CHAPTER IV 



THE RANCHLAND OF ARGENTINA AND 

 SOUTHERN BRAZIL 



IN the fall of 1913 I enjoyed a glimpse of 

 the ranch country of southern Brazil and 

 of Argentina. It was only a glimpse; for 

 I was bent on going northward into the vast 

 wilderness of tropical South America. I had no 

 time to halt in the grazing country of temperate 

 South America, which is no longer a wilderness, 

 but a land already feeling the sweep of the mod- 

 ern movement. It is a civilized land, already 

 fairly well settled, which by leaps and bounds is 

 becoming thickly settled; a region which at the 

 present day is in essentials far more closely kin to 

 the plains country, which in temperate North 

 America stretches from Hudson Bay to the Gulf, 

 than either land is kin to what each was even 

 half a century ago. The main difference is that 

 the great cow country, the plains country, of 

 North America was peopled only by savages 

 when the white pioneers entered it in the nine- 

 teenth century; whereas throughout temperate 



