the Inca armies before the Conquest; and after that came the Spanish adventurers and soldiers of fortune, the founders of cities, the administrators, round whom gathered bands of determined men, those that drifted thither and those that came as sturdy settlers to establish families in the New World. At first these were all tied to Spain, to the Indies, to the great trading companies. It was long before they became measurably self-sufficient. To the degree to which they spread out along lines of natural devclopment—used the best lands known or accessible to them, kept their connections with the sea carriers, sought out new and distinctive sources of revenuc—to this degree they grew prospcrous, substantial. It is a striking fact of history that Atacama, extending right along the coast for nine hundred miles, should yet have been crossed by trails and dotted with towns most of which have kept their pioneer quality through four centuries of time. The present outposts of trade, of social life, of Indian settle- ment furnish a picture of pioneer life as marked as it is persis- tent. A provincial social structure and primitive means of transport in widely spaced communities, these basic conditions have made the region a geographical laboratory where life flows on in accustomed channels except where locally turned aside by the arrival of the revolutionizing railway or the open- ing of a mine. The more striking and significant are these forms of life by reason of the strong contrasts they exhibit to the industrial life of the great mining centers of today like Chu- quicamata or to the nitrate desert whither for more than half a century have come the ships of every industrial nation in the world and over which was fought a bitter and disastrous war.
The Atacama region—for the most part a thinly populated desert—is significant in a still larger sense. In its geographic and historic effects it is not an isolated example but rather belongs to a class of natural regions that have helped to fashion the history of the entire Hispanic-American realm. In colonial times there were only a few centers of power in South America, and these were at great distances from one another. The obstructions and impediments of nature tended to throw the
