of twenty men and seventy horses, and they aimed to reach Salta not later than the end of June so as to make the journey after the subsidence of the summer floods and before the period of drought. In the Salta basin the mules were pastured until fair time, which began early in February and lasted throughout March. Dealers from the pampas here disposed of as many as 60,000 mules alone, without including horses and cattle.
The Peruvian buyers made up their troops of mules, and the muleteers started on the mountain journey—the third and last stage. They knew the places of pasture on the mountain slopes and in the valleys and exported troops of 1700 to 1800 head in charge of two bands of horsemen, one to drive the mules and look after the camp arrangements, a second to prevent straying. Thus were the mules driven by slow stages to the markets of the plateau, Oruro, Corporaca, and Jauja. Oruro was the center of a mining district of Upper Peru, and it has retained its strategic relation to the mines down to the present. Corporaca is south of Cuzco and served a great cen- tral zone. Jauja is near the silver mines of Cerro de Pasco and the quicksilver of Huancavelica and on the royal road to Lima and the coast valleys. Ulloa says that 25,c00 to 35,000 mules were pastured on the meadows of Canas, on the Tablada de Corporaca, and there sold in the great annual fair.[1]
A change in the status of Buenos Aires in the latter half of the eighteenth century (compare pp. 107-108) effected a note- worthy decline in the traffic between the Plata provinces and Upper Peru, with corresponding effects on all the way stations along the great trail connecting these distant South Atlantic settlements with Lima on the Pacific slope. There was the decline in the output of silver from the Bolivian mines, and there was also the break in the economic dependence of Buenos Aires upon Peru, by reason of the fact that it was made a viceroyalty in 1776 and granted the privilege of free trade in 1778. Trafic over the land routes immediately diminished, the security of the route was no longer guaranteed by effective
- ↑ Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan: Relacién histiricea del viaje 4 la América Meridionale, Madrid, 1748.
