thence west across the dry and level plains that stretch from the mouth of the river Plate to the Cordillera.
The early days of the Asuncion settlement were stormy. The rough adventurers fell to fighting among themselves, and their cruelties often drove the patient and submissive Indians into rebellion. Their greed for bigger plantations and more slaves pushed them on to conquering the aborigines in an expanding circle. By 1553 they had founded a settlement on the Upper Paraná and were dominant from river to river in the southern half of the present territory of Paraguay. Until his death, in 1557, Irala was the dominating personality in the colony. According to his lights he was just in his dealings with the Indians. When he died the settlement was firmly on its feet, and even the Indians revered him as their benefactor. The mass of the population was Indian, and Guarany has always remained the prevalent language in Paraguay. Absolutely isolated from the other European colonies, and almost without communication with the mother country, the settlement was, however, an unpromising affair. The few hundreds of Spaniards might have sustained their social and military superiority over the hordes of Indians by whom they were surrounded, but, without material and intellectual communication with Spain, they could achieve no commercial success.
An outlet to the sea was necessary. The original settlers had been adventurers, willing to follow Mendoza through swamp and forest up to the walls of Eldorado, and their children were not less enterprising. The horses brought over by the adelantados had multiplied amazingly, and were spreading wild over the pampa to the south. Cattle, sheep, and goats bred by millions. Before long the attractions of a pastoral life began to appeal to the Spaniards and creoles of Asuncion. The braver and more energetic preferred the free open existence of the pampa to idleness in the sleepy villages of Paraguay.
The Argentine nation proper began its existence when the creole mounted his horse and took to cattle-breeding on the plains. The possession of horses, as much as of firearms, gave the gaucho his military predominance over the fiercest aborigines, and the horse was also the cornerstone of his industrial system. The cattle of the open pampa gave him an unlimited supply of the best food, and his horses enabled him to procure it with a minimum of effort. Irala's successors repeatedly tried to establish a colony near the mouth of the Plate, but they were not successful until the creoles on horseback had pushed their way south along the pampa and driven back or subdued the wandering Indians. In 1560, the Guaranies of Paraguay were definitely crushed in the horribly bloody battle of Acari, but it was not until 1573 that the Spaniards from Asuncion succeeded in founding a city south of the confluence of the Paraná and Paraguay. Santa Fé was the first Spanish settlement on the Plate in territory now a part of the Argentine Republic.
The man who led the creoles to the pampa was Juan de Garay, a Basque, who had been one of the soldiers in the army that conquered Peru. His energy and vigour, and the bravery of the creole cavalry who followed his expeditions down the river and over the pampas, at length opened up communication from Paraguay to Europe and gave Spain a seaport on the South Atlantic. Curiously enough, in the very year that Garay founded Santa Fé, the Spaniards from Peru founded Cordoba—the most eastward of the Andean settlements. Their hard riders had pushed on from Cordoba, reconnoitring as far as the Paraná and there ran across Garay's men. The two currents of Argentine settlements met almost at the beginning, though two centuries were to elapse before they completely coalesced.
Eight years later, Garay succeeded in founding Buenos Aires after Zarate, the third adelantado, had failed as badly as any of his predecessors. Garay, by sheer force of energy and fitness, became the real ruler of the settlements. Active, far-sighted, and able, he perceived that a purely military establishment at the mouth of the river was foredoomed to failure. To be permanent, the port and town must be self-sustaining, and therefore must be surrounded by farms and ranches and be accessible by land from the upper settlements. In the spring of 1580, the acting governor sent overland from Santa Fé two hundred families of Guarany Indians, accompanied by a thousand horses, two hundred cows, and fifty sheep, besides mares, carts, oxen, and other necessaries. The soldiers of the convoy were mostly creoles born in Paraguay. Boats carried down from Santa Fé arms, munitions, seed grain, tools, and whatever in those rude days was essential to a settlement. He, himself, went by land with forty soldiers, following the highland that skirts the west bank of the Paraná from Santa Fé to Buenos Aires.
The Plate estuary affords no proper harbours; the immense volume of water spreading over vast shallow beds chokes it with sand-bars, and the shores are so shelving that even small boats cannot approach the land. The north side is bolder, and at Montevideo and at the mouth of the Uruguay affords bays partly sheltered from the storms which sweep up over the level pampas and make anchorage in the river so unsafe. But the north bank was cut off from land communication with the existing Spanish towns by the mighty Uruguay and Paraná, and Garay desired that his new city should be always accessible from his older settlements on the right bank of the Paraná. His choice of the particular spot where the largest city of the southern hemisphere has since grown up, seems to have been determined by a few trifling circumstances. He kept as near the head of the estuary as possible, in order to shorten the land route from Santa Fé, and picked upon a slight rise of ground between two draws, which made the site defensible. The fact that a nearby creek—the Riachuelo—afforded a shelter for little boats, may also have been given weight in reaching a decision.
Though his settlers did not number five hundred, Garay laid out his city like a town-site boomer. The surrounding country was divided into ranches and the neighbouring Indians were distributed among the citizens of the new town. A "Cabildo," or city council, was named, with the full paraphernalia of a Spanish municipal government. The new town started off in the full enjoyment of all the guarantees known to immemorial Spanish constitutional law. Troubles broke out almost immediately between the creole settlers and the Spaniards who had been sent over by the adelantado to fill offices and get the best things in distributions of land and slaves. Garay had hardly left the town to look after the rest of the province than the creoles, indignant over unfair treatment, forcibly demanded an open Cabildo. This was an extraordinary popular assembly which, according to old Spanish custom, might be called at critical times, and was something like a town meeting. In theory, the property-owners and educated citizens were called together merely to give advice, but in practice, it was a tumultuous assemblage to overawe the office-holders. The Argentine creoles were doing nothing more than asserting their constitutional rights as vassals of the king of Castile. They compelled the Spanish office-holders to compromise.
Meanwhile, Garay was clinching his claim to immortality as the founder of the Spanish power on the Plate. He explored the pampas to the south and west of the new city, and reduced many of the tribes to slavery or vassalage. He found the plains already overrun with hundreds of thousands of horses—the descendants of the few abandoned there forty-five years before when the remnants of Mendoza's ill-starred expedition fled up the river. On his way back to Santa Fé this great Indian fighter was ambushed by Indians and stabbed while he slept.
His death was followed by outbreaks among the creoles, who resented the efforts of the adelantado's new representatives to establish a monopoly in horse-hair. Scarcely had they found a way to make a little money, by hunting wild horses for their hair, than the officials tried to absorb all the profit. The struggle between the repressive commercial policy of Spain, and the interests of the Plate colonists, began with the foundation of the colony of Buenos Aires and went on for more than two hundred years.
In 1588, the creoles obtained a foothold in the extreme north of the mesopotamian region by founding the city of Corrientes near the junction of the Paraná and Paraguay. All the new commonwealths south of Asuncion obtained a solid economic foundation in the herds of cattle and horses which covered the plains. In the regions adjacent to the Andes the Spaniards did not become so exclusively pastoral as their brethren of the pampas near the Plate. While they had more and better Indian slaves, their pasturage was not so good. Though apparently more isolated, their proximity to Upper Peru
