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 arriving they are fed for several weeks or months on green al- falfa and then sold in remittances of a few or many to tributary mines and towns.

Accustomed as we are to the present boundaries between Chile and Argentina, it sounds strange to hear that the north- western settlements of Argentina had their first connection with southern Bolivia and desert Chile. There are two reasons for this, the one historical, the other geographical. The Vice- royalty of Peru at one time embraced most Spanish possessions south of the Isthmus of Panama and west of the “line of de- marcation"” between Spain and Portugal in western Brazil. Lima became a focus of commerce and authority. An old trade route ran southwest of Lima to Abancay, Cuzco, La Paz, Tu- piza, Salta, and Santiago del Estero. It was a part of this route that Almagro took on his way to Copiapó. We have seen that Aguirre came down in the same fashion rather than by what appears to be the easy route of the sea had there been ships or the materials for building them. The first settlers came in the same way and established themselves in fertile valleys within the eastern border of the mountains or on the edge of the ad- jacent plain. Under these circumstances it was natural for the people of Copiapó and other towns farther south to look to- ward the country east of the mountains as a field of coloniza- tion and settlement. Though the mountains raised formidable physical obstacles, they had to be overcome from the first. What seems at first sight a more natural connection with La Plata would then have been an unnatural relationship, for a broad band of plains country beyond the mountains, that is east and south-east of them, lay between, and it was sterile, sandy, desert waste. The transcordilleran province of Cuyo, what is today the provinces of San Juan, San Luis, and Men- doza, pertained to the government of Chile until 1776. It was not until 1778 that the Plata region could be reached by sea, for the agreement between Spain and Portugal restricted commerce on the Atlantic to the Spanish possession of the West Indies and west of the line of demarcation and permitted neither Spanish ships to seek ports nor colonists to seek fields of settlement by way of the South Atlantic.