The one district in which a pure Indian race has remained is that in which Temuco stands, for this is the land of those Araucanian Indians to whom I have already referred, a race deservedly famous as the only aboriginal people of the Western hemisphere that successfully resisted the European intruders.56 I had imagined this people dwelling in the recesses of forest-covered mountains, and themselves tall and stalwart men like the Patagonian giants whom Magellan encountered on the other side of the Andes. But the Mapoche57– that is the name by which the Araucanians call themselves – are, in fact, short men, though sturdy and muscular, with broad faces, not unlike some East Asiatic types. Their country is part of that long and wide depression which constitutes the Central Valley of Chile, a fertile land which, though doubtless once more thickly wooded than it now is, was probably, even in the days of Valdivia's invasion, partly open savannah. There is, and apparently there always has been, so little game that the natives must have lived chiefly by tillage, for they had, of course, neither sheep nor cattle. Although less civilized than were the tribes dwelling north of them, who had received some of the material culture of the Inca empire, they had risen above the savage state, and were at least as far advanced as were the Algonquins or Dakotas of North America. They had organized a sort of fighting confederacy of four tribes, resembling the "Long House" of the Iroquois Five Nations. Each tribe had its leading family in which the chieftainship was hereditary, but if the eldest son were not equal to the place, a second or other son might be selected by the tribe in his stead. For war, they chose leaders of special bravery or talent, as Tacitus tells us that the Germans of his time did. Their weapons were the lance, probably a sort of assegai, and the axe or tomahawk of stone, and a club of wood, sometimes with a stone head fastened to it. When Valdivia, having overcome the more northerly tribes, and having strengthened his force by contingents from them, crossed the Biobio into the Araucanian country, the chiefs of the confederacy summoned a general assembly of all the fighting men – a sort of Homeric agora– and after three days' debate, resolved on resistance. In the first encounters they suffered terribly from the firearms and the horses of the Spaniards. Valdivia defeated them and marched through their country as far as the place where he built (as already mentioned) the town which still bears his name. After a few years, he returned with a stronger force hoping to complete his conquest. A hundred miles south of the Biobio the Araucanians attacked him. Their furious charge could not be stopped by musketry – gunshot range was very short in those days – the invading force was destroyed, and Valdivia, flying from the field, was captured. While he was attempting to save his life by a promise to withdraw altogether from Chile, an old chief smote him down with a club.
From this time on the warfare lasted with occasional intermissions for more than sixty years. The Araucanians discovered by degrees tactics fitted to reduce the advantages which firearms gave to the Spaniards. They obtained horses, and, like the Comanches in Arizona and the Basutos of South Africa, learnt to use them in war. They produced leaders like Lautaro and Caupolican of talents equal to their bravery. When they found themselves unable to stem a Spanish invasion they retired into their woods, and as soon as the enemy had retired, they fell upon the forts and raided across the border. Weary of this incessant and apparently hopeless strife, the Spaniards at last agreed to a treaty by which the Biobio was fixed as the boundary. During his daring cruise in the Pacific in 1578 Sir Francis Drake had occasion to land on the Chilean coast. The Araucanians, seeing white men come in a ship, assumed them to be Spaniards, and attacked them. Had they realized that Drake's crew, being the enemies of their own enemies, would gladly have been their friends, an alliance profitable to both parties could have been struck, and it might have been serviceable to Drake's English and Dutch successors. Fearing such a contingency, the Spaniards made it a part of their treaty with the Araucanians that they should give no help to the maritime foes of Spain. Fresh wars from time to time broke out, but they always ended in the same way, so Araucania continued independent down till, and long after, the revolt of Chile from Spain.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the nation had begun to lose its old fighting habits. Diseases contracted from the whites had reduced its numbers and sapped its strength, while peaceful intercourse with the colonists had mitigated the ancient animosity. Accordingly, when Chile, about 1881, asserted her authority, and the town of Temuco was founded in the middle of the Araucanian country, the idea of resistance which some of the chiefs entertained was dropped on the advice of others who saw that it would be hopeless under conditions so different from those of the seventeenth century. Thus it may still be said of this gallant race that though they have consented to become Chileans, they remain the one unconquered native people of the continent. Though there has not been much intermarriage between them and the Spanish colonists, the long conflict had a marked effect upon the character of the latter, giving to the Chileans a rude force and aptitude for war not unlike that which the constant strife with the Moors gave to the Spaniards in the Middle Ages. The earlier part of the conflict had the rare honour of being made the theme of an epic poem which ranks high among those of modern Europe, the Araucana58 of Alonzo de Ercilla, who himself fought against Caupolican. No ill feeling seems to exist now between the Mapoche and the Chileans. Educated men among the latter feel a certain pride, as do the Araucanians themselves, in their romantic history, each race remembering that its ancestors fought well.
How large the Mapoche nation was when the Spaniards first came is quite uncertain. The estimate of 400,000 seems excessive for a people who had no cattle, and did not till the soil on a large scale. Even now while some put the present population as high as 140,000, others put it as low as 50,000. There is, unfortunately, no doubt that they are diminishing through diseases, especially tubercular diseases, which have spread among them from the whites, and are now transmitted from parents to offspring. Laws have been passed for their benefit, and a functionary entitled the Protector of the Indians appointed, but some of these laws, such as those restricting the sale of intoxicating liquors, are enforced quite as imperfectly as they are in other countries better known to us. The tribal system has almost vanished, but the local communities into which the people are now grouped respect the heads of the old families and often regret the days when a simple and speedy justice was administered by the chieftains.
Scattered over a wide area they dwell in villages of grass huts or frame houses, the latter far less favourable to health, and live by tillage or stock keeping, though a few go north to seek work and are deemed excellent labourers. The custom observed by the Kafir chiefs in South Africa, of allotting a separate hut to each wife, does not seem to hold here, but as the huts are large, each wife, if there are several, is allowed her own hearth and fire. Some families have considerable estates; some own large herds of cattle and sheep which at certain seasons are driven across the Andean passes to the pastures of Argentina.
While the wars lasted there was, of course, no question of converting the Araucanians to Christianity; and though in the intervals of peace friars sometimes went among them, they remained practically heathen till the establishment of Chilean authority in 1882. Their religion is a form of that spirit worship which one finds among nearly all primitive peoples. Its rites are intended to avert the displeasure of the spirits, to obtain from them fine weather or rain (as the case may be), and to expel a noxious demon from the body. The priesthood – if the name can be used – is not hereditary and is confined to females. The women who discharge the functions of wizards or medicine men are selected when young by the elder sorceresses and initiated with elaborate rites. A tree of a particularly sacred kind is chosen and a sort of ladder of steps cut in it, which the sorceress mounts to perform the ceremonies. When the tree dies, its trunk continues to be revered and is dressed up with fresh green boughs for ceremonial occasions. I could not find that any other natural objects, besides trees, receive veneration, nor is there anything to shew that the Inca worship of the sun and the host of heaven had ever spread so far to the south. The old beliefs and usages are now fast waning. Many Mapoche have become Christians, a considerable number Protestants, converted by the English South American mission, others Roman Catholics. They are described as a people of good intelligence, and easy to deal with when they are treated with justice, a valuable element in the population, and one which Chilean statesmen may well seek to preserve, if drink could be kept from them and the germs of hereditary disease rooted out.
The occupation by the Araucanians of a considerable part of the central Chilean valley accounts for the fact that the population of the region beyond them to the south has grown but slowly. It now contains no Indian tribes till one gets across the channel of Ancud to Chiloe and the other islands along the coast. Few settlers came to these parts from Europe until about the middle of last century the Chilean government encouraged an immigration from Germany which continued, on a moderate scale, for a good many years, but thereafter stopped altogether. Going southward from Valdivia one finds both in small towns and in rural districts round them a good many solid German farmers and artizans and tidy little German Fraus who might have come straight out of the Odenwald. We spent a night in Osorno, our furthest point toward the south, a neat and prosperous looking town, and dined with one of the leading German citizens, a man of wide reading, and especially devoted to Robert Burns, whose poems he recited to us, and to Thomas Moore, some of whose songs he had translated into German. Thereafter a group of the German residents hospitably took us to their club, where they have a concert hall and just such a Kegelbahn (skittle alley) as that in which I remember that we students used to play at Heidelberg in 1863, about the time when the parents of these worthy Germans were migrating to Chile. They gave us champagne, the unfailing accompaniment of every social function in South America; but it ought to have been Bavarian beer. This is the only part of western South America to which any considerable mass of settlers have come from Europe, for most of the English, Germans, French, and Spaniards one meets in the commercial and mining centres are passing business visitors. On the other side of the Andes it is different, for there the Italian immigration has been and still is very large.
Comparatively few immigrants enter Chile now, which would imply that the quantity of land available for agriculture, but not yet taken up, is supposed to be not very large. To me the country we traversed appeared to be far from fully occupied, though on such a matter the impressions of a passing traveller are of little value. Of all the parts of the New World I have seen there is none which struck me as fitter to attract a young man who loves country life, is not in a hurry to be rich, and can make himself at home in a land where English is not the language of the people. The soil of southern Chile is extremely fertile, fit both for stock-raising and for tillage. The climate is healthy and mild, without extremes either of heat or cold. Wet it certainly is, but not wetter than parts of our own western coasts.
The summer sun is strong yet not oppressive, the air both soft and invigorating, for Ocean sends up shrill blowing western breezes to refresh mankind.59 There are no noxious beasts, no mosquitoes, no poisonous snakes, nor other venomous creatures, except a spider found in the cornfields whose bite, though disagreeable, is not dangerous. Intermittent fevers, the curse of most countries where new land is being brought under cultivation, seem to be unknown. There are deer in the woods, and plenty of fish in the clear, rapid rivers. The Englishman who loves hunting will not want for foxes; the North American golfer will find grassy flats by the sea, waiting to be laid out as links. Remote, secluded, and tranquil as the country is, the settler should have little difficulty in procuring whatever Europe supplies, for even at Osorno he is only forty hours from Santiago, and Santiago is now only two days from Buenos Aires, and Buenos Aires only seventeen days from Europe.
Perhaps it is the charm of the Chilean scenery that prompts a view of the country, considered as a home for the emigrant, more favourable than might be taken by one to whom life would be just as enjoyable in the boundless levels of Manitoba as within view of a snowy range. Perhaps, also, this charm of southern Chile with its soft, green pastures and shaggy woods and flashing streams was enhanced to us by contrast with the dreary deserts of Peru and Bolivia, through which we had lately passed. Whoever has in his boyhood learnt to love the scenery of a temperate country never finds full satisfaction in that of the tropics, with all their glow of light and all their exuberance of vegetation. Such lands are splendid to visit, but not so good to live in, for exertion is less agreeable, the woods are impenetrable, and the mountains, therefore, less accessible, and the constant heat is enervating, not to add that insects are everywhere, and in many places one has to stand always on guard against fevers. Nothing could be grander than the landscapes in the Andes which we had seen, nor more beautiful than the landscapes in Brazil which we were shortly to see. But of all the parts of South America that we visited, southern Chile stands out to me as the land where one would choose to make a home.
Two excursions, one to the sea, the other into the hills, gave us samples of two different kinds of scenery. Of the many brimming rivers that sweep down from the Andes across the Central Valley none is more beautiful in its lower course than is the Rio Bueno. It has in the course of ages cloven for itself through the hard rocks of the Coast Range a channel so deep that the tide comes up to the little town of Trumajo forty miles from the sea, and from that town small steamers can pass all the way to the bar at its mouth. In one of these little craft which a kind friend had procured we spent a long day in sailing down and back again. The hills on each side, sometimes hanging steeply over the stream, sometimes receding where a narrow glen opened, were clothed with the richest wood. It was a brilliant day in October, answering to our April, and the sun brought out an infinite variety of shades of green in the young foliage in these glens, the trees all new to us, and the spaces between them filled with climbing plants hanging in festoons from the boughs. Wild ducks and other water-birds fluttered over the water and rose in flocks as the little vessel moved onward, and green paroquets called from the thickets. As it nears the sea, the river spreads into a wide deep pool under a crescent of bold cliffs, and at the end of this is seen the bar, a stretch of sand on which the huge rollers of the Pacific break in foam. There is a lighthouse and a few houses near a flat stretch of meadow by the banks, the grass as green and the flowers as abundant as in Ireland. Specially vivid were the yellow masses of gorse, apparently the same species as our own, and, if possible, even more profuse in its blossoms than on those Cornish shores of which it is the chief ornament. I have seen few bits of coast more picturesque than this meeting of the still, dark river and the flashing spray of ocean under rocks clothed with feathery woods.
On our way back something went wrong with the machinery and the vessel had more than once to moor herself to the bank till things were set right. This gave opportunities for going ashore and exploring the banks. In some places the forest was too dense to penetrate without a machete to hew a way through the shrubs and climbers. In other places where one could creep under the trees or pull one's self up the cliffs by the boughs, the effort was rewarded by finding an endless variety of new flowers and ferns. The latter are in this damp atmosphere especially luxuriant; and their tall fronds, dipping into the river, were often seven or eight feet long. It was a primeval forest, wild as it had been from the beginning of things, for only in two or three places had dwellings been planted on level spots by the river and little clearings made; and the hills are so high and rocky that it may remain untouched and lonely for many a year to come.
The other excursion was towards the Andes. There is along the railway no prettier spot than Collilelfu, where a rapid river, broad and bright like the Scottish Tay, but with clearer and greener water, sweeps down out of the foothills into the meadows of the Central Valley. Here a French company have constructed a little branch railway, partly to bring down timber, partly in the hope of continuing their line far up the valley and across a pass into Argentina, in order to carry cattle to and fro. The manager, a courteous Frenchman from the Basque land of Bearn, ran us up this line through a succession of lovely views along the river to a point where we got horses and rode for seven or eight miles further through the forest up and down low ridges to the shore of Lake Rinihue. The forest was in parts too thick to penetrate without cutting one's way through creeping and climbing plants, but in others it was open enough to give mysterious vistas between the tall stems, and delicious effects where the sunlight fell upon a glade. The trees were largely evergreen, but few or none of them coniferous, for in Chile it is only at higher levels that the characteristic conifers, such as the well-known Araucaria, flourish. Here at last we found that characteristic South American arboreal flora we had been looking forward to, a forest where all that we saw was new, unlike the woods of western North America and of Europe, not only because the variety of the trees was far greater than it is there, but also because so many bore brilliant flowers upon their higher boughs, where the sunlight reached them. We were told that in midsummer the flowers would be still more profuse, but those we saw were abundant and beautiful enough, some white, some crimson or scarlet, some yellow, very few blue. One climber lit up the shade with its red blossoms, and below there were long rows, standing up along the path, wherever it was fairly open to the light, of white and pink foxgloves, a species closely resembling our own, while a woody ragwort, eight to ten feet high, bore a spreading umbel of yellow. The Calceolarias, frequent in Peru, do not seem to come so far south as this. Most of the trees had small leaves, but two, one called the lengue, valued for its bark, and another resembling a laurel, had large, dark green, glossy foliage. It was a silent wood, except for the paroquets and the occasional coo of a wood-pigeon; nor did we see any four-footed creatures, except two large, reddish brown foxes scurrying across the path ahead of us. Wildcats are scarce, and the puma, the beast of prey that has the widest range over the Western Hemisphere, is here hardly ever seen. The woodscape was less grand and solemn than what one sees in the great redwood forests of California or in the sombre depths of those that cover the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington, where the Douglas fir and the huge "cedar"60 tower so high over the trails that one can scarce catch the light through their topmost branches. Nor can I say that the views were more beautiful than may still be had in the few remaining ancient forests of England with their ancestral oaks and spreading beeches. But there was here a peculiar feature, giving a sense of the exuberant vitality of nature, in the profusion of parasitic plants clothing the trunks of the trees, both the fallen and the living, some of them flowering plants, but more of them ferns and mosses, especially tender little filmy ferns such as one finds on the moist and shady rocks of western Scotland and among the mountains of Killarney.
We embarked on Lake Rinihue in a tiny steamboat, and sailed some miles over its exquisitely clear, green waters. Steep hills from two to three thousand feet high enclose it, and at its upper end, where it winds in towards the central range of the Andes, small glaciers descend from between high snowpeaks. The view, looking across the deep green of the forests, broken here and there by a rocky cliff, up to these glittering pinnacles, had a beauty not only of color and form, but of mystery also, – that indefinable sense of mystery which belongs to little-known countries. In regions like Scotland or the Alps or Norway one has historical associations and the sense of a long human past to enhance the loveliness of hills and groves and streams. Here one has the compensating charm of an untouched and almost unexplored nature. The traveller in southern Chile feels as if he were a discoverer, so little visited is this land, and such a promise of wild beauty waiting to be revealed lies in the recesses of these mountains. Along the shores of Rinihue, which is twelve miles long, there is, save for a house or two at the place where we embarked, no trace of human life. Other such lakes, many of them much larger, lie scattered over a space some four hundred miles long and fifty miles wide on both the Argentine and the Chilean side of the Cordillera, a land of forests virtually unexplored and uninhabited, except by a few wandering Indians, standing now as it has stood ever since the Andes were raised. The day will come, perhaps less than a century hence, when the townsfolk of a then populous Argentina, weary of the flat monotony of their boundless Pampas, will find in this wilderness of lake and river and mountain such a place, wherein to find rest and recreation in the summer heats, as the North Americans of the Eastern states do in the Appalachian hills; and the North Americans of the West, in the glorious ranges along the Pacific coast. Superior to the former region in its possession of snow mountains, equal to the latter in climate and picturesque beauty, and to the naturalist more interesting than either from its still active volcanoes and its remarkable flora, this lake land of the southern Andes is an addition, the value of which the South Americans have hardly yet realized, to the scenic wealth of our planet.