“American Amazon”? - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 135

frontier would attract the pioneers and gold rush magnates at the edge of the Pacific.
Unlike Church, whose enterprise focused on infrastructure development and navigation
rights,Piperpreferredtospeculatedirectlyonthelandandtheminerals.Heobtainedtwo
enormous parcels for his concession. The first was 230,000 square kilometers, which he
agreed to colonize with Americans and Europeans over a period of twenty-five years.
The colonization company would have rights over all territory not formally registered
underBolivian law(“vacant anduninhabited lands”)andtoallSirionoorother“nomad-
ic”IndianlandsfromtheMadeiratotheRioGrande(theriverjustoutsideofthemodern
city of Santa Cruz). The company would have the rights to emit its own currency and
developitsownbankingsystem,aswellasexclusivenavigationrightsonthePurús,Jur-
uá, and Madeira. 96 The Company could levy taxes and develop infrastructure. In short,
it would have all the prerogatives of a state. Immigrants would produce spices, fruits,
rubber—the usual plentitude—and have access to the tractable and able labor provided
by the local settled Indians, whose virtues were so nicely evoked by Gibbon. 97
The real lure was the Caupolicán area, to which Piper's company had exclusive ter-
ritorial and mineral rights for fifty years, an area deemed by Church and other observers
to be extremely rich in alluvial gold deposits, which could be exploited by the new tech-
niques elaborated in California gold fields and silver mines. On top of that were coal,
cobalt, copper, tin, salt, and diamonds. Bolivia's riches were meant to echo California's
frontier as an upper Amazon El Dorado. Piper explicitly compared Bolivian riches to
thoseofCalifornia,envisioningarobustagrarianeconomysupplyingthemines.Theter-
ritory would stretch from the Madeira (the Iteñez and Itambari) to the headwaters of the
Javari.Thesewerethe“boundary”linesofthe1777SanIdelfonsoTreaty.Thelandgrant
to Piper would encompass the same areas as the Bolivian Syndicate Charter.
Theventurewastoospeculativeandveryexpensive;lackingbroaderinternationalfin-
ancing, it never got off the ground. But upper Amazon schemes were in the air, because
the value of rubber was soaring and explorers of many stripes were making assiduous
resources assessments, including one Sir James Conway whom we will meet in the next
chapter.