If the reading of an author’s work, allusions, imitations and dedications are an index to popularity, Walt Whitman was one of the most popular among the poets of Latin America. The number of times he is mentioned in their works alone indicates the extent of interest aroused by him and their attitude toward him.

An attempt will not be made to show that Whitman was more popular than Poe or Longfellow, but the writer will endeavor to show the extent to which he was known, imitated and emulated by Spanish American poets.

There was a race on, in 1914, to cross Uspallata Pass over the Andes—which would get across first, an automobile or an airplane? Man’s feet had worn trails across the high mountains, but neither of these two vehicles had ever crossed the dizzy heights of this Pass. Both were comparatively new means of transportation, and both faced great hazards in this undertaking. For the auto there was only an old, winding, dirt road; for the airplane there were the formidable, twenty-three-thousand-foot-high snow-capped mountains with their treacherous wind currents. It seemed as if Nature had had a prevision of these new inventions, and, to guard her inviolability, had thrown up insuperable physical barriers. The mountains hampered and impeded communication between various South American countries, and particularly between Chile and Argentina the Andes formed a tantalizing barricade. The ranges were like an ocean separating the two countries, and the same spirit which spurs man on to see what is over the horizon, or around the next bend in the road, would not let him rest until he had flown himself over the Andes.

President Polk’s message to Congress on December 5, 1848, informed that body—and thus the country—that the reports “of the abundance of gold” in California, though “of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief,” had been “corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.” The President’s message touched off the gold mania in the East. There were, of course, by this time thousands in the “diggings,” but they were mostly from California or Oregon.

Most of the Argonauts traveled to California by the various overland trails, but many, especially from the East, went by sea. In 1849 almost all those who traveled by ship either went “round the Horn” or by water to Panama, across the isthmus, and then again by ship to California. In 1849 apparently only one group of gold seekers chose to cross Central America at Nicaragua rather than Panama. The next year, however, as reports came back of the various disadvantages of the all-water route and of the Panama crossing, more and more of the Argonauts turned to Nicaragua.

1. Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. MS copy of part of Landa’s original manuscript discovered in Academia de la Historia, Madrid, by C. E. Brasseur de Bourbourg and first published by him: Relation des choses de Yucatan de Diego de Landa (Coll. Doc. Lang. Indig.… de l’Am. Anc., vol. 3). Paris, 1864. (Incomplete.)

Second edition: Juan de Dios de la Rada y Delgado, Manuscrito de Diego de Landa tomada directamente del único ejemplar que se conoce y se conserva en la Academia de la Historia (Appendix to Spanish translation of Léon de Rosny’s Essai sur le déchiffrement de l’écriture hiératique Maya, Paris, 1876). Madrid, 1884. (First complete edition except for maps.)

The Document entitled “Conversión de los San Luiseños de la Alta California,” by the Luiseño Indian, Pablo Tac, who was born at the California Mission of San Luis Rey de Francia in 1822, and who died in Italy in 1841, is of unusual interest both as an historical and ethnographic record, but perhaps most of all because it is the unique instance of an account of California Mission Indian life written by an Indian. It may also be claimed as the first writing of a literary nature produced by a native of California, even though there may be legal instruments, commercial notes and personal letters by native Californians bearing earlier dates. Although the culture of the Luiseño Indians is fairly well known from the work of modern anthropologists, Tac’s account is certainly the only written description of it by a Luiseño, brief and incomplete though it is.