Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 153, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 June 1915 — CITY of the GRASSHOPPER PLAINS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

CITY of the GRASSHOPPER PLAINS

FIR a city of a million and a half, Buenos Aires la fairly hard to find, writes Paul M. Hollister from the Argentine capital. We crossed a divide 11,000 feet high and a plain 600 miles wide to enjoy the sensation of arriving In this well known Parts of South America, and It was just about as exhilarating as crossing lowa and Illinois to reach Chicago. In fact Its western suburbs are not Unlike Chicago’s. There are fewer tall buildings, and each dinky little stucco house is set apart from its neighbors by a wall, but when the short twilight of Wednesday' evening had faded and we had recovered from the excitement of having a Bleriot and a Wright pass overhead Into the sunset, we saw the lights of a real city ahead,, and the station we anticipated might just as well have been the Chicago & Northwestern instead of the Buenos Aires Pacific. The transandine trip from Chile across the Argentine is worth a word or two as a new experience In life on the road. The train over the mountains runs once a week, during the summer (it is now Indian summer, remember). Leaving Santiago at 6:30 each Monday evening, the passenger rides through Llai-Llal (a name which Hughey Jennings shouts every day from the third base coacher*s box) to Los Andes, arriving there three hours later. At Los Andes a satisfactory railway hotel, built of wood and equipped with plenty of running water, will do for the night, for a reasonable price. The passenger will be called early and will fight for break-

fast, and the transandine train will back down to the hotel fpr him. Top of the World. The train is of narrow gauge, with regulation double seats on the right, or uphill side, and single seats on the left. We commandeered two singles. The route follows a narrowing and tortuous valley up a crazy cafe-au-lait river, and after an hour or so begins to shin up the side of the mountain, grinding over the steeper grades by means of a rack and pinion, and puffing hard until it reaches the top of the world. The constant changes in the view make you forget your eardrums, by noon you reach a crystalline lake on the backbone of the Andes. Prom there it is a smoky few minutes through a tunnel, and you notice that the uniforms of the gendarmes at the next station are different and the soil is red, and you are in the Argentine. It is seven hours down, through two more valleys, to the plain. The mountains cease abruptly, the river the train has followed dissipates somewhere in the distance, cattle and alfalfa grow more numerous, and at 7:30 you shoot through miles of vineyards to Mendoza, the wine center of the Argentine.

From Mendoza a double track of flve-feet-eix gauge rides into Buenos Aires. One of its tangents is over a hundred miles long. Prom 9:30 Tuesday night until seven Wednesday morning we rode the plains. It is Nebraska steam-rolled smooth. The only disturbing element we saw was an occasional cassowary in the fields —according to the primer the cassowary lives in Timbuctoo, but he also follows the cattle in the great stretches of Argentine “camp.” Alfalfa and Grasshoppers.

The power of the Argentine, the element which is its salvation from war time depression, is the “camp”—the hundreds of square miles of farms. The alfalfa looked good, so did the wheat, and so did the cattle. We fol-, lowed excessive rains, and there was a good deal of standing water on the ground, but the rains have not hit the crops appreciably.. In one section we passed several miles of grain fields eaten bare by the grasshoppers, and the stories the Argentine estancia owners tell of the grasshoppers make

Munchausen a Sunday school story. “When they hear the grasshoppers are coming toward a certain locality they call everyone out to fight them,** one train acquaintance said, “and everyone comes or gets In trouble. They build ditches, and lead the grasshoppers Into pits six feet square and deep, and I’ve seen one of those pita fill in half an hour. Then they drench the pit in kerosene and burn ’em, but It never seems to do much good If they can catch ’em during the 18 days when they have to hop and can’t fly they’re easier to stop, but If they start flying—good night!” The grasshoppers average two and one-half inches to three and one-half in length, as we found when the train stopped. They eat every living thing but the stalk of the grain, and don’t object to clothing. With population so sparsely distributed they are a grave menace, and the government* while willing to fight them, has not the means at present to meet the huge estimates for. a finish fight Buenos Aires is the first real city we have found. We rode up from the station to the Savoy hotel in a private car which, with hundreds of others, hard times have pressed into taxi service. Half a mile along the river front, under the shadow of four, five and six story buildings, and then a mile up the Avenida de Mayo (sounds Irish, but Isn’t), or main street, and past the house of congress, which is a little more glorious than a new state capitol, and a little less so than the Washington edifice. Subway stations, sidewalk cases, neat rows of trees

sheltering them, and lamppost islands in midstreet looked metropolitan, and plenty of electric lights, and automobiles zipping up and down on the wrong side of the street are my authority for calling it a real city. Yet this isn’t the season, and the Four Hundred, or whatever is its equivalent in the metric system, is down at Mar del Plata, getting sunburned, while business goes on untroubled but somewhat less officially speedy in their absence, and the ninety-eight different trolley lines bang right on, also on the wrong side of the street, and the cigarette posters scream their message to the city-bound plebeians, Buenos Aires is not defunct yet. Work Mostly In Afternoon. The Argentines are slow about getting to work in the morning. Ten o’clock is reasonable, and is preceded among the natives by the customary light breakfast Breakfast at noon is a function, and a long afternoon makes a real working day last until six or later, particularly among the hides men, whose exchange does not open until four. Dinner occurs at eight, and you get to bed some time the next morning. For diversion in the evening there are three odoriferous vaudeville performances,' numerous movies, and a few midnight danoing palaces where you may sit inside and drink beer and see an -Argentine tango. Whichever you do, you will find the beer is excellent thanks to German brewers in the Argentine, and the tango is very, very poor. -

As for work, The commercial traveler can do no better than to present himself to the commercial attache of the department of commerce. Dr. Albert Hale, who will learn his mission and place him as soon as possible in touch with prospective customers. There are 200 North Americans working in Buenos Aires, 80 of whom are in positions of responsibility, and with, some of them he can deal in his own language and his customary way. With the Argentines he will find a more tedious program of introduction and repeated interview necessary, encumbered by the medium of an interpreter if he himself does not speak Spanish, and enhanced by the pleasant relar tions rising from the innate courtesy, of the Latin. * ■