On the Mexican Highlands, with a Passing Glimpse of Cuba

Our only terrors are the ants, but we set the legs of the cots in little earthenware pans of water and are safe. An Indian family, living in the distant end of the rambling, abandoned buildings across the courtyard, provides us with boiled rice and stewed chicken. Izus has brought us an abundance of bananas and oranges, fresh, fragrant, and luscious. We buy several oranges for a centavo, and a centavo is worth less than half an American cent. The Indian keeps poultry and also gamecocks. These latter are tied by the leg near his door. They are his pride, and he fights them on Sunday after church. When the priest has closed the services the neighbors, who have all brought their chickens, form in a circle, and there the week’s wages are staked and lost upon the issue of the fights. I send you a snap shot of a battle.

When dining, we sit on improvised stools around a homemade table and just back of us crouch a group of attentive admirers – the famished family dogs, rough-haired, cadaverous, wolf-eyed, silent dogs they are. They watch with furtive intentness each morsel we put into our mouths, they instantly pounce upon each crumb and bone which falls within their reach. They never bark – only a shrill melancholy howl I sometimes hear breaking the stillness of the night; they never wag their tails, for these are always tucked between their legs. When we have finished, we toss to these wistful watchers the refuse of our meal. There is a silent scuffle, a hasty crunching and then each dog sits up as hungry and observant as before. Thus our friends breakfast and dine and sup with us, and so filled with suspicion and fear of man are they, that they never by any chance allow us to approach. “Veni aqui perro” (come here, dog) an Indian boy calls out, and immediately perro slinks out of sight. Descended originally from the wild coyote, which they much resemble, these dogs seem to have acquired little taming by contact with man.

Next up the creek above us lie the Azteca mines, long since abandoned, and then come the China (pronounced cheena) mines, the only group now being worked, the present superintendente being a member of the Castrejon family to whom they belong. The vein is a porphyry-and-quartz carrying copper, and is about three hundred feet wide and almost vertical. It is nearly with the watercourse, about one degree to the west, and how deep it may go no one knows. This whole region is full of holes, generally, say, four feet to six feet square, from which for centuries the copper ore has been taken. The rich pieces were carried away and the balance was thrown upon the ground. The entire country is filled with innumerable piles of this abandoned copper ore carrying two and three per cent of copper, and waiting for that distant day when railroads, modern machinery and efficient labor shall make this natural wealth profitable to modern enterprise. As it is, the present primitive Indian methods of mining and transportation on mules, unventilated pits, and awful trails climbing stupendous heights, destroy the possibility of profit even in working the richest ores.

Sunday we spent in riding over the hills which rise from three to five hundred feet above the stream. Up their easy, rounded slopes a horse can clamber almost anywhere. It is a country where cattle roam and where the Mexican vaqueros (cowboys) are the only human beings. In the afternoon, we went down to the San Pedro River, now a small stream, and bathed in the tepid water, where I surprised an old familiar friend, also watching the limpid water, a Belted Kingfisher.

Monday, we spent from seven o’clock to ten, going through the China mines, which are worked by the Mexicans in the old primitive way. We went into the side of the hill by a short tunnel, which led to a black hole up out of which stuck a slippery pole. On one side of this pole notches are cut, and into these notches, if you want to descend, you must sidewise set your feet. Our guide clasped the pole with one arm, holding aloft his flickering light with the other, and slowly sank from sight into the blackness below. We all went down, not knowing what might be beneath us. At first, my feet would not hold in the notches, but it was a matter of setting in my feet or falling into unlimited darkness, so I clung tight and came slowly down. The distance was only about twenty feet. Here there was an off-set of eight or ten feet, and then another pole and more notches, blackness above as well as below, and the notches had grown slick through years of contact with shoeless Indian feet. Thus we went down and down, descending some two hundred feet to where the air lay hot and heavy and our breathing became stertorous and slow. We then followed a long narrow tunnel, and came to where naked Indians with steel wedges were sledging out the ore. The Indians descend in the morning, they work as long as the foul air permits, then they gather up all the rock they have dislodged, put it into a bull hide sack, load this on their backs and climb up the notched poles again to daylight. On issuing from the mines they stagger to an ore pile, under a thatched roof set on high poles, and dump their loads. Around this pile of ore squat twenty or thirty Indians, each holding a stone in his hand. Each has before him a large flat piece of rock. He reaches for the ore pile, takes from it a lump which looks fairly good and cracks it to powder between the two stones. The mean ore is thrown on a dump pile, the rich ore is all cracked up. This is the original of the modern stamp mill, and it is the only stamp mill the Indian-Mexican will probably ever know. The ore, after it is pulverized in this way by hand, is put into a wooden trough into which water is poured which has been carried up in bull hide sacks from the stream below, and the ore is thus washed and concentrated. It is afterwards put into sacks, about two hundred pounds to the sack, and taken fifty or sixty miles, over the frightful precipitous trails, to the railroad at Patzcuaro, whence it is shipped to the smelter.

It is a wonder that even the Mexicans can thus work these mines, year after year, and make the smallest profit. The most efficient American manager would find this to be impossible. The Mexican superintendente lives on nothing and his Mexican employes live on less. Eighteen to twenty cents a day Mexican (less than ten cents a day in American) is the miner’s pay. On this amount he must support himself and often a large family. The Mexicans follow the old Spanish theory, that human labor is cheaper than machinery, if you can crush down the human labor to a sufficiently low wage. Hence, the Mexican employing classes discourage both the use of machinery and the education of the peon. Ignorance and the abject poverty of the working class is the Spanish-American ideal. The day laborer in Mexico is little better than a slave. The wealthy mine owner, who lives in luxury in the distant Capital, or in Paris, or Madrid, may exhibit the evidences of culture and refinement, but Mexico can never greatly advance until the masses of the common people shall be enlightened and by modern statesmanship be lifted from this condition of industrial servitude.

Some of the types among these Indians are curious. One man has a head that runs up straight behind his ears, nor has he much brain in front. Another looks like a Japanese. These Indians – they are called Indians, but are many of them half-breeds, for there is much Spanish blood mixed in among them – are pitifully poor and are hopeless in their poverty. They have been hammered and battered for so many centuries by the merciless Spanish overlord, that they have had all spirit long ago knocked out of them. They seem to be unable now to rise. Nor are they a hardy race. When sickness prevails they are too poor to employ a doctor, but rely upon charms and religious rites. I have just acted the part of a physician. I have brought with me a small box of selected medicines sufficient for the common ailments of this land of semitropics. I am now prescribing quinine for Doña Caldina, calomel for Señor Perez. I hear that a crippled man is coming to-morrow to see me and ask whether the white señor can cure him and make him walk. There is a certain childlike quality about these peones. How humbly they accept the superiority of the white man, whom they do not love!

I see many instances of what might be called degenerates, misshapen heads, ill-shaped and deformed bodies, signs of a race too much inbred. They wear white cotton clothes, peaked straw hats and rawhide sandals. The men generally carry blankets (zerapes) folded across the shoulder which they wrap up in, as do their brothers on the highlands, when the air grows cold.

The coldness of the nights and the burning heat of the day are strange. I slept last night in flannel underwear, a woolen jersey over that and flannel pajamas still outside; then two thick wool blankets and a rubber poncho over all. Early, toward one or two o’clock I woke up chilled to the bone. I put on my corduroy coat. I was just warm, for an icy wind was blowing down from the lofty altitudes of the Tierra Fria. This morning when the sun rose about six o’clock, the air was still cold. In an hour it was pleasantly warm, birds were singing and flying from tree to tree. By nine o’clock the sun blazed like a ball of fire. I am now, at half past nine, going about in slippers, in linen trousers and my thin pajama coat, and even then I hide from the sun. By ten o’clock a silence lies upon the land profound and overwhelming, not a living thing is astir, except only the lizards and the cicadas. The daylight ends precipitately. The day lasts only as long as the sun is up. By half past five the sun hangs above the mountains on the west. Suddenly it is gone. In fifteen minutes it is dark, the stars are out, and such white stars they are! The cold air of the highlands then settles down upon us for the night.

XIII

Some Tropical Financial Morality

Churumuco, Mina el Puerto, On the Rio de las Balsas,December 6th.

We were up before the day, our horses and mules having been fed with grain a little after midnight. Thus the food is digested before the journey of the day is begun. It was dazzling starlight with a gleaming streak of white moon. Our two pack beasts had been loaded, we had breakfasted and were in the saddles a little after four. A keen wind which cut like a knife-edge blew steadily down from the highlands behind us. I had kept on my warm clothes of the night. We traveled rapidly by the brilliant starlight and passing down the aroyo along which we camped, turned down the San Pedro River toward the south. We crossed the stream frequently, traveling in single file. By seven o’clock the sun was peering over the hills and I began to shed my clothes. By half past eight I retained only my thinnest underwear, my pajama coat, my linen trousers and slippers. By ten o’clock the sun was scorching, our great Mexican sombreros alone saving us from its fierce rays. Our way lay for twenty miles almost due south down the valley of the San Pedro, then turning to our left, we followed a slightly-traveled trail, crossing a succession of low hills, until after four long hours we came to immense plains or llanos stretching flat as a table for twenty miles toward the Balsas River. The streams were dry, the leaves were falling from shrubs and trees. It was the dry season. Mesquit and cactus and mimosa were the only vegetation, except the blistered stalks of the sun-dried grasses. No water was visible anywhere. The ground was parched and cracked. A light breeze which followed us all day and a few highflying clouds, which now and then hid the sun, alone saved us from being almost broiled alive. The watch in my pocket became burning hot, I could scarcely hold it in my hand; the metal buttons on my clothes almost burned themselves loose; only the dryness of the atmosphere made it possible to have made this journey during the day.

The great llanos, stretching south and southwest, were crossed by many well-beaten trails, where the horses and cattle, which roam here in thousands, have worn the paths they take to reach the distant water. It is said that these animals, which wander at large, have schooled themselves to cross the wide plains beneath the stars in the cool of the night.

We reached the mines of El Puerto about half past one o’clock, crossing the plain for several hours toward the mountain on whose side the mines are perched. The only living things we met upon these llanos were the jack rabbits and an occasional roadrunner, which birds were very tame. Although his rabbitship has attained a reputation for lightning leg-velocity upon the sagebrush plains of our own far-west, yet surely his Mexican cousin has him outclassed. A vaquero, followed by a couple of lean and seasoned hounds, had met us on the borders of the llanos and kept with us almost across the plain. The dogs, despite the fact that they must well have known the power of the jack rabbit, would often come upon one crouched in the grass, and so nearly within their reach that they quite forgot their lessons of the past, and started full cry upon his trail. It was almost laughable to see the hounds’ despair, so quickly did the rabbits shoot out of sight, quite beyond all dog power to keep the pace. The pair would regularly return with their tails between their legs, the picture of disorganized defeat.

We have climbed three hundred feet up the side of the mountain to a group of open sheds, thatched with palm leaves, while above us volcanic rock masses tower more than two thousand feet. Across the river Balsas, apparently rising from the water’s edge, are the tremendous heights of the Cordillera, lifting themselves twelve to thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea.

The Mina el Puerto is an ancient mine, now nearly exhausted; for it has been worked almost two hundred years, all through a single doorway cut into the rock, barred by a great wooden door, fastened by a ponderous lock with a ponderous iron key. Each morning, for many decades, the owner has taken the key from his belt, unlocked the big door and sent fifteen to twenty naked Indians down the “chicken ladders” four hundred feet into the hot mines below. There is no ventilation, there are no pumps, there is no other way to go in or out. Two or three hours is the longest time a man can work at the bottom of this hole; when the Indian can stand it no longer he climbs up bringing on his back the ore which he has been able to dislodge, or a bag of water, if any shall have leaked in. By three or four o’clock in the afternoon, those who went down have all come out again. The ore they have dug is thrown upon a pile beneath the palm-thatched roof; the owner of the mines then locks the door. When the ore pile has been reduced to powder by the hammering of many dusky hands, it is concentrated in the wooden troughs, washed with water from the river Balsas, three miles away, brought up in bullskin sacks upon the backs of mules; and when a sufficient number of two-hundred-pound bags of concentrated ore have been accumulated, forty or fifty mules are tied together neck to tail, loaded with the bags and driven almost one hundred miles up to the plateau. These ores have always been particularly rich, the gold and silver in them having been sufficient to pay the cost of transportation to and charges of the smelter, leaving the copper for net profit.

The Mexican owners have lived well from the fortune of their mines. In fact, to them copper ore in the ground has been equivalent of cash in the bank. When they have wanted money they have dug into their ore bed. They generally smelted it themselves in crude clay furnaces, using charcoal burned near at hand. What of gold and silver there might be was also run into the copper bars and the bars were currency. A pile of bars meant rollicking jaunts and roystering junkets. The family and friends, the servants and retainers were gathered together, muskets and swords, horns and mandolins were assembled, horses and pack animals were loaded and bestridden, and a tour of the surrounding countryside was made. Bullfights, cockfights, balls and fandangoes were gloriously enjoyed, duels were fought, hearts were stormed and the copper ingots were blown in even to the last ounce. Then the company would return, the fast-locked door would again be opened and a new supply of copper extracted from the mine. Like princes lived these Señores de las Minas, so long as the earth yielded up her hidden treasure.

At this particular mine, this sort of thing has been going on for a hundred years. Generations have come and gone and come again, and the ore has not yet given out. But the thrifty ancestors so managed it as to pay only the smallest taxes to the government. Why should they pay good money into the itching palm of the distant despots, who might for the moment hold supreme power in the far-off capital! The first owner had “denounced,” (i. e. taken up), only half an acre. In the middle of this he cut the doorway to the mine. His descendants have always paid taxes on that half acre! The government never asked for more. Even Diaz was content. So the workings went on, and spread and ramified into the many acres surrounding the single so well-guarded entrance. The original half-acre had long years ago been mined out. And no one ever entered the mine or knew of its depth or latitude except the owner, who took the big key from his belt each workday morning and opened the ponderous wooden door. The Indians dug and sweated and smothered in the hot depths, even as their forbears had done. The Castrejon family held fast to the big key and enjoyed their credit for unbounded riches. La Mina el Puerto was a busy place, and its hospitality was equal to its wealth.

Thus it might have continued to this day, but for an accident which happened two or three years ago. One stormy night two travelers sought shelter beneath the Castrejon thatch. In crossing the llanos they lost their way and their horse cast his shoe. They discerned the light on the mountain side and came to it. The courteous lord of the mine gave them true Spanish welcome. “All that he had was theirs!” They slept in his biggest hammocks and ate his fattest poios (chickens). The strangers were gringos (Americans) and “missionaries” and one spoke excellent Spanish and the other smiled. El Señor told them how many years he had worked the mine, he and his ancestors, and he boasted, just a little, of its wealth. In the morning, rested, fed and smiling, they bade their gracious host a parting adios as they followed his superintendente, who rode with them to the main road from which they had strayed. The mine as usual worked on. The incident was forgotten. A few months later, one sultry evening, the gringos returned and with them a mining inspector of the Mexican government and a company of rurales. The Fomento (Department of the Interior) had granted to them all of the mineral rights surrounding and outside of the half acre which contained the big door. Los Señores de Castrejon had never had legal title to any mineral, but what lay under that half acre. If ore had been taken from outside of that half acre, it had been stolen from the government and dire are the penalties for theft in this land of the iron hand. And what ore had been taken from the outside of that half acre now belonged to the two strangers. They might sue in the courts and recover the full value of it and all legal costs. The two Americans were very courteous as they explained these matters to El Señor. The mining inspector was there to examine the mine and the rurales held in their hands repeating rifles of the latest pattern. El Señor was a discreet man. He accepted the courteous offer of the smiling Americans that they would not prosecute, provided he made them a deed for all claim he had to the half acre, the big door and whatever else he might possess. He was pleased to sign the deed. He then mounted his horse – they gave him back his horse – and rode away a beggar. Next morning the Americans put the big key in the door, unlocked it and sent the Indians down to their daily toil. The mining inspector received liberal recompense for his trouble and rode contentedly back to the Tierra Fria. The rurales were induced to remain yet a little while, as a sort of protection against unforeseen mishap.

The new owners remained long enough to place a new native superintendente in charge at increased salary, and then accompanied the rurales upon their return. But los Americanos were themselves gentlemen who had had to leave the States in rather hasty flight, and soon fell into feud among themselves. One, I learn, is now residing in a Mexican penitentiary for robbing a brother missionary, and the other, having sold his own interest as well as that of his partner to uninitiated purchasers in Kansas, has also disappeared. At the time of our visit the mines are in the hands of a receiver of the courts, and the Kansas people are endeavoring to ascertain just “where they are at.” Do you wonder, when I tell you that I find throughout all this ancient mining region a certain suspicion of visiting Americans, even on the part of Mexican owners whose titles are beyond a flaw?

Saturday.

Early this morning Tio and I mounted into our saddles and with an Indian-Mexican guide crossed the llanos to see two quartz veins showing copper. The veins are “undenounced,” open to whosoever may care to take them up. We did the unusual thing of going out in the middle of the day, and before we returned the fierce sun’s heat burned almost like flames of fire. I have never known anything but fire so to scorch. Even in this great heat we passed a hawk poised upon a cactus top watching for his prey and seemingly wholly unmindful of the terror of the sun.

After our siesta, we loaded the two pack beasts, saddled our riding animals and, about four o’clock in the afternoon, set out for the river Balsas, two miles to the south, and to the little town of Churmuco on its banks. From the mountain side we took a last look over the wide expanse of the llanos, extending twenty or thirty miles toward the west, as level as a floor, the blue line of the Cordilleras marking the horizon far beyond.

We passed through several prehistoric, Indian towns. Their streets were laid out with regularity, generally at right angles, the foundations of the ancient houses still plainly showing. In many places, the base walls were intact and constructed of rounded bowlders laid carefully, in a row, upon one another in substantial tiers.

The rich bottom land along the river, wholly uncultivated, much impressed me. The soil, a black and chocolate loam, is capable of bearing any crop, and is twenty to thirty feet in thickness. There was no cultivation anywhere. These lands belong to some mighty hacienda (a hacienda contains often from one hundred thousand to two million acres) owned by some absentee haciendado. It is said to be worth about ten cents (Mexican) per acre!

The river Balsas looks as broad as Elk River in West Virginia, where it enters the Kanawha (four or five hundred feet in width). It is now the dry season, but, nevertheless, the river is swift and deep, a tide of clear blue water too swift and too deep to ford or swim. In the rainy season it must be a boisterous mighty stream, for its fall is rapid. In the dry season it is fed by the melting snow fields of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl far to the east. The stream is said to afford good fishing, and in it veritable crocodiles (Cayman) abound.

Approaching the river, we found ourselves at a primitive ferry where two wild-looking vaqueros were about to cross. Availing ourselves of this opportunity to voyage upon the Balsas – Mexico’s greatest river – we tied our horses in the shade of a friendly mimosa and climbed aboard the craft used as a ferryboat – a sharp pointed scow which is entered at the stern. The two Indian boatmen pulled each a ponderous blade, but despite their most strenuous efforts, the powerful current carried us down quite half a mile before we landed upon the farther shore – a wide bar of sand and pebbles. Our fellow passengers eyed us in suspicious silence, each holding fast his broncho lest it should jump out, their wild dark glances betokening little friendliness. Reaching the shore each silently swung into his saddle and galloped off toward the not far distant Cordillera. These silent, untamed men traverse this desolate country everywhere, keeping constant track of the thousands of cattle and horses which roam their wastes; and the Indians of Guerrero bear the name of being the most turbulent and treacherous of all Mexico.