american-holocaust

90 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTish seemed to think at first that the supply of labor was infinite and inexhaustible.Whole valleys, once filled with thriving villages and hundreds ofthousands of native people, were picked clean of human life. But at lastthe friars and some settlers began writing to their king in Spain, askinghim to use his influence to moderate the holocaust, lest the absence of anyIndians-a prospect that was beginning to seem imminent-serve to shuttheir enterprises down. 112The Crown consented. On Christmas Day in 1551, the king decreedthat henceforth all Indian labor in the mines must be voluntary. The mineowners countered by using forced Indian laborers to carry supplies to theremote and isolated mining regions (that form of involuntary servitudewas unaffected by the king's decree) and then trying to coax those laborersinto working "voluntarily" in the mines. Others "rented out" Indian workersfrom Spanish labor overlords. But still the supply of workers, along withall the native people, continued to disappear.Finally, in the 1560s, the Spanish viceroy on the scene countermandedthe royal decree and declared that "for the good of the realm" one-seventhof the native tributary population living within approximately 150 milesof a mine would be drafted to labor in the mine pits. After four monthsthat group would be replaced by another collection of conscripts from thesame area. Although such draftees were treated better than the earlier slaves,and were allowed to spend each night above ground rather than in themines-they were, after all, now a much scarcer and thus more valuablecommodity-conditions during the day below ground were as bad as theyhad always been. Indeed, even the trek up the mountains to reach themines remained a murderous journey. One Spaniard described a march hewitnessed of "more than seven thousand souls" from the province of Chuquitoto the "silver mountain" of Potosi. It covered a "distance of aboutone hundred leagues [and] takes two months" he wrote, because the cattlewhich were driven up the mountain alongside the people "cannot travelquicker, nor [can] their children of five and six years whom they take withthem." He continues:Of all this mankind and common wealth which they take away from Chuquito,no more than two thousand souls ever return, and the remainder,about five thousand, in part, they die, and in part they remain in Potosi.. . . And for this, and the work, so excessive that, of six months, four inthe mines, working twelve hours a day, going down four hundred and twentyand at times seven hundred feet, down to where night is perpetual, for it isalways necessary to work by candlelight, the air thick and ill-smelling beingenclosed in the entrails of the earth, the going up and down most dangerous,for they come up loaded with their small sack of metal tied up to their backs,taking quite four to five hours, step by step, and if they make the slightestfalse step they may fall seven hundred feet; and when they arrive at the topout of breath, find as shelter a mineowner who scolds them because they did