Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 September 1887 — A South American Yankee. [ARTICLE]

A South American Yankee.

“The South American Yankee” is the title of one of the attractive articles in the September Harpqr’s, written by Wm, E. Curtis, a South American travelei of long experience. His account of Chili and its people affords a lively example of what a plucky race may accomplish under severest obstacles. “The Chilano,” he says, “is the Yankee of South America, the most active, enterprising, ingenious, and thrifty of the Spanish-American race, aggressive, audacious, and arrogant, quick to perceive, quick to resent, fierce in disposition, cold-blooded, and cruel as a cannibal. "He dreams of conquest. He has only a strip of country along the Pacific coast? so narrow that there is scarcely room enough to write its name upon the map, hemmed in on the one side by the eternal snows thatcrown the Cordilleras, and on t te other by 6000 miles of sea. He has been stretching himself northward until he has stolen all the seacoast of Bolivia, with her valuable nitrate deposits, all the guano that belonged to Peru, and contemplates taking actual possession of both those republics soon. He has been reaching southward by diplomacy, as he did northward by war, and under a recent treaty with the Argentine Republic divided the Patagonia with that nation, taking to himself the control of that valuable international highway, the Straight of Magellan, the unexplored country between the Andes and the ocean, and thousands of islands along the Pacific coast, whose resources are unknown.” A people so like ourselves, with their perpendicular cities luxuriously decorated by beautiful gardens, costly architcture, abundant status, and fine shops, with sumptuous castles and , palaces, with lavish millionaires, with handsome women and piCiuresq ue peons, and with Irish supremacy (for Barnard O’Higgins is the Washington of Chili, and Arthur Pratt the hero of the last war), furnishes an entertaining study.