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Beginning at Tupixa, the capital of the province of Chichas, in the extreme south of the Republic, and running directly northwest through Huanchaca, Potosi, Oruro, Sicasica, and La Paz, on up through the shore provinces of Lake Titicaca, and terminating in the Sotolaya district of the Department of La Paz, are the great silver and tin mountains of Bolivia, covering a vast territory of about 300 leagues long and 70 leagues wide, over the whole of which are scattered the old workings of the Spaniards.

At intervals of every 15 or 20 miles within this great silver belt, are to be seen the old abandoned mines of the Spaniards, the traces of whose vast operations represent results achieved through the enforced and unpaid labor of the Indians that, in the light of our modern methods of mining and just consideration for labor, seem incredible.

One can not travel through the zigzag tunnels and down the tortuous declivities of these old Spanish mines, which always followed the lode in utter disregard of the proper and permanent development of the mines, without being impressed with the thought that these cruel old taskmasters, like guilty men, hastened to secure their ill-gotten gains with all possible speed, as though conscious that their savage brutality in forcing the poor Indian to toil in the mines unpaid and practically unfed must bear its just fruits, as it ultimately did, in their final expulsion from the land of their oppressions at the hands of those they had so sorely oppressed.

Señor José Maria Dalence, in his rare and interesting "Bosquejo Estadistico de Bolivia," published in Chuquisaca in 1851, after a careful personal investigation of the subject by departments, provinces, and mining districts, gives the number of mines abandoned and the number in operation in Bolivia in 1848, as follows: Bull. 555