The Winning of the West

Central Brazil is a vast green wedge of almost unexplored land. Seventeenth-century Portuguese explorers staggered out of its jungles bringing tales of a great lost City of Gold in a Garden of Eden. Plunging into the trackless Mato Grosso (Thick Forest), such 20th century big-game hunters as Theodore Roosevelt and Alexander ("Tiger Man") Siemel encountered jaguars hardly smaller than the fiercest tigers of Bengal. Nine years ago, out to win the 116,000 square miles of this wild Brazilian west. President Getulio Vargas set up the government-financed Central Brazil Foundation and ordered: "Conquer the wilderness. Colonize the area.''

Last week, trying all the harder to carry out these orders now that the old man is back at the helm of Brazil, the foundation was valiantly hacking away at one of the world's last great frontiers. To do the job, it had an appropriation of $400,000, and a construction outfit consisting of a bulldozer, a road scraper, six light planes and some of the most determined men on the South American continent.

With their two pieces of earth-moving equipment, a foundation gang last week pushed a rough track (see map) through the jungle at the rate of half a mile a day. The foundation's goal is a road running 1,100 miles across the Amazonian basin to Manaus, and linking the river by land with Brazil's industrial metropolis of Sao Paulo, 1,700 miles to the south. Flying over five emergency airfields that foundation men have opened along the way with their machetes. Brazilian air force planes next week will start the first scheduled air line service from Rio directly to Manaus on the Amazon.

The foundation has already created two new towns along its pioneer highway. Aragarc,as (pop. 2,000) has new houses for road workers, a school for 350 children, a 70-bed hospital, sawmill, machine shop and brick factory. Chavantina (pop. 300), a cluster of brick huts, lies even deeper in the Mato Grosso, on the banks of the Rio das Mortes (River of Deaths) and near the hunting grounds of the fierce Chavante Indians.

Largely because of the years of missionary pacification by Brazil's Indian Protective Service, whose motto is "Die if you must, but never kill." the Chavantes have given no trouble. In fact, recently a party of breech-clouted braves joined with the roadbuilders in a fiesta so festive that their chief wound up taking a flight in a foundation airplane. The chief circled ecstatically over his village of dome-shaped huts, roaring with laughter and shouting greetings to his people below.

With the road now 40 miles past the River of Deaths, new settlers, some 1,000 families strong, are due to arrive after the first of the year. Foundation men have already started clearing and planting garden plots with rice and beans to feed the colonists. Each family will receive 250 to 500 acres. Successful test plantings of cotton have already been made; that is likely to be the settlers' main crop. And the foundation's neat new towns of Aragarc,as and Chavantina are already more substantial than the Portuguese explorers' gold-filled dreams.

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