216 ROADS AND RAILWAYS 



means of wagons before railways were constructed. 

 The limit between the area of wagon-transport and the 

 area in which goods were conveyed on the backs of 

 animals is quite stable. It is still of some significance, 

 in spite of the development of the railways ; wagons 

 and mules are used at each station to collect and dis- 

 tribute goods. The area of farming and of selective 

 breeding on the Pampa, the sheep-area in Patagonia, 

 and the timber belt on the Chaco, still make use of 

 wagons ; and goods are carried on the backs of mules 

 in the Andean area. The Peru road was, broadly 

 speaking, fit for wagons as far as Salta, but it is rough 

 between Tucuman and Salta, and wagons that used 

 it generally stopped at Salta. In this way wagons 

 avoided the ford of the Sali, which was easier for 

 mules. On the plain itself the water-sources were 

 often so distant from each other, and the stages so 

 long, that mules had to be used instead of wagons. 

 Wagons could easily get to Mendoza by the road along 

 which the Tunuyan runs at its driest section, but all 

 the convoys from Cordoba to San Juan, or Rioja to 

 Catamarca, were composed of mules. Hence Cordoba 

 was, like Tucuman, a station for changing on the 

 road from Buenos Aires to the north-west. Lastly, 

 while the scrub presented no insuperable obstacle to 

 wagons, they could not enter the humid tropical 

 forest, where the soil never dries. On the fringe of 

 the Misiones forest, the wagons that came from San 

 Tome unloaded at San Javier, and mules took the 

 goods on to the yerbales. 



The two areas of different kinds of transport were 

 not sharply distinct. The muleteers (arrieros) some- 

 times avoided the domain of the wagoners, and com- 

 peted with them as far as the banks of the Parana. 

 In 1860 (Hutchinson) the muleteers carried about a 

 fifth, in weight, of the goods from the interior to 

 Rosario, and they got more than a third of the trans- 

 port from Rosario to the interior. They had, how- 



