Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
who survived the warfare and disease of the 16th century found refuge
on the Pampean frontier.
Towns and Trade
Potosí's market stimulus provided the commercial basis for the forma-
tion of trade routes extending thousands of miles across mountains and
plains. Santiago del Estero, Tucumán, Santa Fe, and Mendoza owed
their economic well-being to the passage of goods and livestock to the
highlands and of the return cargos of silver. Along the extended freight
routes lay small villages, farms, and post houses that served teamsters
and muleteers and their draft animals and the cattle drovers and their
herds.
Indian warfare by no means disappeared following the Spanish
occupation of the northwest. Typically, the Spanish governors ratified
and even enhanced the traditional power of some Indian chiefs, whom
the Spaniards called caciques (a term picked up by the Europeans
from the Taíno of the Caribbean). But occasionally, renegade Spaniards
mobilized Indian rebellions for their own benefit. Pedro de Bohórquez,
for example, called himself “Inca” and he united 117 native caciques,
whose followers then rose up in arms against the Spaniards in the area
of Tucumán in 1657.
The combatants on both sides attempted to destroy the economic
assets of the other. The native warriors burned the wheat fields of the
Spaniards just before harvest; the latter set fire to the cornfields of the
indigenous peoples. Captives on both sides suffered prolonged and
severe torture during which indigenous warriors played native musical
instruments, such as reed panpipes and wooden trumpets, until the
death of prisoners.
To settle once and for all the indigenous resistance, the Spanish
at Tucumán resorted to an Inca system of social control: They exiled
recalcitrant groups to distant colonies. One group from La Rioja walked
back from their exile in Potosí to continue their struggle, but the
Spaniards successfully resettled another group, the Quilmes, to a loca-
tion just south of Buenos Aires. Quilmes is now the name of a suburb
of the capital and one of the leading local beers.
Tucumán and Santiago del Estero, both lying midway between
the economic and administrative center of Córdoba and the Salta
mule fairs, were important trading intermediaries in the colonial era.
Santiago found early prominence as a center of exchange, boasting of
some 40 plazas for trade. According to a commercial summary of 1677,
