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Updated: June 6, 2025
Our host himself, and his son, Dom Joao the younger, who was state secretary of agriculture, and the latter's charming wife, and the president of Matto Grosso, and several other ladies and gentlemen, had come down the river to greet us, from the city of Cuyaba, several hundred miles farther up-stream. As usual, we were treated with whole-hearted and generous hospitality.
Walk around Brazil and you have traveled a distance equal to two-thirds of a journey around the globe. If every man, woman and child in the United States were placed in Matto Grasso, the state in Brazil where Roosevelt discovered the "River of Doubt," in 1914, that state would not have as many people to the square mile as England has at this moment.
But now even here in Caceres the spirit of the new Brazil is moving; a fine new government school has been started, and we met its principal, an earnest man doing excellent work, one of the many teachers who, during the last few years, have been brought to Matto Grosso from Sao Paulo, a centre of the new educational movement which will do so much for Brazil.
As has been stated, in such a wooded country as the Matto Grasso there was always more or less of this, and Long had taken a critical survey of the rapids and noted the stuff which went plunging and dancing through them. Now, however, he was sure there was an increase, and a good deal of it consisted of large trees and logs, which must have been brought down by some cause more than ordinary.
Any Governor who did not bend without question to the will of the President was instantly deposed, and in this way the Governors of Matto Grosso, Ceará, and Amazones were deprived of their posts. Every official, in fact, who did not show himself disposed to serve the new autocrat with a blind obedience was deprived of whatever office he had held.
In my canoe Luiz the steersman, the headman, was a Matto Grosso negro; Julio the bowsman was from Bahia and of pure Portuguese blood; and the third man, Antonio, was a Parecis Indian. The actual surveying of the river was done by Colonel Rondon and Lyra, with Kermit as their assistant.
Born in Matto Grosso, in the tropics, our host had the look of a northerner and, although a grandfather, he possessed an abounding vigor and energy such as very few men of any climate or surroundings do possess. All of his sons are doing well. The son who was with us was a stalwart, powerful man, a pleasant companion, an able public servant, a finished horseman, and a skilled hunter.
For some eighteen years he was occupied in exploring and in opening telegraph lines through the eastern or north middle part of the great forest state, the wilderness state of the "Matto Grosso" the "great wilderness," or, as Australians would call it, "the bush." Then, in 1907, he began to penetrate the unknown region lying to the north and west.
Then he went to Rio, served for a year in the army as an enlisted man in the ranks, and succeeded finally in getting into the military school. After five years as pupil he served three years as professor of mathematics in this school; and then, as a lieutenant of engineers in the Brazilian army, he came back to his home in Matto Grosso and began his life-work of exploring the wilderness.
Ashman gathered from what was told him that the Murhapas were a tribe numbering fully a thousand men, women and children; that they occupied a village or town on the right bank of the Xingu about twenty miles above the rapids, where the incidents already recorded occurred, and that they were far superior in intelligence, physical development and prowess to any other tribes in the Matto Grosso.
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