Post Cards from Bolivia 1907

By Bill Stark, Copyright August 2012

Post Cards from Bolivia

I seldom think about buying postcards to send to friends and family when I travel. Facebook and other social media sites make posting my photos much easier. My great-grandfather, Hugh Callory Watson, would have benefited from social media. He took photos of his mining expeditions and collected and sent many postcards. What follows constitutes a view into photos and postcards that now share space on pages of photo albums dedicated to his friends and travels in Latin America.

Next to the photos Hugh took while traveling in Bolivia at the turn of the century—images of Cholitas, Quechuas, and Aymaras—there are postcards depicting opulent buildings, plazas, and soldiers parading in front of historic sites. Did Hugh mean to send the postcards? To whom?

My great-grandfather traveled to La Paz, Bolivia, in 1907. Only a few years before, he had graduated from the Colorado School of Mines and signed on with a multinational mining conglomerate out of New York City. He had not yet met my great-grandmother, Mary Margaret Paradise. A mining engineer, consultant, assayer, and mine superintendent, Hugh worked in Central and South America and Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century.

The frayed photo above shows three women walking on a cobblestone street by an open market in La Paz. A woman stands, chin in hand, in the entrance of her shop, her goods on display for passersby. Two other figures, toting large, cumbersome bags on their backs, occupy space behind the three central figures. The inscription in the upper left-hand corner of the image tells the viewer that the scene is in La Paz, while the rest of the inscription is illegible. Nevertheless, the photo provides detail about commerce and aspects of daily life in La Paz at the turn of the century.

I visited La Paz nearly a century later. We arrived in a two-engine airplane, which afforded us a view of the massive bowl in which La Paz sits. The edges of the city are riddled with abandoned old mine shafts. One of the national capitals of Bolivia, La Paz sits at the bottom of a deep canyon on the Altiplano at an altitude of 11,942 ft (3,640 m). The city itself, I recall, exhibited a surreal combination of modern commerce, including McDonald’s on every other corner, Domino’s Pizza, and Starbucks, mixed with turn-of-the-century buildings constructed with cast iron, appearing to hold the Earth down wherever we saw them. In the center of the city, there is a large, smoky open plaza where Cholas gather to sell potatoes, vegetables, and other goods: the Plaza Mayor. There are open-air stalls that sell chorizo sandwiches and delicious soups and stews. I ate some of the best food in South America in that plaza. The produce was amazing. The people were friendly, eager to interact, to sell.

The photo below shows a Cholita wearing the distinctive bowler hat, layers of long puffy skirts, and a thick poncho draped over her jacket. When I was in Bolivia, Cholitas were still dressing the same way.

 

In the photo above, a group of men, women, and children have dressed for a photo. At the entrance, in front of a clothing store, the group is seated and standing, a fully dressed mannequin directly behind them but seemingly part of them. On the left, in the middle ground behind the woman, a little hand is attached to a faded arm and a blurry head. A ghost? Or a fidgety kid?

My great-grandfather learned Quechua while working in Bolivia. He was a gregarious soul who liked to talk with people.

Native Aymara.

A Collection of Postcards from Bolivia

In Hugh’s collection of postcards, there are black-and-white photos like the one below, and many others modified with color.

The Bolivian Army, the 1st Infantry on parade in Murillo Plaza, La Paz.

Guaqui, Bolivia, is a railhead and port on Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. This port connects with Puno, Peru, via a ferry (car float).

Although Bolivia is a landlocked country, Lake Titicaca is home to the Bolivian Navy. Before the War of the Pacific (1879) with Chile, Bolivia had access to the Pacific Ocean via the Port of Antofagasta. Most of the original fleet of ships arrived at Lake Titicaca piece by piece via mule train from the Port of Antofagasta. Most of the materials for the ships came from Great Britain.

After making their way to the Port of Antofagasta, they were carefully transported by pack mule via steep mountain trails to Lake Titicaca, where engineers then reassembled the ships. Once the coal ran out, the ships were modified to burn llama dung.

Lake Titicaca is also purportedly the home and birthplace of the Inca. La Isla del Sol is said to be the site of his birth. There are several ways to get to this island in the middle of the lake. I traveled southeast from Arequipa, Peru, to the city of Puno on the northwest shore of Lake Titicaca. From Puno, direct bus routes link Puno to Copacabana. Copacabana is an international haven for young, hip travelers that sits on the southeastern shore of Lake Titicaca. There are restaurants, hostels, internet cafés, and some of the coolest, hippest lounges and bars in Latin America.

Balsas are still in use on Lake Titicaca to this day.

As I mentioned before, La Paz is an amazing city that sits at the bottom of what appears to be an enormous crater. And, while it is possible to see the scars that mining has left upon the city, it is a city of refined charm, with elegant 19th-century architecture and broad boulevards that bustle day and night with commercial and cultural events. As this photo of my great-grandfather’s friend, violinist Molly Pierce-Hope, suggests, La Paz was a center of haute couture at the turn of the century. The opera house was one of many architectural landmarks built to attract more Europeans to Bolivia and to show that an appreciation for the arts existed in the rugged New World.

The Cochabamba Trip April 1907

Bill Stark, Copyright August 2012

In 1907, my great-grandfather, Hugh C. Watson, traveled to Bolivia, where he visited La Paz and documented his expedition from Oruro to Cochabamba with photos and topographical maps.

     What follows is the beginning of a fictionalized account of that expedition.

The Cochabamba Trip

 April 16, 1907:

Sleep does not come to me easily lately, nor do I find any peace in my waking hours. There are times when I feel no need for rest. Trapped in this earth-bound form, I yearn instead to extend myself into every corner of the world, to be absorbed by all and to disappear fragmented into the multitude and the universe.

I did not sleep well the night before leaving Oruro on the Cochabamba trip. The commotion in the street below my window was to blame. I saw with my own eyes the destitute souls, impoverished of spirit and substance, roaming outside my hotel. Their spectral forms silhouetted against the backdrop of a dreamlike landscape. Like phantoms, they surged from the depths of the earth to lick and probe the corners of reality.

The brute force of the state is powerless against these figures; for even as it inclines to beat them and dispose of their transient forms, a grim, resonant truth rings from the nation’s bell towers and echoes from shallow, unmarked graves.

I left Oruro, Bolivia at 7:15 a.m. with four new mules and the arriero Montero Rodriguez. We set off to the West N10E for four leagues over a flat pampa. If you have never been on the pampa, you need only endeavor to imagine a barren wasteland that stretches out in every direction as far as the eye can see. Desolate and godforsaken, it is a region inhabited by ghosts. Its vast expanse is a labyrinth that defies the imagination. Lost and forgotten souls wander its empty plateaus and barren foothills. One can hear their cries in the wind. They whisper in the darkness. Nothing is what it seems here. The freezing winds pierce the thickest armor and penetrate the living and dead alike; and the summer heat melts the will and erases memories.

Making our way across the pampa, the first settlement we met was Paría. It is a small town on a small river on a vast horizon. The river is most probably dry in winter.

In the early morning darkness, the sun appeared from behind the mountains. We headed N18W for one league to Sorochata. There is an old smelter dump and evidence of current copper mines. We stopped there to meet Santiago Jumie, our Aymara guide.

After half an hour or so, he appeared. As he approached, it was clear that he was in an ornery state. Dust covered his hat, and his pants suffered the same. His stiff poncho seemed to be the only thing holding him up. I asked him if he was alright, if he wanted anything to eat or drink before we were underway.

He grumbled under his breath and stopped short of me to lean against a wooden fence post. He then tipped his hat forward. He appeared to have nothing more to say, although his silence told another story.

I walked over to the pack mule that carried the food. I reached into a panier and removed a small newspaper-wrapped package of hard-boiled eggs. I selected one of them, cracked it, and began to peel away the fragments of shell and solidified albumen. The smell rose up to my nostrils. Santiago looked away. I took two swift bites, and the egg was gone. I brushed my hands off on my pants and kicked dirt over the eggshells on the ground.

A chill still hung in the air. Dew clung to the brush. Several birds gathered on a nearby tree to greet the sun as it pulled up over the hills before us. Santiago stared off beyond the horizon at a distant point that I could not recognize. For a while, we sat there together in silence, me thinking about the trek ahead of us, and Santiago sitting there in his own element, gazing into oblivion.

I wondered what Santiago was thinking about. Did he think of the kinds of things that I do when I chase the wind? I looked at him. He was disheveled from head to foot. I shook the idea off. Not a chance. I resolved that for some as for any, the way you look at a thing depends on where you’re standing. A piece of bread appears either as a feast or a last meal. In like manner, I reckoned, one man’s paradise is another’s hell. It became acutely clear to me in that moment that as we made our way into the foothills, we were on our way to find treasure and fortune—maybe even glory and fame. It never occurred to me that one man’s treasure might not be so for another.

I stood up brusquely and asked Santiago and Montero to prep the mules and get ready to leave. Time was slipping, and our date with destiny could not wait.

To Sorochata it is a fine, level pampa. From there, at about a mile, the foothills start. I took the lead as we crossed a few quebradas and then for about a league followed up the dry riverbed of Osucullani. We then cut across the range by a rather rough but good road till we struck the Leque River. This we followed all the way in. Where we started to climb, the altitude was 3,850 meters. Lequepalca is 3,950 meters. From there they say there are 18 leagues to Tapacarí, so I am going to Meza and Machaca all the way through to Independencia.

 

The railroad can easily get here on an average 1% grade of not too heavy work. There are several good outcrops on the road. In Lequepalca there is no town, but one can stop at the house of Valentine Alvarado. There is water here all year, but the river sinks into the pampa farther down in the winter. In the rains, it floods around Caracollo.