AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
RESEARCH SERIES NO. 6

RECENT COLONIZATION
IN CHILE

BY
Mark Jefferson

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AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY S EXPEDITION
TO A. B.C. COUNTRIES IN I9I8
NO. I

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NEW YORK '¦'>'
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMERICAN BRANCH: 35 West 32ND Street
LONDON, TORONTO, MELBOURNE, AND BOMBAY

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YALE
UNIVERSITY UBRARY

AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
RESEARCH SERIES NO. 6

RECENT COLONIZATION
IN CHILE BY
Mark Jefferson

AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY S EXPEDITION
TO A.B.C. COUNTRIES IN I9I8
NO. I

NEW YORK
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMERICAN BRANCH: 35 West 32ND Street
LONDON, TORONTO, MELBOURNE, AND BOMBAY
I 9 2 I

COPYRIGHT, Ig21
BY
THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
OF NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT IN GREAT BRITAIN
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

E IO

THE CONDE NAST PRESS
GREENWICH. CONN.

RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
Creole Chile
After the northern deserts, where one passes browns and
yellows day after day, unrelieved by the smallest patch of
green, the irrigated bottom lands of central Chile are a great
delight to the eye. Where the alfalfa fields floor the valley and
the cattle browse lazily, though the hills are brown and only
spotted over -with scrubby trees, they frame a pleasant picture
of Chilean homes -with poplars lining the irrigation ditches beside
the dusty road. Much bright sunshine; house walls in light
colors of plaster fagade under the red-tiled roof; occasional
hovels and street walls of adobe; a land of horses, mules, oxen,
and goats, of abundant beef and potatoes, of wheat, corn, and
barley, of alfalfa and onions, of watermelons and olives and
grapes and excellent wines, of oranges, peaches, walnuts, and al
monds, of houses built in a hollow square about a patio, of
dark-eyed women at windows barred with iron grilles — this is
Creole country, this is Chile.
It is a country held in large estates, and seen in the broad
it looks empty; for the landlord's house is far back from the
road, and the wretched brown hut of the roto is hard to see.
But it gives the essential picture of Chilean society, a society
divided into two classes — an upper class that possesses and
enjoys and a lower class that labors and obeys. And, though
socialism and anarchism are at work, this organization shows
little sign of changing its nature. The roto is landless, ignorant,
wretched, and almost without hope. The peon of the Argentine
Republic has his position of inferiority immensely mitigated by the
mastery of wide spaces that comes from owning a horse, an easy
thing in a land where there are more horses than inhabitants.
But, though horses were formerly more plentiful in Chile,^ the
^ Before 1870 when General Roca put down the Indians of the Argentine Parapa
Argentine cattle and horses were carried off for cheap sale in southern Chile. See
W. Jaime Molins: La Pampa, Buenos Aires, 1918, p. 7.

2 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
country now has only one horse to eight people, and the roto in
search of work travels humbly and painfully afoot. On the other
hand is the upper class which owns land, is the ruling power, and
regards even the lightest manual work as beneath its dignity.
The system is feudal and Creole.
The Chileans as a Race
The Creoles are ¦ all American-born, of Spanish race, with
or — rarely — without a touch of Indian blood. Indian blood
indeed is universal in South America. He who claims pure
Spanish descent speaks in the sense noted by the distinguished
Argentine scholar-president Mitre, who assures us that a genera
tion after the Rio de la Plata region was settled "the sons of
Spaniards and native women were regarded as of pure Spanish
descent." ^ Few or no women accompanied the Spaniards who
came not as immigrants, but as soldiers bent on war and con
quest. Especially is this true of Chile. In the other Andean
countries conquest was over in an amazingly short period.
At times a single battle sufficed to put the Spaniard in place of
the defeated native lord as ruler and master. But in Chile the
Araucanian was still unsubdued at the end of three centuries,
during the greater course of which an endless succession of
Spanish soldiers had streamed towards Chile. "Its possession has
cost Spain more blood and treasure than all the rest of her settle
ments in America" wrote Molina at the end of the eighteenth
century.' And still today the Frontera looms large in Chile, an
Indian frontier behind which the white man might not pass
within the memory of men not yet old.
Among the Chilean aristocrats the Indian blood is ancient
or collateral, from an Indian princess perhaps; but it exists in
all classes. Even the singular group of families with English or
Irish names — the Edwards, Walker, Williams, Tupper, Clark,
Holly, Miller, Thompson, Lynch, O'Higgins, O'Brien, Cochrane,
2 Bartholom# Mitre: Historia de Belgrano y de la independencia argentina,
4th edit., 2 vols., Buenos Aires, 1887; reference in Vol. I, p. 10.
3 Giovanni Ignazio Molina: Saggio sulla storia naturale del Chili, 2 vols., Bologna,
1782, 1787; reference in Vol. 2, p. 264.

Fig. 2 — Patio of Creole house. It is an open courtyard on which the house rooms
open. Though it is winter, the weather is mild, the front door is open, and we are
looking through the wide entrance hall.
Patios of the houses of the rich have beautiful plants and shrubs.

Fig. 3 — A sunny garden gate in town. The gardens are very attractive but diffi
cult to see unless you have the freedom of the house. The city streets are of unin
terrupted walls. Though it is winter there is the typical Creole sunshine between
the Eucalyptus trunks. This is old Chile.

THE CHILEANS AS A RACE 3
and Mackenna families — that are so prominent in the Chilean
Four Hundred have Indian blood by their marriages with
Creole families. A Chilean physician, Nicoliis Palacios, has
written a two-vokinie work on the Chilean race ' and pronounces
strongly on this subject. He gathered abundant evidence from
the old chroniclers, which an American writer cleverly con
denses as follows r "the Chilean masses are descended from the
crossing of Europeans with captive native women. Early Chile
was a man's colony, and white women were few. The Spanish
trooper fared south to the frontier with from four to six native
women to attend him. Four to one was the ratio of the sexes in
the frontier garrisons, and soon there was a swarm of half-breed
children. In a single week in 1580 sixty such children were born
in a post with one hundred and sixty soldiers. In 1550 the mary-"
ried men in Valdi-via had up to thirty concubines apiece. Aguirre,^
one of the conquistadores, left at his death fifty legitimate sons,
to say nothing of daughters. De Escobar had eighty-seven
living descendants, and he by no means held the record for his
time. It is doubtful if the exploits in parentage of the Chilean
pioneers can be^ matched in history. The men of two of the most
bellicose breeds the world has ever known wore each other down
by endless warfare, so that innumerable native women became
the booty of the surviving white men and bore them children.
As late as 1776 in Santiago the women were ten times as numer
ous as the men. This blending of strains occurred so long ago
' and was so complete that the modern Chileans do not reveal
the atavism of mixed breeds. They are virtually a new race
with definite, transmissible characteristics, and betray, it is
said, no tendency to revert to either of the ancestral stocks."
Palacios ^ likes to refer to the European 'ancestors of the Chileans
as Goths rather than Latins, believing that at the time of the
Conquest the Spanish kingdoms were poorly knit into a nation
and that Latin meant nothing racial but only a language and
a civilization powerful enough to impose its language on the
' Nicolas Palacios: Raza Chilena, 2nd edit., 2 vols., Santiago, 1918.
s Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 45-56.

4 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
whole peninsula. A later Chilean writer, Luis Thayer Ojeda,*
maintains that the Spaniards of the Conquest had become firmly
welded into one race and that the Araucanians did not enter
into the composition of the Chilean race so much as did the
Mapuches. He seems to be right.

The Feudalism of Creole Society
The artistocratic Creole society has dominated in all Latin
America. The lower class may occupy a little land, but in general
it is only by permission of the patron.'' Whether peon, roto,
or guaso, he has more Indian blood than his master. In Peru
and Bolivia h^ is purely Indian. His function is to labor for a
patron. The Argentine law required him to carry a book of
Conchavo, in which was stated and attested by whom he was
employed, for how long, and at what wages. Without it he might
be put to work on public tasks. .
In Chile the peasant is an inquilino, which might be rendered
"tenant," but "serf" would be more accurate. He has a pretense
at wage, the use of an acre or two of land, a wretched hut of
unbaked bricks with roof of thatch, the privilege of using some
animals from the farm, and fairly feudal obligations to serve all
the needs of his master's house, he and his family too. In re
turn the inquilino does what work the patron asks of him. He
toils hard and lives miserably, but life is assured him and his
invariably large family. Under the Creole system he may
always count on a good deal of advice, on care in sickness, when
medicine and personal attention will be provided, and on help
and protection in special adversity. The patron does not mind
how wretched the state in which his inquilino lives but would
be ashamed to let him starve. 1 am not sure that this obligation
of the patron is made as much of in Chile as in other Creole
' Luis Thayer Ojeda: Elementos etnicos que han intervenido en la poblaci6n
de Chile, Santiago, 1919, p. 131.
7 On Indian landownership in Bolivia see George McCutchen McBride; The
Agrarian Indian Communities of Highland Bolivia, Amer. Ceogr.Soc. Research Ser.,
No. 5, 1921.

THE FEUDALISM OF CREOLE SOCIETY 5
society. In the Argentine thirty years ago the master's obligation
was pronounced. '^'
The inquilinos do not suffice to gather the harvest. There is
always lack of hands for that. So the landlords have always
clamored for help, but only for two months in the year. Sons
of the inquilinos may drift to the city, where good fortune may
find them some work; but there are few factories, and there is
little need for hands. Many go to the Argentine, both to the
southern region and near Mendoza. The lot of the landless Chil
ean is very hard. He cannot find work in a country that has
always encouraged and aided immigration. Before the war
common labor brought 30 or 40 cents (United States) a day. In
191 8 in Valdivia it was worth from 60 cents to a dollar and a half.
And the Chilean roto is a splendid worker.
Such is the essentially feudal character of Creole society.
It is difficult for Americans to realize the difference between
the laboring classes of South America and those of our own
country. Up to recent days the masses in the United States have
been Europeans, transformed in the New World by the posses
sion of the soil they till instead of tilling it for others, as their
forefathers have done; transformed into men of widespread
capacity for action. Our people have no Indian blood, and we
have no peasant, or landless, class. For land through a long period
was as easily accessible in the United States to the poor man as
to the rich. Ferrero^ found European culture repeated in the
mentality of the South American, but in the United States he
seemed to discover a new world. Naturally the more gifted of the
South Americans think themselves chosen to lead the masses,
and love to practice this leadership. Often, indeed, they do excel
in guidance of their people; but they fail in accomplishment very
often most unhappily because the people they have to guide are
of so little resourcefulness. It is impossible for the dominant class
of Creole society to think highly of the class whose status they
constantly, but unconsciously, depress. No color line is drawn in
South America, although I fancy the South American really ex-
8 Guglielmo Ferrero: Puritanism, Atlantic Monthly, Vol. io6, 1910, pp. 1-6.

6 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
eludes his Indian fellow citizen from his conception of nationality
as completely as we exclude the negro from our conception of the
ideal American.
South Americans are more European than we. I am sure
Ferrero is right, not merely as to social stratification but as to
their tastes and feelings. An admitted upper class assumes the
great responsibility and the great privileges of the national life,
and although this upper class often has something of Indian
blood its culture is highly European. Such are the fruits of
Spanish conquest; such are the South Americans up to the mid
dle of the nineteenth century.
It is because of these conditions that the wide adoption of the
constitution of the United States in the South American republics
is so formal and of so little effect. Feudalism mixes badly with
the rights of man. The peasant of Creole society accepts his
inferiority. And, though the system is not inflexible and a man of
ability may pass into the upper class, to do so is not easy nor is it
of frequent occurrence. It is all in absolute contrast with develop
ment in the United States, where none of the native-born have
any sense of inferiority, except of a temporary character, and
the passage of individuals into higher social strata is quite a
matter of course.
Colonization in Southern South America
But for more than fifty years now colonization by European
families has been going on in that part of South America that
lies in the temperate zone. Families of Italians, Portuguese,
Spaniards, and Germans from the landless classes of Europe
have been getting little properties on South American soil that
they till with European hands. They are initiating New World
changes in feudal South America.
Of course not all immigrant peasants get possession of land.
The ragged Portuguese porter in the streets of Rio, the barefoot
German peon who works beside a negro loading trucks in the
streets of Porto Alegre, Brazil, or shovels dirt beside a better
dressed Indian in Temuco, Chile, the Basque or Italian who does

Fig. 4 — Upper Class Chilean. A type not infrequent in Santiago.

Fig. s — Winter sunshine in Creole Chile. Here the visitor may tie his horse to the rail while he dismounts
to drink. A poor neighborhood in the outskirts of Los Andes. Houses of brick and stucco with tile roof. Far
ther back one of adobe and thatch.

COLONIES IN SOUTHERN SOUTH AMERICA 7
hea-vy work in the streets of Buenos Aires, is merely a better
worker, more frugal and- steadier than the Indian peon or roto.
The upper class Creole regards all these, just as he regards the
peon and the roto, as a class apart, bom to do his work and to
accept his control. They are usually as ignorant as the Indians,
from whom they are distinguished by steadier habits of labor, by
less drunkenness, but especially by a more eager desire to save
money in order to buy land. ¦ As soon as the immigrant acquires
land his children go to school. In these children is being born a
new race of South Americans, whose development is going to
parallel our own. In them South America is being colonized.
The American Geographical Society's Expedition
To visit these people and study their colonization where it is
furthest advanced, that is in southern Brazil and Argentina, was
the object of the American Geographical Society's Expedition
to South American Colonies in 191 8.
As the continent is reached most quickly now by the West
Coast route, it was proposed to make also such an examination
of the German settlements in southern Chile as the on-coming
rainy season might allow before crossing the Andes. Leaving
New York April 2, 1918, we reached Valparaiso April 21, passing
from there to Santiago and down the whole length of the great
interior valley to Temuco, Valdivia, and Puerto Montt. There
the valley plunges under sea, and the Chilean archipelago begins*.
We knew that much of Chile was semiarid and treeless, like
the Argentine Republic. I had seen a little of it in 1886 and had
lived in the Argentine. The value of water for irrigation, the scar- -
city of lumber and even of firewood, the splendor, of the sunlight,
and the tonic of the air were therefore familiar things. On the
other hand, it was from the charm of woodland scenes in New
England and the Middle West that we had drawn pleasant
anticipations of the German settlements in southern Chile's
woodlands. A further impression, gained from our reading, was
that the region was thoroughly Germanized. It is a widespread
notion. As a sufficient example a recent passage will serve:

8 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
"The temperate portions of southern Brazil and Chile are dotted
with German villages, in which the majority of the people are
Germans and the German language is spoken." ' Puerto Montt,
one man assured us, was wholly German, a hotbed of German
intrigue. The Germanization of Southern Chile a Myth
It was with some astonishment, therefore, that, as we pene
trated into the parts of Chile regarded as German, we saw only
a few Germans among considerable numbers of Chileans. On
the streets, in the shops, and at railway stations the Germans
became more in evidence as we went farther south; but always
there were more Chileans than Germans, generally ten or twenty
times as many. In central Chile, north of Concepci6n, the oc
casional Germans belonged to the upper class, spoke Spanish,
and were among the most intelligent looking people to be seen.
Most of the Germans of the south were of a different type, more
peasant-like. Occasionally we saw a ragged and barefoot German
working at some manual labor alongside a Chilean roto. More
usually the German workmen were engaged in some handicraft,
as carpentry or shoemaking; but they were always a minority.
Closer examination and study confirmed our first impression.
The Germanization of southern Chile is simply a myth. There
is no town or settlement in the country where a majority of the
people are of German origin or speak German. In Cautin,
Valdivia, and Llanquihue, the three provinces at the southern
end of the great valley where most of the "German'' settlements
are, the census of 1907 reported a total population of 363,000
inhabitants. Persons of German descent in all Chile were not
more than 30,000, of whom 20,000 were estimated to have
kept their German speech. Many of these Germans live in Val
paraiso and Santiago, being engaged in business there, and are
not colonists at all. For comparison it is of interest to note that
the same authority estimates that there are 10,000 persons of
English speech in the country, and these I presume are almost
' Journ. of Geogr., Vol. 19, 1920, p. 47.

GERMANIZATION OF SOUTHERN CHILE 9
all in business. The authority is Dr. Carl Martin, long a resident
of southern Chile, a patriotic German who loved the old Empire
wholeheartedly. His book on Chile^" is far the best work on the
country from every point of -view. Thayer Ojeda says that the
population of German race numbers 40,000, but he gives no
grounds for the statement."
It may be thought that our impressions in travel and the above
figures are reconcilable on the bases of the existence of scattered
small settlements, possibly off the railroad, in which Germans
preponderate. But this is not the case: the German settlements
are well known by name, and I have visited them. Puerto Montt,
it is agreed, is the most German of all. I saw there the same
thronging Chileans, among whom were a few Germans. In the
proclamation of April, 1918, calling the 44 young men of Puerto
Montt newly of age to their military service in the district,
there were no more than three German names. La Alianza
Liberal of May I announced four births in the city, Jose Manuel
Rojel, Eeuina (Eduina?) Bustamante, Olga Almonacid, and
Ilda Frida Tolg, of which names only the last can be German.
Puerto Montt was said to speak German and read German
newspapers. I was even told I should find people there who were
bom in the country but could speak no Spanish. All this is ex
aggeration of the grossest sort. Of certain places, like the Ger
man hotel Heim, such a statement may be true; but apart from
that I heard Spanish everywhere. Two newspapers in Spanish,
La Alianza Liberal and El Llanquihue, were offered for sale
everywhere, but I could not get any German paper. The direc
tory of the telephone company, Sociedad Progreso de Llanquihue,
lists as newspapers (diarios), the two mentioned above and no
others. I found two persons who spoke no Spanish, but both
were German-bom. No street in the city has a German name,
nor is German used on signs. Even German business houses
give their names in the Spanish form — Casa Carsten, Hermanos
Schmidt, etc. I noticed similar absence of the use of German in
1° Carl Martin: Landeskunde von Chile, Hamburg, 1909.
n Thayer Ojeda, p. 112.

10 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
other "German" points, in Valdivia, for instance, and no towns
have German names. In this respect Chile is quite unlike
southern Brazil, with its Blumenau, Hamburger Berg, etc.
On the other hand. Dr. Martin's figures include 10,000 people
of German origin who have lost their German speech. On search
ing through the narratives of German settlements one finds many
a mention of Chileans who helped in the work of German coloni
zation, but this mention is casual and unaccentuated. We are
given to understand that it was the Germans who did everything.
At Humin, for instance, a few miles east of Los Angeles, 20
German families settled in 1859, prospered exceedingly, but
became Chilean of speech, until in 1890 a teacher was brought
from the fatherland and a German school was set up. Yet no
Chileans are mentioned at Human at all. How did the children
pick up their Spanish? From whom? Evidently the Chileans
were there, although ignored, and they could not have been un-
influential or insignificant if they managed to impose their
language on the newcomers. As a matter of fact, we learn from
Palacios ^^ that, after allowing 36 German families to choose
lots at Human, the authorities distributed 80 lots of the same
size among Chileans.
One hears much of the Germans at Temuco, capital of province
Cautin. I was even told it was a German town. It is not that at
all. Temuco is a young and modest town, but its low wooden
houses without the charming patio of plant and garden are un
speakably dreary (Fig. 11). Itwas founded in 1881, in the course
of opening up the Frontera. There is a mile of road just outside
the town known as the German Road. Along it are about a dozen
pleasant little German houses set back in attractive gardens of
flowers and vegetables. Most of the land immediately around
the city is in German hands, but of the province they own but two
per cent. The Germans of the city numbered 500 in a population
of 16,000. The mayor was an Englishman of charming manners,
who spoke German and Spanish as well as English and was re
puted to be strongly pro-German ! I get the number of Germans
^ Palacios, Vol. 2, p. 235.

GERMANIZATION OF SOUTHERN CHILE ii
from Dr. Martin, who took the trouble to estimate the number of
Germans or German families in each of the so-called German
settlements, with very astonishing results. Of Lautaro's 3,139
inhabitants, 70 are Swiss and German; CollipuUi has 20 Germans
in 2,806 persons; Ercilla 160 in 1,450; Victoria 410 in 10,002;
Quillen 170 in 1,191; Nueva Imperial 80 in 2,537; and Carahue
and Bajo Imperial between them have 70 in a total of 3,036.
Dr. Martin distinctly states that Germans are always minorities.
Of Puerto Montt he says (p. 728), "the Germans, even if we count
with them the few French, English, and Scandinavians who have
come in with them, hardly form a sixth part of the population."
There are many in Valdivia, but he does not give the number.
They must be a minority, however, for there were enough
Chileans in the city of Valdivia at the last elections (1917) to
oust all but one of the German city councillors because of arro
gant talk about the war. Of the rural properties in Valdivia
province that were worth over $2,000 "Chilean" in 1907, 64 per
cent were in the hands of descendants of Spaniards, 25 per cent
in the hands of people of German descent.^^
The Chilean Germans are always surrounded by an over
whelming majority of Chileans. In the south these consist of
Chileans of the lower class, except for a certain proportion of
officials and army officers. The upper class Creole Chilean hardly
counts the rainy south as part of Chile and would not care to
live there. The Germans, too, admit that their colonies were
long cut off from the great vital centers (Lebenscentren) of the
land. A good many of the German immigrants and their children
have moved into what we may call Chile proper, or Creole Chile.
The Llanquihue lands proved so small for the large German
families that between 1900 and 1910 an emigration of colonists'
sons had begun to provinces farthernorthand to the Argentine."
Those who persevered and stayed on the land have won a valuable
property at the cost of most strenuous labor. They have a po
sition immeasurably above their status as peasants in Germany
" Thayer Ojeda, p. 146.
" Deutsche Arbeit in Chile: Festschrift des deutschen wissenschaftlichen Ver-
eins ZU Santiago, 2 vols., Santiago, 1910, 1915; reference in Vol. i, p. 54.

12 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
but far below the condition of Germans who came to the United
States at the same time. Most of those who have gone into
Creole Chile have fared better, being for the most part skilled
workers in a land that lacks craftsmen. But they have not
usually become landowners, for land is not available there.
They have not acquired the same stake in the country as those
who have land.
The Forested Country of Southern Chile
From Valparaiso southward the landward or eastern side of
the coast ranges is notably dry, but from the Andes that wall
off the eastern view .water rushes across the valley flats in in
creasing abundance as one goes farther south, until in CollipuUi,
in latitude 38°S., there is a definite change from the landscape of
central Chile. A deep valley with rich green meadows across
the floor, with slopes of alternate green fields and expanses of
well-tilled red soil, with real woods of broad-leaved trees above —
there is something of home to the American in this view from the
high railroad bridge over the Malleco; but it is the end of old
Chile, the Chile of the sunny stretches, of dusty roads and old
Creole life. Down by the river is a little sawmill. Here begins
the rainy, woodsy country. Here the house is of wood with roof
of shingle or shakes or corrugated iron in place of thatch or tile.
The patio has disappeared; the wooden houses are not built
around an inner court, and there are no bars on the windows.
We have entered the Frontera, the northern limit of the forested
country of southern Chile.
Off the middle part of the coast of the Frontera is the litde
island of Mocha. Now Mocha is a division point in the Chilean
climate. Northward from this point the cool, northward-flowing
Humboldt Current and feeble southerly winds affect a coast that
already dry near Valparaiso becomes sterile further north. At
Mocha winds and currents from the west impinge strongly on
the coast; from here southward we are in the belt of the stormy
westerlies, and the driving rains and dripping forests of that
region are the result. As we have said the wooded country today

FORESTED COUNTRY OF THE SOUTH

13

T

<<s.

^ \-; > CRE

R-y

S'i nliago

^

visibly begins at CollipuUi, in the central
valley, a little north of 38° S. The long
trip down through the central valley to
Puerto Montt is through an almost con
tinuous forest. Here and there are dreary
slashings like those of northern Michigan,
but still the trees are abundant and tall
fine growths. It is a splendid forest, a
delight to the visitor's eye. "What are
those handsome trees?" we ask a resident.
"Those are coihue, the pest of Chile." They
are simply giant weeds and only too abun
dant. Too heavy and weak for lumber, too
wet to bum, they simply keep out the sun
and make a quagmire of the ground, cum
bering the earth with their useless presence.
The Chilean forests are all too thinly
sprinkled with useful trees. There are very
few conifers. The Chilean pine, Araucaria,
grows in limited groves far up in the Cor
dillera. The pinones, seeds from the cones,
provide the Indians with an important
article of food; they are even sold on the
Santiago market, but the lumber is rarely
seen. The alerce, another conifer, is good
and light, but it also is scarce. For a
hundred years the Indian has brought out
on his back alerce boards from the diffi
cultly penetrable interior. In Darwin's
day they were the only money product
of Valdivia, the land beyond the Frontera.
The European
Fig.' 6 — Colonial Chile. Heavy woods cover the Frontera
and the lands farther south. [ The Chile of actual occupa-
tion'was between Frontera and Valparaiso, and there was
thin occupation toward La Serena and the desert as the
widening of the lines of shading suggests. The immigrant

ONTERA

SOUTHERN TORTS
I Coneepcida
ZArauco
3LebuAValdivJA SOsomo
G lUmpal
7 Impcml

colonies have been located in Frontera or Valdivia.

poplar, which is
grown all over
Chile beside
roads and fields,

14 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
is of great use in house building. In Creole Chile, where all the
houses are of brick, the floors, rafters, etc., are usually
of poplar. An admirable Chilean wood for doors and
windows is rauli, but it is too scarce and dear. Of heavier
woods for cabinet work there is no lack; it is construction wood
that is lacking. To Holdich it seemed "almost incredible that
the chief source of supply of lumber for the dockyards should
be California." '^ The long roof beams of consul Patillo's fac
tory in Temuco are of American white pine, imported into the
heart of the Chilean lumber industry. For fifty years there has
been a considerable importiation of Oregon pine for long light
timbers. Today the principal import is of Douglas fir.
Here and there great lumber piles beside the railroad attest
that lumbering is an important industry in the south. Actual
figures are hard to obtain, for "no institution in Chile, private or
governmental, is concerned in the compilation of statistics of
lumber production," but an estimate for an average year, 1913,
placed the domestic production at 45 per cent of the country's
requirements.!^ In this year import of lumber was valued at
$1,140,000 (United States).
Physiographically the Chilean coast resembles that of our
Pacific states, British Columbia, and Alaska, in reversed but
symmetrical arrangement. Nearest the equator the deserts of
northem Chile match those of Lower California; the central
valley of Chile between the coast ranges and the Andes matches
the great valley of California between the coast ranges and Sierra
Nevada; the wooded valleys of Cautin, Valdivia, and Llanquihue
end at the sea at the Gulf of Reloncavi just short of the island of
Chiloe, just as the wooded valleys of western Oregon and Wash
ington end at the sea in Puget Sound just short of the island
of Vancouver. Then follow the Chilean sounds and fiords be
tween the coastal Andes and the Chilean archipelago, just like
the Alaskan sounds and fiords between the coast mountains
" T. H. Holdich: The Countries of the King's Award, London, 1904, p. 196.
" Roger E. Simmons: Lumber Markets of the West and North Coasts of South
America, U. S. Dept. of Commerce, Special Agents !Ser. No. 117, Washington, D. C,
1916.

FORESTED COUNTRY OF THE SOUTH 15
and the Alaskan archipelago. One might expect Puerto Montt,
situated in the forest country on the Gulf of Reloncavi, quite as
Seattle is on the wooded shores of Puget Sound, to show some
parallelism to the American city in its expansion. The cities
were of about the same size in 1875. In that year Puerto Montt
had 2,137 inhabitants and in 1916, 7,255; whereas Seattle grew
from a population of 1,107 iu 1870 to a population of 237,194 in
1910 and of 315,652 in 1920. As a matter of fact, lumber seems
to do nothing for Puerto Montt. It is true that the railway
did not reach Puerto Montt till about 1912, while the Northern
Pacific reached Puget Sound in 1883; but it was not the railroad
that developed lumbering in Washington. Nor is it for lack of
enterprise and knowledge of lumbering in Chile, for North
American lumbermen are active there. The fact is simply that
the Chilean forests are of very moderate value, while those of
Washington are unrivaled.
"It will not even burn, it is so wet,'' they say of the coihue. In
these rain-drenched forests a fire is actually difficult to set.
Darwin, writing from Chiloe in 1835, says, "The whole of ChiloS
took advantage of this week of unusually fine weather to clear
the ground by burning. In every direction volumes of smoke
were curling upwards. Although the inhabitants were so assidu
ous in setting fire to every part of the wood, yet I did not see
a single fire which they had succeeded in making extensive." "
Twenty years later when P6rez Resales was arranging the first
important settlement of Germans near Lake Llanquihue he hired
Indians to clear away the woods by fire. Of course the drier sorts
of lumber, the only good sorts the Chilean forests provide, suf
fered fearfully in these burnings. What resisted fire and remained
abundant were the wet, less usable materials. The Llanquihue
burnings did clear off a good deal of ground, but a narrow escape
of the leader of the party illustrates the singular wetness of the
woods. It happened at one moment that this Indian found him
self surrounded by the fires that had been set, but by digging a
" Charles Darwin: A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World, London, 1886,
p. 296.

i6 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
hole in the wet ground under a big tree he escaped unharmed."
In their wetness the Chilean woods are quite unlike our forests.
"In winter the climate is detestable, and in summer it is only a
little better. I should think there are few parts of the world,
within the temperate regions, where so much rain falls — the
sky [is] almost always clouded; to have a week of fine weather
is something wonderful. It is even difficult to get a single glimpse
of the Cordillera: during our first visit once only the volcano of
Osomo stood out in bold relief . . . The forests are so impenetra
ble that the land is nowhere cultivated except near the coast and
on the adjoining islets. Even where paths exist, they are scarcely
passable from the soft and swampy state of the soil . . . In . . .
shaded paths it is absolutely necessary that the whole road should
be made of logs of wood, which are squared and placed by the
side of each other. From the rays of the sun never penetrating
the evergreen foliage the ground is so damp and soft that,
except by this means, neither man nor horse would be able to
pass along.""
In the southern provinces settlements are completely isolated
during the rainy season. There is only one piece of good road in
all southern Chile, the 12 miles from Puerto Montt to Puerto
Varas, which cost the government $40,000. In the forest, plank
road is the only expedient for the worst stretches. In low places
the planks quickly look as if they had been blown up by a mine.
At Valdivia the plank road is in excellent condition for three
miles out of the city. Then it gives place to mud, and only a
horse or an ox team would take you further. How travel is
affected by the coming on of the rains may be judged by the fact
that in winter no through ticket can be bought from Santiago
to points south of Valdi-via. \A'hile wood is the main material for
building, it is gradually being replaced in the more pretentious
buildings at Puerto Montt and Valdivia by corrugated iron, as
alone able to withstand the violence of the rain for any length
of time.
'8 Vicente Perez Rosales: Recuerdos del Pasado C1814-1860), Biblioteca de
escritores de Chile, Vol. 3, Barcelona, 1910, p. 407.
" Darwin, pp. 273, 274.

BEGINNINGS OF FOREIGN COLONIZATION 17
Of the south of Chile generally one may say what Darwin said
of near-by Chiloe, "If we could forget the gloom and ceaseless rain
of winter, Chiloe might pass for a charming island." ^'' Of the
character of the winter rains we had some experience — for we
reached Temuco as the rainy season was coming on. A steady
downpour fell all day and most of the night. We were glad of the
corrugated iron roof, glad of the solid foundations and walls to
withstand the brown floods racing down the street. How to
cross the streets was a problem. Fortunately the walks were
high above the roadway, but that did not help when one came
to a comer. Beyond the little paved district of the center of the
city one was dependent on planks laid across the mud at each
street comer. \t one of these comers we had a charming illus
tration of Chilean manners. An immaculate Chilean officer met
us in the middle of the street and stepped unhesitatingly and
smilingly into the deep mud with his beautifully polished boots
to make room for two civilians. Prussian officers may have
instructed him in warfare, but not in manners.
Elsewhere I have called 80 or more inches of rain excessive.
Southern Chile has certainly excessive rain. The Indian becomes
accustomed to it. He lies out in a heavy rain all night un
protected and reports feeling well in the morning. The white man
finds so much water a great affliction.
Beginnings of Foreign Colonization in Chile
At the date of Chilean independence the Araucanian Indians
were undisputed masters of the Frontera. The country beyond,
on the mainland, was Valdivia. In 1861 the part south of the
Rio Bueno (40° 15' S.) was set off as Llanquihue.
We get a tolerable idea of the state of the region at the time
from Darwin's narrative of 1835.^^ It consisted of great expanses
of impassable forest in which were scattered occasional grassy,
open plains with more fertile soil, much as the oak openings
'» Darwin, p. 297.
21 Ibid., pp. 297-299.

i8 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
were scattered through the woods of southern Michigan.^^ '"Yhe
Llanos are the most fertile and thickly peopled parts of the
country, as they possess the immense advantage of being nearly
free from trees. . . . I have often noticed with surprise, in wooded
undulatory districts, that the quite level parts have been desti
tute of trees." The few inhabitants were Chilianized Indians.
"The town [Valdivia] is situated on the low banks of the stream
and is so completely buried in a wood of apple trees that the
streets are merely paths in an orchard.'' Materials brought from
Santiago were said to come from "Chile." Priests and officials
from Santiago regarded themselves as exiled into a wilderness.
This was not Chile, but Chilean territory. In 1850 it was still
in the Convict Zone, to which criminals were banished. The
poorer Chileans found it hard to get land, even when willing to
undertake the difficult task of clearing it. First, they had to
apply to an official surveyor, paying him 50 cents (United States)
for each cuadra (nearly i^ acres). Then the surveyor fixed a
price and put the land up at auction three times. If no one bid
higher than the appraised value, the applicant might have it at
that price.
From the earliest days of independence the Chilean govern
ment appears to have been desirous of attracting foreign coloni
zation. The law of 1824 provided that a foreigner who would
(i) set up in Chile a factory to work Chilean products, use
Chilean workmen, and make no secret of his processes could
be granted land for factory and plantation and exemption from
all tax for a period of years; a foreigner who would (2) settle
in Chile as agriculturist could be given land at the discretion of
the authorities and exemption for 10 years or more from tax on
the products of wild land that he made productive. The law of
1845 pro-vided (l) that the President might assign a suitable
part of 6,000 cuadras of vacant land owned by the state to es
tablish colonies of natives and foreigners who came to the coun
try to settle down and carry on some useful trade there and might
2= Compare Holdich-s comment (op. cil., p. 308) "Beautiful glades in the forest
where grass undulations stretch in many folds from one wall of trees to another,
inviting European colonization."

THE VALDIVIA COLONY 19
give them tools, seeds, and other things necessary for cultivating
the ground and for help the first year, and afterwards aid them
further; (2) that lands given in Creole Chile were not to exceed 8
cuadras for a father and 4 more for each son over 14 years of age,
and north or south of Creole Chile were not to exceed 24 cuadras
for a father and 12 more for each son over 14; (3) that the
Treasury should pay the cost to be reimbursed as the President
might provide; (4) that there should be 20 years' exemption of
taxation; and (5) that all such colonists should become and
formally declare themselves Chileans. The law of 1845 provides
for natives as well as foreigners, but the only instance in which
the interests of the former were met appears to be the distribu
tion made at Human (see p. 10).
The government, however, was .hard up and failed to give
the early colonists the help that had been promised. The early
German settlers got along only because they brought money
with them (Hoerll estimates $200,000 in 1850-1858). Further
more, the actual beginnings of colonization were unofficial.
The Valdivia Colony
Ferdinand Flindf, a Valparaiso merchant and quondam Prus
sian consul, had bought 1,000 cuadras of land for his firm be
tween La Uni6n and Osomo and conceived the idea of bringing
a number of skilled German laborers and their families for
its better development. He made his arrangements through
B. E. Philippi, who had a brother in Germany at Kassel, and
eight families arrived in August, 1846. There were two black
smiths, a carpenter, a cabinetmaker, a millwright, a shoemaker,
a gardener, and a shepherd. They had experienced trying
weather in their four months' voyage and suffered a distinct
shock at sight of the wretched hovels of Valdivia — mere posts
with a roof of thatch and the dirt for floor. For further dis
couragement the news met them at Valdivia that Flindt, their
patron, had failed. However, another German, named Kinder-
mann, bought the property and renewed the contract; and, best
of all, the workmen found their skill in immediate demand at

20 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
wages that seemed to them munificent. They appear to have
settled at Bella Vista, the place for which Flindt had destined
them, and it is probable that the weather of 1846-1847 was
unusually agreeable. They wrote home letters expressing the
greatest enthusiasm for southern Chile, praising the soil, the
cUmate, and the freedom and lack of all oppression there. The
letters must have had strong influence in Germany. These
first families were Protestants.
For several years the Chilean government, which consisted of
the great Creole landowners of central Chile, had been planning
German immigration with a view to settling Valdivia. PhiUppi
had carefully worked out a plan which was accepted, and in
July, 1848, he was sent as the representative of the Chilean
government to bring some hundreds of families of skilled workers
from Germany, with the proviso that they were to be Catho
hcs. Another agent was sent to Ireland to get three or four hun
dred Catholic families from there. Meanwhile Kindermann had
gone to Germany to get more settlers. These he meant to place
on lands which his father-in-law had "bought" from the Indians.
The purchase was a farce on both sides. The Indians, on the
one hand, made up camp after camp on pieces of land that
Renous desired, entertained him at these camps as owners, and
went through the pretense of a sale, while he, for his part, handed
them some trifle of insignificant value. In this way he had
acquired title to very large tracts. Neither these titles nor
Kindermann's immigration project had government support.
Indeed, the notion of Protestant immigration, especially in
compact bodies, was naturally distasteful to the influential
Catholic clergy of Chile. But Kindermann succeeded in arousing
the interest of an emigration society in Stuttgart, to whom he
sold 40,000 cuadras of his Valdivian lands and an option on 40,000
more. To individuals also he sold considerable areas of land.
One of these was Traugott Bromme, a name that occurs in the
thirties on a number of German circulars urging emigration to
Michigan. While Kindermann was winning these successes by
his personality and his recommendations from Germans in

THE VALDIVIA COLONY 21
Chile, aided no little by the letters sent home by his eight con
tented settlers in Bella Vista, the official parties inviting Irish
and German Catholics met no success at all. In Germany the
bishops forbade emigration to Chile. It seemed as if Catholic
immigration were unattainable.
Back in Chile things did not go well. Kindermann's land-
buying father-in-law had roused antagonism by his operations.
The state took a hand and declared all his titles void. And then
— the colonists began to arrive. All through the year 1850 they
came, 287 of them in five successive ships, only to learn that the
land which they had bought and had come out to settle was not
theirs, had not belonged to Kindermann at all. And his efforts
to have his land purchases validated failed completely.
\ Nothing but the unlimited hospitality and kindness of the
Chileans of Valdivia, the omnipresent majority which is given no
credit for the "German"' colonizing, carried the Germans through
their troubles. Perez Rosales, the government immigration
agent, proved sympathetic, prudent, and capable, as he did
throughout his whole career. Kindermann sent some families
to Bella Vista to get land near there and at Osomo. The island
Teja in the river opposite Valdivia was sold to others by the
French general, Benjamin Viel, who had come to Chile with
San Martin, and land was found for them to purchase at various
^points in the neighborhood. Some families went north to the
cities of Chile proper, though their ignorance of the Spanish
language and the customs of the country served largely to deter
the German immigrants from this step. Also, their eager desire
for land induced them to undergo great privations. There is no
doubt that they had to work much harder on the frontier than in
the cities. At the same epoch (1870) Franceschini^ estimates that
there were 3,000 Italians in Chile, and none of them farm colon
ists, since "the larger cities offered greater earnings than tilling
the soil with less sacrifices." This is still true. Probably a major
ity of the 30,000 of German stock in Chile are now in the cities.
^Antonio Franceschini: L'Emigrazione italiana nell'America del Sud, Rome,
1908, p. 762.

22

RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE

100 JIlLES

Fig. 7 — Little German colonies in Llanquihue. The Andes — here shown by
stippling — occupy half the width of Chile, and in their valleys lie many alpine lakes
of great beauty, a natural result of heavy rainfall and ancient gladation. The whole
region is covered with dense wet forest. The best land is in grassy openings in the
central valley, which is here from 25 to 35 miles wide. The Germans settled mainly
about Valdivia, Osorno, Puerto Montt, and the shores of lake Llanquihue.

THE LLANQUIHUE COLONY 23
It is not quite accurate to say no Catholics were wiUing to
come to Chile, for 14 persons of that faith did come in the last
ship of 1850. As Catholics they enjoyed government protection
from the start and were given good lands at Cudic6 near the
present city of La Uni6n. A few other Catholics came later, and
not a little trouble rose between them and their Protestant
countrymen. Later we hear of the leader of these Cudic6 Ger
mans at Santiago accusing his Protestant rivals of attempts to
convert Chileans to Protestantism. A commission was even sent
into southern Chile to investigate, with the result of completely
exonerating the Protestant Germans from the charge.
However great the hardships that met the Germans on their
arrival, the results of their activities were immediate. There
were no skilled workers in Valdivia before them. All but the crud
est products of civilized industry the rich had brought from
Europe, the poor had done without. But now shops were opened,
wares were made and put on sale at moderate prices, and money
at once began to circulate for unskilled labor too. Whether the
Chileans admired the German houses and German bread as
much as the German narrators would have us believe, may be
open to doubt; but it may be taken for certain that "they were
astonished to see the Germans at work early in the morning,
keeping on till nightfall every day in the week, with the master
first in the shop and last to leave it."
It would be difficult to find fault with the Chilean government
for not making arrangements to receive immigrants whom they
had not invited and did not want and who had come when the
government was hard up for money. It is to their credit that they
recognized at once that the newcomers were of the greatest
promise for the future of Valdivia. The insistence on Catholic
immigrants seems to have been dropped.
The Llanquihue Colony
Yet more important were the preparations made to receive the
immigrants still to come. The government had made beginnings
of land surveys for the Catholic colonists that Philippi was

24 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
to have brought. Perez Rosales ^ now went with an engineer to
the shores of Lake Llanquihue in the hope of finding that its
southern end was somewhere near the sea, since the universal
badness of the roads made the interior of Valdivia almost useless.
Such a trip was an exploring expedition of a very serious kind.
Plenty of good land was found, but it was overgrown by wet
forests. The Indians were set to remove them by burning in the
district between Osomo and the lake. In three months this
was accomplished, not thoroughly, but sufficiently in the driest
places to afford land enough for the time being. The commander
of a Chilean warship at Ancud was commissioned to cruise
to the eastward and look for an approach to Lake Llanquihue.
He found the Gulf of Reloncavi, with a settlement of Indian
woodcutters at its northern end where Puerto Montt now stands.
The lake, they told him, was but 12 mUes away. The woodcutters
put us in touch with the only important industry of the region
in the early days — that of bringing out boards or logs from the
forests on the heads of Indians or by horses or canoes. Captain
Basil Hall, who took San Martin up the coast to Peru in 1820,
reports purchasing at Tom6, near Concepci6n, beams 20 feet
long by a foot square at five shillings apiece. The wood, he says,
was Liiie (lingue?), "as good as ash." ^^
Meantime new arrivals had been gathering at Corral, where
they had no better shelter than the old Spanish fortress, and their
number had been augmented by some of the earlier colonists
whose land had turned out to be poor. Rosales felt that he could
not wait to explore the road from the gulf to the lake but set
out at once with a shipload of 212 German colonists from Corral
to Puerto Montt. They immediately set to work on cutting a
road to connect with Lake Llanquihue. The passage through the
woods from this point to the lake proved to be extraordinarily
difficult. The woods were so wet they would not burn at all; the
ground was a veritable sponge into which one sank at every step.
^* Perez Rosales, pp. 399-418.
"^ Captain Basil Hall: Extracts from a Journal Written on the Coasts of Chile,
Peru, and Mexico in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, 4th edit., 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1825;
reference in Vol. I, p. 348.

Fig. 8 — Puerto Montt on the Gulf of Reloncavi, dominated by the quarters of thc
Llanquihue regiment.

Fig. 9 — German houses at Puerto Montt, of wood with roof of corrugated iron.
Windows, roof, and the whole aspect of the house are foreign to South America.

THE LLANQUIHUE COLONY 25
The first day two of the immigrants perished in the mud of the
forest. The road had to be cut out with the ax, step by step.
It took several months to traverse the 12 miles. Meanwhile a
road was also being cut from Osorno to Llanquihue. The Lake
Llanquihue colony was formally opened on February 12, 1853,
at Puerto Montt. That was in the summer dry season.
That fall (April) Perez Rosales left them for Santiago, after
making a contract with Ruiz de Arce of Valdivia to supply the
colonists with stipulated rations of food through the winter.
We can understand his eagerness to get back to Chile, into sun
light and out of the incessant rains, after his long expedition
through the woods the year before, his illness that resulted from
the upsetting of his dugout canoe on the lake, and his many
efforts to provide necessities and encouragement for the disap
pointed colonists. But for the colonists there was no escape to
homes in sunny Creole lands. The winter that followed was one
to try their souls, and they were sorely unprepared to meet it.
They had been busy clearing the forest and had made no plan
tations as yet. The contractor on whom their food supply
depended sent them nothing at all, and Osorno, their nearest
point of supply, was 72 miles away through well-nigh trackless
forest. That May and June the rains were extraordinarily
heavy. The country about Lake Llanquihue, always moss-
grown and oozy for the greater part of the year, was fairly flooded
with water; and communication through the woods became
almost impossible. It happens that we have records of rainfall
that year at Valdivia, just begun by a rather remarkable German
named Karl Anwandter, ex-mayor of Kalau in Germany and an
ex-member of the First Prussian Assembly, and of the Prussian
Assembly of 1848. He continued the series for many years, and
it shows the calamitous character of the wet season of 1853 when
a dry January was followed by a fearfully wet May and June.
In all the years since then. May has had a greater rainfall
only once and June but twice. Only in 1854 have the two months
May and June together had so much rain as this. Thus their first
two winters were harder for the newcomers than any year since.

26

RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE

The sufferings of that winter of 1853 were terrible. There
was no game in the woods, ^^ and there were no provisions on
hand. Men had to set out for Osorno through the flooded forests
and bring back what they could get on their backs. One settler
perished in crossing a flooded stream. No wonder some were dis
couraged. It must not be forgotten, however, that their sufferings

Rainfall 1852-53 MeanafZTyears.
I85Z Aug. 20.2  ...13
Sept. 10.2  _....7
Oct 2.4  _B
9.2  J
Dec. 3.8  ..5
1853 Jan. 0.4 3
S.5  .,3
Mch. 51.  7
Apr. 7.7..  9
May 21.8  ....._  15
June 29.5 .. . 18
July 10.9  16
Aug. £[.9.  J3

Fig. io — Diagram of monthly rainfall at Valdivia in inches. The thin line shows
the rainfall from the mean of 27 years, the thick one that of 1852-53, to illustrate
the extraordinary wetness of the first season the Germans spent on Lake Llanquihue.
Rain enough for a year fell in May, still more in June.

were purely physical. They had come out of the oppression of
German peasant life of 1848. Here they were free and in homes
of their own. The Chileans were always kind and helpful when
they reached them. The bad season was fought through, and
from that time things began to mend. With the harvests and,
above all, the products of German handicraft money began to
^ It seems agreed by all writers that the Chilean forests lack wild game. The
author saw ragged boys set out gleefully from Puerto Montt with guns and game
bags in May, 1918, who seemed to match nicely with other boys with big bunches
of partridges at stations a few miles north. But it appears certain that settlers in the
Chilean forests found none of the help from hunting that pioneers in the United
States enjoyed.

EARLY GERMAN SETTLEMENTS 27
circulate in Valdivia in a region where the only currency hereto
fore had been planks from the forest.
By 1861 the colonization of Valdivia and Llanquihue — ^set
off from Valdivia in that year — was complete. The government
of ChUe had spent $105,000 on the undertakings, of which
$40,000 was for the road from Puerto Montt to Lake Llanquihue,
the only good road — i.e. passable for anything but ox teams in
bad weather — in southern Chile. Good land cannot have been
very abundant in Llanquihue, or something kept it out of use,
for presently the sons of settlers and some settlers themselves
whose lands turned out badly appear in ChUoe or even farther
north and in the Argentine seeking land for settlement. Very un
favorable reports were spread in Germany about this time as to
the suitability of Chile for colonization — reports spread partly
by colonists who had made the attempt and failed. The for
bidding of emigration to Brazil by the Prussian minister Heydt
undoubtedly influenced all emigration from Germany. There is
no mention in the German accounts of Puerto Montt of the part
Chileans played in the settlement. Today they are six times as
numerous as the Germans. Indian blood is very strong in them,
as it was when Darwin saw them in 1835; but those who know
them differentiate them strongly from the Indians. All insist
that the Chileans are a race.
Success of the Early German Settlements
The German settlements of Valdivia and Llanquihue had
succeeded in introducing into the southern forests settlers of
European race around whom great numbers of Chileans gathered.
They succeeded in introducing much-needed handicrafts, shoe
factories, tanneries, and breweries, the products of which were
wanted and had previously been brought from Europe at greater
cost. They had given value to worthless southem lands. They
had aided in bringing law and order into forests that had been a
safe refuge for cattle thieves. They made possible the extension
of the great valley railway to Puerto Montt at the southern
extremity of the central vaUey of Chile. And it may be added

28 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
that numerous clean and comfortable little German hotels make
practicable touring of the lovely Llanquihue lake district in the
drier months of the year.
These were great accomplishments, so significant and im
portant to Chile, indeed, that it is hard to realize how slight
a thing numerically the German element was and is. Up to 1864,
when the settling of Llanquihue was practically finished, 3,367
persons in all had come, to whom must be added a few hundred
Catholic German Bohemians in 1873 and 1875. As there was al
ways a movement from the forest colonies to the cities of Chile
proper, the whole number of Germans who stayed can hardly
have been larger than 3,000. Two things are clear: that the in
dustry and persistence of these few German peasants and crafts
men had enormous significance compared with the accomplish
ment of the Chilean roto, who had much less technical knowledge
and a very low standard of life; and that it is absurd to say
that Valdivia and Llanquihue have become "wholly German."
The Germans are less than four per cent of the population of
Valdivia, less than five per cent of that of Llanquihue. It is
certain, however, that the Chilean government could not view
with entire satisfaction the fact that the Germans did not be
come Chileans. Their Chileanizing seems to consist in having
learned Spanish, which they generally know, and in wearing the
poncho. They have retained and cultivated every German
institution and custom in support of which the German Empire
showed a very active zeal. By 1904 there were 31 German
schools in the south, attended by 2,400 pupils and in some part
supported by funds from Germany. Though Chile did not and
probably could not provide Chilean schools, the presence of
foreign schools in her territory was disquieting. Also the Germans
were mostly Protestant, and Chile is officially Catholic. So the
Chileans would have liked more colonization like that of the
Germans yet not so completely German. In the colonization of
the Frontera, which followed and took proportions ten times as
great, immigrants were sought from many countries, but the
results have not been so striking.

THE FRONTERA 29
The Frontera in Chilean History
Up to the period of modem colonizing the Frontera was
distinctly a dominant feature in ChOean geography. As we have
said, the Frontera is the beginning of the wooded country of
southem Chile; and itwas here that the Araucanian Indians found
support in their three centuries of heroic resistance to the Span
iards. The frontier indeed is still older; for the Araucanians offered
a like resistance to the Incas, who failed to extend their conquests
beyond the Rio Maule (about 35° 30' S.). The northem limit of
"Araucania" may be taken approximately as the River Bio-Bio;
but during the first hundred years of Spanish rule the effective
frontier -was probably the Rio Maule, and there were several raids
across the stream, Santiago even being threatened on occasion.
By the peace of Quillin in the mid-seventeenth century the Bio-
Bio was formally recognized as the frontier. The rights of the
Araucanians to the territory south of the river were recognized by
treaty at the date of Chilean independence. The Araucanian
holdings south of the Bio-Bio, however, did not continue to the
southem extremity of the great valley. In the open glades farther
south Spanish settlements early displaced the Indians. Pedro de
Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile, established a series of forts be
tween Concepci6n and Valdivia. The forts in the Frontera proper
were immediately destroyed, and Valdivia himself was kiUed
by torture on the ruins of Tucap61, January i, 1554.^^ Attempts
at re-establishment were never successful; but beyond the
Frontera at Valdivia, Osomo, La Uni6n, and Calbuco on the
mainland and at Ancud and Castro in the island of Chiloe Spanish
settlement, despite many vicissitudes, was fairly permanent.
On the south the Frontera had no definite limit. The Province
of Valdivia, south of the Frontera, was formed in 1826 as one of
the original eight provinces of the republic and had no definite
northem boundary. Not till 1852 ^ was the River Tolten assigned
2' M. L. Amundtegui: Descubrimiento i conquista de Chile, 2nd edit., Santiago,
1913. p. 218.
^ At this same date Arauco was formed from the part of ConcepciOn west of
the Sierra Nahuelbuta. Concepci6n was one of the eight provinces into which
Chile was divided in 1826. It consisted of the present provinces of ConcepciGn,
Arauco, Bio-Bio, Malleco, and Cautin.

30 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
to bound it on the north. That was the first southern boundary
of the Frontera. In the Valdivian region there were Indians here
and there, probably in the rare openings in the woods, and there
were also scattered Chilean settlements. It is probable that the
very density of the forest kept the Indians farther north. This
explains the singular character of a frontier which limited Chile
on the south but at the same time had Chilean settlements
beyond it. It was a zone some 140 miles wide.
The Araucanian Indians as Forest Indians
All over America there has been a striking contrast between
the Indian of the forest, living by the hunting and fishing that the
forest pro-vided, and the Indian of the drier lands, who has raised
himself by irrigation of the sod to beginnings of agricultural life
and sedentary culture. The forest Indian has been savage and
unconquerable. With his stone a.\ he could kill his food, but he
could not cut down the trees of the forest. He must live, by
hunting and fishing; he must fight for the use of his hunting
ground. He became a ready fighter. The Indian of the arid
lands has a good soil that the forest cannot occupy because it is
too dry, upon which he is able to bring water from a stream by
simple appliances. His labor yields him abundant food but
requires him in return to tie himself to the spot. He is confronted
with civilization's earliest problems — division of land, water
rights, and construction of permanent houses. The permanent
house encourages the development of the arts that supply the
house with utensils and furnishings. Agricultural and artisan
classes arise who do not fight.
Asiatic and European cultures dawned in the arid valleys of
the Euphrates and the Nile and throve about the semiarid shores
of the Mediterranean. These latter cultures had to fall before the
repeated onslaughts of barbarians from the forest glades of
Germany. The Indians of the semiarid plateaus of Mexico, Peru,
and Bolivia sent their warrior class to meet the handful of Span
ish invaders. They were defeated ; and at once the whole social
organization found the Spaniards at its head in place of the

31
ruling Indians. Most remarkable is the rapidity with which the
Spaniard became master of the whole American semiarid region.
The forest Indian of the eastern United States was pushed"
slowly backward to the Mississippi Basin, to the plains and the
Rockies, as the young republic expanded between them and the
Atlantic. The Indians of the United States were fought and were
defeated and were put on reservations throughout three cen
turies. The Indians of the Uruguayan v.-oods delayed settlement
of Montevideo for nearly two hundred years. Fiercest and most
successful of all, the Araucanians maintained themselves in the
Chilean forests to our days, undefeated. So much did they hate
the white man and so little did they fear him that within a genera
tion two of their warriors have been known to attack a regiment
of Chilean troops in broad day so ferociously that, although the
ChUeans were ordered to take them alive and tried to, they had to
kill them. Another Araucanian carried off a boy out of the midst
of a regimental band by a sudden rush after riding up and down
the line and putting a spirited horse thiough his paces to distract
attention. Settling the Frontera
The successful settlement of the Germans in the almost im
passable forests of the south gave interest to the Frontera as the
possible site of further European settlements. As a matter of
fact, the time had long gone by when Chile had room for immi
gration. The arrival of immigrants always found the authorities
in trouble to get land on which to place them. In 1864 the only
unoccupied lands in Chile suitable for colonization were in the
Frontera, which a treaty reserved to the Indians. Most oppor
tunely in that year occurred an Indian uprising that relieved
the Chileans of obligation to respect the treaty. Chilean troops
armed with modern repeating firearms began the conquest of
the Frontera, land became available, and new colonization laws
were passed with the dates 1868, 1870, 187 1, and 1873. The
law of 1868 proposed "to aid the poor farm laborers and increase
with them the population of the Frontera.'' The land was to be
sold cheaply on long term without interest, 20 hectares on level

SETTLING THE FRONTERA 33
happen than getting these men into possession of Chilean soil.
No Creole laborer in America is a better worker than the Chilean
roto, none gives better value for his wages. His standard of
living is low, his wants are quickly satisfied. He will cultivate
less land than a European peasant and be satisfied with a smaller
yield, but he is the countryman of the ruling oligarchy of Chile.
He is still with them when the immigrant arrives. He con
stitutes the mass of the Chilean nation. His standards of living
are not raised by ejecting him from his farm to give it to Germans,
Italians, or Boers. This practice has made him a vagabond in
his own land and an emigrant to the Argentine, where his labor
meets a better reward.
A good many of the takers of land in 1871 were not agricultur
ists and sold their lots. Selling means buying, and from about
this time dates a growing speculation in land by the "rich Santia-
gueiios," some of them in office and all influential. These buyers
did not always farm. Some of them never pretended to do so.
The obligations of the colonist were not enforced against them.
They meant to hold the land for a rise in price. Then the at
tempt was made to get foreigners already resident in Chile to
take lots under this law. Failure again. Those who did so sold
their lots in too many cases without occupying them. They
preferred city work in Chtle, the attractiveness of which was
quite unknown to the German settlers in Valdivia, who had no
contact with the real Chile.
In 1 87 1 the experiment was made of renting land to poor Chil
eans who would clear and till it, at 15 to 20 cents Chilean a
hectare. Nothing could suit the roto better. It called for no
initial capital. It imposed no obligations. By 1873 there were
56,000 hectares of land rented under this project, probably to
two or three thousand Chileans, engaged in the highly desirable
work of getting more Chilean land cleared of encumbering forest
and broken for crops. The contribution made by the roto to this
task is larger than he has had credit for. Rarely did the best class
of European immigrants know how to go at the work of the New
World pioneer. Almost invariably they had to be taught, they

34 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
had to be shown by the Chilean peon, or they had to hire the
peon to do the work. But whether by intention or not, the law
gave the renter no security of tenure. The term of rental ex
pired at the will of the government without any recompense for
improvements. The land might be taken away from the tenant
on the eve of harvest — and this actually happened — ^when the
land was wanted for another occupant.
In 1873 was inaugurated the unfortunate system of auction
sales of public lands for a third of the value down and thereafter
ten annual instalments without interest. This was unfortunate,
because it has tended ever since to deprive the mass of Chileans
of land in their own country and also because it has provided the
rich with opportunity for enormous gains at the expense of the
country's welfare. The Treasury, it is true, got cash, which it
greatly needed in those days. An immediate consequence of the
auction sales was the legal eviction from the lands sold of renters
and squatters, hard-working ChUeans who were entitled to the
protection of their government. The evictions were carried out
by the very efficient Chilean police. Nothing has done more to
prepare Chile for the work of the socialists and anarchists that
are in evidence in the land today than these evictions of poor
Chileans in the interest of the rich people of the cities.
At this time, 1879-1881, came the War of the Pacific, between
Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. It not merely showed the military
supremacy of Chile on the western coast and gave her possession
of a vast fortune in guano and nitrates, but it also tended to knit
all classes of Chileans together in a consciousness of nationality,
rich and poor alike, for the sons of the rich shirked none of the
dangers of battle. Most remarkable was the effect on the Arau
canian Indians. They sent a contingent to the war. It dis
tinguished itself greatly and was so drawn to the Chileans by
the common adventure that the chiefs consented to withdraw
their claims of exclusive right to the Frontera and accept personal
allotments for Indian families instead. Thus the whole Frontera
came into the hands of the government, and a program of active
immigration was resolved on, a program stimulated by a consider-

SETTLING THE FRONTERA 35
able exodus of ChUean workmen after the war to the Argentine
Republic, Peru, and Panama. It is noted that in 1888 a Chilean
warship was sent along the coast as far as California to repatriate
any Chilean who wanted to come home.^ In 1882 the Paris Gen
eral Agency for Colonization and Immigration was established.
In 1883 a General Inspector of Lands and Colonization was ap
pointed, and in the next 18 years 36,000 immigrants were in
troduced, about ten times as many as the Germans of Valdivia-
Llanquihue. In round numbers there were 11,000 Spaniards, 8,500 French,
and about the same number of Italians, 4,000 Swiss, about 2,000
English, and 2,000 .Germans. Apparently non-Germans had
been definitely sought, of Latin rather than Teutonic races.
Less than a fifth of the immigrants were Swiss, Austrians, and
Germans with the solidarity o'f the common German tongue.
Germans, writing the history of colonization in Valdivia, tell
us that in 1850 Germany had been preferred to other countries
as a source of colonists because she was then a small power
not inclined to interfere in South America in behalf of her emi
grants as England and France had done. Perhaps this feeling
had disappeared in 1882.
Thus it happens that the Frontera towns of the eighties are
very composite in their foreign population. Probably their
Germans have greater solidarity than any other racial group
and less inclination to dissolve into Chilean nationality. The
Englishman grumbles a little at his children of a Chilean mother
speaking only Spanish but, more often than the German, takes
no steps to prevent it.
C0NTUI.M0: AN Example of Settlement in the Frontera
A Frontera town of very special aspect is Contulmo, a charming
village in an idyllic valley in the western slopes of Nahuelbuta,
the coast range that extends about one hundred miles southward
from Concepcidn. For the two driest months, January and
Febmary, it is a favorite summer resort, with large, well-painted
80 Franceschini, p. 765.

36

RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE

houses set in enormous fruit orchards among beautiful hills. A
little group of Germans from Berlin founded it in 1884, far from
the nearest railroad or even settlement. Their original destina
tion had been Traiguen, some 50 miles to the southeast. At
present a branch of the railroad from Concepci6n down the
central valley, on the eastern side of Nahuelbuta, terminates at
Traiguen. In those days the terminus was at Angol, a town of

100 Miles

Fig. 13 — The Frontera settlements. More than a third of the width of Chile is in
the Andes here. In the valley between the coast range and the Andes are Hum&n
where the Germans forgot their mother tongue, CollipuUi where the woods begin,
Puren from which the Contulmo settlers crossed the range to eastward when the
railhead was at Angol, Capitdn Pastene village of Nueva Italia, Temuco chief
town of the Frontera, and Pitrufqu^n and Gorbea where the "Boers" were placed.

SETTLING CONTULMO 37
7,000 on the northem border of the Frontera. Two circumstances
had contributed to turn the newcomers aside from Traiguen,
which was already settled. One was the desire of their German
leader to found a religious community as far as possible with
drawn from contact with other men. The other circumstance
was that Don Esteban Iriarte, governor of the Department of
Arauco, -was troubled by cattle thieves who took refuge in the
Nahuelbuta valleys. A German colony out there, he thought,
would enable him to get rid of the thieves.
The change of destination made the Berliners a lot of trouble.
It was the beginning of the rainy season. Only ox teams could
get loads over the wretched trails, and ox teams had been pro
vided for them by the Chilean government. Of course they knew
nothing about handling them, could not even remember that im
portant thing for driving them — the oxen's names ! Oxen ran
away everynight and every mora ing charged their awkward driv
ers when they tried to yoke them up. Wooden axles on which
turned wooden wheels caught fire or broke. Wagon boxes came
off or were overturned in the midst of streams, and women and
children were thrown into the water. At Pur6n a two weeks'
downpour compelled the colonists to wait in such shelter as
they could find there, before venturing to climb the washed-out
mountain paths to the crest of the range. But at last one April
day they arrived, all in good health, at a group of houses in a
clearing made by the ChUeans. Two weeks later they were
joined by another band of Berliners, strangers to them, who had
simply followed their trail to Contulmo.
How came the houses and the little clearing to be ready for
them? The story of Contulmo has been admirably told by Dr.
Albert Meyer.'' He gives no explicit answer to the question. I
quote all ¦ the references to the Chileans from his text. "Many
years before, Chilean countryfolk had settled here in the primeval
forest and had naturally picked out for themselves the best
places. The German colonists, to whom these partly cleared and
broken lands were assigned as property, might well be contented
" Deutsche Arbeit, Vol. 2, pp. 68-99.

38 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
with their lot." . . . "They had to share their home, that is,
the common Chilean rancho buUt of posts with a dirty roof of
straw and a smoking fire inside, with the Chilean fellow workers,
which naturally gave rise to a hundred kinds of annoyance." . . .
"When on their arrival the dirty ranches were assigned to the
colonists as dwellings, their condition was so far from Berlin
ideals of a dwelling that the immigrants shuddered at them and
couldn't bring themselves at first to unpack the chests and
trunks they had brought with them in the ox carts. The women
were the first to recover their old energy and love of labor.
They tried to make the ranchos at least habitable and contrived
order in them." And there was "the foreign language, the diffi
culty of understanding their Chilean fellow workers who had
stayed temporarily on the land and worked with the colonists
for half the harvest."'^ A little later colonists who had a'trade
became weary of the hard farm work and, much like Americans
in similar situations, "went into the nearest cities, got tolerable
wages, and left the farm work to their Chilean fellow workers. . . .
At the time of the harvest they either sent their wives or came
themselves for some weeks to harvest the crop with the Chileans
and divide it with them." The most remarkable of these little
comments on the Chileans which I have culled out of a long and
interesting account of the labors and sufferings of the Germans
is the following tribute to the good will of the Chileans toward
the strangers who had ousted them from their homes. "Never
was there any complaint in the colony or the neighborhood of
personal insecurity. Apart from two murders, which, we regret
to say, were committed by the Germans themselves in their own
families, there was only one attack known that cost a colonist
his life and has never been explained. No organized band of
highwaymen ever showed itself here." It is not clear whether
the Chileans whom the Germans found here were renters or
squatters. But it is certain that they had come out into the forest
with courage and zeal no whit less than that of the Germans and
enlarged the national territory by bringing their portion of the
'2 Deutsche Arbeit, pp. 7S, 8l, 82, 83.

SETTLING CONTULMO 39
forest lands into productivity. They had selected the good land,
they had cleared the ground of trees, they had built the ranchos,
miserable huts in which the roto, like the South American peon
everywhere, makes his home. They had deserved better of their
government than to be forced to give place to Germans who
seem to have had no slightest scruple at ousting them. It is
certain they could never have made Contulmo what it is today,
what German intelligence and resourcefulness have made it.
But the price of the difference has been the turning of Chilean
landholders into landless laborers. Was it worth it?
As it was, half of the Germans left Contulmo, so unattractive
did they find life there. They easily produced — or their ChUean
"fellow workers" did — more food than they could consume,
but low prices and the prohibitive cost of wagon transport
allowed them no outlet for their product. The roads were in
describably bad. Los Sauces was 32 miles away across the range,
Caiiete 26 miles to the northwest. Men there were who set out
with a cartload of wheat or potatoes and after two weeks of a
veritable Odyssey returned in rags with nothing to show for the
adventure but oxen so exhausted that they could not work
for months.
Prosperity was unknown at Contulmo until the colonists
learned that their cue was to raise fruit and honey. Then it
came at once. An excellent price stimulated them to increase
their product, a co-operative society took its sale in hand, and
the government helped by constructing better roads and pre
serving the forest trees from which the bees got their honey; and
.now good times are in full swing. Only the raUroad is lacking,
and that will come soon. They have done well, those Germans,
and they have been splendidly rewarded for their persevering
work. All classes in Chile speak well of them. But people out of
ChUe entirely overrate their significance. No small part of their
success is due to their despised Chilean neighbors. Doubtless
these, too, are sharing in the prosperity, if only as landless
laborers with abundant work. When the Germans boast that
they have not taken work from the Chileans in colonizing Chile

40 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
but have given them abundant work at "real wages," one must
suppose a reference to the great Creole estates where the poorer
people are expected to help in the work of the house and the
estate as inquilinos (tenants), with little pay apart from the use
of their little field and much smaller assistance from time to
time, as the patron thinks some need has become urgent. What
the Germans forget is that these men are a large part of the
Chilean nation and that before the Germans came they were in
possession of its soil.
Later Colonies and Evictions
Colonization with mixed races had its great try-out in the
island of ChUoe in 1895 and the following years.^' The Paris
Agency sent over 320 families and, as usual, without much ex
amination of their fitness. Land was found for them in Chilofe
by ejecting the native people. There were only 20 farm' workers
in the first 150 families. Many of them were criminals, many
were suffering from disabling diseases, many were not in families
and were of undesirable trades, as "seamstresses" and "dress
makers." Twenty-eight families were expelled — to the ChUean
mainland — ^for crime. Seventy-six were expelled as useless, and
others ran away, so that in 1899 only 153 families remained.
The government had paid for their transportation, provided
houses, hiring the ejected Chilotes to build them, as the immi
grants did not know how — gave them tools and seed with a sus
tenance allowance for the first year and longer of $30 a month —
three times the monthly wage of the Chilotes. This they were
to repay on easy terms, but of course the expelled families never
made any payments. The different nationalities did not, would
not, work together but split into hostile groups. This unde
sirable state of affairs the government had brought about by
ejecting from their holdings the industrious Chilotes in greater
numbers than the immigrants who were put in their places.
Vigorous protests to the newspapers, to officials, and to the
" Palacios, Vol. 2, p. 256. And see W. Anderson Smith: Temperate Chile,
London, 1899, pp. 59-74.

THE BOER COLONIES 41
Inspector General brought only the answer, "It is to be hoped
that the situation will change of itself when the people here
learn the advantages that colonization by foreigners brings
along with it." Apparently that time has not come yet.
To the mainland in 1903 came 48 families of "Boers," 280 in
dividuals. They were located at Pitrufquen and Gorbea on the
railroad some 30 miles south of Temuco. Lands were taken from
Chileans to provide for them, even from those who had filled all
legal requirements, "unless there was room beside the Boers. "^
The Minister's instructions to the Inspector General ran thus:
"You wUl leave in possession occupiers of lots who have built
houses and fulfilled the conditions necessary to become Chilean
colonists, if you have land enough to locate them as well as the
Boers. ... If you have not land enough, you may give them
(i.e. the ChUeans) land elsewhere, paying them for their im
provements; or you may, if you prefer, leave them in possession
of ten hectares and make up the rest of the lot that is taken from
them in lands somewhere else." The police drove the Chileans
off the best lots near the railway and then were set to teaching
the Boers the local methods of agriculture. But the people of
Chile have begun to protest against such proceedings. After a
useless appeal by the Temuco authorities, workmen's unions
in Temuco sent a petition to the Minister of Colonization calling
attention to the great work the evicted Chileans have accom
plished in bringing under tillage ground that was a wilderness.
But all without result. Indeed, the government had declared
its policy very plainly in 1902. The country needed foreigners,
and the poor ChUean squatters might very properly be dis
placed to get them. "The interest of the country in a division
of its lands among its own people is trifling in comparison with
the importance of fostering foreign immigration." "In our judg
ment, we must give up the idea of forming colonies of our citi
zens, as it is contrary to the clearest rules that should govern
in this matter." ^ IncidentaUy, it is stated that the much-talked-
" Palacios, Vol. 2, p. 280.
" Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 317.

42 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
of Boers mostly spoke Italian — ten were really Boers, the rest
were Uitlanders who had been working on the Boer railroads.
It is quite clear from all this that there are abundant ChUeans
to take up and clear any new lands to which the government
will let them have access.
In 1898 Congress approved a law empowering the President
to grant lands to Chileans, 150 hectares to a famUy, with 20
more for each child of 12 or more years, if the head of the famUy
could read and write, and had not been convicted of crime, "with
the same rights and obligations as for foreign colonists." This
entitled Chileans to transportation, house, tools, seed, and
monthly allowance for the first year, with the obligation to fence,
build, and cultivate. Had this law been put into effect, it would
have had the result of quickly clearing all of Chile's vacant lands
and bringing them under cultivation by native-born Chileans.
It was received with eagerness. Five thousand Chilean families
applied for land under it, many trying to get title to the land
they were occupying at the time; but not one of these applications
was granted. The Inspector General declared the thing was not
practicable and suspended the application of the law. "There
was no inhabitant of the south who did not think he was author
ized to demand a lot as a colonist," says the Inspector General,
adding that "he hadn't the 500,000 hectares of land he should
need." '° As a matter of fact when Chileans colonize they can
do with much less than 100 hectares. The government had
complained that four or five Chilean families would come in on
one lot. Concessions, Auctions, and Evictions
Now begin to appear the concessions to colonize. Hitherto,
land has been granted on easy terms to foreigners and, in rare
cases, to natives who would begin its cultivation. Now, so
much land is granted to a contractor for every colonist that he
will settle on it. The government pays the expense of bringing
the settlers, as before, and the contractor is rewarded by the
difference between the amount of land he receives from the gov-
35 Palacios, Vol. 2, p. 311.

THE ITALIAN COLONY 43
ernment and that which he hands over to the settlers. Nueva
Italia is a good instance. There are a good many Italians in
Chile who are engaged almost exclusively in trade and as skilled
workmen. For agriculture and other unskUled labor the pay was
too small to attract them, and .there were plenty of Chileans avaU
able. The Italians were, consequently, mostly in the cities of the
north. But there was founded in 1904 a purely Italian colony
west of Traiguen, about 35 miles northwest of Temuco. The
vUlage was named Capit4n Pastene after an Italian famous in the
period of the Independence. The concession was 27,000 hectares
for 100 famUies, although at first only 30 were to come. Ac
counts vary; but apparently parcels of land up to 166 hectares
were assigned to each family by lot. After the whole number of
families had arrived, the contractor would have benefited to the
extent of 10,400 hectares, gratuitously acquired, and the expense
of his journeys to Europe with his wife in fulfilling the con
tract.^ As usual, the police e-victed the Chileans already on the
ground. But the time had gone by when such evictions passed
without echo in the depths of Chilean forests. There were work
men's organizations in the cities, and there were liberal news
papers that were eager for sensations, and much was made of the
injustice to Chilean citizens. In some cases disturbances arose
that were menacing for Italians. The newspapers of the south
assert that 150 Chilean famUies had to be evicted to make room
for the 30 Italian families. Newspaper publicity on these pro
cedures must eventually bring them to an end. The Italians of
Santiago have their own paper, which is frankly contemptuous
of the Chilean laborer. "This country, like other South American
nations, can only be raised to prosperity by foreign colonization
. . . Italian especially, so that these disturbances and threats
hurt ChUe rather than us." The law of these concessions is that
of 1874. It granted 150 hectares of level land, or 300 of hilly
land, to anyone who would bring one colonist family from Europe
or the United States, with an additional 75 hectares for each
child over 10 years old, and 37>^ more for a child between 4 and
" Palacios, Vol. 2, p. 359.

44 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
10, the transportation being at government expense. The profit
to the concessionary, as in the case of Nueva Italia, was that
much smaller lots than this were actually handed over to the
colonists. This was not in the law of 1874 but appears to be an
"executive interpretation" of it. The only gain to the country
was in enlisting the selfish zeal of the concessionary to collect
colonists, which the Paris Agency was not getting in satisfactory
quantity or quality.
The selling of land at auction had begun in 1873, when some
of the land won from the Araucanians on the Frontera was sur
veyed and subdivided into lots of from 200 to 700 hectares and
put up at auction. There were sold in this way 46,000 hectares
at an average of eight dollars a hectare. The interest of the
Treasury in this transaction was that it got cash, and no cash
had come to it from any of the other methods of settling the
land. But of course the auction sales involved speculation, with
the result that in Chile, as elsewhere, much land was kept out
of use. Some buyers never paid their first quota, some cultivated
their own land and government land alongside, to which they
had no title. Incomplete payments became very common, so
that by 1900 there were $5,500,000 overdue the state. In 1903
Congress was supplied by the Treasury Department with a list
of these debtors, which was in part reproduced in the Santiago
newspapers. It contained the names of members of both Houses
and of judges of the courts as delinquent in payments for these
land purchases, showing that the privUeged classes were getting
hold of the land without satisfying their legal obligations. There
were some great names in this list as not having paid even the
first quota on their purchase, yet the same names figure again
in subsequent auctions. Of 60 odd persons whose names were
published in the newspapers, 9 protested that they owed nothing
to the government but gave no documents in support of their
assertion. One of these protestants was the General Inspector
of Lands and Colonization. There was a considerable outcry
from the public, which is making itself heard more and more
in Chile. It did not, however, prevent a law being passed

THE POWER OF "INFLUENCE" 45
that remitted a great portion of these debts. To give better
color to the transaction, the half million dollars stUl owing by
real colonists, Germans and others in the south, are referred to
very prominently in the text of the law. It wUl be noticed that
the debts thus remaining had been running for 30 years. Up to
1900 there had been 20 of these auctions, disposing of over a
mUlion hectares — 4,000 square miles — of land in the Frontera.
The same method of disposal was applied to other districts.
Always there has been more or less protest, but the procedures
have been very profitable to a class of speculators.
Since the year 1900 simple decrees of the president have
granted concessions of unsurveyed lands by extreme limits to
John Doe or his representatives^ One was to occupy "the lands
of the nation in the hydrographic basin of the rivers Cocham6 and
Manso from the sea to the boundary of the Argentine Repub
lic." '* Very moderate obligations were imposed, such as es
tablishing sawmUls, sheep runs, and some cultivation of the land.
Also, "to give work in their industrial establishments to the
colonists -who may come with government contracts," which, of
course, excludes the Chilean settlers on the spot, who are driven
off by the Chilean police. Very commonly the ChUeans on the
ground are squatters without rights ; but even when able or wUl
ing to buy or rent they are given no chance, as when the Baker
concession to the distinguished Santiagueiio, Julio Vicufia Suber-
caseaux, was "later made over by this concessionary to the
Argentine Cattle Companies of Lake Posadas," with the certainty
that "to deliver the soil of the nation to foreign exploitation there
wUl be expelled from it the Chileans who are occupying it and
have occupied it for many years, and they did not rent and did
not buy because they were never notified that it was going to be
put up at auction." '' In 1903 cessions of huge territories were
made not at the rate of the basic law of 1870, 150 cuadras for
each head of famUy, but "for so many families," 40 in one case
for a concession 80 mUes north and south across the whole width
'• Palacios, Vol. 2, p. 276.
"La Alianza Liberal, Puerto Montt, May l, 1918.

46 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
of Chile on the 47th parallel ; and these families need only to be
introduced "two a year," at the expense of the government, of
course! Thus what was originally a law for the settlement of
empty ChUean lands has been made an agency for gigantic
speculations that take away from the ChUean people all chance
of getting land and that bring huge quantities of it into posses
sion of persons of great wealth, with no equivalent payment of
value. Of course the real cause underlying the eviction of the
Chileans from their grounds was greed — -the desire for the un
earned increment of land value which is very powerful every
where. That Chileans were evicted to put Germans or Italians
in their places only means that the instigators of the eviction
thought the foreigners would give value to the land more quickly.
The Case of tlLTiMA Esperanza
Probably the most remarkable evictions in all this history
are those in the Ultima Esperanza country of Magellanes in 1906,
when the Germans and other foreigners who had discovered the
value of the region, who had squatted on it in 1891 with permits
from the ChUean representative at Punta Arenas, and had ac
tually won it for Chile by occupying it, were turned out by an
auction sale that disposed of nearly 400,000 hectares in a lump.
The service that they had rendered is plainly stated by
Colonel Holdich.
Up to 1843 Patagonia as far as the Strait of Magellan was a no-
man's land. In that year ChUe sent the frigate Ancud to take
possession of the Strait, not because she saw the value of Pata-
gonian lands, but because the Strait was the main entrance
to the Chilean Pacific. A fort was built at Port Famine a little
south of Punta Arenas, to which the post was soon transferred.
The grasses of the country are extraordinary for fattening sheep,
but this was not discovered until 1877. In 1885 the sheep in
Magellanes province numbered 40,000. In 1891 they had in
creased to 500,000 and in 1916 to 2,000,000. In 1891 Captain
Hermann Eberhard, who had sailed those waters many years,
went by boat with some other Germans and the Australian Kark

THE CASE OF tiLTIMA ESPERANZA

47

totfltima Esperanza Inlet, about 130 mUes northwest from Punta
Arenas, and settled there under a license obtained from the
Chilean representative at Punta Arenas. They succeeded at
sheep farming immediately, and other Germans joined them

100

zoo Miles

Fig. 14 — Cltima Esperanza region. The Strait of Magellan has been Chilean
since 1843. Further north the boundary was not fixed until the "King's Award" in
1902, The black area on Cltima Esperanza (last hope) Inlet was adjudged to Chile
because the squatters there so desired. The Chilean government caused an auction
sale of their lands to a sheep-raising company which ousted the settlers.

under temporary licenses from Chilean authorities. By 1906
they numbered 600 and were very prosperous.* They had built
wharves, hotels, roads to Gallegos and Punta Arenas and had
established steamboat connections with the German Trans
atlantic lines.
When the Argentine Republic awakened to the value of Pata-
,gonia and the whole matter of the boundary with ChUe came into
"Deutsche Arbeit, Vol. 2, p. 96.

48 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
dispute, the question was referred to King Edward VII for arbi
tration. In 1902 a commission from the King, under Sir Thomas
Holdich, went to tjltima Esperanza Inlet to examine the ground.
Holdich found the Germans in occupation, and the Award recog
nized the rights of these settlers and made the district Chilean,
"All this country of tUtima Esperanza has been occupied by enter
prising colonists, who have partitioned the land between theni
without waiting to know to which republic it might eventually
belong. They have done great things in order to improve their
holdings, and it was with especial reference to their locally
recognized limits of occupation that the Award was made in
those few parts of the line where no natural feature was available
to furnish a practical boundary." ^
When the Chilean government announced that the whole
region was to be put up at auction without makjng any reserva
tion of the lands of the men who had won it for Chile under
temporary licenses to settle, there was consternation among
them. But they postponed trouble by getting Rudolf Stuben-
rauch, the German consul, who had been one of the original
settlers, to bid up the price. The sale was held in March, 1905.
Under Stubenrauch's management the price went up from $5
a hectare to $50 and even $135, so that the purchasers on think
ing it over forfeited their deposits rather than make payment
at such a price. There appear to have been four companies with
several millions of capital each that had been formed for the
purpose of bidding in these lands. But another auction, held
rather suddenly in September, caught the resourceful consul
away in Europe, and 351,000 hectares of land were sold to the
Exploration Company of Tierra del Fuego at ^12.25 a hectare.
Eberhard and Kark were allowed, as a special consideration,
to purchase their holdings, which were withheld from the sale;
and a concession was granted gratuitously to the famUy of
the Chilean governor at Punta Arenas, who had given out the
temporary licenses by which the land had come to be part of
Chile and been reprimanded for it by his superiors! Most of the
*^ Holdich, p. 222.

CHILE NOT COLONIZATION COUNTRY 49
settlers had to leave, driven out by the government they had
served too well, which treated them exactiy as it had been
in the habit of treating the working-class Chileans.
Chile Not a Colonization Country
, The handbooks say that immigration into Chile is small and
is aided by the government. If immigration were not so aided,
there would be none at all. Creole Chile has plenty of workers
for its good land, as is proved by the low rate of wages and the
low standard of life of the workers there. In the deserts of the
north the exploitation of nitrate and to a less extent of mineral
ores — copper — alone calls for hands, and they are secured without
difficulty. Agriculture is only possible there on a few square
miles of surface, and it must always be so. Equally hopeless are
the mist-wrapped, rain-swept forests of the southem archi
pelagoes. Almost two-thirds of the national domain is utterly
hopeless; ChUean, but never to sustain Chilean life. It is by
counting it Chile that we reckon 13 Chileans to a square mile.
Thousands of square miles will support no one. Ordinary farm
ing ought to support over 100 to the square mile. Temperate
South America all looks attractive from that point of view; but
it matters a good deal how many hopeless deserts and swamps
are included in a country's area. The Annuaire International
estimates that 89 per cent of Uruguay is productive, 74 per cent
of the Argentine Republic, 8 per cent of Chile. At a guess I should
say 25 or 30 per cent of BrazU is productive. That puts the ques
tion of population density in another light. If the estimates are
accurate, and I think they are within reasonable limits, then the
real densities are quite other than the statistical densities. Sta
tistically, in 1920, the Argentine had 8, BrazU 6, Uruguay 17, and
ChUe 13 persons to the square mile; really the Argentine had 11,
BrazU 20 (?), Uruguay 19, and Chile 160. A country is not made
of rocks and desert expanses but of human beings and their
homes. A nation is a group of people under a government ac
cepted by them. A country is a group of people with the land they
draw their life from. The fair plains of France were there ten

50 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
thousand years ago, although then clothed with thick woods.
But France did not yet exist. The French nation was not there.
The best picture of a country the geographer has today is the map
showing the size and location of that country's cities. For civil
ized men inevitably create towns and cities. The city diagram for
Chile (Fig. 1 5) shows the concentration of life into Creole Chile
in the central territory. And the reader must recall on studying
such a chart that the rural population is mostly contained in
the interstices between the towns, not on one side of them.
It is not towns alone that are absent in the eastern third or more
of Chile's narrow strip occupied • by the wilderness of Andean
slopes and ridges, but men as well. The best traveled route from
the Argentine Republic to Chile had three long and solitary days
of mule travel in former times. Even now it is a long solitary day
by train between the two countries. The cities map makes this
clear. The cities outline Chile. It has all the inhabitants it can
feed unless they take up manufacturing or fairly intensive agri
culture. Chile has little manufacturing at present. Its agricul
ture, on the other hand, is far more intensive than in most
American countries, in spite of the winter rains which are re
garded in Chile as a handicap. Of course they compel irrigation
for summer growth, but Chilean yields are high in all crops.
Taking data from the Annuaire International de Statistique Agri-
cole for 1915-1916, Chile's leading crops by acreage were in 1913
Table I — Chile's Leading Crops in 1913
CROP HECTARES
Wheat . 412,000
Grapes 66,000
Barley 62,000
Oats 49,000
Potatoes 33,000
Corn 24,000
as given in Table 1. No comparative yields are given for grapes,
but for the others the Annuaire gives results for the mean of the
years 1907-1916 as in Table 11, except that for potatoes I have
used the mean for the years 1912-1916, since the potato yield

HIGH YIELDS OF CHILEAN FARMS

51

reported for the Argentine Republic in 1907, 1908, 1909, 250
quintals per hectare, is absurd. Even Belgium has not exceeded
211 quintals.
Table II — Comparative Yields in Metric Quintals Per Hectare

CROP

chile

argentine

URUGUAY

UNITED STATES

FRANCE

Wheat

12.6

6.4

5-6

9.9

134

Barley-

18.4

8.1

5-7

134

13-7

Oats

14.4

8.4

7-1

10.7

12.9

Potatoes

83.

71.8

64.1

88.4

Com

lS-2

13-

6.4

16.3

12-3

Average cereal

iS-i

9.

6.2

12.6

I3-I

The yield of wheat, which is ChUe's principal crop, is much
greater than that of its great wheat neighbor, the Argentine
Republic, in every one of the years cited as well as in the mean of
aU of them. Though the Argentine Republic produces eight times
as much wheat as Chile, it takes nearly sixteen times as much
land to do it on. It is doubtless due to the scarcity of land and the
cheapness of labor that agriculture in ChUe is taking on an inten
sive form, as evidenced by these large yields.
Table III shows the futUity of spending government money
to encourage immigration into Chile.

Table III-

-CoMPARATivE Productive Areas and Population
Densities

PERCENTAGE OF

POPULATION DENSITY

country

PRODUCTIVE

PER PRODUCTIVE

AREA

squabJe mile

France

94K

204

United Kingdom

84

463

Canada*

zV^

49

United States*

46

62

Argentine Republic

74

II

Chile

8

149

* If we use 13 J^ and 60 per cent respectively for the productive areas of
Canada and the United States, as I should prefer, we should get densities 19
and 48, still more indicative of the need of immigration and the room for it.

52 RECENT COLONIZATION IN CHILE
The United Kingdom is eminently a country of emigration,
France is less so. In the table the Argentine appears best adapted
to receive immigrants, Canada comes next, and then the United
States. But Chile is not in the immigration class at all. The
Chileans are sprung of a splendid stock of American Indians,
with a tincture of Spanish blood and a garment of Spanish
culture. With nothing of the Frenchman's inheritance of thrift
or his knowledge of agriculture, they have almost as small a
share of the earth at their disposition, even if it were as available
to them as is the soil of France to her peasants.
To say that Chile is the most Creole of American countries is to
call its governing class a landed aristocracy, its peasants land
less. There is little likelihood of early change in this condition.
Effective immigration is impracticable. There is no room for it.
Industrial education would increase the well-being of all the
people; but that calls for the co-operation of the ruling class, who
are not sensible of the needs of the masses. The awakening of the
ruling class would be the finest development of Creole life.

CHILE

CITIES

OF 1907

Number of

intiabirants

• 1,000

10,000 •

/ 2,000

20,000 /

• 3,000

30000 A

•4.000

WOOD ¦

0 5,000

scoooO

« S,OQO

60,000®

e 7.000

70,000®

« 8,000

¦MOOO®

• MOO

90000®

e

e

200,000

300,000

Fig. is — Most of the Chileans live in these cities or in the country between. The
Andes exclude settlement from the eastern half of the country for most of its length,
as is shown by the lack of city marks between Santiago and Mendoza. The cities
are mostly in Creole Chile.

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