I spent two days with the American superintendent of "Platanal," the electric plant run by water power a few miles out of town through fields of head-high maize. The night before my arrival bandits had raided the establishment and one of them had been killed. The president of Zamora had profusely thanked the "gringo" in charge when he presented himself in town with the body. On pay-day the manager went and came from the bank with two immense revolvers and a loaded rifle.
The current supplied by the rapids of "Platanal" is carried on high-tension wires to several cities far distant, including Guanajuato, a hundred miles away. Let the dynamo here break down and the cage of "Pingüico" mine hangs suspended in its shaft and Stygian darkness falls in the labyrinth below. In the rainy season lightning causes much trouble, and immense flocks of birds migrating south or north, according to the period of year, keep the repair gangs busy by flying against the wires and causing short circuits through their dead bodies. Woodpeckers eat away the wooden cross-pieces on the iron towers with disheartening rapidity. The company is philanthropically inclined toward its employees. Even the peons are given two weeks' vacation on full pay, during which many rent a patch of land on the mountainside to plant with corn. A savings bank system is maintained, strict sanitation is insisted upon in the houses furnished by the company, and the methods of the haciendas of the region, of paying the peon the lowest possible wages for his labor and produce and selling to him at the highest possible prices at the estate store, thereby keeping him in constant debt and a species of slavery, are avoided. The result is a permanent force of high Mexican grade. All attempts of the company to introduce schools, however, even on its own property, have been frustrated by the powerful churchmen. A bright young native in the plant was an expert at figures, which he had been surreptitiously taught by his "gringo" superior, but he could not sign his name.
My compatriot strongly opposed my plan of walking to Uruapan--at least without an armed guard! The mountains were full of bandits, the Tarascan Indians, living much as they did at the time of the Conquest, did not even speak Spanish, they were unfriendly to whites, and above all dangerously superstitious on the subject of photography. There are persons who would consider it perilous to walk the length of Broadway, and lose sight even of the added attraction of that reputed drawback.
