The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-10-25

tSay anu the men are QSllQS rom LISlE pirOgues drawn up near the shore In these parts clothes are not counted 1 among the necessaries of life. For all ! native children under age" absolute l nakedness is the rule, while neither | men nor women wear more than lOin- l cloths of restricted dimensions, each l rectangular scrap of bead-work fas- l tened by dirty string. Occasionally you see along shore a group of mud 1 huts, tenanted by negroes or lOw-class Creoles, who are probably rubber-hun CTS. pearl fishers, asphalt diggers. or 1 engaged in some other queer industry that pertains to the locality. They wear a scanty garment or two apiece
 and appear to live little better than 1 their neighbors of pure Indian blood:
 but as to morals and the common de cencies of life, they are manifestly poor as the poorest.
 The first stop is made at Santa Cata-
 lima, the seat of the powerful "Orinoco company" which has the modest capital
 of thirty million dollars invested in | Venezuela, and whose headquarters are
 at Faribault, Minn The company en- 1 joys concession to millions of acres of surprising fertility, besides mineral de
 posits of untold value and unlimited 1 possibilities in the way of valuable tim Der, including "balOta," the new substi-
 tute for India rubber.
 The men who are employed to develop
 this splendid domain are housed in a
 two-stor frame structure which looks like a hospital, or summer hotel on
 the Jersey coast Among other fine
 things on the Orinoco company's prop erty is mountain of iron, said to con-
 tain sixty-seven per cent. of metallic
 ore.
 Another stop is made at Las Tablas,
 whence all the gold is shipped from the fomous mines of Fl CalIao." which lie up the Caroull river, one hundred and
 thirty miles south of the Orinoco. In
 times long past large amounts of treas
 ure were taken from those mines, and
 they are still claimed to be among the
 richest in the world Fl Callao was ac-
 cidentally discovered by Jamaican ne-
 gro named Steibel He sold three fourths of it to some Frenchmen who were poor as himself, but possessed of greater intelligence, and in a few years
 all were multi millionaires. Though
 working under enormous difficulties,
 upwards of thirty-five million dollars in
 gold were taken out of Fl Callao during
 the first twenty years. According to
 English and American mining experts,
 the Callao zone" Is one uninterrupted
 gold-field hundred miles wide. Un-
 fortunately, it is almost inaccessible,
 there being no regular means of com
 munication between it and the outer
 world, and absolutely none of trans
 port. Coal sells there for eighty dollars
 the ton and food-stuffs are literally
 ''out of sight"
 Ten cents per pound is charged for
 transporting machinery, which must all
 be brought on the backs of men and
 mules through the painless jungle from
 the river. Nevertheless twenty-six
 mines are being worked to-day in the
 Callao district, and thousand miners
 are earning there at the present mo-
 ment from four to twelve dollars a day
 The one thing needful is railroad only
 one hundred and thirty miles long. To ] more fully comprehend the Orinoco's S
 magnitude, one must remember that
 modern geographers have divided South
 America into three great basins-those of the Amazon the Orinoco and the Rio de la Plata To dominate the mouth of one of these colossal arteries of com merce is to control one-thrd of the southern continent Within the four hundred miles between the Orinoco's s mouth and Cuidad Bolivar, its yellow tide receives twenty other great navi- gable rivers; while still further into the
 interior it's eastern bank lets in ninely- one large rivers, and the western bank between thirty and forty. It is not gen. orally known, but it is nevertheless 8 fact, that the Amazon and the Orinoco
 rivers rise at the same source, and that were few snags and sand-bars and other impediments removed, a light :, draught steamer could enter the mouth of one river and sail out to sea through $ the mouth of the other, thus crossing the continent twice, from the Atlantic
 almost to the Pacific, by different routes. The Orinoco is now navigated } to within a short distance of BogOta 2 the capital of Colombia, and the day is S at hand when much of Colombia's = trade, as we'll as that of Ecuador S (which at present goes mostly to Eng S land, via Cape Horn), will be seeking e the United States through this new D channel Schemes for dredging out the h snags and sand-bars have been some e times under consideration, and if the 3 Venezuelans and Colombians could only Il quit "revoluting" few months, the
 longest line of fresh water navigation = in the world would soon be opened-e r system of water ways more prodigiou T than the mind can readily conceive n The upper Orinoco country has neve r been thoroughly explored, and to thi e day nobody knows what can be fount = or raised there; but ever since it's dis 5 covery the most astonishing storie 5 have been told of it. Somewhere in tn heart of those waterways lies the fablet
 Fl Dorado, which the world dreamed li a bout for two hundred years. You hav
 read how it was alleged to have beer n discovered by that treacherous knight Adelantado Gonzalo de Cassada, whom 5 Francisco Pizarro sent on an exploring expedition after the conquest of Peru
 11nHar his hrothar Gonzales with