Chapter XVI: Through Guatemala on Foot and by Rail

My entrance into Central America was rather amusing. I had fallen in with two other Americans, and after a night spent at Mariscal on the border, we started to walk across a wooden bridge into Guatemala. The rails of the “Pan American” line ran across it—but the trains did not! We had scarcely set foot on the bridge when we heard a great shrieking across the river. Three very ragged Guatemalan soldiers, barefooted and wearing calico uniforms and straw hats, had run out of a palm-leaf hut and were waving three weapons. One was a very aged musket, another a rusty bayonet, and the third a piece of wire that looked like a ramrod. These “three musketeers” had one whole gun among them, though probably no cartridges.

“Don’t cross the bridge!” they yelled. “No one is allowed to cross the bridge!”

“Why not?” we shouted back. “We are not very heavy!”

“You must come across in a boat!” they ordered. “The Pope himself cannot cross that bridge; Guatemala does not wish it!”

The central _plaza_ of a Guatemalan village—just bare ground with palm
trees here and there.
]

By this time they themselves had nearly crossed it in running toward us. As we turned back to find a boat, the guard sought again the shelter of their palm-leaf hut. A very ancient and leaky rowboat soon carried us across to the southern bank of the shallow Suchiate River. A dozen childish-looking shabby soldiers surrounded us and led us to the _comandancia_. There an officer whose dignity and uniform were worthy of a general got out a big ledger and wrote down in it answers to all sorts of questions. Name, birthplace, business, religion, reason for coming to Guatemala, and a great many other points that seemed even less important, interested him. At that time Guatemala had a stern dictator, Estrada Cabrera, who required his officials to keep close track of all foreigners entering the country. Since then political conditions in Guatemala have become much more stable.

Down in Central America there is usually no better transportation than
crude two-wheeled oxcarts. Spanish-speaking people always fasten the
yoke to the top of the oxen’s horns.
]

The little baggage we carried having been carefully examined, we swung it over our shoulders and set out to walk to a railroad station nearly fifty miles away. There was a little narrow-gauge railway from the sandy jungle town of Ayutla, just beyond where we landed, but no train would run on it that day. The sun was blazing hot, and when we were not ankle-deep in sand we were wading rivers or pushing through tunnel-like openings in the dense jungle. My companions fell behind but I went on and at night I reached Coatepeque, where I found a hotel run by an American. The place was hardly up to the level of, let us say, the Waldorf-Astoria, yet my bill for lodging and breakfast was fifteen dollars—or, to use the Spanish term, fifteen _pesos_.

However, do not let this keep you away from Guatemala. One can often get sixty Guatemalan dollars for one American dollar. The two Americans who crossed the border with me had only three American dollars with them then, yet next morning when they arrived at Coatepeque they had more than a hundred dollars left! Meanwhile they had paid five dollars to ride all night in a two-wheeled bullock cart that made them feel as if they had been through a threshing machine.

The owners of big estates often send a peon a hundred miles or more to some town where there is a bank, to get the money for paying off workmen. The peon, carrying a grain sack full of the ragged, dirty paper money, walks back all the way alone. At night he tosses the sack into a corner of the hut where he is to sleep, and no one ever seems to think of robbing him.

Where Coffee Grows

Guatemala is a land of volcanoes, some of them still active. All over the country great sharp-pointed peaks, cinder-colored, reach into the sky. In a way the volcanoes of Central America are a blessing, for if their eruptions sometimes bring along an earthquake and shake down a city, the lava dust makes the soil very rich, and a few good coffee crops usually pay for all the damage.

The two principal products of Central America, at least so far as concerns the rest of the world, are coffee and bananas. Some of the largest coffee plantations in Guatemala are along the road we followed after leaving Coatepeque. Coffee bushes, about as high as a man’s head and so compact that they look almost like little green haystacks, grow best at about two thousand feet above sea level in tropical countries. The coast lands are too hot and moist for coffee, and highlands like the Mexican plateau are too cold and dry. Plantations, made up of long parallel rows of bushes, may be found in most of the foothills of Central America, and because coffee requires some protection from the blazing tropical sun it is planted in the shade of banana groves or thin forests.

Coffee bushes are covered with bright red berries. Inside the red skin of each berry we find two white beans, each having a flat and a rounded side. The flat sides face each other. Indian women and girls pick the berries, putting them into baskets and then into sacks, which men carry to the center of the estate. There, among the buildings where the owner or manager and nearly all the plantation people live, the sacks are emptied upon outdoor floors. The berries are shoveled over and over in the hot sunshine and old women hull them in the shade of their huts. When the separated berries are well dried they are ready for market but they must be roasted and ground before they are in a form to use for making the coffee we drink.

Many of the plantations belong to Germans, and most of the others to rich Guatemalans, who perhaps live in Paris or New York and never see their estates. The Indians who do the work, picking or shoveling or carrying coffee from daylight until dark, with only an hour or two off for food and perhaps a short nap, are paid less than ten cents a day in our money, though they receive a monthly allowance of fifty pounds of corn and beans and half a pound of salt.

Guatemalan Indians

An Indian boy of Guatemala carrying his small brother on top of a
heavy load he is taking to market.
]

We met thousands of Indian carriers. Most of the trails of Guatemala are so poor that the best way to carry goods over them is on men’s backs. Our road being a little better, we met some oxcarts. The yokes were so tightly strapped to their horns that the oxen could not even shake off the flies. There were donkeys under huge packs, men riding mules, even an occasional automobile where the road was especially good. But the procession of Indians loaded with freight was almost continuous—not only strong young men, but old men, boys, women and even little girls who early learn to carry big earthenware jars of water. In the evening we passed groups of these carriers squatting around little fires cooking their suppers.

The Indians of Guatemala are short but very sturdy. There are so many of them that Guatemala might almost be called an Indian republic. Clothed in their ancient costumes, homespun and colored with crude dyes, they look picturesque and very interesting at first sight. On closer view they appear rather stupid. Perhaps that is not their fault. They have been much abused ever since Alvarado, a cruel lieutenant of Cortés, conquered Guatemala four hundred years ago. Even now they are forced to accept a job from anyone who will pay them low wages, though no one can require them to carry more than a hundred pounds or go more than two days’ walk away from home.

Only one-third of the people of Guatemala claim to have any European ancestors. Six out of ten persons are pure Indian, and eighteen or twenty different tribes are said to be represented among them. Many are probably descendants of the Toltecs who, between the seventh and twelfth centuries, were driven out of Mexico by the Aztecs. Many more are Mayas, of the tribe that left splendid ruins in Yucatan, Guatemala, Salvador and Honduras. Is it not sad to think that these people now are unable to build anything better than a thatched _adobe_ hut unless someone tells them how?

Panama Mail Steamship Co., San Francisco

These blanket venders of Guatemala offer a fine study in the more
intelligent type of Indian found in that part of Central America.
]

One very dark-skinned tribe, who worry little about clothes, build their homes in palm trees, on platforms thirty feet above the ground. Since such platforms can be reached only by climbing the notched tree trunks that serve as ladders, the children learn to walk up and down tree trunks almost before they learn to walk on the ground. The natives’ large toes are very much overdeveloped by constant climbing. Members of this tribe use bows and arrows.

Panama Mail Steamship Co., San Francisco

A picturesque group of Guatemalan pottery venders.
]

Most of the Guatemala Indians are very docile, obeying even a white child. They are small in stature, the men averaging hardly five feet in height, and the women being even shorter. However, an American who could carry for an hour on a good level road what these Indians can carry all day, and day after day, over steep and difficult mountain trails, would be considered a wonderful athlete. Carrying heavy loads gives them very erect soldierly bodies, but often their complexions are bad because they eat a yellow earth mixed with sulphur, which they think will cure disease. Some of the men have thin beards, in contrast to the naturally smooth faces common among American Indians.

Queer clothes in bright colors are so much liked that a group of Guatemalans resemble an opera chorus. The women wear no hats, but have three garments—a loose waist, a thick cloth skirt, and a gaudy sash. They wear as much jewelry as they can get, especially necklaces of silver coins. They are very expert at such handicrafts as weaving cloth for garments and making ropes and hammocks of maguey fiber or cactus hemp.

We Reach the Capital

We had hoped to reach Retalhuleu by the end of our second day of walking and to take a train for Guatemala City at six the next morning. But the trail was so bad that we finally stopped at a little thatched village, ate a supper of native bread, cheese and coffee, and stretched out for a few hours’ sleep. I got up again at two in the morning and for six miles stumbled along the trail through the darkness. Bands of dogs dashed out at me from every hut, barking savagely; fortunately their bark was worse than their bite. By trotting the last few miles, I just caught my train.

It is barely a hundred and thirty miles from Retalhuleu to the capital, but the train took twelve hours for the journey. We made a large number of stops. Many of the passengers were yellow and listless with fever, and did not seem to enjoy life much in this land of perpetual summer.

Panama Mail Steamship Co., San Francisco

Mount Agua, Guatemala, one of the volcanoes which has caused so much
trouble near the country’s capital.
]

About noon, at Escuintla, our train turned eastward and began climbing from the coffee-growing Pacific slope to the pine-tree heights of central Guatemala. We spent an hour winding along the shores of beautiful blue Lake Amatitlán, then crossed part of it on a stone causeway. There are several such gem-like lakes of sparkling blue water in settings of towering mountains. On the larger ones are steamers, as well as the Indians’ dugout canoes. Most of the steamers—like the hotels and the sugar, cacao, and coffee plantations of Guatemala—are owned by Germans.

We passed close to two cone-shaped volcanoes that can be seen from almost any part of the country. It was getting dark when the first houses of Guatemala City began to appear among the trees, and half an hour later we dragged into the station. A barefooted policeman in a straw hat had already gone through the train writing down facts about the passengers, so we were free to make our way through a shouting mob and try to find supper and lodging.