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Updated: September 13, 2025
To-day the large ollas are worth about 2 pesos, and carabaos are valued at from 40 to 70 pesos. Mayinit salt passes in barter to about as many pueblos as do the Samoki pots, but while the pots go westward to the border of the Bontoc culture area the salt passes far beyond the eastern border, being bartered from pueblo to pueblo.
An irrigated sementera 60 by 100 feet, having 6,000 square feet of surface, is valued at two carabaos, or, in money, about 100 pesos. It produces an average annual crop of ten cargoes of palay, each worth 1 peso. Thus there is an annual gross profit of ten per cent on the value of the permanent investment. It requires ten men one day to turn the soil and fertilize the plat.
Four of the richest men of Bontoc own fifty carabaos each, and one of them owns thirty hogs. Two other men and a woman, all called equally rich, own ten head of carabaos each. Others have fewer, while two of the ten richest men in the pueblo, have no carabaos. Some of these men have eight granaries, holding from two to three hundred cargoes each, now full of palay.
Later, when I said it was time for me to start for home, he set me out a meal of fruit and boiled rice. I quite expected to hear him order Europa to wait on the table, but he did not, and when I came away, and he came with me down the mountain as far as the "carabaos" track, the two big apes stayed on the verandah as if to guard the house.
He has no roads for wheels; neither carabaos, cattle, nor horses could go among his irrigated sementeras; and he has relatively few loads of produce coming in and going out of his pueblo. Such loads as he has can be transported by himself with greater safety and speed than by quadrupeds; and so, since he almost never moves his place of abode, he has little need of animal transportation.
It had previously been the custom of the wild men to kill chickens, pigs or carabaos in case of illness, in order to propitiate evil spirits, the kind and number of animals killed being of course determined by the wealth of the patients.
We stayed long enough to take on a number of carabaos, which were swum out to the ship, and then hauled out of the water by a sling passed around their horns. Our next stop was at Vigan, a well-built town, many of whose houses are of stone. We reached the town in a motor-car, passing through well cultivated fields of maguey.
The next morning there were no horses to be found; and it was not till the afternoon that I procured a cart and a couple of carabaos to take me to Santa Cruz, whence in the evening the market-vessel started for Manila. One carabao was harnessed in front; the other was fastened behind the cart in order that I might have a change of animals when the first became tired.
This operation, which requires several months for its completion, yields such a bad, dark-brown, and viscid product that the pitcher fetches only two dollars and a quarter in Manila, while a superior oil costs six dollars. A winch, turned by two carabaos, sets a number of rasps in motion by means of toothed wheels and leather straps.
Dwellings are also disposed of if the original occupant is to vacate and some other person desires to possess the buildings. Death may destroy one's personal property, such as hogs and carabaos, but almost never does an Igorot "lose his property," if it is real.
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