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Updated: June 22, 2025
Van Diemen returned to the United States, but his wife soon became homesick for her native land, and, like a good husband as he was, he went once more to Mexico. This time he settled in Santa Fé, where he accumulated a handsome fortune, lived in the best house in the city, and owned haciendas.
There were endless quantities of stock cattle to select from on the two haciendas, and when ready to start, under the specifications, a finer lot of cows would have been hard to find. The worst drawback was that they were constantly dropping calves on the road, and before we reached the river we had a calf-wagon in regular use.
Few of the men had departed, those few who had ridden in from nearby haciendas where unwarned families waited in ignorance of the menace sweeping down upon them from the hills. Thode worked with heaving chest and straining muscles, but his brain was singularly clear and his observation acute. Gentleman Geoff seemed to be everywhere at once, urging, exhorting, commanding.
Below them swept green reaches of ranch land, dotted here and there with cattle and horses or the picturesque haciendas of old Spanish families. The camino stretched white and broad before them, winding through rolling hillocks, shaded sometimes by huge overhanging trees. "Isn't this Francisco Sanchez, whom we go to visit, a soldier, a former commandante of your town, alcalde?" asked a rider.
The dismal forebodings of the planters seem to have been fulfilled to some extent at least, for we heard, not long after our return to Europe, that the Indians had plundered and set fire to numbers of the haciendas of the south country, and that our friends the administradors of Cocoyotla had escaped with their lives.
Luis Cervallos is my friend, the best of Ecuadorianos. He owns three cacao plantations at Naranjito and Chobo. At Milagro is his big sugar plantation. He has large haciendas at Ambato and Latacunga, and down the coast is he interested in oil-wells. Also has he spent much money in planting rubber along the Guayas. He is modern, like the Yankee; and, like the Yankee, full of business.
I am Ecuadoriano, true, but I am Spanish. I am Manuel de Jesus Patino. I own many haciendas, and ten thousand Indians are my slaves, though the law says they are free men who work by freedom of contract. The law is a funny thing. We Ecuadorianos laugh at it. It is our law. We make it for ourselves. I am Manuel de Jesus Patino. Remember that name. It will be written some day in history.
Clara, returning to Santa Fé under the care of her energetic and affectionate relative, found that the deluge of debt would cover town house and haciendas, leaving her barely a thousand dollars. She was handsome and accomplished, but she was an orphan and poor. Yes, there was another sustaining possibility, and of a more poetic nature.
Sisal hemp, which I found much like our yucca or "bear grass," is but little grown. Sugarcane is usually cultivated in large plantations, as in Louisiana, these plantations themselves called haciendas, and their owners hacienderos.
Even these haciendas, rectangular structures forming the headquarters of large landed estates, are semi-fortifications, capable of a stout defense against roving banditti, who have long been the dread and curse of the country and are not yet obliterated. These structures are sometimes surrounded by a moat, the angles being protected by turrets pierced for musketry.
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