Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/533

Rh hill. About the villages and the buildings of the sugar estates are trees, and across the valley of Tlacolula a line of giants stretches from hill to hill; but, except among the distant sierras, you cannot see any not planted by the hand of man; there are few natural groves or forests. This scarcity of trees is doubtless owing to the fact that this region has been inhabited almost from time immemorial. To this, again, we may trace the thorough cultivation of Southern Mexico. There is not a valley, vale, or hill that is not or has not been cultivated, wherever there is a chance to scrape with a hoe, or prod with a sharpened stick. The more level stretches, the great basins filled with alluvium, are owned by rich hacendados, or landowners, and the Indians are forced toward the outskirts, where the hills lap over into the valleys, and thence they carry their little gardens and fields of corn up toward the crests. Not a foot is left untilled; not a rod of those brown, denuded hills covered with a few inches of soil that is not occupied.

It was an agricultural race that the Spaniards found in possession of Mexico,—a people that had held and tilled the soil for hundreds of years before the white man heard of the New World,—not a savage horde that subsisted by the chase. As a consequence, we find every portion of this southern republic susceptible to the influences of the hoe and plough carefully and exhaustively cultivated. One may ride through leagues of territory, with an Indian settlement only at long intervals, and wonder at the thriving appearance of the fertile fields, in decided contrast to the parched and barren hills. Two things seem strange: first, where the people are who till these fields so thoroughly; and, secondly, how they can cover so much territory by day and occupy so little space by night. It is only when an immigration agent comes along, or some one desiring to secure property, that one obtains a conception of how closely human beings can stow themselves. A village of one hundred Indian huts may contain two thousand people. And no one of these huts would be considered worthy of use as a donkey-shed in the North. But let it be noised through their town that there is any movement on foot for introducing immigrants into that