscape through which we pa.s.sed was very beautiful. The most conspicuous tree in the forest was the flat-topped pine, the shaft of which rose like that of a royal palm. The branches spread out at the top just where the palm-leaves spread out on the palm, only instead of drooping they curved upward like the branches of a candelabra. There were many other trees in the forests which I could not recognize or place. Some of them looked like our Southern live-oaks.

Then there were palms, and mult.i.tudes of big tree-ferns. In places where these tree-ferns grew thickly among the tall, strange candelabra pines, with palms scattered here and there, and other queer ancient tropical plants, the landscape looked as if it had come out of the carboniferous period--at least as the carboniferous period was represented in the attractive popular geologies of my youth. There were flowers in the woods, of brilliant and varied hue, although we saw but few orchids; and in the glades or spots of open prairie there were immense patches of lilac and blue blossoms. The flowering trees were wonderful. On some the blooms were blue, on others yellow. The most beautiful of all flamed brilliant scarlet. The trees that bore them, when scattered over hillsides that sloped steeply to the brink of some rus.h.i.+ng river, made splashes of burning red against the wet and vivid green of the subtropical foliage. As we got farther south I was told that there were occasional sharp frosts, but that the low temperature never lasted for more than an hour or so. In answer to a question as to how these rare, short frosts affected such plants as palms and tree-ferns, it was explained to me that the frosts prevented coffee being grown, but that they had no effect on the palms, and, rather curiously, no effect on the tree-ferns if they were under big forest trees, but that if they were in the open the fronds were killed, the trees themselves not being injured, and new fronds taking the place of the old ones.

In the open prairie country of the state of Parana we stopped at Morungava to visit the ranch of the Brazil Land, Cattle, and Packing Company. Our host, the head of this company, Murdo Mackenzie, for many years one of the best-known cattlemen in our own Western cow country, was an old friend of mine. During my term as President he was, on the whole, the most influential of the Western cattle-growers. He was a leader of the far-seeing and enlightened element. He was a most powerful supporter of the government in the fight for the conservation of our natural resources, for the utilization without waste of our forests and pastures, for honest treatment of everybody, and for the shaping of governmental policy primarily in the interest of the small settler, the home-maker.

We rode first to Mackenzie's home ranch, about a mile from the railway, and then to an outlying set of ranch buildings ten miles off. At the home ranch were the American foreman and his American wife and their children. The buildings and the food and the whole life were typical of all that was best in the old-time "Far West," in the days when I knew it as a cattle country. We were given a most delicious and purely American lunch, including all the fresh milk we could drink; and the foreman himself piloted us over the immense stretches of rolling country, and in every action showed himself the born cattleman, the born and trained stockman. Half of the employees were men from the Western ranches, from Montana, Colorado, Texas, or elsewhere; and they and the stock and the vast, pleasant, open-air country were enough to make any man feel at home who had ever lived in the West. The children round the ranch-house were already speaking fluent Portuguese!

There were Indians in the neighborhood; but we saw none, for they are very shy and dwell in the timber. Although nominally Christian, and somewhat under the influence of the priests, they are otherwise entirely outside of governmental control. At first Mackenzie's cattle were sometimes killed by the wild, furtive creatures; but he stopped this by a mixture of firmness and fair treatment.

It was a beautiful country, well watered, with good gra.s.s and much timber. I was a.s.sured by both the men on the ranch and their wives that the climate was better than that of our own Western cattle country, for the heat is not as extreme as during summer in the southern part of our country, and the winters are mild, with only occasional touches of frost. Much care has to be shown in dealing with the ticks and certain other insect plagues, but not materially more than in some of our own Southern regions. While we were at the outlying ranch we saw the cattle being dipped in familiar ranch fas.h.i.+on.

Cattle, horses, and hogs all thrive. All the native stock offers material on which to improve. The company is carefully breeding upward, following precisely the same course which in Texas, for instance, has effected a complete subst.i.tution of graded beef and dairy cattle for the old longhorns. The native cattle are very distinctly better than the old Texan cattle--the native Mexican cattle. The Durham and Hereford bulls introduced from the States will in a very few years completely change the character of the herds. Good cows are kept in sufficient numbers to insure a constant supply of the breeding bulls. In the same way Berks.h.i.+re boars are being crossed with the native pigs, and blooded stallions with the native mares. In short, everything is being done exactly as on our advanced and successful ranches at home. The country is still largely vacant, and opportunities for development will be almost limitless for at least another generation.

Aside from the extreme interest of seeing the ranch itself, the twenty-mile ride was most enjoyable. The country was like our own plains near the foothills of the Rockies, except that there was more water and a greater variety of timber. The most striking trees were the occasional peculiar flat-top pines, and there were also other and very beautiful pines through which the wind sang mournfully; and there were many flowers. In one place we saw a small prairie deer, and in galloping we had to keep a lookout for armadillo burrows, just as we keep a lookout for prairie-dog holes in the West. The birds were strange and interesting, some of them with beautiful voices. Out on the plains were screamers, noisy birds, as big as African bustards. One sparrow sang loudly, at midday, round the corrals where we dismounted for lunch. He was a confiding, pretty little fellow, with head markings somewhat like those of our white-crowned and white-throated sparrows. He sang better than the former, and not as well as the latter.

The horses were good, and we thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon canter back to the home ranch, when the shadows had begun to lengthen. We loped across the rolling gra.s.s-land and by the groves of strange trees, through the brilliant weather. Under us the horses thrilled with life; it was a country of vast horizons; we felt the promise of the future of the land across which we rode.