Chapter IX
Eastern Border Towns
Approach Across the Argentine Pampas
Where the plains or pampas of Argentina break with the mountain country on the northwest we find the life a curious blend of the frontier and of long-established conditions, as if all the settlements were breaking out of one age into another. The oldest Spanish settlements in Argentina were made in these remote northern valleys at the border of the plain, yet the region seems today a border country like our West when railroad building was at its height. It is only in the last two decades that the high pastures of the upper mountain slopes and valleys and basins have been intensively developed. Traffic has been carried on by primitive means that prevailed from the beginnings of Spanish settlement. Even the oxcart is absent from most lines of communication. Here for four hundred years the pack mule has been the chief dependence of the merchant. Towns old in history, important in trade, repeatedly mentioned in the annals of the past four centuries have still no means of communication with the outside world except such as the mule and the burro afford. The contrast between old and new is not alone in the valleys on the moun- tain border, it extends into the plain. Where the streams from the higher country spread their waters and their rock débris out over the edge of the flat land of pampa, sugar estates have been developed and towns, the leading centers of the region, like Catamarca, Andalgalá, Tucuman, Salta, and Jujuy. And these too have a life as strikingly changeful as if their founding were a modern event instead of a fact four cen- turies past.
To take the route to the northwestern frontier from the Plata is to discover some new things by the way. On leaving
Buenos Aires the railroad passes through typical pampa—not
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