Kansas City journal. [volume] (Kansas City, Mo.) 1897-1928, 1898-10-02

to form a mush or bake a cake At noon
they have bowl of hot beans, and for
supper or dinner, as they call it here, they
get a. second bowl of beans, with, perhaps,
some more toasted meal added. The last
two meals they eat in the fields. with what
extras their wives bring from home. They
sit down on the ground to eat, and their
only eating utensil is an iron spoon OF, what
is more common, mussel shell. Still, on
such food they will work from sunrise to
sunset and will carry enormous burdens
and do the heaviest work.
The huts which form their homes are lit
tie better than our pig pens. They are
usually just high enough to get into and
not over fifteen feet square. Their walls
are of waited twigs. sundried bricks, or
in the south of boards, and the roofs are
usually of thatch. The dirt forms the floor
and in many cases the bed of the family
A box or two and n table is about all the
furniture. There are seldom partitions in
this one room. The people herd together
like pigs and several families often occupy
the same room
They All Get Drunk.
The chief end of the Chilean rotos life is
to get drunk. He works only for this. and
nine-tenths of his kind are in a state of
beastly intoxication at least once a week
He stays drunk and will not work as long
his money lasts. For this reason Mon
day is called the ''rotos holy day" for he
is so drunk on Sunday that he has to take
Monday to taper off. The men. women and
children of this class all drink together.
None of them seem to have any desire to
better their condition and all seem to con-
tinue in this state till they die. The liquor
they use is the vilest of alcohol, made of
potatoes and rotten vegetables. 1t would
as one of their employers says. kill the or
binary man at a thousand yards. They
gUlp this down in great quantities and
drink. not for the pleasure of drinking, but
to get drunk.
Their Terrible Mortality.
The result of their excuses. of their poor
food and the unsanitary condition of their
houses is that the mortality among them
is very great. They breed like Australian
children who live are only the strongest
The peon child who has constitution
enough to grow up in Chile has constitu-
ton enough for anything. 1t is perhaps
for this reason that the poems as a class
are as strong as any people in the world
| have seen them all day carrying bags
of nitrate each weighing 300 pounds and
tossing them about like bags of feathers.
Four of them will lift up a piano and
trot off with it. and in the mines a peon
will carry bag of ore weighing $50 pounds
up notched stick that serves as a ladder
all day long. Comparatively few of them
I am told have gone through the marriage
ceremony, but nearly all have wives. and
they are. as a rule, true to them. They
are kind to their old people and always
ready to help one another when in trou-
BILE. They have the humor of the Irish
and the superstition of the Chinese. They
are as great fatalists as the Turks. They
are as treacherous in their enmity as the
Spaniards from whom they descended. ana
will stab you in the back if they are offered
the chance 1t was thought that the sys-
tenn of common schools inaugurated by the
Chilean government might attract the
peon. It has not done so to any extent,
and to-day of the 100000 people in Chile
less than one in four can read and write
FRANK G. CARPENTER.