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stringing together a nation

Tseng 2003.12.9 07:11 6952 Diacon / STRINGING TOGETHER A NATION / sheet 2 of 242
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stringing together a nation

c â n d i d o m a r i a n o da s i lva ro n d o n

and the c o n st ru c t i o n of a

modern brazil, 1906–1930

todd a. diacon

Duke University Press * Durham and London * 2004

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© 2004 duke university press All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan. Typeset in Cycles by Tseng

Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

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contents

Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

one Stringing Together a People and a Place 9

two Building the Lonely Line, 1907–1915 19

three Working and Living on the Lonely Line 53

four The Power of Positivism 79

five Living with Others on the Lonely Line 101

six Selling a Person and a Product: Public Relations

and the Rondon Telegraph Commission 131

seven The Legacy of the Lonely Line 155

Notes 163

Bibliography 207

Index 225
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i l lu st r at i o n s

Maps
1909 expedition 28

Cuiabá–Santo Antonio telegraph line 48

The telegraph line 158

Figures
Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon 2

Telegraph right-of-way 24

Rondon and officers on the Juruena River 26

Telegraph right-of-way, probably near Pimenta Bueno

station 31

Roosevelt and Rondon 35

Rondon and officers with supply wagon 35

Brazilian and U.S. flags, Rondon-Roosevelt expedition

camp in Porto do Campo, Mato Grosso 38

Roosevelt-Rondon expedition at the headwaters of the

River of Doubt 40

Rondon, Theodore Roosevelt, and members of the

Roosevelt-Rondon expedition 43

Erecting a telegraph pole 49

Telegraph posthole diggers returning to camp 50

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Lieutenant Sebastião surveying near the Jamari River 58

Commission workers 60

Reveille 60

Rondon in unidentified camp 70

Unidentified men in camp with Rondon 72

Raising the flag 86

Positivist-Indian shrine 88

Rondon and his wife, Francisca Xavier da Silva Rondon 98

Rondon with Parecis men and women in front of

Utiariti Falls 117

Rondon distributing presents and clothes to Parecis men,

women, and children 119

Rondon addressing a Nambikwara man 119

Unidentified telegraph station 157

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ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

A few years ago an anonymous donor established the

Thomas Jefferson Award for creative research at the Uni-
versity of Tennessee. My receipt of this generous award dur-
ing the first year of its existence freed me from the need
to spend time and energy writing grant proposals. Instead,
I was able to engage in archival research in Brazil immedi-
ately, and my work proceeded quickly and smoothly. Thus I
wish to thank, first and foremost, that unnamed individual for
this wonderful endowment. For additional funding for earlier
parts of my research I also thank the National Endowment for
the Humanities (Summer Stipend Program) and the Fulbright
Foundation (Lecturing and Research Award).
Conducting archival research in Brazil is always a reward-
ing experience, due primarily to the staffs of the archives
discussed below. These fine professionals are committed to
furthering historical research in Brazil. But more than that,
the Brazilian archivists with whom I worked became both
my friends and advisors; indeed, these days a trip to Rio de
Janeiro would not be complete without stopping by to say
hello to them. At the Museu Histórico do Exército, located in
the Copacabana Fort, Solange Coelho Calvano, Maria Isabel
Travassos Romano, Maria Bley da Silveira, Isabel Maria San-
son Portela, Maria Lídgia Peçanha Alonso Gonçalves, Ivan
Coelho de Sá, and Tenente Gilson César da Silveira Bastos
made my work profitable and comfortable.
There is no better place to conduct research in Brazil than
at the Museu do Índio in Rio de Janeiro. The building and
grounds are lovely, but it is the people who make it special.
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x * ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

Thanks so very much to Rosely Rondinelli, who offered, in addition to

much-needed help locating documents, her passion for life, her friend-
ship, and many, many cafesinhos. Thanks to Penha Ferreira for her help
in the library and for helping me track down dissertations and theses.
Thanks as well to José Levinho, director of the Museu, for his tireless
work on behalf of the museum, its collection, and the indigenous peoples
of Brazil. During the early stages of my research in Brasília, Marco Anto-
nio da Rocha and Terry McIntyre were also of great help.
In Brasília a row house juts upward like the dark gray bow of an ocean-
going vessel. The building seems oddly organic. Each time I visit the place
it has grown an arm (bedroom) or has extended its trunk (a new sitting
room). Inside, Jovita Lacerda Furtado and Wriggberto Câmara Furtado
offer food, entertainment, and lots of noisy conversation to their son-in-
law. My thanks and love to them and the rest of their clan: Sandra, Bill,
Betinzinho, Cidinha, Adalberto, Cynthia, Tamara, Maroa, Kiko, Chico,
Malena, Eduardo, and last but not least, Gabriel. Thanks as well to Anto-
nio Osório Fonseca Ayres. In Rio de Janeiro I have the fortune of calling
two fine people my friends: Maria Laura Barreto is a whirl of intelligence,
compassion, and friendship—truly one of a kind; Roberto Villas Boas
kindly shares his knowledge of Brazil and the world with me. Thanks to
you both.
Many people in the United States and England also contributed to this
book. I wish to thank my friend and colleague Bruce Wheeler for reading,
editing, and commenting on the manuscript. Thanks to Joel Wolfe for his
ongoing advice and friendship. Thanks also go to Marshal Eakin, Peter
Beattie, Tom Holloway, Hendrik Kraay, and J. B. Finger for their support,
as well to the two anonymous readers of the manuscript for Duke Uni-
versity Press. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in the journal Past
and Present, and I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of that manu-
script for their helpful suggestions. A special abraço goes, of course, to
my mentor and friend Thomas E. Skidmore. The question ‘‘where would
I be without you?’’ is superseded only by the question ‘‘where would the
profession be without you?’’
A simple thank you is not enough, I know, to acknowledge the sup-
port and help of my wife, Moema Lacerda Furtado. She helped, as always,
with the translations and read and edited the entire manuscript. In con-
trast, I can only watch and admire her growing career as an artist. She and
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ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s * xi

our son, Natan Louis Diacon-Furtado, supported me during the many

ups and downs of my research and happily traveled along through Mato
Grosso and Rondônia.
In 1924 James Louis Diacon was born in rattlesnake-infested north-
west Oklahoma. This man, my father, grew up in poverty, selling news-
papers and shining shoes to help his widowed mother make it through
the Depression. At the age of seventeen he joined the navy and saw action
in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily, and all of the major naval land-
ings in the Pacific during World War II. He made it through college and
medical school in just six years. As a physician in the 1950s and 1960s,
he worked hard to provide for his family and to live the good life, the
American Dream of Cadillacs, Porsches, and trips to Mexican resorts. He
then lived the downside of that dream as cancer robbed him of his be-
loved wife at an early age, following which he struggled with bouts of
alcoholism and drug abuse. Finally, during the last decade of his life, he
completed rehab and once again became a wonderful father and grand-
father, until emphysema, the result of a lifetime of chain-smoking, felled
him. He was, indeed, a figure of his generation, and as such his life, which
was so full of history, encouraged in no small part my own interest in
history. I miss him every day and dedicate this book to him.
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i n t ro d u c t i o n

N early blind and weakened from his ninety-one years of

living, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon spent much of
his remaining life force dictating letters to national and inter-
national leaders. From his apartment overlooking the famed
Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Rondon sent letters of all
sorts to Brazilian politicians and foreign diplomats in 1956. He
welcomed Ellis Briggs, the newly appointed ambassador from
the United States, to his post. He congratulated the Norwe-
gian ambassador to Brazil on the birthday of Norway’s mon-
arch. He contacted the Colombian ambassador on that coun-
try’s independence day.
But the aged and increasingly infirm Cândido Mariano da
Silva Rondon engaged at the same time in correspondence of
a different sort. In July 1956 he received a letter from Antonio
Ferreira Silva, postmarked from the faraway town of Aqui-
dauana in the far-western state of Mato Grosso. Silva, accord-
ing to his own note, had served in 1909 as the first telegraph
operator at the Utiariti station in northwest Mato Grosso. In-
credibly, nearly fifty years later, Silva still worked for the Bra-
zilian Telegraph Service. He was writing Rondon to seek sup-
port for his request for a transfer to the city of Belo Horizonte,
so that he might end his career and spend his final days on
earth near his family.1
Utiariti. The name likely rolled off Rondon’s lips with a
wistful sigh. Sitting in his study, with the windows open, Ron-
don no doubt heard the familiar rhythms of waves washing
across Copacabana Beach. But at that moment his thoughts
were elsewhere and instead of waves, Rondon easily could
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Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon,

Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.
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i n t ro d u c t i o n * 3

have conjured up a far different set of sounds: birds cawing, monkeys

howling. Instead of the sound of cars rushing along Rio’s busy Atlan-
tic Avenue, in Rondon’s mind at that moment shovels, axes, and saws
clanged, chopped, and hummed. The shouts of children running ahead
of the waves gave way to the cries of workers suffering machete wounds
to the feet and hands. The glistening sun off the greenish waves of the
Atlantic Ocean gave way to the glistening sweat on the backs of soldiers.
The ocean itself vanished into his memories of the Amazon jungle. The
weakened, elderly, and nearly blind ninety-one-year-old man once again
became a vigorous, youthful, and feared officer in the Brazilian army.
This is a book about a man, an army commission, a country, and a
nation. The man is Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon (1865–1958), a Bra-
zilian army officer and architect of Brazil’s current policy toward indige-
nous peoples. The commission is the Strategic Telegraph Commission
of Mato Grosso to Amazonas (Comissão de Linhas Telegráficas Estra-
tégicas de Mato Grosso ao Amazonas), commonly known as the Ron-
don Commission or by its acronym, cltemta. The country is Brazil. The
nation, well, that is more difficult to explain, as will become clear dur-
ing the course of this study. Suffice it to say that the nation, thought of
as an ‘‘imagined community,’’ to use Benedict Anderson’s well-known
phrase, was under construction during Rondon’s life, as it is, of course,
to this day.2
The Rondon Commission, established in 1907, constructed the first
telegraph line across the Amazon Basin. In addition, its members ex-
plored the vast territories of the Brazilian northwest, surveyed and
mapped immense regions, and encouraged the colonization and settle-
ment of the region. Rondon and his men also implemented his policies
governing relations with indigenous groups resident in the region. The
Rondon Commission exemplifies the issues and intricacies involved in
the expansion of central state authority in Brazil and in the construc-
tion of a particular kind of Brazilian nation. The expansion of central
state authority refers to the growing presence of central state officials
in northwest Brazil, a vast region where landowners and local officials
held sway and where residents often knew nothing about the govern-
ment in Rio de Janeiro. Responding largely to military concerns (Brazil’s
troubles during the Paraguayan War, 1865–1870) and market issues (the
Amazonian natural-rubber boom), central state authorities committed
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4 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

resources to secure northwest Brazil via infrastructure development, an

expanded military presence, and colonization schemes.
President Afonso Pena turned to the military to construct this new
state presence in the interior. Rondon’s job, as a military engineer, was
to build an infrastructure of roads and telegraph lines that would con-
nect the vast hinterlands with the coast. His decades-long quest to do
so meant an expanded central state presence in the area, as officers and
soldiers, sometimes as many as six hundred of them at a time, lived and
worked in the region over the course of three decades. While they spent
federal funds purchasing supplies from local merchants, they also fought
with local residents, and Rondon and his officers challenged, although
not very successfully, the authority of powerful landowners and poten-
tates. In other words, members of the Rondon Commission strove to
establish the physical presence of the central state in a lonely corner of
the Amazon Basin.
These same men engaged in nation building as well, in that they at-
tempted to create a unified community of ‘‘Brazilians’’ from a popula-
tion whose loyalties and identities were much more local and regional in
scope. In essence, Rondon sought to make the hinterlands part of the na-
tion of Brazil as he and other urban Brazilians defined it. To do so he em-
ployed the accoutrements of nation building—speeches, flags, and civic
celebrations—spending as much energy on such nation building efforts
as he did on infrastructure development. Indeed, he considered infra-
structure development important precisely because it promised to facili-
tate efforts to mold residents of northwest Brazil into citizens of ‘‘his’’
Brazil. Rondon spoke to local authorities about the greater glories of the
nation and about the limitless future of the country as mapped out by
himself and other national leaders. He lectured to soldiers and workers,
tirelessly teaching them his official version of Brazilian history as a means
to create the shared or imagined community of the nation. Most signifi-
cant, he staged civic celebrations in the hinterlands and taught locals that
certain dates were national holidays and that certain items—a particular
flag, a certain song—were symbols of the nation.
Rondon directed much of his effort toward the indigenous peoples
living in the Amazon basin. For good reasons, most of what has been
written about Rondon examines his relationship with these people and
the policies he developed to govern Indian–white relations in Brazil. This
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i n t ro d u c t i o n * 5

literature is largely in Portuguese, however, so it is important to bring

the subject to an English-speaking audience. When Rondon wrapped an
Indian boy or girl in the Brazilian flag, he did so to send the message that
Brazil literally and figuratively covered these people as well as whites.
Language, religion, and dress increasingly signaled that the nation to
which they belonged was now Brazil.
Rondon’s efforts at national integration and infrastructure develop-
ment and his design and implementation of Indian protection policies
drew from the same intellectual source that shaped his ideas about the
nation: Positivism. This intellectual movement and religion sparked
Rondon’s desire to carry out his strenuous work and gave him the forti-
tude to complete it. It produced in him a moral certainty regarding the
correctness of his acts, as well as a fanatical devotion to the cause. Most
important, Positivism formed his worldview and informed his blueprint
for the nation. Simply put, building Positivism in Brazil was nation build-
ing for Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon and his colleagues.
To understand Rondon and his life’s work we must take his Positivism
seriously, for his career was, in a real sense, a decades-long effort to create
a Positivist utopia in Brazil. Ironically, the Positivist utopia included the
eventual elimination of large nation-states like Brazil, for Positivists felt
that these entities prevented the unification of mankind and the creation
of what they termed Humanity.
The Positivist ideal also included the elimination of standing armies,
for a unified Humanity (the Positivists always capitalized the word)
would have no use for such bellicose forces. The contradiction of Ron-
don, a career army officer, subscribing to a doctrine that preached the
need to eliminate armies suggests that the Rondon Commission is best
understood in terms of its contradictions. That is to say that the very
things that guaranteed the successes of the Rondon Commission also lim-
ited its effectiveness.
Positivism inspired Rondon and his officers, but it also at times alien-
ated powerful leaders and supporters, as when commission personnel
criticized Catholicism, Catholic officials, and the influence of the Catho-
lic Church in Brazilian political affairs. Likewise, the Positivists’ belief
that technology and machines would forge world unity and human pro-
gress, along with their promotion of the telegraph as the key to progress
in Brazil, created another set of critics. Radio communications doomed
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6 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

the telegraph line to obsolescence even before its inauguration in 1915,

and opponents turned Rondon’s faith in technology against him when
challenging the commission’s projects, its budgets, and its continued
existence.
These contradictions limited the power and success of the Rondon
Commission and highlight the fundamental weakness of a crop of re-
cent, and very good, Brazilian studies of the Rondon Commission. For
sound reasons these studies criticize and condemn Rondon for attempt-
ing to force his version of Brazilian citizenship on other peoples. How-
ever, in so doing, these studies exaggerate the successes of Rondon and
his commission, because they fail to research and report on the myriad
contradictions that crippled the implementation of his policies. As a re-
sult, both those who strongly favored Rondon’s policies during his life-
time and those scholars who condemn them today grossly exaggerate the
efficacy of his programs.
The misplaced belief in the power and results of the Rondon Commis-
sion is the real legacy of Rondon’s work in Brazil. Thus, this book exam-
ines the very real limits of his influence in both the Amazon basin and in
Rio de Janeiro, the nation’s capital. For many authors the questions to ask
are ‘‘Why was Rondon’s blueprint for the nation so abusive of others, and
why was he so successful in implementing it?’’ Instead, I believe it more
accurate to ask, ‘‘Why do scholars believe he was so successful, when, in
fact, he was not?’’
Rondon’s influence, in any case, is everywhere evident in Brazil. Any
educated Brazilian today knows of Rondon and his efforts to contact,
pacify, and incorporate indigenous peoples into the Brazilian nation.
Most Brazilians can easily cite the famous motto of Rondon’s Indian
policy: ‘‘To die if necessary; to kill never.’’ 3 Students in the smallest rural
villages study in schools that bear his name. Exasperated motorists in Rio
de Janeiro fight traffic jams on the Avenida Marechal Rondon. Residents
across the nation live in high-rise apartment buildings named after him.
And, of course, citizens of the state of Rondônia confront his legacy in
their daily lives.
Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon was born in the far-western state
of Mato Grosso in 1865. His father died five month’s before his birth, and
his mother, a descendant of the Terena and Bororo indigenous peoples,
died when he was two years old. Sent to live with an uncle in Cuiabá,
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i n t ro d u c t i o n * 7

Rondon graduated from normal school at the age of sixteen. Like many
Brazilians, Rondon’s only affordable option for further schooling was to
join the army. Transferred to Rio de Janeiro, he studied at the Military
Academy and at the Superior War College, graduating as a military engi-
neer in 1890.4
Rondon played a small role in the events leading to the declaration
of the Republic in 1889. Sent as a young officer back to his native Mato
Grosso, he spent thirty years constructing telegraph lines. In 1927, at the
age of sixty-two, he began the arduous task of inspecting and surveying
all of Brazil’s international borders, much of which he did on foot and
via canoe, crossing some 25,000 miles of territory. Retired from the army
in 1930, he led a very active life as president of the National Council for
the Protection of Indians. In that capacity he lobbied successfully for the
creation of the Day of the Indian national holiday, even while he devoted
himself to the cause of Positivism. He died in 1958.

* * *
This study grew out of my lengthy engagement with the literature on
Rondon, the Brazilian Old Republic, and the related themes of nation
building and state consolidation. Nevertheless, my goal is to keep this
book accessible to a larger audience. Undergraduate students and those
in the general public who are interested in history will, I believe, find
the story of the commission interesting and even entertaining. To insure
this I have kept my dialogue with the literature to a minimum in the text,
although it does appear often in the notes. The one glaring exception is
the chapter on Rondon’s policies toward Indians, for given the amount
and nature of work on this subject I found it impossible to construct my
telling of this topic without wading into debates in the larger scholarly
literature. I hope I have presented this discussion in a fashion that non-
specialists also will find interesting.
Chapter 1 places the Rondon Commission in its broad historical and
historiographical context. Chapter 2 narrates the construction of the
line, while chapter 3 focuses on the lives of the soldiers sent to work on
this project in the Amazon. Chapter 4 urges a renewed appreciation for
the role Positivism played in Rondon’s life and work. Chapter 5 discusses
Rondon’s and the Rondon Commission’s interactions with indigenous
peoples in northwest Brazil. Chapter 6 analyzes the commission’s im-
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8 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

pressive public-relations machine in terms of the successes and failures

of those efforts. Finally, chapter 7 explains the continued significance
of the telegraph line and of the life and work of Cândido Mariano da
Silva Rondon one hundred years after commission soldiers felled the first
gigantic trees in the Amazon forest.

A Note on Brazilian Orthography

Several changes in Brazilian orthography have occurred since the cre-
ation of the documents cited in this study. In the notes I have maintained
the original spelling of the documents, such as ‘‘escriptório’’ instead of
the modern ‘‘escritório.’’ The one exception is with newspapers that are
still published today; for example, I will use the modern spelling of Jornal
do Comércio instead of Jornal do Commércio. In addition, for a time Positiv-
ists used their own orthography. I have maintained the original spelling
in these documents as well.
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Chapter One: st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r
a p e o p l e a n d a p l ac e

T o travel across the world’s fifth-largest country in 1900

demanded much time, tremendous stamina, and great
patience. Indeed, such a trip was nearly continental in scope,
as Brazil occupies one half of South America’s land mass and
is larger than the United States minus Alaska. Such a jour-
ney meant traveling thousands of miles, for the country spans
2,700 miles at its widest point, while 2,500 miles separate its
northern and southern borders. Brazil is a colossus; its size
is surprising. Most of the countries of Europe together would
fit easily within its borders. Marshall Eakin’s ingenious obser-
vation that ‘‘the major cities of northeastern Brazil are physi-
cally closer to West Africa than to neighboring Peru and Co-
lombia’’ is as shocking as it is true.1
Assigned to command telegraph construction in the west-
ern state of Mato Grosso, the young army officer Cândido
Mariano da Silva Rondon and his crew departed Rio de Ja-
neiro on 21 July 1900. By rail they traveled to Araguari, in the
state of Minas Gerais, which was the final stop on the Mogi-
ana Railroad. On 29 July they began their march across the
state of Goiás, where they were joined by fifty soldiers of
the Twentieth Infantry Battalion in the town of Goiás Velho.
Thirty-six days later, on 19 September 1900, the men reached
São Lourenço, Mato Grosso, their final destination—the trip
from Rio had taken almost two months.2
The other route between Rio de Janeiro and Mato Grosso
involved an ‘‘immense river detour,’’ to cite Warren Dean’s
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10 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

nicely turned phrase. On this route one sailed down the Atlantic coast
from Rio de Janeiro, then up the Paraná and Paraguay Rivers, such that
when traveling from one Brazilian state to another the visitor was forced
to pass through three foreign countries: Argentina, Uruguay, and Para-
guay. The journey lasted thirty days if connections with steamships were
good, compared with the forty-five days immigrants spent traveling from
Japan to Brazil in the 1920s. Once in Mato Grosso, travelers often faced
equally lengthy trips just to move about within the state. In 1900 Mato
Grosso comprised nearly 15 percent of the total land area of Brazil. Cover-
ing 1.4 million square miles, Mato Grosso was roughly the size of Alaska,
although it has since been split into two states: Mato Grosso and Mato
Grosso do Sul.3
In a land the size of Brazil, time and space could conspire to create
baffling situations for federal officials at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury. Such was the case in 1914 in the southern state of Santa Catarina,
where the Brazilian army was fighting a bloody war against millenarian
rebels. Seeking to enlist local residents in the fight against the rebels,
an army commander invited Francisco Pires, a local landowner of some
means, to visit army headquarters. Soldiers raised the Brazilian flag and
played the national anthem on the parade grounds while Pires was in the
commander’s office. The landowner reportedly raced to the window and
expressed great puzzlement over what was happening before his eyes.
Incredibly, he had never seen the Brazilian flag nor heard the national
anthem, even though both had been adopted decades earlier! 4
These episodes suggest that in 1900 Brazil was a country but perhaps
not a unified country, if by that one means ‘‘the land . . . to which a per-
son owes allegiance.’’ 5 For federal officials stationed and living in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil’s vast interior could seem like a foreign country, separated
by enormous distances and varied beliefs and allegiances. Of course, the
opposite was also true, with the lives of interior residents having about as
much to do with Rio de Janeiro as they did with Paris, Berlin, or Tokyo.
Connecting these two Brazils would be Cândido Mariano da Silva Ron-
don’s lifelong challenge. Via a single, lonely telegraph line he hoped to
incorporate the faraway lands and peoples of the interior into the urban,
coastal nation governed from Rio de Janeiro.6
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a p e o p l e a n d a p l ac e * 11

Stringing Together a People

Rondon was part of a generation of Brazilians that pressed for reforms
during the final thirty years of the nineteenth century. Whether it be
the abolition of slavery (1888), or the overthrow of the Brazilian monar-
chy (1889), change was the goal of this generation. It sought reform in
part, the historian Emília Viotti da Costa argues, because of new ideolo-
gies imported from Europe; but more important, she continues, those
new ideologies resonated with Brazilians because they addressed the dra-
matic changes engendered by the expansion of world trade and Brazil’s
increasing incorporation into the world market as an exporter of tropi-
cal agricultural products. The expansion of export agriculture drew once
isolated interior lands into the nation’s economic orbit. Agriculturalists
even further inland then began to produce for expanding urban mar-
kets. As a result, economic ‘‘development (urbanization, immigration,
improvements in transportation, early manufacturing industry and capi-
tal accumulation) provoked social dislocations: the emergence of new
social groups and the decline of traditional elites. . . . [As such] the po-
litical hegemony of traditional landed and commercial oligarchies had
become anachronistic obstacles to progress by the 1870s and 1880s.’’ 7
Brazil’s dismal performance in the Paraguayan War (1865–1870) added
to the perceived need for change. At the beginning of the war the Para-
guayans cut Brazilian access to the Paraguay River, thereby demonstrat-
ing the isolation of the Brazilian west. Land travel to the theater of war
at times was difficult, if not impossible. Troops were hard to mobilize,
and logistical nightmares haunted Brazil’s war effort. The Paraguayan
soldiers were better equipped and better trained and were supported
by Paraguay’s surprisingly well-developed industrial base. Even though
Brazil eventually won the war, it ‘‘raised fundamental questions about
whether their own ill-integrated society was ready to join the race to
modernity.’’ 8
Influential Brazilians traced their country’s problems during the war
to a lack of civic spirit or national pride. In other words, they felt there
was something defective in the Brazilian ‘‘nation.’’ Perhaps the problem
was that no unified set of beliefs united Brazilians into a single people
with a shared vision. The nation, then, would have to be built, or at
least refashioned, into something new and modern. A homogenous iden-
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12 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

tity was to replace the panoply of customs, cultures, beliefs, and back-
grounds. As the Brazilian philosopher Marilena de Souza Chaui notes,
the nation would have to include ‘‘an empirical reference (territory), and
imaginary reference (a cultural community and a political unity via the
State), and a symbolic reference (a field of cultural signifiers . . . ).’’ Urban
intellectuals and political leaders asserted their right to create that iden-
tity.9
Julyan Peard observes that ‘‘imitation was a strategy that many Latin
Americans adopted for resolving anxieties central to new nations.’’ 10 In
Latin America this meant that intellectuals looked to Europe for clues
and ideas on how to construct a supposedly modern nation. Prominent
nineteenth-century European thinkers argued that one race (one people)
comprised the nation, and they believed that ‘‘intermediary groups or
minorities destroyed [it].’’ 11 In Brazil, nation building in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries thus became primarily an elite-led
attempt to create one ‘‘people’’ (povo), or one race or national ‘‘type.’’ Yet,
Brazilian intellectuals faced a dilemma, for to be ‘‘modern was to be white
and European, but most Brazilians were neither.’’ 12
An initial solution to this seeming dilemma was to promote the mas-
sive immigration of European, and hence, white, settlers. Brazilian scien-
tists accepted the racial hierarchies of social Darwinism and hoped that
European immigrants would help ‘‘whiten’’ Brazil’s population, thus pro-
ducing a ‘‘modern’’ nation. The problem for Brazilian intellectuals, how-
ever, was that European racist theories argued that any mixture of whites
and nonwhites would produce inferior people. Given Brazil’s sizable
nonwhite population and long history of miscegenation, this seemingly
doomed the country to perpetual inferiority. Ingeniously, Brazilian intel-
lectuals rejected the Europeans’ condemnation of miscegenation (but
maintained their emphasis on racial hierarchies) by employing a version
of Lamarckian eugenics to assert instead that over the course of genera-
tions the ‘‘superior’’ white genes would ‘‘triumph’’ in Brazil.13
According to Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, race has always been a compo-
nent of nation formation in Brazil. Gradually, however, Brazilian cultural
thinkers moved away from defining whiteness as the goal of any mod-
ern nation toward a celebration precisely of the mestiço as the symbol of
Brazil. Brazilians formed a strong, unified nation, this school of thought
argued, precisely because of the union of three great races: blacks, whites,
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a p e o p l e a n d a p l ac e * 13

and Indians. And with the inclusion of the latter, Doris Sommer notes,
Brazilians truly could proclaim their independence from Portugal, for
what could be more ‘‘Brazilian’’ than to be Indian? 14
Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon subscribed wholeheartedly to the
latter attempt to create a Brazilian people and, hence, a Brazilian nation.
To be sure, he spent much of his time directing the construction of tele-
graph lines, roads, bridges, and other projects, yet he also spent much
time, perhaps even more time, energy, and thought, on implementing
plans to incorporate peoples of different ethnic and racial backgrounds
(especially Indians) into one shared nation. Building such a nation, how-
ever, first required that the isolation of vast regions of the country be
overcome. As an officer in the Brazilian army, Rondon felt he was well
placed to do this, because the army, along with the Catholic Church, was
the only truly national institution in Brazil at that time. In other words,
to build a particular kind of nation, leaders would have to extend the
reach of the Brazilian government over those who, like the perplexed
landowner in Santa Catarina, recognized none of the symbols of the na-
tion or its government.15

Stringing Together a Place

To speak of the expanding power of the federal government in Brazil
in the 1890s and early 1900s will strike students of Brazilian history as
odd. After all, the men who overthrew the centralized Brazilian monar-
chy in 1889 did so in part because they felt that the central government
did not respond to their needs vis-à-vis the expansion of agricultural ex-
ports and international trade. As a result, those who established the Bra-
zilian Republic, such as the coffee barons from the state of São Paulo,
passed the Constitution of 1891 and created a decentralized federation
with strong states’ rights. Individual states could now contract foreign
loans directly, without any input from or interference by federal officials.
All public lands, which were controlled by the central government in the
empire, passed to the control of individual state governments. With new
powers of taxation, the state of São Paulo began to raise more revenues
than the federal government! Under the new republican structure, local
landowners were largely left alone to rule in the interior.16
Recently, scholars have begun to argue that the federal government
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14 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

attempted to assert its power during the decentralized Old Republic

(1889–1930). This central state activity increased because of the spectacu-
lar growth of commercial agriculture in Brazil, which increasingly re-
quired national regulation and organization. It also resulted from the at-
tention that commercial expansion drew to the vast, sparsely populated
hinterlands, especially to Brazil’s international borders, and the calls
for increased security measures for those lands. Furthermore, periodic
rebellions in the interior meant that large numbers of central state rep-
resentatives, in the guise of soldiers and their officers, occupied interior
lands, and thus expanded the central government’s authority there, at
least temporarily.17
This incorporation of faraway lands and peoples was quite possibly
the primary activity of the Brazilian central state during the Old Repub-
lic. Incorporation combined both nation- and state-building activities
because expanding state control over these lands would expose residents
to the coastal Brazilian nation and would lead eventually to their trans-
formation into modern Brazilians. Nowhere is this combination more
evident than in the federal government’s public-health campaigns of the
early 1900s.
Physicians and scientists such as Oswaldo Cruz and Carlos Chagas
played a key role in nation building, for they sought to improve the na-
tion by improving the health of its citizens. Convinced that Brazilians
were not condemned to perpetual racial inferiority, they argued instead
that the nation’s problems, its backwardness, poverty, and the sickly na-
ture of its population, resulted from diseases that could be cured. Bra-
zilians were not inherently inferior, despite what European intellectuals
claimed. Instead, they were sick, and thus for public health officials ‘‘ill-
nesses became the crucial problem for constructing nationhood.’’ 18
Improving the nation’s health, Cruz and Chagas argued, required
strong, centralized, and coordinated actions by federal authorities (i.e.,
the expansion of central state power). The extreme federalism of the Old
Republic, they argued, resulted in halfhearted, poorly funded, and redun-
dant programs by the individual states. Brazilians could be redeemed,
but only via a national public-health campaign led by federal officials.
Cruz, Chagas, and their colleagues used the findings from their own pub-
lic health expeditions to press successfully for the creation of a federal
public-health service in 1919.19
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a p e o p l e a n d a p l ac e * 15

That the effort to construct a unified Brazilian nation required the ex-
pansion of the central state’s power can also be seen in the recruitment
activities of the Brazilian army. Early twentieth-century supporters of a
universal conscription law, such as Federal Deputy Alcindo Guanabara,
argued that an army of invigorated conscripts would help the central
government establish effective control over Brazil’s interior and would
thus serve as ‘‘an engine of national integration,’’ as Peter Beattie put it.20
Mandatory military service would also become an extended civics les-
son, in essence, by distilling ‘‘an ennobling and unifying sense of patriotic
identity to be carried throughout Brazil’s vast territorial extremities by
reservists.’’ 21 Mandatory military service, it was argued, would incorpo-
rate different groups and produce a shared, national identity. Further-
more, it would improve the health of poor Brazilians, thereby strength-
ening the nation.22
That interior peoples and lands remained far removed from urban,
coastal Brazilians, and vice-versa, can be seen from two examples from
the state of Mato Grosso. Paraguay initiated the Paraguayan War by in-
vading southern Mato Grosso in 1865. Incredibly, officials in Rio de Ja-
neiro only learned of the invasion six weeks after the fact, and throughout
the war news from the front took weeks to reach the national capital.
Twenty-four years later, on 15 November 1889, officers and soldiers in Rio
de Janeiro overthrew the Brazilian monarchy and declared the republic.
Yet, given the difficulties of communication with the far west, residents
of Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso, did not learn of these events until
a month later.23
More than anything, the Paraguayan War demonstrated that the na-
tional government needed to establish a system of rapid communication
with the far west. The telegraph, a relatively new technology, promised
to do just that. It promised to conquer long distances with relative ease. It
alone, Laura Maciel notes, ‘‘was capable of lassoing the states, for it could
sew them together, thereby avoiding the disintegration [of Brasil].’’ In-
deed, she continues, the telegraph promised to serve as a kind of ‘‘metal-
lic highway’’ between the coast and the interior. Only after such infra-
structure development, Brazilian President Afonso Pena noted in 1906,
would the vast hinterlands of the country open to the circulation of agri-
cultural and industrial products. As Rondon himself put it, the expansion
of central state authority via telegraph construction was necessary for
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16 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

the progress of the Brazilian nation, for ‘‘wherever the telegraph goes,
there people will experience the benefits of civilization. With the estab-
lishment of order . . . the development of man and industry will follow
inevitably, for commerce will connect continuously the societies [of the
coast and the interior].’’ 24

The Wired Nation

The telegraph promised to extend the reach of the central state across
Brazil, and its construction became a matter of national security in the
aftermath of the Paraguayan War. For this reason, an early U.S. observer
of the Brazilian telegraph system noted, the government never consid-
ered allowing private industry to develop the telegraph in Brazil. It was,
and would remain, a state-owned and -operated endeavor. That the first
telegraph line built in Brazil (1852) linked the Imperial Palace with mili-
tary headquarters was no coincidence.25
Brazil operated just forty miles of telegraph line at the onset of the
Paraguayan War. The war spurred construction of a line from Rio de
Janeiro to Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in
order to speed communications with the front. In 1888 the government
maintained 11,462 miles of line, but three vast interior states—Goiás,
Amazonas, and Mato Grosso—were still without service that year. This
was truly a breach in national security, for the latter two states included
hundreds of miles of international boundaries.26
Such a gap in the strategic telegraph coverage of the country sparked
a failed effort to build a line to Cuiabá in 1888. In 1890 the army assigned
Rondon, then a young military engineer, to serve in a unit instructed to
build a 360-mile telegraph line between Cuiabá and a station in western
Goiás, from which it would then connect with the rest of Brazil. After the
inauguration of this line in 1892, Rondon went on to supervise construc-
tion of a line connecting Cuiabá with the town of Corumbá in southern
Mato Grosso. Construction of this line bogged down and was abandoned
in 1896 due to the difficulties of building across the vast swamps of the
region known as the Pantanal.27
The abandonment of this line meant that in 1900 the lands invaded by
Paraguay in 1865 were still hundreds of miles removed from the nearest
telegraph station. Citing such a strategic debacle, in 1900 the federal gov-
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a p e o p l e a n d a p l ac e * 17

ernment named Rondon commander of a military commission charged

with building a main north-south telegraph line between Cuiabá and Co-
rumbá, along with hundreds of miles of auxiliary lines to the settlements
along Brazil’s borders with Paraguay and Bolivia. In seventy months, be-
tween 1900 and 1906, Rondon’s commission finally integrated this once-
isolated but strategic region into the rest of Brazil. The commission in-
augurated nearly 1,100 miles of telegraph lines, 220 of which crossed the
swamps of the Pantanal and another 150 of which traversed thick forests.
The commission built sixteen telegraph stations and thirty-two bridges.
Rondon and his men, according to Rondon’s own estimates, explored
some 2,500 miles of Mato Grosso’s territory and mapped, often for the
first time, much of the state’s holdings.28

Conclusion
In his official reports Rondon wrote surprisingly little about the details
of telegraph construction during his seventy-month stay in Mato Grosso.
Instead, he emphasized his other activities, such as explorations and
mapmaking, for they promised to extend the power of the federal gov-
ernment over these lands as much as the telegraph line itself did. But
what occupied Rondon the most during those years, it seems, were his
encounters with the Bororo people living in southern and central Mato
Grosso.29
By 1906, in part because of his experiences with the Bororo, Rondon
was beginning to see the nation building implications of his telegraph
work. That is, he began to feel that the telegraph could be something far
greater than a military instrument to secure border lands. His work, he
felt, could spark the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the Brazil-
ian nation as well as the migration of coastal Brazilians to Mato Grosso’s
fertile lands—it could spark, in other words, the physical, but also emo-
tional and affective, unification of his country and his nation.
Rondon’s dream of telegraph-led development for the Brazilian north-
west soon received official sanction. In February 1907, while directing
line construction between Cuiabá and the town of Cáceres in nothern
Mato Grosso, Rondon received word of a fantastic plan to extend his
activities. President Afonso Pena, impressed by Rondon’s accomplish-
ments, created a dramatically expanded telegraph commission to build a
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18 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

telegraph line north and west into the Amazon basin. The new line would
extend nearly a thousand miles from Cuiabá to the banks of the Madeira
River, and then on to Brazil’s rubber-rich territory of Acre.30
The task seemed herculean. Southern Mato Grosso was sparsely popu-
lated, but it was a veritable megalopolis when compared to the lands to
the northwest. To be sure, a few Brazilians of European descent lived
along the numerous tributaries of the Amazon River, as did groups of in-
digenous peoples. But for the most part the proposed line would cross
lands rarely seen or mapped. It would cross the Amazon basin by land,
thus breaking the riverine grip on the settlement of that vast region.
President Pena’s edict established the Rondon Commission’s duties
with a nod to the dual goals of state and nation building. In addition
to building the line, Rondon was to study the region, to explore it and
map it so as to promote the effective occupation and incorporation of
the area. He was to survey lands and open them to the flood of migrants
he hoped would follow his lead. Using methods he had developed in the
previous years, he was to contact indigenous peoples and turn them into
Brazilians. Thus, with great spirit and energy, Rondon announced that
his goal was to develop the Amazon, ‘‘to make it productive by submit-
ting it to our actions, to bring it nearer to us [coastal Brazilians]. It is to
extend to the farthest ends of this enormous country the civilizing effort
of mankind. This is the elevated directive of our great statesman [Presi-
dent Afonso Pena], for he understands the primordial necessity of the
development of this Patria.’’ 31
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Chapter Two: building

t h e l o n e ly l i n e , 1 9 0 7–1 9 1 5

R ondon’s daunting task was to build a telegraph line across

nearly a thousand miles of sparsely inhabited and rugged
terrain, much of which was covered by dense forests and
wide rivers. Unknown indigenous peoples occupied the re-
gion. There were few maps to guide Rondon and his men.
The drama of this grandiose project, however, disguised
its modest and mundane beginning. Already in the field after
concluding his previous projects, Rondon and his men simply
began the next phase of construction. One unit began work
on the line north out of Cuiabá in the first stage of the planned
main line between that city and the Madeira River. To the
west, Rondon personally supervised the construction of an
auxiliary telegraph line from Cáceres to the town of Mato
Grosso, on the border with Bolivia.
Neither project was especially difficult. To be sure, the
Cáceres–Mato Grosso line crossed the northern reaches of the
Pantanal, and that could make for rough going. Construction
of this auxiliary line began during the dry season in May 1907,
when the swamps were passable and the heat bearable; by
the time the line was inaugurated in February 1908, however,
the nine officers, 160 soldiers, and more than fifty civilian
workers labored in waist-high swamp waters in daily tem-
peratures approaching 100 degrees. This increasingly ragged
outfit, dogged by injuries and malaria, listened as Rondon in-
augurated the line by speaking in the hot sun for nearly two
hours about the history of the telegraph, the history of the
region, and the evils of political corruption.1
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20 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

The initial construction of the main line in mid-1907 hardly called to

mind the dangerous jungles of the Amazon basin as it passed through
populated zones north of Cuiabá. The rolling hills of the cerrado (which
‘‘looks in a way like an orchard, with a light distribution of 6 ft. tall or
so trees’’) facilitated construction, and in January 1908 the line reached
the town of Diamantino, which had once been a diamond-trading cen-
ter but had become a collection point for the rapidly expanding rubber
trade. From there construction continued to the north and west under
similar conditions, so that by January 1909 the commission had inaugu-
rated telegraph stations at Parecis, Ponte de Pedra, Barão de Capanema,
and Utiariti. The latter station was some 300 miles northwest of Cuiabá,
meaning that about a third of the line had been completed in roughly
eighteen months of work. It would take seven long years, however, to
complete the remainder of the line.2

The Age of Exploration, Part 1

As construction continued, Rondon launched the second phase of his
project, which was the crucial exploration of the lands of the Amazon
basin in what today is the state of Rondônia, for his telegraph line would
eventually pass across these lands. This was the region that fired the
imaginations of Rondon and his officers, as well as those of many Bra-
zilians living in coastal cities. This was the unknown Brazil. The head-
waters of the Juruena River, seen by at most a handful of Brazilians of
European descent, seemed as distant and as magical as El Dorado. And
beyond it the vast lands stretching to the Madeira River remained largely
uncharted and unincorporated into the nation and state. Indeed, for Ron-
don the real joy of the telegraph project seems to have rested more in the
chance to explore these lands than in the actual construction of the line
itself.3
For centuries Brazilians of European descent had lived virtually as
prisoners along the banks of rivers in the Amazon Basin. At the begin-
ning of the twentieth century Rondon’s journeys promised to break these
chains so that people, and not just rivers, could rush across the jungle
landscape, forming a kind of human bridge between major riverine settle-
ments. To do this Rondon planned a 1907 expedition to discover the
headwaters of the Juruena River and to establish contact with indigenous
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 21

peoples known collectively as the Nambikwara. He planned after that to

undertake two more expeditions in order to cross the jungle between the
Juruena and Madeira Rivers. Even if one discounts the apparent exag-
gerations of Rondon’s and others’ accounts of the trials and tribulations
of these expeditions, it is nevertheless undeniable that he and his men
overcame great obstacles of illness, hunger, and exhaustion to explore
the region.4
The trek to the Juruena River began at Diamantino, which at that mo-
ment was the furthest point of telegraph construction. On 2 September
1907, sixteen men, thirty-four horses, and four oxen began the journey.
A lead group scouted the way, followed by Rondon, who took survey
notes and sketched rough maps of the lands they crossed. Another group
cleared a six-foot wide path so that the supply wagons that brought up the
rear could keep up with the men. Crossing lands occupied by the Pareci
people, Rondon contracted with two Pareci guides to lead the group to
the Juruena River. As the expedition moved west, the easier terrain of
the cerrado began to give way to thickly forested river valleys and vast
thickets known as charravascais. The forest, Rondon noted in his diary,
frightened his men, but what probably frightened them more was the
fact that within a month seven men were too ill to work and two had
been injured.5
On 20 October 1907, or some six weeks after they had left Diamantino,
Rondon and commission photographer Luis Leduc reached the Juruena
River, which they honored ‘‘with three blasts from my Remington and
three shots from Leduc’s pistol.’’ Rondon marveled at the 300-foot wide
river, which was bordered by ‘‘majestically high trees.’’ Now joined by
eight of his men, they stripped down, shouted ‘‘hail to the Republic,’’ and
jumped into the ‘‘river we all had so coveted.’’ 6
A group of Nambikwara men attacked the expedition two days later.
Rondon heard a birdlike, fluttering sound, then looked down to see an
arrow sticking in the leather strap of his Remington rifle. He fired the
rifle into the air several times and dispersed the attackers. All the while
a peculiar yelping sound echoed through the forest, as Rio Negro, Ron-
don’s hunting dog, had been hit by an arrow.7 That night an angry Ron-
don wrote an aggressive entry into his diary. The attack outraged him.
Didn’t the Nambikwara know that his intentions were peaceful? ‘‘Why, I
never dreamed,’’ he wrote, ‘‘that such a treasonous attack could happen.’’
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22 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

‘‘What joy,’’ he concluded, ‘‘I escaped a shameful death at the hands of

traitors!’’ 8
The next day Rondon’s tone softened. In his diary he reflected on his
good sense to have ordered his men not to pursue the attackers, and he
expressed sympathy with the Nambikwara, who, in other regions, had
suffered attacks by rubber-tappers. Furthermore, he recognized that the
success of the telegraph project depended on establishing peaceful re-
lations with the Nambikwara. In camp he and his men had ‘‘discussed
what all agreed would be a lack of courage if we did not demonstrate soon
our superiority [by counterattacking]. At first I participated in this line
of military thinking, but happily I soon realized that from the point of
view of establishing humane and fraternal relations it was best to retreat
from the lands of the Juruena.’’ 9
With his men ill and having suffered the Nambikwara attacks, Ron-
don headed back for Diamantino. In early November the supplies gave
out, so that ‘‘everyone was in bad spirits,’’ and many of the men were
‘‘covered with sores.’’ The now motley crew arrived back in Diaman-
tino two months and twenty-eight days after the start of the expedition,
during which time they covered, Rondon claimed, some 600 miles. He
dismissed the Pareci guides, giving them two Winchester rifles, some
money, and ‘‘my uniform from my time as a Major.’’ 10
Rondon’s interest in the Juruena River was as a staging area for the
exploration of the largely uncharted area to the west, which was to be
the site of the new telegraph line. But he first had to develop a supply
network, for the Juruena camp was too far from the rest of the stations
on the main line to be supplied efficiently. To the southeast of the line
Rondon established a large commission warehouse at Tapirapuã, on the
Sepotuba River, which fed into the Paraguay River near Cáceres. Small,
motorized boats plied the Sepotuba to supply the warehouse, with the
trip from Cáceres lasting as many as fifteen days during the dry season.11
Between Tapirapuã and Juruena, however, stood the imposing Parecis
Plateau, which from afar looks like a dark blue catepillar rolling across
western Mato Grosso. Pack animals struggled to carry supplies north-
west up the escarpment of the plateau (an abrupt rise of over 1,200 feet)
and across its sandy plains. In this region pasture was absent, so that the
animals often died before reaching Juruena, which was 200 miles from
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 23

Tapirapuã. In addition, on the approach to the Juruena River the oxen

and mules had to ford several streams and small rivers. Piranhas proved
to be a constant problem there, for they attacked any beast that had cuts
or open sores. To combat this problem, transport personnel guided the
weakest ox into the water as a sacrifice of sorts. With the piranhas’ atten-
tion diverted, the rest of the herd was then led across safely. Commission
workers eventually constructed a road suitable for truck traffic between
Tapirapuã and the Utiariti telegraph station.12
During the first six months of 1908 Rondon organized his ambitious
expedition to build the road between Tapirapuã and the Utiariti station,
to establish a base camp at Juruena, and to explore the hundreds of miles
of jungle between the Juruena and Madeira rivers so as to fix a path for the
telegraph line. A great supply train of more than 100 oxen and 58 mules
carried more than 13,000 pounds of supplies, which included everything
from combs to sewing machines, machetes, Mauser rifles, canned foods,
morphine, batteries, dishes, steel cable, a gramophone, tables, tents, and
quinine extract. The first wagon left Aldeia Queimada (the staging area
just upstream from Tapirapuã on the Sepotuba) at 6:30 a.m. on 29 July
1908. The last departed at 11:00 a.m. that same morning.13
Approaching the Juruena River in August, the approximately 120 sol-
diers on the expedition began to cut a road through the increasingly thick
forest. Several times they built bridges to accommodate the heavy wag-
ons. On 26 August they reached the Juruena River, and the soldiers went
about establishing a permanent commission camp (and later telegraph
station) on its banks. There they slaughtered the exhausted oxen for food
while other men were sent to hunt game.14
Trumpeters played reveille in this camp to roust the sleepy soldiers
on Brazilian Independence Day (7 September), and on that date Rondon
switched caps from construction engineer to nation builder. There, in
the thick jungle, so far away from Rio de Janeiro, he ordered the Bra-
zilian national anthem to be played on a gramophone brought just for
that purpose. The sounds and symbols of Rondon’s modern Brazil cut
through the surroundings just as axes had the day before. The gramo-
phone, a mechanical novelty, symbolized the role technology would play
in incorporation. The national anthem announced sonorously that these
lands, and the people in them, were now as ‘‘Brazilian’’ as those living in
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Telegraph right-of-way. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Regi-

stro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 25

the cities. The fluttering Brazilian flag, hoisted atop a long pole planted
in the middle of the jungle, reinforced the nation-building lessons taking
place below.
At 7:00 a.m. Rondon officially established the Juruena camp, then
exhorted his troops to fulfill their duties and destinies. ‘‘The crashing
sounds of dynamite’’ then ‘‘echoed up and down the Juruena Valley,’’
as joyous soldiers celebrated the holiday. That night Rondon concluded
with a final assertion of nation and state as fireworks filled the sky while
against the jungle backdrop a commission projectionist showed slides of
the president of the republic, the minister of transportation, and other
figures.15
In a little less than a month Rondon and his crew of some seventy sol-
diers managed to open a trail to a point fifty-five miles west of the Juruena
base camp. During that time an expedition scout got lost in the dense
forest and was rescued a day later, but only after Rondon had ordered his
men to scale trees, fire their rifles, and explode sticks of dynamite to draw
the wayward soldier’s attention. In the meantime almost all of the pack
animals had faltered, leading Rondon to order his men to carry their own
supplies. This order, he noted later, along with the constant fear of at-
tack from the Nambikwara people, caused four men to desert with their
supplies and weapons and led Rondon to collect all of the rifles of the
soldiers not on guard duty ‘‘so that more desertions would be avoided.’’ 16
Similar problems with desertions from the crew constructing the tele-
graph line forced Rondon to abandon this cherished expedition in early
October 1908. Twenty-eight soldiers had gone awol, and those who re-
mained staged work stoppages because of food shortages. Informed of
the problems on the line by two tired messengers sent from Juruena,
Rondon called off the expedition and returned to Diamantino. There
he addressed the matter (although how he does not say), then turned
immediately to organizing yet another expedition from Juruena to the
Madeira River.17
Rondon’s 1909 plan to cross more than 800 miles of territory on foot
and thus to conquer this great unknown region rested on a flawed supply
plan. From the previous expedition Rondon knew that oxen could not
survive the entire journey, as there simply was not enough pasture to
support the beasts. The sandy soils of the Parecis Plateau did not pro-
vide enough fodder for pack animals. West of Juruena the Amazon forest
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26 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

Rondon and officers on the Juruena River. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço
de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.

likewise robbed the animals of needed grasses. Rondon ordered a group

of men to travel with supply canoes up the Jaciparaná River from the
Madeira River, mistakenly believing that his expedition would cross the
Jaciparaná and thus would be resupplied by this unit.
On 2 June 1909, Rondon and forty-two men departed Tapirapuã for
the Juruena base camp. In addition to officers in charge of exploration,
topographical services, and the medical unit, a botanist and zoologist
were along to collect samples of the region’s flora and fauna, for nation-
state building meant gathering information about the region so that offi-
cials could control it eventually. Two years earlier the stretch between
Tapirapuã and Juruena, which included the escarpment of the Parecis
Plateau, had posed a major obstacle for commission explorations. Now
a commission-built road, inaugurated in May 1909, made this the only
uneventful portion of the journey.18
By late August the expedition, which was 120 miles northwest of the
Juruena base camp, followed a now familiar routine. A vanguard unit led
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 27

by First Lieutenant João Salustiano de Lyra tackled the onerous task of

hacking an artery through the forest. Rondon and a few men followed
with the surveying instruments, taking coordinates, sketching maps, and
collecting specimens. Another crew widened the narrow path into a
seven-foot-wide route. Members of the supply units brought up the rear
by guiding pack animals along the freshly hewn trail.19
By early September the expedition was deep in the heart of Nambi-
kwara lands. Rondon warned his men of possible attacks and ordered
them not to retaliate. He regularly left presents of machetes and cloth as
a goodwill gesture and at one point even left, as a visual reminder of ‘‘his’’
nation, a painting that depicted commission officers welcoming Indians
with open arms. He announced his expedition’s presence by making as
much noise as possible on the trail during the day and in camp at night.
He ordered dynamite to be exploded during the day, flares launched at
night. He allowed his men to bring musical instruments, and impromptu
concerts accompanied daytime rest periods. The sounds of flutes and ac-
cordions further accompanied the slideshows projected against the for-
est canopy at night. Rondon would play music on the expedition’s trusty
gramophone when his musicians tired, so that his nervous soldiers could
sleep, briefly anyway, surrounded by familiar sounds.20
At the beginning of the fourth month of the expedition, in Octo-
ber 1909, difficult terrain and supply problems tormented the soldiers
and slowed the expedition’s progress. Around what is today the town of
Vilhena, the Parecis Plateau gives way to the steep slopes of the Parecis
Range. Soldiers now entered into the Amazon forest proper and labored
under the thick canopy of the jungle. They struggled to cross seemingly
endless valleys, rivers, and streams. They wove their way around gigan-
tic, hundred-foot-tall Ipê trees and struggled past the equally colossal Su-
mauma trees, whose majestic roots alone stand six- to eight-feet high.
The rainy season had begun as well, so that fierce thunderstorms and
downpours pelted soldiers and quickly became the unwanted compan-
ions of the increasingly disgruntled workforce.21
At about this time the expedition reached the headwaters of the River
of Doubt (Rio da Dúvida), whose name reflected its unknown course.
After six weeks of marching, the men were only 250 miles northwest of
the Juruena base camp and had exhausted their supplies. The last sub-
stantial delivery of supplies from Juruena had taken place in early Au-
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2º

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1909 expedition. Inset map revised from original in Bakewell, History of Latin
America, xxiii.
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 29

gust and the crew was well beyond the range of commission pack ani-
mals from that camp. In early September soldiers abandoned the last of
the expedition’s exhausted oxen, thus forcing Rondon to jettison most of
the botanical and zoological specimens, heavy photographic plates, and
most of the remaining gear. The men now hauled equipment on their
backs. Furthermore, a sense of dread washed over them, as the expedi-
tion failed to encounter the resupply crew Rondon had sent up the Jaci-
paraná River. Due to an error in the existing maps, Rondon had believed
he would cross this river on the journey to the Madeira River. Instead,
they passed hundreds of miles to the north.22
For the final months of the expedition Rondon and his men hunted,
gathered, and fished for their food. Monkeys, insects, honey, and fish
provided sustenance, if not satisfaction, and the hard work of hunting
simply added to the difficulties of blazing a trail. Fishing consisted of
throwing sticks of dynamite into pools and streams, then collecting the
fish that rose to the surface. On one occasion in late October, Lieuten-
ant Antonio Pirineus de Souza collected a piranha amongst the bevy of
stunned fish gathered in his arms. As told later by Rondon, the piranha
regained consciousness and bit off a part of the lieutenant’s tongue. The
massive bleeding that followed nearly suffocated him.23
In November 1909 malaria weakened Dr. Joaquim Augusto Tanajura,
the expedition’s physician, and several other officers and soldiers. At
the headwaters of the Pimenta Bueno River, a tributary of the Jiparaná
River, Rondon ordered the ailing Tanajura, First Lieutenant Alencarli-
ense Fernandes da Costa, commission zoologist Dr. Alípio de Miranda
Ribeiro, and eleven other mostly ill men into the dugout canoes soldiers
had fashioned on the spot. From there they descended the rivers to the
point where the Jiparaná empties into the Madeira River, where, after
five weeks of difficult portages, the sick and hungry men finally obtained
aid and comfort in the town of Calama.24
Rondon and his remaining men trudged on under the thick forests of
what is today the state of Rondônia. They crossed the Urupá River. They
reached the headwaters of the Jaru River on 7 December 1909. At that
point Rondon instructed his men to fashion more dugout canoes and
ordered two ill lieutenants and twelve sick men to float that river to the
Jaciparaná River, then on to the Madeira River at Calama, where they ar-
rived on 29 December.25 At this point ‘‘six soldiers, six civilian workers,
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30 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

and Lieutenants Lyra and Amarante remained with me; our backpacks
contained nothing more than a change of clothes.’’ The crew continued
on, although most of them were ill, including Rondon, who suffered the
high fevers of his chronic form of malaria. All the while they continued
to chart the path of the future telegraph line.26
In the sixth month of his expedition Rondon and his skeleton crew ap-
proached the headwaters of the Jamari River on 13 December 1909. There
they surprised a husband-and-wife team who were collecting latex, for
no one imagined that men would appear out of the jungle, by land,
in a region that was limited to riverine settlements of latex gatherers.
The couple explained to the exhausted and sick men that this was the
Jamari River, not the Jaciparaná, leading Rondon to realize that he would
never encounter his resupply crew. Armed with this information, Ron-
don opted not to cross the remaining territory between the Jamari and
Madeira Rivers. Instead, he and his men prepared dugout canoes and de-
scended the Jamari. After having spent several days passing through areas
occupied by latex gatherers, on 25 December 1909, the crew approached
the town of Primor—after six months and nearly 900 miles, an emo-
tional event for the men. Rondon characteristically stressed the nation-
and state-building implications of their arrival: ‘‘What a shock it was for
residents of the Jamari [River] to witness our Expedition, because we ar-
rived flying the Republican [national] banner which for three straight
years had guided us on our journeys across northwest Mato Grosso; and
because they heard, probably for the first time, who knows, the victori-
ous melody of the anthem of the Fifth Battalion of Engineers.’’ 27

The Age of Exploration, Part 2: Roosevelt and Rondon

Suffering debilitating fevers from recurring bouts of malaria, a weakened
Rondon and his officers traveled by boat to Manaus, where they boarded
a steamer that took them down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean,
then south to Rio de Janeiro. Rondon afterward spent fourteen months in
the city establishing a central office for the commission, writing manda-
tory reports about the Mato Grosso expeditions, organizing the Indian
Protection Service, and giving speeches about his explorations in Mato
Grosso. Regular trips to mineral baths in the mountains above the city
helped restore his health.28
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 31

Telegraph right-of-way, probably near Pimenta Bueno station. Courtesy of Comis-

são Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.

Construction of the telegraph line in Mato Grosso continued in his

absence, and in July 1910 soldiers inaugurated the telegraph station at
Juruena. Beyond that station the beginnings of the Amazon forest slowed
progress, and malaria stopped it entirely, as whole units fell ill and were
evacuated from the region. Work resumed only on Rondon’s return to
Mato Grosso in April 1911, as he was now aided by recently hired ‘‘re-
gionals’’ to help in construction. Rondon had long sought permission to
hire such men, for he felt that these civilians, who were largely recruited
in Manaus and in towns along the Madeira River, would be more accus-
tomed to working in the jungle and thus more productive than soldiers
drawn from Rio de Janeiro.29
The construction norm was to clear a 120-foot-wide right-of-way to
keep the line clear of all tall trees that could fall and disrupt service. Im-
mediately beneath the line, soldiers cleared a ten-foot swath of all trees,
tree trunks, bushes, and so on. To speed construction Rondon created
the so-called Northern Section to begin work east out of Santo Antonio
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32 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

do Madeira in November 1911. The main crew, now named the Southern
Section, continued construction northwest out of Juruena.30
Throughout 1911, 1912, and 1913, soldiers made steady progress while
Rondon traveled back and forth between the two sections, sometimes
surveying the line northwest out of Juruena, sometimes directing the
placement of the line southeast out of Santo Antonio do Madeira. On
the Southern Section he inaugurated the Nambikwara, Vilhena, and José
Bonifácio stations in 1911 and 1912. By June 1912, soldiers of the North-
ern Section had inaugurated stations at the terminus of Santo Antonio
do Madeira, at Jamari, and at Caritianas, the latter two of which were
located on the Jamari River.31
A year later workers inaugurated the Barão de Melgaço station. At
that station, in early October 1913, a very busy Rondon received an un-
usual telegram from Lauro Muller, an old Army Academy classmate who
was now Brazil’s minister of foreign relations. In the telegram Muller
ordered Rondon to proceed immediately to Rio de Janeiro. Former U.S.
President Theodore Roosevelt was set to give a series of speeches in the
countries of southern South America. As part of his tour, Roosevelt had
requested that Muller arrange a December safari through the Brazilian
northwest as a sort of grand finale of his South American journey. He
asked Muller to contract a guide to accompany the expedition. Rondon
was to be that guide.32
The timing of Roosevelt’s request and Muller’s order could not have
been worse. Construction had begun to bog down in the thick rainforest
of the Amazon basin. Illnesses sapped the strength of the construction
crew and strained Rondon’s administrative abilities. A November 1914
inauguration date for the telegraph line loomed large. And now Rondon
would have to drop everything and head for Rio de Janeiro. To make mat-
ters worse, there was no quick and efficient way to travel from the tele-
graph line to the coast. Thus it took him five weeks to make the trek, first
down the Jiparaná River in a canoe and a small, motorized boat to the
Madeira River, then on a steamer down the Amazon River to the Atlantic
Ocean and on to Rio.33
Rondon clearly recognized the public-relations benefit of Roosevelt’s
proposed journey for the country and for his telegraph project, but he
lamented that Muller had informed him of the mission just as Roosevelt
set sail for Brazil. This meant that an encounter between the two would
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 33

have to wait until the expedition began in late December, for Roosevelt
had already toured and left Rio de Janeiro for Argentina by the time Ron-
don arrived in the city. ‘‘What a pity it is that they only called me just as
Roosevelt was leaving New York,’’ he noted in a telegram to one of his
lieutenants while on route, ‘‘for I do not own a dirigible with which to
fly over the vast territory of our country.’’ 34
Roosevelt’s traveling partner, the American priest Father John Augus-
tine Zahm, described their reception in Rio de Janeiro as akin to ‘‘all
the wild enthusiasm of a national holiday.’’ Large crowds met Roose-
velt when he arrived on 22 October 1913. The ex-president and his wife
toured the city, met with Brazilian officials, and attended state dinners.
Roosevelt lectured at the ymca and at a reception in his honor at the
Jockey Club. The Instituto Histórico Geográfico Brasileiro named Roose-
velt an honorary member. Newspapers covered the events with banner
headlines and front-page photographs of the festivities. ‘‘Mr Roosevelt,’’
a Jornal do Comércio reporter gushed, ‘‘is a true friend of Brazil.’’ 35
Other authors, however, just as quickly condemned Roosevelt’s im-
perialism. They denounced his participation in the war with Spain and
in the U.S. manipulation of the events leading to the creation of Panama.
Roosevelt’s speeches in Rio defending the Monroe Doctrine offended
them, although one journalist argued that this visit convinced Roosevelt
of the impossibility of imperial rule over large, prosperous countries such
as Brazil. An Imparcial reporter noted Roosevelt’s assertion that together
the United States and Brazil, as allies, could bring peace and civilization
to South America. That, the journalist concluded, was the kind of lie a
parent tells a child.36
Commentators sensitive to the construction of a modern Brazil seized
on Roosevelt’s planned expedition across the wilds of Brazil to criticize
the refusal of Americans to see Brazil as anything but a nation of jungles
and wild animals. Indeed, they sought to teach Roosevelt the foreigner
about the real, modern Brazilian nation as they saw it. Roosevelt wasn’t
interested in the Brazilian people, an Imparcial reporter argued, nor was
he interested in the Brazilian society and government. Instead, he cared
‘‘only about our animals and how to hunt and kill them.’’ In a mocking
editorial, ‘‘C.L.’’ satirized the decision of Brazilian officials to tour the
city of Rio de Janeiro with Roosevelt. The former president did not want
to see buildings, C.L. bellowed. Nor did he wish to see signs of civiliza-
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34 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

tion such as railroads and skyscrapers, because the U.S. was already full
of such things. No, he charged, Roosevelt lusted only for the wild, sav-
age jungle. Thus, if C.L. had been organizing things, he would have met
Roosevelt’s ship with schoolgirls dressed as Indians, with snakes piled
high and wide on the docks, and with monkeys running wild through the
crowds in order to create an ‘‘authentic’’ Brazilian experience for Roose-
velt’s enjoyment. Thank God, C.L. sneered, that Roosevelt had protected
such an uncivilized people from European invasion! And on a more seri-
ous note he suggested one small addition to Roosevelt’s precious Monroe
Doctrine: that it also protect American nations from conquests and ter-
ritorial expansion by one particular American nation, for ‘‘then, yes, we
could support the Monroe Doctrine!’’ 37
As Roosevelt continued his South American tour, Rondon, in tran-
sit to Rio, proposed to the former president an exploration of the Rio
da Dúvida instead of a simple hunting trip across the Brazilian north-
west, a suggestion that Roosevelt accepted enthusiastically. Rondon was
fairly certain that this river emptied into the Madeira River, but its upper
course had never been mapped or explored (hence its name). To reach
this river, the expedition would first travel from the commission ware-
house at Tapirapuã to the telegraph line at Utiariti. Then they would
march under the telegraph line for roughly 150 miles to the headwaters of
the Dúvida. This new and decidedly more onerous itinerary concerned
Foreign Minister Muller, and he warned Roosevelt of its dangers. After
all, Roosevelt would turn fifty-five while on the expedition.38
Roosevelt was finishing his months-long South American tour when
he and Rondon met on ships moored in the Paraguay River in Decem-
ber 1913. Among those accompanying Roosevelt were his son Kermit (an
engineer who had been employed in railroad and bridge construction
in Brazil for the past year), as well as Father Zahm and two naturalists,
George Cherrie and Leo Miller, from the American Museum of Natural
History. The diminutive Rondon and rotund Roosevelt communicated
in halting French, sometimes employing Kermit as a translator. After
several hunting trips in central Mato Grosso, they made their way to
the Tapirapuã camp of the Rondon Commission, where they arrived on
16 January 1914.39
The scope of preparations in Tapirapuã impressed Roosevelt, and he
attributed them to the importance Brazilian officials placed on the expe-
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Roosevelt and Rondon, probably near Cáceres, Mato Grosso. Courtesy of Comissão
Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.

Rondon and officers with supply wagon. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de
Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.
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36 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

dition, noting that the government wanted ‘‘not merely a success, but a
success of note.’’ What he could not have realized was that this was busi-
ness as usual for the Rondon Commission and that the scope of prepara-
tions paled in comparison with the explorations that had departed from
Tapirapuã in 1907 and 1908. Roosevelt also did not understand or ap-
preciate the new round of problems he created for Rondon, for he had
arrived with far more baggage and many more crates than Rondon was
prepared to transport.40
In fact, Rondon searched frantically for more pack animals while his
men labored to divide the contents of the largest crates into units ap-
propriate for mules, horses, and oxen. Indeed, Rondon himself created
a crisis within the commission when he appropriated the pack animals
that had been reserved for commission biologist Frederico Hoehne, who
was along to collect specimens for the National Museum of Brazil. An
outraged Hoehne resigned from the expedition, raising the nationalist
complaint that he had been deprived of transport ‘‘while at the same time
the foreigners were allowed to continue with bountiful resources and
pack animals.’’ 41
Hoehne’s nationalist quip highlighted ongoing tensions, for Rondon
and Foreign Minister Lauro Muller (whose ministry financed the expe-
dition) clearly hoped that Roosevelt, a famous foreigner from a modern,
industrialized nation, would trumpet Brazil’s progress and potential to
foreign audiences. Yet, this meant treating the Americans lavishly to gain
their favor, which only emphasized Brazil’s subservient status among the
nations of the world. By that point expenses far exceeded the ministry’s
budget for Roosevelt’s visit and expedition, and Muller began to balk at
Rondon’s requests for funds to purchase more animals and other items.
Rondon dared not offend the Americans by asking them to reduce their
own baggage, so he began to abandon commission supplies. In despera-
tion he insisted on overloading his pack animals, and his men struggled
to place the giant loads on new, unbroken animals. This prompted the
Americans to attribute the growing chaos to Rondon’s and the Brazilians’
incompetence, and led a furious Kermit Roosevelt to write that at that
point he was ‘‘ready to kill the whole lot [of pack animals] and all the
members of the expedition.’’ 42
Two separate units, which together included some 250 pack animals,
departed Tapirapuã on 21 January 1914. The route, which by then was
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 37

quite familiar to the Brazilians, would take them up the escarpment of

the Parecis Plateau and on to Utiariti, which was some 150 miles from
Tapirapuã. The expedition leaders rode horses and mules, while soldiers
marched behind carrying their own equipment. Rondon ordered the lead
unit to prepare a special campground each night to insure the Ameri-
cans’ comfort. The Americans slept in better tents, and Rondon fur-
nished Roosevelt’s tent with a rug purchased for just that purpose. The
Americans dined on canned goods (soups, sausages, lentils, beef, fruits)
and drank bottled water, while the Brazilians were left to consume rice
and beans, supplemented occasionally with beef when an exhausted ox
was slaughtered. Dr. Cajazeira, the commission physician, noted that the
dietary differences widened as the exhaustion of pack animals forced the
abandonment of more commission supplies, and Rondon ordered his
Brazilian men to eat less ‘‘so that our guests could continue to enjoy the
abundance to which they were accustomed.’’ 43
Insects and illnesses impressed the Americans the most. Clouds of
insects swarmed the men. Gnats, sweat bees, and small stinging bees
worked their way past hats and gloves. Tiny ticks covered their clothes.
Giant ants, more than an inch long, possessed a bite ‘‘almost like the sting
of a small scorpion,’’ Roosevelt complained. These ants, and the boro-
chudas, or blood-sucking flies, left Kermit Roosevelt ‘‘marked and blis-
tered over his whole body.’’ Swarming ants devoured clothes and shoes.
In poetic fashion Roosevelt described his unwanted travel companions:
‘‘Now while bursting through a tangle I disturbed a nest of wasps, whose
resentment was active; now I heedlessly stepped among the outliers of
a small party of carnivorous foraging ants; now, grasping a branch as I
stumbled, I shook down a shower of fire ants; and among all these my
attention was particularly arrested by the bite of one of the giant ants,
which stung like a hornet, so that I felt it for hours.’’ 44
A malaria-induced fever of 102 degrees added to Kermit Roosevelt’s
woes. Another American expedition member, Frank Harper, had already
abandoned the journey because of this illness. Furthermore, the expedi-
tion was headed for the Utiariti and Juruena telegraph stations, which
Dr. Cajazeira declared to be the least healthy places in the region. Malaria
was endemic there, as the flood waters from the Papagaio and Juruena
Rivers left large standing pools of water. All seven members of the Ron-
don Commission stationed in Utiariti were suffering from malaria when
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Brazilian and U.S. flags, Rondon-Roosevelt expedition camp in Porto do

Campo, Mato Grosso. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro
Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 39

the expedition arrived there in late January. Furthermore, an advance

team preparing dugout canoes at the River of Doubt had returned to
the station at Vilhena, as they were too weak to work due to malarial
fevers.45
Troops, expedition leaders, and pack animals rested at the Utiariti sta-
tion. Roosevelt slept in a house especially furnished for him. Lanterns
and flags (both Brazilian and U.S.) decorated the station. Rondon wished
to spend several days in camp in order to complete a thorough survey of
the surrounding commission lands. In addition to the ongoing dispute
over supplies and transportation, Rondon’s wish generated another rift
between the Brazilians and Americans, for Roosevelt insisted that they
pick up the pace of the expedition. Recognizing Roosevelt’s authority as
the titular head of the expedition, a disappointed Rondon noted that ‘‘in
Utiarity we abandoned all hope of finishing our work.’’ 46
Roosevelt’s decision to expel Father Zahm from the expedition lifted
the Brazilian leader’s spirits. Rondon disliked the priest, in part, perhaps,
because of Rondon’s intense Positivist beliefs but also because Zahm
complained incessantly about conditions during the trek to Utiariti. At
one point he outraged Rondon by requesting that Indians be contracted
to carry him in a sedan chair. An equally perturbed Dr. Cajazeira likewise
applauded Roosevelt’s decision.47
On 3 February 1914 the expedition members walked under the tele-
graph line, turned west, and began the 150-mile march to the headwaters
of the River of Doubt. Before they reached the next telegraph station
(Juruena), pack animals once again began to give out, forcing Rondon
to abandon supplies by the side of the right-of-way, even while ‘‘always
taking care that these reductions did not include in any fashion our
respected guests.’’ Dr. Cajazeira described sixteen- and seventeen-hour
marches, often under burning sun, but also under torrential rains, as the
rainy season had begun. Mules and oxen bogged down in the heavy mud.
Everyone chafed under damp clothes and slept under damp blankets.
‘‘Overnight,’’ Joseph Ornig writes in his book about the expedition, ‘‘rifles
and iron camp fittings turned scratchy with rust. Green and white mold
spores bloomed on leather harnesses, boots, and binocular cases.’’ 48
After resting at the Juruena telegraph station, the expedition mem-
bers trudged on, finally reaching the headwaters of the River of Doubt on
27 February 1914. In five weeks men and beast had covered hundreds of
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Roosevelt-Rondon expedition at the headwaters of the River of Doubt.

Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu
do Índio.
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 41

miles. Sickness, hunger, and exhaustion hovered over the camp, yet the
expedition, properly speaking, had not yet even begun, as nary a canoe
had entered the River of Doubt’s waters. In dramatic fashion Roosevelt
recalled the uncertainty that awaited them. If the River of Doubt emptied
into the Jiparaná River, then the trek would end within a week. If it
emptied into the Madeira River, it might take several weeks. If it did not
connect with either river, then their final destination and their fates were
unknown. Rondon, by contrast, was confident that the river emptied into
the Madeira, so much so that he had arranged earlier for a commission
relief crew to travel up the Aripuanã River, a tributary of the Madeira, to
await the expedition.49
The nagging discontent over supplies quickly reappeared. In Juruena,
Rondon insisted that the Americans abandon the canvas canoes they
had brought with them, for their weight was too much for the Brazilian
porters to bear during the rain-soaked trek to the River of Doubt. Roose-
velt then discovered that Rondon ‘‘had somehow allowed several mule
loads of provisions for his men to be left behind when their pack train
was reorganized,’’ which, we now know, Rondon had ordered so as to not
threaten the foodstuffs of the Americans. Roosevelt now felt it necessary
to share the Americans’ food with the Brazilians because of Rondon’s
‘‘rather absurd lack of forethought,’’ as Roosevelt put it.50
Rondon had hired, at considerable cost, thirteen of Mato Grosso’s
best canoeists to guide, along with three soldiers, the expedition’s dug-
out canoes down the River of Doubt. Rondon, Dr. Cajazeira, and Lieu-
tenant Salustiano Lyra rounded out the Brazilian contingent. Theodore
Roosevelt, his son Kermit, and the naturalist George Cherrie completed
the crew. They prepared to descend the river in the heavy dugout canoes
that, because of the weight of supplies, barely rode above the surface of
the waters. ‘‘Now entirely on their own,’’ as Joseph Ornig describes it,
‘‘Roosevelt’s party found themselves descending a wild, timber-choked
mountain stream that had overflowed its banks after weeks of torren-
tial rains. The surrounding forest stood drowned in a network of lagoons
and channels extending far inland. Scores of palm trees, uprooted by the
souring current, lay strewn like matchsticks along the shoreline. In some
places, a dead tree sagged far enough across the narrow river to force the
boatmen to make a frantic detour around the huge trunk. It was then, T.R.
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42 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

wrote, that ‘the muscles stood out on the backs and arms of the paddlers
as stroke on stroke they urged us away from and past the obstacle.’ ’’ 51
On the River of Doubt the dispute over the nature and goals of the
expedition quickly surfaced once again. Roosevelt’s primary goal was
to experience an adventure and to help his American colleagues gather
specimens for the American Museum of Natural History. He desired a
speedy descent of the River of Doubt, especially because of his height-
ened fears concerning the expedition’s food supplies and because his son
continued to suffer from high fevers. Rondon, by contrast, envisioned a
much slower descent, for he sought to explore and survey not only the
River of Doubt but also its major tributaries. Unlike Roosevelt, the dwin-
dling supplies did not concern him. He had, after all, recently survived
significantly more strenuous treks on foot across northwest Mato Grosso
and had done so with far fewer provisions.
Surveying the river did indeed consume much time and energy. Ker-
mit Roosevelt would go ashore with a sighting rod while Rondon would
read the angle and distance from his canoe in order to establish coordi-
nates. According to Ornig, this meant that in a six-mile stretch Kermit
Roosevelt landed 114 times to plant the survey rod. To make matters
worse, four days into the descent they encountered their first set of falls
on the river.52
The expedition’s massive dugout canoes could shoot precious few of
the river’s rapids; some of them were as long as twenty-five feet and
weighed well over a thousand pounds when empty. On the third of
March, crewmembers began the first of what would become many por-
tages, this time around the Navaité Falls. First the men unloaded the
cargo, then employed a block and tackle to hoist the waterlogged canoes
up the steep banks of the river. Ahead of them some of the men struggled
to clear a path through the forest. Yet others fashioned small logs to serve
as rollers, across which everyone strained to push and pull the canoes
overland. Finally, the men carried the cargo on their backs along the
newly hewn trail. Two-and-a-half exhausting days later the canoes were
back in the water.53
Another series of grinding portages strained bodies, emotions, and re-
lations among expedition members after just two days of calm waters.
Between March seventh and ninth the men cut a quarter-mile portage
path through the jungle to avoid the next set of falls. On 15 March a
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 43

Rondon, Theodore Roosevelt, and members of the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition,

probably at the unveiling of an obelisk marking the naming of the Kermit Roose-
velt River, 1914. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual,
Museu do Índio.

third major portage turned into disaster when Kermit Roosevelt ignored
Rondon’s orders and, along with a canoeist, explored a possible route
through the rapids. The craft overturned, and while Kermit was able to
swim to shore, the commission employee drowned. An outraged Ron-
don lamented the loss of his crewmember and the disregard of his orders.
Theodore Roosevelt, by contrast, was seemingly more worried about the
possible delay the accident might cause. ‘‘On an expedition such as ours,’’
he noted, ‘‘death is one of the accidents that may at any time occur. . . .
One mourns sincerely, but mourning cannot interfere with labor.’’ 54
In separate incidents the rushing waters of the River of Doubt carried
away canoes and the precious block and tackle. By mid-March the lack
of canoes forced most of the men to struggle over river boulders and
through the forest on foot, while Theodore Roosevelt and Dr. Cajazeira
guided the remaining canoes, now lashed together to form a raft, on the
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44 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

river. Roosevelt was by now in a near panic over the dwindling supplies,
but Rondon seemed to view the events as business as usual and appeared
satisfied by efforts to hunt and gather food. The former U.S. president
despaired over the slowness of the journey, complaining that in eighteen
days they had traveled just seventy-five miles. ‘‘We had lost four canoes
and one man,’’ the ex-president noted. ‘‘We were in the country of wild
Indians, who shot well with their bows [the expedition never encoun-
tered Indians, nor were they ever attacked, save Rondon’s dog]. It be-
hooved us to go warily, but also to make all speed possible, if we were to
avoid serious trouble.’’ 55
The roiling dispute over the speed of the trek came to a head in mid-
March when Rondon, over Roosevelt’s objection, ordered a halt of sev-
eral days to build new canoes. In personal correspondence uncovered by
Joseph Ornig, we know that an infuriated George Cherrie and Kermit
Roosevelt accused Rondon of ordering his canoe builders to go slowly
so that Lieutenant Lyra would have time to survey the area. A perturbed
Theodore Roosevelt pulled Rondon into his tent for a conversation, ex-
pressing concern for Kermit’s health, the dangers of Indian attack, and
the lack of supplies, and insisting that all formal surveying of the river
cease immediately.56
A disappointed Rondon agreed to Roosevelt’s demand. This was a
hard pill to swallow, for surveying the River of Doubt had been his pri-
mary goal for the expedition. Rondon indeed had justified the delay the
expedition would cause in the construction of the telegraph by point-
ing out precisely the benefits of such a survey. Thus, while Rondon’s on-
going task was to display the authority of the central state and explain
the power of his vision of the Brazilian nation to those in the interior,
at this point he faced his own and his country’s subservience to a more
powerful nation, the United States of America, as well as to the powerful
personality of Theodore Roosevelt. In public Rondon never articulated
any dismay over this situation. Whether or not he did so privately is un-
known. Curiously, all of his diary entries for the Roosevelt-Rondon ex-
pedition are missing, as is his unpublished account of the trip. Likewise,
the official ‘‘Orders of the Day’’ for the expedition are missing for the
days of the descent of the River of Doubt.57
Roosevelt was the titular commander of the expedition, and Rondon
had little choice but to accept the American’s wishes. ‘‘I replied that we
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 45

were there to accompany him and to take him across the wilderness,’’
Rondon later recalled, ‘‘and that therefore we would execute the services
in accordance with his wishes.’’ ‘‘For this reason,’’ he concluded, the ‘‘sur-
vey proceeded without our being able to obtain all the benefit of the tech-
nical resources which we had at our disposal and with which we had
carried out a sufficiently exact and correct work.’’ 58
A late-March encounter with an even longer and much more difficult
series of rapids mocked the strain of the journey thus far and threat-
ened to break the expedition members. Furthermore, the rapids cut a
deep gorge through the surrounding terrain, so that portaging the canoes
over land was impossible. Instead, men tied long ropes to the canoes and
scampered across shoreline boulders while guiding the vessels through
the rapids. Others hauled the supplies up the river’s bank, cleared a two-
mile path over the steep hills above the gorge, and began carrying the
cargo to an area below the rapids.
This canyon portage consumed a week of time and the last of Roose-
velt’s patience. Constant hunger haunted everyone, he noted, and many
of the men were too ill to work effectively. Prompted by the memories
of this particularly difficult time, Roosevelt observed later that Rondon
and the Brazilians ‘‘did an extraordinary amount of work; but they would
leave out certain essential things. This was characteristic of everything
they did. Their short-comings in preparation were astonishing.’’ 59
In contrast, Rondon, who was still smarting from Roosevelt’s recent
refusal to allow him to explore a major river (the Taunay) where it
emptied into the River of Doubt, still described the journey as business
as usual. ‘‘The sanitary conditions of the expedition were good,’’ he noted
about the days of this portage, ‘‘and the quantity of provisions were . . .
sufficient to assure . . . the termination of the voyage.’’ Indeed, under
normal circumstances (that is, without Roosevelt), Rondon argued, this
would have been ‘‘a good occasion to extend, with greater leisure, our
exploration into the interior of these lands.’’ 60
Rondon’s hope for greater leisure and normal circumstances evapo-
rated as Theodore Roosevelt’s health worsened in late March and early
April. On 27 March Roosevelt cut his leg while helping to right a cap-
sized canoe. On the next day he began to exhibit signs of malaria, and his
fever topped 105 degrees. He steadily worsened, and Dr. Cajazeira estab-
lished a night watch for the patient and began to inject quinine every six
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46 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

hours. To make matters worse, Simplício, one of the paddlers Rondon

hired for the trip, shot and killed corporal Manoel Vicente da Paixão in
an argument.61
By 8 April the crew had traveled just 125 miles in forty-one days. Roose-
velt’s leg was now swollen with infection, just as another series of rapids
promised more hard work. On what proved to be the final major portage,
a nearly delirious Roosevelt hobbled along, refusing offers of a stretcher.
By now Cherrie was in a virtual war with Rondon. The Brazilian’s sugges-
tion that they take a day to survey another tributary (the Cardoso River)
infuriated him, especially given Roosevelt’s worsening condition. Then
Cherrie refused to enter the canoe he shared with Roosevelt because it
lacked an extra paddle. He feared that if a paddle broke there would be no
way to steer the bulky canoe around minor rapids. Cherrie got his extra
paddle, and that very day a paddle did break as they approached a set
of smaller rapids. In his diary entry Cherrie snorted that in ‘‘many ways,
in lack of foresight regarding special details, Col. Rondon had proved
himself to be incompetent as the head of such an expedition!’’ 62
Now on flatter lands, the River of Doubt spread to a width of 400
feet. Dr. Cajazeira drained Roosevelt’s infected wound and continued to
worry about his fever. The former president was now incapacitated and
rode in a canoe covered with a tarpaulin the men had fashioned to pro-
tect him from the elements. On 15 April 1914 the expedition finally passed
the first signs of latex gatherers in the region, and the frail Roosevelt
and the other Americans gained hope. On 19 April they eagerly partook
of food and shelter at the shack of a surprised but welcoming rubber-
tapper. Roosevelt’s health began to improve; he had lost more than fifty
pounds.63
On 26 April 1914 the weary men approached the confluence of the Ari-
puanã and Dúvida (which Rondon had renamed the Roosevelt) Rivers.
There the national flags of Brazil and the United States flew above the
relief camp commanded by Lieutenant Pirineus de Sousa, who had been
waiting nervously at the site for six weeks. In fifty-nine days the expedi-
tion members had traveled slightly over 400 miles. Because of the rapids,
the first 170 miles had taken forty-eight days to cover. The men now
sipped champagne and feasted on the foods the relief party provided
them. The next day they boarded a steamer waiting for them on the Ari-
puanã River. On 30 April they reached Manaus, via the Madeira River,
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 47

where Brazilian doctors tended to Roosevelt’s leg. They then traveled

down the Amazon River to Belém, which they reached on 9 May, and
the Americans boarded a steamship for New York. At 11 p.m. on the very
same day he arrived in Belém, nearly eight months after he had left the
site of his telegraph construction, Rondon boarded another ship to head
back up the Amazon and Madeira Rivers. He had a construction deadline
to meet.64

Conclusion
Rondon realized that construction of the telegraph line would likely
grind to a halt during his seven-and-a-half-month involvement with the
Roosevelt-Rondon expedition. He justified his decision in part on the
publicity his participation in Roosevelt’s activities would bring to his
project. That assumption proved to be correct, for newspapers in Rio
de Janeiro trumpeted the expedition and Rondon’s telegraph work for
months on end. Furthermore, the press covered at length Theodore
Roosevelt’s June 1914 lectures in England about the trip, as well as the
publication of Roosevelt’s account of it (Through the Brazilian Wilder-
ness).65
Publicity alone, however, would not finish the construction of the line.
For that, Rondon returned directly to northwest Mato Grosso in order to
lead the final construction push. Since October 1913, Rondon had trav-
eled to Rio de Janeiro, returned to Mato Grosso, and led the Roosevelt
expedition down the River of Doubt. He now returned to finish construc-
tion as the inauguration date (which had been pushed back to 1 January
1915) dominated his thoughts. While Theodore Roosevelt rested in the
stateroom of his transatlantic steamship and later at his home in Oyster
Bay, New York, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon headed back into the
Amazon basin to begin the most difficult and crucial phase of telegraph
construction.
The disarray of the construction camps up and down the proposed line
confirmed Rondon’s earlier fears. Great waves of malarial infections had
shut down construction for the entire time Rondon had been attending
to Roosevelt. During Rondon’s absence, eight different officers had as-
sumed command of construction, but each one of them quickly retreated
to Rio de Janeiro in various stages of ill health. To make matters worse,
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Cuiabá–Santo Antonio telegraph line. Inset map revised from original in Bake-
well, History of Latin America, xxiii.
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 49

Erecting a telegraph pole. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro

Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.

construction was now passing through the most difficult terrain of the re-
gion, from the headwaters of the Jiparaná River west to the Jamari River.
Thick forests, sharp peaks, and rushing rivers strained workers’ abilities,
even as the constant presence of malaria weakened their resolve.66
After reorganizing work on the Southern Section along the headwaters
of the Jiparaná River (at the Barão de Melgaço and Pimento Bueno tele-
graph stations), Rondon returned to the Northern Section and began sur-
veying the right-of-way east from the Arikêmes station to the left bank of
the Jaru River. Leaving the construction of this section to subordinates,
Rondon then led the difficult right-of-way survey of the forest between
the Jaru River and the Jiparaná River, finishing in September 1914.67
In the months after the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition (May–
December 1914), Rondon and his men inaugurated five telegraph sta-
tions (Pimenta Bueno, Presidente Hermes, Presidente Pena, Jaru, and
Arikêmes) and 230 miles of telegraph line. Between 1907 and 1915 they
had strung the main telegraph line across 800 miles of mostly difficult
terrain and constructed some twenty telegraph stations. They built an-
other 300 miles of connecting telegraph lines, along with a dozen more
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Telegraph posthole diggers returning to camp. Courtesy of Comissão Ron-

don, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.
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b u i l d i n g t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 51

telegraph stations. They built bridges, corrals, and rafts to serve as fer-
ries. They explored rivers and valleys. They fought illnesses, torrential
rainstorms, insects, and animals, and faced severe shortages of food and
supplies.68
After the expenditure of so much time and energy and after so many
years of danger and adventure, the inauguration of the entire line on
1 January 1915 took place with surprisingly little fanfare. This seems odd
because during the eight years of construction Rondon celebrated every
station inauguration, every national holiday, and even minor events such
as Columbus Day with speeches, fireworks, and music. Perhaps Rondon
and his men were too tired and ill to plan and participate in such festivi-
ties. He had not seen his family for any extended period in more than
sixteen months, and perhaps he wished simply to go home to Rio de
Janeiro.69
‘‘An electric buzz of progress’’ now connected Cuiabá with the Ama-
zon basin. And yet, on 1 January 1915 very little changed, which might
have been the real reason for the lack of inaugural festivities. To begin
with, few people wished to use the services of the telegraph line. Second,
those precious-few souls who did attempt to send a telegram could not,
for the line had been inaugurated in name only. Constant service inter-
ruptions caused by rushed jobs and shoddy workmanship meant that the
line, a commission officer later admitted, basically did not work.70
Rondon traveled to Rio de Janeiro in early 1915, where he enjoyed
great acclaim for his efforts and gave stirring speeches to packed audi-
ences about the commission’s heroic accomplishments. Meanwhile, in
the Amazon basin officers, soldiers, and civilian workers trudged back
down the telegraph line’s right-of-way to continue with what they had
been doing for eight years. There they labored for another full year to fin-
ish construction and to inaugurate telegraph communications in more
than name only. These were the men (and women) who truly built the
telegraph line.
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6952 Diacon / STRINGING TOGETHER A NATION / sheet 65 of 242

Chapter Three: wo r k i n g a n d l i v i n g
o n t h e l o n e ly l i n e

D r. Joaquim Augusto Tanajura might have been the busi-

est physician in all of Brazil during the winter and spring
of 1909. As the medical officer of the Rondon Commission, he
traveled up and down the construction zone treating illnesses
and injuries. Foot and leg injuries occupied much of his time,
as officers routinely requested his help in treating the long,
deep wounds soldiers inflicted on themselves as they cleared
the right of way with their machetes.
On 2 July 1909 Dr. Tanajura also probably traveled farther
than any other Brazilian doctor that day to treat a patient.
And this time it was more than a leg wound. A winded runner
reached Tanajura to tell him of a Nambikwara attack against a
transport column that was moving up the line to supply Ron-
don during the expedition of 1909. Dr. Tanajura mounted his
horse and galloped forty-five miles to the scene of the attack.
When he reached the transport crew near what would later
become the Parecis telegraph station, soldiers guided him to
their comrade, a soldier known as Pequeno. Although the
arrow wound to his chest was serious, it was probably not life-
threatening. The treatments the soldier’s colleagues had ad-
ministered before the doctor’s arrival, however, were another
matter. Desperate to help Pequeno, the soldiers had washed
the wound with a mixture of tobacco and table salt, then
rubbed the wound with warmed animal fat covered with rock
salt, and finished with another application of the tobacco-
and-salt mixture. Dr. Tanajura managed to save the patient
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54 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

with regular antiseptic washes combined with morphine injections to

ease the pain.
Two months later, however, the physician failed to save the life of a
soldier who accidentally shot himself with the Winchester rifle he was
cleaning. Deep in the forest during the 1909 expedition, some 135 miles
northwest of the elementary medical facilities at the Juruena base camp,
Tanajura was forced to attempt emergency surgery, aided by the com-
mission’s zoologist, Dr. Alípio de Miranda Ribeiro. Despite their efforts,
the soldier suffered internal hemorrhaging and died the next day.1
Injuries such as these happened so often that they became almost rou-
tine during telegraph construction. The life of a Brazilian soldier at the
turn of the twentieth century was not an easy one anywhere in the coun-
try. But the life of a soldier or worker in the Rondon Commission perhaps
was the most difficult and hazardous of all.

Reluctant ‘‘Recruits’’
National leaders spoke of, analyzed, and increasingly worried about the
quality of Brazilian soldiers during the years of the Rondon Commission.
A modern nation required a modern army staffed with healthy and prop-
erly educated soldiers. Ongoing attempts to create a national draft lottery
focused on ‘‘civilizing’’ the Brazilian poor through national military ser-
vice and training. Alarmingly, these soldiers, ideally to become agents of
the state and nation themselves, were often illiterate, mostly sick, and
troublesome.2
They were also fearful. In his 1913 report to Rondon, Captain Luiz C.
Franco Ferreira repeated a familiar complaint. Soldiers in Rio de Janeiro
who had been assigned to the Rondon Commission simply did every-
thing they could to avoid service in the Amazon. Ferreira’s colleague Cap-
tain João Florentino Meira de Faria noted in his own report that a soldier
chosen for service with the Rondon Commission ‘‘is the target of the sin-
cerest and saddest expressions of sympathy.’’ Fears of dreaded and deadly
diseases terrified soldiers, and most of them treated their assignments
to the Amazon as death sentences. Given such fears, Captain Ferreira
noted, armed guards accompanied commission soldiers as they marched
through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, lest they escape before boarding
ships bound for the dreaded region.3
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l i v i n g o n t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 55

Legislation called for a minimum of 350 soldiers to serve with the Ron-
don Commission. As many as 600 soldiers were assigned to the commis-
sion for much of the construction era (especially 1910–1914). Most of the
soldiers came from the Fifth Engineering Battalion in Rio de Janeiro, al-
though at times Rondon was allowed to request additional troops from
garrisons in the states of Goiás and Mato Grosso. If one follows Peter
Beattie’s estimate of roughly 12,000 to 16,000 soldiers in Brazil during
peacetime in this era, then perhaps as many as 5 percent of all soldiers
in Brazil were serving with the Rondon Commission at any given time.4
Officers complained about the quality of the soldiers assigned for duty
on the telegraph line. Most of them, the officers noted, had been forced
into military service, were illiterate, very poor, and often criminals. Army
commanders ordered to cede soldiers to the Rondon Commission did so
by sending their worst workers, biggest troublemakers, and most insub-
ordinate soldiers. Soldiers weak from chronic illnesses such as tubercu-
losis and malaria reported for Rondon Commission service. If they were
prisoners from barracks revolts, they arrived broken by corporal punish-
ment and from having eaten nothing but bread and water for days.5
In this sense the Rondon Commission mirrored the situation of the
Brazilian army at large. The impressment of soldiers was the norm, so
much so that Beattie noted that ‘‘the army functioned as a national labor
regime and quasi-penal institution in different regions of Brazil.’’ He in-
dicates further that perhaps as many as half of all soldiers served against
their will. Most soldiers were obtained from the ranks of the so-called
unprotected poor, meaning that they did not have the financial resources
or political connections to avoid military service. Furthermore, as with
the Rondon Commission, commanders in other regions commonly un-
loaded their sickest and most troublesome soldiers when authorities in
Rio de Janeiro requested troops.6
In one infamous case, the Brazilian government forced rebellious
sailors to labor for the Rondon Commission. In 1910 sailors in Rio de
Janeiro mutinied in protest of corporal punishment, among other things.
The Chibata Revolt, so-called because the chibata was a type of whip
used in naval corporal punishment, ended with the imprisonment of the
mutineers and the decision to send 100 prisoners to Santo Antonio do
Madeira in the Amazon, where they would work on telegraph construc-
tion under Rondon’s command.7
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56 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

Locked in the hold of the ship Satellite, the prisoners/sailors revolted

off the coast of Bahia in late December 1910. The ship’s captain executed
the leaders of the rebellion, restored order, and reached Santo Antonio
do Madeira on the third of February 1911. For forty-one days the pris-
oners/sailors had been kept below deck and fed only the most meager
of rations. The Rondon Commission official who met the ship described
the men as mere skeletons and noted that the sailors, most of whom were
Afro-Brazilians, looked as if they had just escaped from slavery.8
Belfort de Oliveira, a Rondon Commission employee in Santo Antonio
do Madeira, described the subsequent treatment of the sailors in an ex-
plosive letter to the Brazilian statesman Ruy Barbosa.9 Despite the in-
tense heat of the jungle, the men were pleased to be free of the Satellite.
They were well behaved and followed orders, at least until they began to
march up the recently opened stretch of right-of-way on the Northern
Section of the line. After several kilometers of marching, they refused
to go farther, apparently exhausted by their previous ill treatment and
slowed by their increasing fears of the jungle. At that point Commission
Lieutenant Matos da Costa allegedly shot two men in the head with his
pistol and threw their bodies into the jungle. ‘‘And that is how these men
met their end,’’ Belfort de Oliveira noted, ‘‘either by the bullet or by ma-
laria.’’ 10
The transportation of Rondon Commission soldiers to the Amazon
was usually not so violent or dramatic but was often tiring and bad for
the health. Oftentimes troops boarded ships in Rio de Janeiro, traveled
down Brazil’s Atlantic coast, past Montevideo and Buenos Aires, and up
the Paraná River to Asunción, Paraguay. From there they traveled up the
Paraguay River into Mato Grosso, stopping in the town of Cáceres. There
they boarded small, motorized canoes to travel up the Sepotuba River to
the commission warehouse at Tapirapuã, with the entire journey taking
a month. Actually, the journey took longer than that, for then the sol-
diers would have to march for two or three weeks more to reach the place
of telegraph construction, so that travel from Rio de Janeiro to the con-
struction zone sometimes took nearly two months.11
Many of the soldiers who reported to duty in Rio de Janeiro were al-
ready ill with malaria, hepatitis, or syphilis. Usually they were sent on
the journey anyway, and some responded by deserting when their ship
docked for supplies along the way. Their destination, Tapirapuã, was sin-
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gularly unhealthy, full of shallow pools and standing water where, ac-
cording to one commission physician, ‘‘malaria washe[d] over the place.’’
Officers organized units and often began the one- or two-week march
to the site of telegraph construction on the very day of arrival in Tapi-
rapuã.12
In June 1908, 274 soldiers arrived in Tapirapuã after the long journey
from Rio de Janeiro. Forty-five of them were too ill to make what at that
time was the subsequent nine-day march to the construction zone. In
1913 an indignant commission officer witnessed not the arrival of sick
men but rather the arrival of what clearly were insubordinate troops de-
termined to resist their fate. With horror he noted that as they marched
‘‘the soldiers began to dance the samba’’ while they shouted ‘‘Death to
the [Rondon] Commission.’’ A commission officer in Santo Antonio do
Madeira devised a novel approach to guarantee the morale of troops
arriving from Rio de Janeiro via Manaus. Fearful that his own troops
looked frightfully unhealthy, he ordered them to leave the city so as to not
startle the new recruits who, after all, arrived ‘‘with the expectation, even
certainty, that they would encounter [in the Amazon] a habitat which
is incompatible with the most rudimentary conditions of human exis-
tence.’’ 13

Routinely Ill
Newly arrived soldiers quickly learned camp and work routines. Reveille
sounded at 4 a.m., at which time men jumped into nearby rivers or
streams for a quick bath. Such washings were enjoyable and relaxing dur-
ing a lazy afternoon of rest, but in the morning darkness soldiers gashed
feet on submerged sticks, twisted ankles on slippery rocks, and dreaded
encounters with snakes. Soldiers queued for a breakfast of tea, coffee, and
farofa, a type of fried flour mixed with bits of beef. At 5 a.m. they began
the march from their camp to the construction site, which, depending
on the location of construction, might take an hour, or even two. At the
same time an advance team of surveyors would be waking up at their
isolated bivouac far beyond the construction site.14
Some of the men did not wake up alone, as women routinely accompa-
nied their partners. Sometimes they helped carry their husbands’ tools
and other equipment on the marches to and from the point of construc-
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Lieutenant Sebastião surveying near the Jamary River. Courtesy of Comis-

são Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.
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tion. They lived in army-issued tents or in lean-tos the women built

themselves. The women sometimes quarreled with their partners and
with other soldiers and sometimes faced expulsion from the camp. They
gave birth in camp. Indeed, they raised children in camp, carrying tod-
dlers in their arms as they marched with their husbands.15
The wife of one worker took care of the couple’s nine-year-old and
two-year-old children, impressing a commission physician with her
dedication and strength. ‘‘The woman in question,’’ the physician noted
as part of his report about the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition, ‘‘marched
under the hot sun and pouring rain, carrying with her always her young-
est son.’’ Tragically, the woman suffered a miscarriage on the march
between Tapirapuã and Juruena. Yet, she continued on with her hus-
band and the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition, ‘‘walking 20 miles a day
as if it were nothing.’’ An undated commission report lists the deaths
of five women on the telegraph line between 1908 and 1918. ‘‘All of
these women,’’ the report concluded, ‘‘demonstrated their dedication
and courage confronting life in the hinterlands. . . . They carried part of
their husbands’ belongings, and resisted infernal temperatures as they
lived alongside their partners.’’ 16
Soldiers separated into three units. The vanguard included surveyors
in charge of exploring ahead and establishing the path of line, as well as
an engineer who would mark the future line with stakes planted every
ninety meters or so. The largest unit pursued the utterly exhausting work
of clearing a forty-meter-wide swath of all vegetation for the line’s right-
of-way. In the jungle this meant that for miles on end soldiers felled enor-
mous trees using only bulky and dangerous handsaws. The post crew
felled trees to serve as telegraph poles, dug postholes, planted the posts,
and strung the wire. On a good day, 150 posts, or about seven miles of
line, could be finished.17
At dusk work ended, and the soldiers began their trek back to the base
camp. This meant as much as a two-hour hike, at night, and it was one
of the things soldiers dreaded most. Exhausted from their labors and
carrying up to eighty pounds of equipment on their backs, they trudged
through dense forests. At night, too, the danger of getting lost preoccu-
pied the soldiers. It was easy to lose one’s bearings, especially on moon-
less nights. Soldiers could become hopelessly lost just a few yards off
the path, and sometimes the wayward man would be forced to spend
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Commission workers. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-

Visual, Museu do Índio.

Reveille. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu

do Índio.
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the night where he was, hoping that his colleagues would find him the
next day. Once in camp the men ate a quick dinner at eight or nine
o’clock, then retired to their tents, which were arranged by rank. To pro-
tect against attacks by wild animals, the norm was to camp in the form of
a square, with three sides composed of tents and the fourth of the bank
of a river or stream. Around the perimeter the men stacked yokes and
supply boxes against the walls of their tents. Soldiers serving two-hour
watches stood guard through the night. Commission dogs, sometimes
more than twenty of them, provided another layer of security.18
Sundays and holidays provided the only rest days for soldiers. They
washed clothes, bathed, swam, and at times listened to mandatory health
lectures from commission physicians. Rondon filled holidays with events
that probably seemed like work to his men. Flags were raised, anthems
played, and sometimes the men marched in formation. Ever interested in
building his version of a strong Brazilian nation and strong Brazilian citi-
zens, Rondon used such events to deliver long civics lessons to assembled
troops. Rondon would often speak for an hour, or maybe two, about Bra-
zilian history and national heroes. In addition, as a fervent believer in the
Positivist religion he also lectured his troops on the Positivist worldview,
emphasizing in particular key Positivist holidays such as Columbus Day
and New Year’s Day. In camp at night he held informal Positivist study
sessions so that his men might learn about the faith that guided his life.19
In reality, life on the line was not nearly as routine as the preceding de-
scription suggests. Endless hours of hard labor under difficult conditions
were the norm and thus became routine, but this should not obscure the
myriad difficulties soldiers faced every hour of every day: a tree might
fall, as it did on one soldier, forcing the amputation of his leg; another
soldier died when the mule he was riding fell on top of him.20
The Brazilian army issued inferior boots to recruits in Rio de Janeiro.
The boots injured the men’s feet as they marched in the Amazon and
usually fell apart within the first weeks of service. Most soldiers went
barefoot, which created another set of health problems. Men bruised and
cut their feet on rocks, sticks, and thorns. Dangerous gashes on the legs
and feet, which quickly became infected in the jungle, resulted from the
clearing of the right-of-way with machetes.
Going barefoot further exposed soldiers to two chronic conditions.
One was the so-called bicho de pé (literally, ‘‘foot animal’’), caused by
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62 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

the burrowing of a tiny, female flea into the skin around toenails. The
fleas deposited eggs, which grew into larvae and caused chronic itching.
Another, more serious condition, ancylostomiasis (hookworm disease),
began with parasites that bore through the bottom of the foot. These
parasites produced larvae that fed off of the host’s large intestine, causing
lethargy and severe anemia. It was known for this reason as the ‘‘lazi-
ness disease’’ (doença de preguiça) and was thought to infect as much as
70 percent of Brazil’s rural population at the time.21
Seemingly endless swarms of insects, of the kind that molested Theo-
dore Roosevelt during his journey through the region, also awaited the
soldiers. Tiny sweat bees tortured commission personnel with their con-
stant buzzing around the eyes. Ticks, horseflies, snakes, and scorpions
made life miserable. Fungal infections, especially around the crotch, arm-
pits, and feet, were a constant woe. And on top of all of this there was
the black ant tocandeiro, ‘‘whose bite is so supernaturally painful that the
Amerindians use it for initiation rites.’’ 22
Torrential rains during the wet season (October–March) added to the
soldiers’ woes. The men continued to work, of course, but did so in
clothes that never seemed to dry completely. Moisture seeped into the
small tents, which were made from inferior cloth. Wild thunderstorms
flooded them at night. Soldiers fashioned wooden platforms for their
canvas huts, but even these would sink in the mud during the rainy
season. Some accepted these conditions stoically, a commission officer
noted, but many others did not.23
The list of life’s daily difficulties continues. On the Southern Section
a soldier stripped down to swim across a river. Unfortunately, he failed
to notice the fresh cuts on his buttocks, which resulted from brushing
against a thorn bush, and his desperate screams soon pierced the air as
piranhas attacked. He survived by making it to a small island but lost con-
siderable flesh nonetheless. In 1910 Nambikwara archers shot another
soldier in the buttock. His companions struggled to remove the barbed
arrowhead, but it broke off at skin level. Fortunately a commission physi-
cian was nearby. Many times, however, no physician was present, forcing
nervous officers to administer questionable medical care, such as when
a colonel burned a patient’s chest by leaving a mustard plaster on for
too long.24
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In addition to the accidents, wounds, illnesses, attacks, and pests, sol-

diers faced chronic food shortages. Initially pack trains supplied the sol-
diers out of Diamantino. By late 1908, however, construction was far
enough advanced to make this route impractical, because the oxen would
weaken long before reaching the construction camp. As an alternative,
supply trains left the commission warehouse at Tapirapuã, bound for
Juruena and beyond, but the absence of pasture on this route meant that
the oxen again weakened before they could deliver supplies. In addition,
waves of illnesses among supply troops shut down deliveries and pro-
duced dramatic, chronic shortages of food and general supplies. Dur-
ing such times, squads were assigned full-time to hunting, fishing, and
gathering in order to feed the 300 or more soldiers. Commanders urged
troops to grow crops on lands adjacent to telegraph stations to combat
these problems.25
One illness in particular filled Rondon Commission soldiers with
dread as they departed Rio de Janeiro for service in the Amazon—ma-
laria. It was the one thing they knew to fear most, and when they arrived
they discovered that the stories they heard were not exaggerated. The
specter of malaria hovered over the personnel of the commission and
more than any other factor made service in the Rondon Commission a
miserable proposition.
One Brazilian health official at the time estimated that 80 to 90 per-
cent of the workers in the Amazon had contracted malaria. Public-health
pioneer Carlos Chagas argued in 1911 that malaria killed 30 to 40 per-
cent of all latex gatherers in the region during any given year. In a 1910
visit Oswaldo Cruz, the famous public-health officer from Rio de Janeiro,
noted of the Madeira River valley, and specifically of the town of Santo
Antonio do Madeira, that ‘‘the level of malaria [was] colossal.’’ Histo-
rian Laura Maciel writes that at any given time malaria incapacitated 25
percent of the Rondon Commission’s personnel.26
The female Anopheles mosquito acquires the malarial parasite by in-
gesting the blood of an infected person. The bite of the mosquito then
transmits the parasite to other humans, where it first lodges in the liver,
then eventually (after days or even months) enters into the red blood
cells. As the parasite releases toxins into the body it grows, causing the
red blood cells to burst and symptoms to appear.
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Two parasites cause malaria in Brazil. Plasmodium vivax is not fatal.

It does, however, cause relapses every year or so, and, in some cases,
after several years (Rondon suffered from this variety of malaria). Symp-
toms include headaches, high fevers, vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions,
severe anemia, and extreme fatigue. If not properly treated, the other
malarial parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, ‘‘may cause kidney failure,
seizures, mental confusion, coma, and death.’’ Today there are an esti-
mated 300,000–500,000 new cases of malaria worldwide per year. It re-
mains endemic in Brazil, especially in the Amazon.27
Trying to build a telegraph line across a region marked by dense tropi-
cal forests and plagued by heavy rains and searing temperatures, and with
poorly clothed and equipped men, would have been difficult enough. Add
to that endemic malaria, which has as its primary symptoms debilitat-
ing fevers, severe anemia, extreme fatigue, and sometimes death, and it
comes as no surprise to learn that waves of malaria felled soldiers and
brought commission activities to a halt.
In accordance with the commission’s charge of national integration,
Rondon Commission personnel engaged not only in line construction
but in myriad explorations as well. Rondon’s goal was to map the en-
tire northwest, and small expeditions constantly fanned out across the
hinterland. Judging from the totality of commission records and reports,
Rondon took his charge of exploration seriously and thus devoted con-
siderable time and energy to organizing expeditions and publishing their
findings.
Almost without exception malaria seized these expedition members
and forced commanders to delay, or in many cases, cancel their jour-
neys. Lieutenant Alencarliense Fernandes da Costa’s 1909 exploration of
the headwaters of the Jiparaná River concluded with eight of the fifteen
members of the expedition ill with malaria. In 1912 a seven-man crew
set out to explore lands between the Vilhena telegraph station and the
Guaporé River. Within a month, six of the seven had contracted malaria,
and the commander called off the expedition, forcing the weakened men
to make their way slowly back to the telegraph line. Most famously, of
course, malaria attacked Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit during
the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition.28
A devastating wave of the illness brought line construction to a halt for
nearly a year between July 1910 and July 1911, a time when Rondon him-
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self was recuperating in Rio de Janeiro from his own bout with malaria.
The sickness struck officers and soldiers alike, and several died. Malaria
then grounded construction activities from October 1913 to April 1914,
just as the 1915 inauguration deadline was fast approaching. Commission
reports of this period describe a scene of growing desperation, as sick
soldiers struggled to labor and healthy officers replaced their stricken
comrades, only to succumb to the illness themselves in what became an
unbroken cycle of arrival, sickness, and departure.29
This deadly period began in 1913 when Captain Cândido Cardoso, re-
cently nominated commander of the Southern Section, died of malaria
en route to replacing Lieutenants Marones and Vasconcellos, both of
whom were incapacitated by the illness. In rapid succession a series of
commanders took over construction, which was now operating deep in
the jungle northwest of the Pimenta Bueno telegraph station. Malaria
struck Lieutenant Nicolau Bueno Horta Barbosa. He was replaced by a
Lieutenant Bellaruino. Malaria felled him as well and then his replace-
ment, Captain Tinoco. Two more replacements, Lieutenants Cuitinho
and Carneiro Pinto, took ill shortly thereafter. Lieutenant Horta Barbosa
sought treatment in Bahia, and after recovering requested to be removed
from the commission ‘‘because of the impossibility of continuing with-
out sacrificing his very existence.’’ 30
The command situation stabilized with the arrival of Lieutenant Cân-
dido Sobrinho in April 1914. Although work resumed, the lieutenant
found that all but six of the soldiers under his command were suffering
the high fevers and fatigue of malaria. He ordered the immediate transfer
of the construction camp to a drier, and thus healthier, locale. Neverthe-
less, between April and December 1914, as the final push for completion
of the line proceeded, malaria forced the lieutenant to send fifty-one men
to commission infirmaries for treatment. Tragically, in this same period
thirty-two of his men died of malaria.31
Desperate soldiers and officers sought out local cures when visiting
towns like Cáceres and Cuiabá. A popular treatment in the town of Mato
Grosso involved fashioning suppositories out of leaves and cotton, and
filling them with a mixture of gunpowder, pepper, pig fat, and pulver-
ized tobacco (snuff). In other locales soap was added to the mix. Early in
his telegraph construction career in Mato Grosso Rondon himself sought
the services of a local medicine woman who prescribed a purgative made
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of the Brazilian herb fedegoso. Commission physicians eventually settled

on the use of mosquito netting and daily doses of twenty to fifty centi-
grams of quinine as a prophylactic, along with quinine injections every
six hours during malarial episodes.32
Despite efforts to quell malaria and mend broken bones, 159 soldiers
died while in the service of the Rondon Commission between 1907 and
the inauguration of the line on 1 January 1915. A total of 101 of these
deaths (64 percent) occurred during the push to finish construction in
1913 and 1914. Seventeen officers died while on duty between 1901 and
1919. Commission reports document at length the circumstances sur-
rounding officers’ deaths, but the list of soldiers’ deaths includes only
the names, places of death, and dates of death. This bureaucratic differ-
ence of treatment mirrors the very real differences soldiers and officers
received in the treatment of their illnesses and injuries. Soldiers were
treated in the field. At best they might have been sent to the nearest com-
mission infirmary on the line. Officers, in contrast, regularly gained per-
mission to return to Rio de Janeiro to improve their health. In death the
distinction continued, as soldiers were buried by the side of the right-
of-way, while officers were buried in commission plots in Cuiabá and
Cáceres whenever possible.33
A constant stream of men descended the telegraph right-of-way in
search of treatment. For soldiers the destination was the nearest commis-
sion infirmary. For officers it was Rio de Janeiro. Desperately ill officers
faced long, complicated journeys of several weeks or more, and many did
not reach their destination. Second Lieutenant José Paulo de Oliveira,
for example, died of malaria in Corumbá while waiting for a steamer to
take him back to Rio. First Lieutenant Firmino Portugal died on the line
while making his way from the Utiariti station to Cáceres, from which
he planned to continue his journey to the coast. Cadet Antonio Sam-
paio Xavier died in Cáceres, also during the initial phase of his return
home. Second Lieutenant Fernando Martiniano Carneiro returned to the
Amazon after having spent time in Rio recovering from an earlier bout
with malaria. Back in Mato Grosso in 1914, he quickly took ill again and
died while desperately trying to reach Manaus and, presumably, Rio de
Janeiro.34
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Fear and Loathing on the Telegraph Trail

The constant fear of illness and injury combined with the agonies of
forced recruitment and labor to create a dark and potentially explo-
sive emotional brew among commission soldiers. Rondon’s style of com-
mand and, increasingly, soldiers’ fears of Indian attacks added to the mix.
As a result, desertions rocked the commission throughout its history and
forced Rondon and his officers to devote much of their time and energy
to tracking down and punishing wayward soldiers.
Descriptions such as ‘‘sympathetic,’’ ‘‘friendly,’’ ‘‘compassionate,’’ and
‘‘understanding’’ do not come to mind when discussing Rondon’s quali-
ties as a commander. Nor, to be fair, would Rondon have thought they
should. Instead, words such as ‘‘tough,’’ ‘‘demanding,’’ ‘‘rigorous,’’ and
perhaps even ‘‘mean’’ and ‘‘insensitive’’ seem more apt. Rondon certainly
argued that the demands of telegraph construction in the hinterlands,
combined with the quality of soldiers under his command, required an
iron fist of discipline.
That iron fist created problems for Rondon early in his career. In June
1894 Rondon commanded telegraph construction between Cuiabá and
Araguaia, on the border with the state of Goiás. In Cuiabá, on the day
he was to travel to Rio de Janeiro, Rondon received a desperate report
that revolting soldiers had expelled their officers, taken over the con-
struction camp, and ‘‘fallen into . . . an uncontrollable orgy of drink.’’
Rondon mounted his steed and raced back to the scene. He gathered his
officers, several of whom, much to Rondon’s dismay, had fled into the
surrounding woods. Together they succeeded in rounding up the terrifi-
cally drunken men, and an enraged Rondon immediately began to beat
them severely with a switch, doing so, by his own admission, for more
than an hour.35
Captain Tavares, commander of the Eighth Infantry Battalion from
which some of Rondon’s soldiers were drawn, filed a complaint against
Rondon over the matter. The army established a tribunal in Cuiabá, in
front of which Rondon testified about his belief in the need to discipline
the kinds of unruly men routinely found in military service. Rondon then
traveled to Rio de Janeiro in 1895 to testify again in the matter. The min-
ister of war dismissed the charges against Rondon eighteen months after
the rebellion.36
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Officially the army abolished corporal punishment in 1874, but well

beyond that year it remained a central component of military discipline.
Indeed, it is fair to say that in Rondon’s time such punishment was the
norm, for rough ‘‘treatment was the only way officers could imagine
welding together the poor soldierly material.’’ At times the punishment
meted out by commanders such as Rondon was ‘‘more akin to torture
than to disciplinary punishment.’’ In this particular case, Rondon was
investigated only because a fellow officer filed a complaint, which pre-
vented officials from ignoring the matter as they might have done other-
wise.37
A quick review of Rondon’s career suggests that corporal and other
kinds of punishment flowed from the commander’s quick temper. In his
diary Rondon recorded one such event from 1905, when he discovered
that a soldier herding commission pack animals was drunk. When Ron-
don reprehended the man and asked him why he had not gathered the
pack animals as ordered, ‘‘he responded to me in a most insubordinate
manner which caused me to lose my temper, and thus I beat him with a
stick I found at that moment.’’ Later, the soldier deserted with Rondon’s
Winchester rifle and was never seen again.38
The inebriation of his soldiers threatened military discipline and Ron-
don’s authority. In his diary Rondon recorded an episode from the in-
auguration of the auxiliary telegraph line from Cáceres to the town of
Mato Grosso in February 1908. In the town of Mato Grosso the inaugu-
ration festivities quickly got out of hand when ‘‘the soldiers became so
inebriated as to not obey officers’ orders anymore.’’ An enraged Rondon
mounted his horse and rode to the store where a merchant was selling
cachaça (a type of rum) to his soldiers. He burst into the store on horse-
back, smashed all of the cachaça bottles, then destroyed several barrels
containing the drink. Only then, Rondon noted, did the disorder subside.
Just a day earlier he had promised his men several days of rest follow-
ing the completion of the line. He now rescinded that promise, and as
punishment ordered a forced march of the men along the recently com-
pleted line.39
Rondon could be harsh with his officers as well. In the above-
mentioned 1894 rebellion he made a point of chastising his officers be-
fore punishing the rebellious soldiers. Likewise, he did not spare even his
brother-in-law, Francisco Horta Barbosa (Chiquinho), who was the offi-
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cer in charge of placing the right-of-way for a telegraph line in southern

Mato Grosso in 1901. In April of that year Chiquinho and another officer
burst into camp late at night seeking to form a posse of soldiers to help
them avenge a drunken insult the two had received from a Portuguese
merchant in the nearby town of Coxim. Rondon condemned the attempt
at revenge, although he did order the arrest of the offending merchant.
He then delivered such a stinging rebuke to his brother-in-law that Chi-
quinho requested to be relieved of his duty, for he was greatly angered
by Rondon’s tone, which he judged to be offensive.40
Rondon was a disciplinarian wedded to an unerring routine. He was
a perfectionist and stern taskmaster. In reports he chastised the perfor-
mance of his men and criticized, even ridiculed, the incompetence and
lack of energy demonstrated by them. He could also be difficult and just
as demanding with local authorities, as he apparently was when pre-
paring for the inauguration of the Cáceres auxiliary telegraph line. In
that case Rondon expressed dissatisfaction with the unkempt appear-
ance of the town in preparation for the inauguration of the line. Such a
shoddy appearance, it seems, did not befit representatives of the central
state, nor did it correspond to the kind of orderly, clean, and progres-
sive Brazilian nation Rondon was attempting to construct in the region.
Furious, he called the town’s citizens to the town square, made a speech
calling for more civic responsibility, and pressured them to clean the
streets and buildings to make things more presentable. He also ordered
his troops to assist in the clean up, ‘‘because the Town Council doesn’t
worry about this matter, or any other one, given that its members are all
illiterates, surpassed only in their stupidity by the President [of the coun-
cil].’’ Furthermore, he commanded his troops to clean the local army
barracks, which likewise fell far short of his exacting standards.41
In his diary Rondon says very little about individual soldiers, and he
never provides any kind of personal information on his men. Even the
death of a soldier elicited precious few words from him, as, for example,
in June 1908, when Rondon was directing line construction northwest of
Diamantino. Of a soldier’s death on 10 June, Rondon wrote only that ‘‘at
three a.m. an ill soldier died of chronic articular rheumatism. No posts
were cut today because the soldiers could not find the appropriate trees.
The dead soldier was buried on the left side of the path.’’ 42
In contrast, Rondon’s terseness blossomed into patently loquacious
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Rondon in unidentified camp. Note photograph of family on table. Courtesy of

Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.

odes when he discussed one of his favorite topics: his dogs. Rondon loved
his dogs, which he used to hunt game and protect camp. A beloved set
of three or four dogs constantly accompanied the commander, with as
many as twenty of them living in camp at any one time. At night Rondon
would share his food with them, and he was always quite affectionate
toward them. He once halted a day’s march during the 1908 expedition
from Juruena to the Madeira River so that his dogs could rest. His diary
entry for that day lamented that the brutal sun was so hard on the dogs,
though he never mentions its effect on his men. In 1905, while construct-
ing a line in southern Mato Grosso, Rondon delayed a march because his
dogs were tired. Indeed, the day before he had carried one of the dogs ‘‘so
he would not die of exhaustion.’’ A week later he grew concerned when
two of his dogs, Santusa and Fortuna, did not make it to camp. The next
day Rondon walked back down the line until he found them and brought
them back.43
Unlike the death of a soldier, the death of his dogs sparked touch-
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ing eulogies in Rondon’s diary. On the day Vulcão died while hunting in
southern Mato Grosso, Rondon wrote, ‘‘Travel companion who guarded
my tent. . . . Poor companion! How I feel your death. . . . You who served
me so well, without my being able to pay you back for half of your dedica-
tion.’’ In September 1908 Nambikwara Indians wounded Rondon’s dog
Turco with two arrows. In his diary Rondon noted what a fine dog he was
and that he had immediately ordered the commission physician to treat
the dog’s injuries ‘‘with all due care and kindness.’’ That month must have
been especially difficult for Rondon, as he also lamented the death of his
favorite mule, Lontra. ‘‘Poor Lontra,’’ he wrote, ‘‘so good and so strong,
you performed wonderfully throughout the [construction] campaigns of
Mato Grosso until today.’’ 44
Rondon’s dogs and mules did not desert. Rondon’s men did, and they
did so often. In this they were like Brazilian soldiers in general. Peter
Beattie estimates that between 300 and 400 Brazilian soldiers deserted
every year in the early twentieth century. At times desertion levels forced
army leaders to deny discharges to soldiers who had fulfilled their tours
of duty, in order to maintain required troop levels. Soldiers on the fron-
tier deserted more frequently because officials reserved service in such
undesirable locations for incorrigible soldiers who were more prone to
desert in the first place. Also, supplies and housing were more meager
there. Furthermore, soldiers feared diseases and danger in frontier lands
such as the Amazon.45
Beattie’s discussion reads like a roll call of the reasons for desertions
from the Rondon Commission. According to one commission officer, sol-
diers, many of whom were from coastal cities, dreaded life deep in the
forest. Actually, he said, it terrified them. What especially frightened sol-
diers and encouraged desertions were Indian attacks and the threat of
such. This was especially true for the two- or three-man crews manning
telegraph stations who, as construction moved ahead, were left largely
alone in the jungle. Periodic breakdowns in supply trains caused further
unrest among the soldiers, and food shortages led many hungry men to
desert.46
Rondon estimated a desertion rate of 10 percent of his soldiers for
the year 1912. Specific cases of desertion suggest that at times the rate
was far higher. Between June and December 1907, fifty-seven of 154
soldiers building the commission road out of Tapirapuã deserted. The
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Unidentified men in camp with Rondon. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de

Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.

most famous case occurred in 1908, when desertions and work stoppages
shut down construction and forced Rondon to abandon his trek to the
Madeira River. Troops under the command of Major Custódio de Senna
Braga first fled en masse in December 1907, when a third of his soldiers
simply disappeared. Then, on 1 September 1908, eighteen more soldiers
deserted Braga’s unit, presumably because of hunger, as pack trains were
having trouble reaching the construction site and a merchant in Cuiabá
was refusing to sell more supplies to Rondon due to the commission’s
already sizable debt to him. Major Braga feared more desertions, and
indeed ten more did leave eventually, for ‘‘the discontent of the men is
plainly visible, as they live in terror of being left without food in this
wasteland.’’ 47
Desertions robbed Rondon of vital personnel. That much is obvious.
They also caused construction delays because of Rondon’s insistence that
his officers capture the wayward soldiers, ‘‘so that,’’ one officer put it, ‘‘we
can prevent additional desertions from occurring, which would cause
further damage to [army] discipline.’’ This officer, Second Lieutenant
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Virgílio Marones de Gusmão, commanded road construction near Tapi-

rapuã in July 1908. In one day twenty-one of 158 soldiers deserted. To
prevent more desertions, Marones de Gusmão turned over the direction
of construction to an assistant and organized a search party comprised
of four soldiers and himself. They descended the Sepotuba River to look
for the escaped soldiers, assuming that they would be trying to reach
Cáceres, the only real town in the region. They surprised eleven of the de-
serters on the banks of the river. Eight surrendered and three fled into the
dense forest. Those three men had nowhere to go, and they surrendered
the next day. Marones de Gusmão apparently never found the other ten
men. ‘‘As a consequence of the apprehensions,’’ the confident lieutenant
noted, ‘‘desertions stopped.’’ But, in fact, they did not stop, for over the
next five months another thirty-six men fled his command.48
The behavior of the three men who surrendered on the second day
highlights an important point. Given the isolation of the region crossed
by the telegraph line, fleeing soldiers often faced a daunting lack of op-
tions once they did escape. The most horrific example of this is the ex-
perience of the soldier Cândido Seraphim Pereira, who deserted from
line construction in 1908 near what became the Parecis telegraph station.
The soldier fled into the forest, where he quickly got lost. He fell as he
fled and cut his right hand and left foot. While trying to survive in the
woods alone, his wounds quickly became infected, ‘‘and were invaded by
maggots . . . which destroyed skin and muscle tissue, leaving the bone
exposed.’’ In a desperate state Perreira turned himself in, the commis-
sion physician amputated his right hand and left foot, and the patient
recovered.49
Often, the only hope of escape for deserters was to track back down
the telegraph line without being detected. The line’s right-of-way, after
all, was the only path in or out of the region, save for rivers, and most of
the soldiers could not swim, had no canoes, and probably did not know
the course of any particular stream (although their commanding officers
probably did). Given this, escapees could often do little more than to try
to pass unseen around the telegraph stations. That they usually tried this
during daylight hours added another level of complexity, but at night it
was too easy to lose one’s way in the forest.
At the Parecis telegraph station commission officer Armando Amilcar
Botelho de Magalhães received a telegram from a forward camp stating
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that thirteen men had deserted and were most certainly heading down
the line’s right-of-way toward him. The officer planned to have his men
fan out through the forest to await the deserters. Botelho de Magalhães’s
problem, however, was that he did not trust his soldiers to make arrests
if they did encounter the fleeing soldiers, as a certain amount of soldierly
solidarity often meant collusion between soldiers and deserters. He thus
asked the one soldier he trusted and a group of civilian contract workers
stationed in the camp to help him. The men spread out around the sta-
tion. Mounted on his horse, Botelho de Magalhães surprised the thirteen
deserters and trained his pistol on them. He yelled through the woods
to the nearby trusted soldier to come and help him make the arrest. The
soldier did not respond to his calls, however, and the deserters broke
and ran further into the woods. A chagrined Botelho de Magalhães cap-
tured only one of the men. The others, he noted feebly, ‘‘fled into the
jungle, where my lack of experience as a backwoodsman prevented me
from pursuing them.’’ 50
It was clearly important for deserting soldiers to find a friendly third
party if they were to escape successfully. Such abetment outraged Ron-
don, frustrated attempts to capture escapees, and demonstrated the very
real limits of the commission’s authority. In August 1906 Rondon and his
soldiers were exploring possible paths for the proposed auxiliary tele-
graph line between Cáceres and the town of Mato Grosso. They passed
near the fazenda (landed estate) known as the Fazenda Baia de Fumaça,
which Rondon described as a ‘‘hangout for assassins and thieves, . . .
and which is a quilombo [literally, a runaway slave community] for de-
serters from the Army.’’ The estate owner, Rondon noted, was a thief
who ‘‘attracts and protects all the criminals in the region, including de-
serters from the Army.’’ Oddly, at one point Rondon even accused the
commander of troops stationed in Cuiabá of fomenting the desertions of
commission soldiers and of protecting those men who did desert.51
Depending on the location, a final option for deserters was to seek aid
from other employers. Mostly this meant working as a latex gatherer,
and while commission officers sometimes successfully tracked down
deserters-turned-rubber tappers, often they did not. Near the town of
Santo Antonio do Madeira, the other option was to flee commission ser-
vice for a job constructing the infamous Madeira-Mamoré Railroad. Of
this latter option, a frustrated commission official wondered if it would
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be possible to force the railroad to reimburse the commission for the

deserters’ fares to Mato Grosso.52
At least one employee resorted to another unusual option in order to
avoid work. On 1 October 1915 the commission fined telegrapher Ivan
Ferreira de Souza thirty days’ pay. Presumably tired of answering calls
and receiving work assignments, Ferreira de Souza had ‘‘intentionally
shot down the telegraph line in front of his station,’’ thus causing a
lengthy disruption of service. An indignant but unnamed commission
employee complained that by doing so the telegrapher ‘‘had transformed
himself into the destroyer of that which he was entrusted to preserve.’’ 53
So, deserters, at least some of them, anyway, did succeed in escaping
the difficulties of service in the Rondon Commission. To combat this
problem the commission began hiring regional laborers instead of sol-
diers to work on the line. During line construction until 1915, commis-
sion officers commanded these regional workers, and they worked under
the same military discipline as the soldiers. Beginning in 1915, how-
ever, the commission contracted labor brokers in Manaus to provide
workers and allowed the contractors, not commission officers, to direct
the workers in the crucial task of clearing the right-of-way and truly
establishing telegraph service after the supposed inauguration of the line
in January 1915.54
The panacea of using regional contract workers instead of (mostly
urban) soldiers failed, however, to materialize. Instead, all of the same ills
that plagued commission soldiers, both literally and figuratively, plagued
commission contract workers as well. In October 1915 commission Cap-
tain Alencarliense Fernandes da Costa, with Rondon’s approval, autho-
rized the hiring of 100 men in Manaus to widen and clear the roughly
120 miles of right-of-way deep in the jungle between the Pimenta Bueno
and Presidente Pena telegraph stations. The commission officer hired the
men, but there was a delay in leaving Manaus, and only twenty-six of the
100 workers actually reported for duty. Then the commission lieuten-
ant in charge of accompanying the workers to the construction site fell
ill with malaria and failed to reach the Presidente Pena station, return-
ing instead to Manaus to treat his health. That lieutenant’s replacement
did not even make it past the Madeira River before he too returned to
Manaus to care for his health.55
Faced with this chaotic situation, Captain Fernandes da Costa hired
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two labor contractors in Manaus. The commission agreed to pay the con-
tractors for each kilometer of right-of-way cleared and widened, with the
contractors then responsible for paying their workers. The first contrac-
tor, Mr. Francisco Trocoly, managed to clear only fifteen miles of right-
of-way, while the other contractor, Pedro Leão, cleared less than a mile.
Malaria stopped both men and almost all of their workers. This, Fer-
nandes da Costa explained, was because the workers were Portuguese
immigrants who ‘‘not being from this region were not adapted to the
unhealthiness of these lands, and thus they succumbed entirely.’’ 56
Desperately seeking to salvage the situation, Fernandes da Costa or-
dered commission physician Dr. Pedro de Aguiar to travel from Manaus
to the construction site. There he was to establish a field hospital in
order to treat the workers so that they might resume their labors. In-
stead, Dr. de Aguiar refused to visit the sick men, preferring instead to
hole up in a comfortable house on the Jiparanã River that was owned by
the Asensi Rubber Company. Then, ‘‘when his services were most desper-
ately needed [the physician] suddenly withdrew from the Commission’’
and the workers were abandoned, presumably to find their own ways
back to Manaus.57
Indeed, the personnel situation never really improved for Captain Fer-
nandes da Costa. In 1916 he ‘‘sent five units to clear the right of way,
and five units fell victim to malaria.’’ In that same year he authorized the
contracting of 300 workers in faraway Belém, on the Atlantic coast, ‘‘but
only 90 men enlisted, and they were no good’’—most of them deserted.
Finally, in 1922 Rondon ordered Captain Boanerges Lopes de Souza to
contract 120 civilians in Manaus to once again tackle the clearing of the
right-of-way. A flu epidemic ravaged the men en route, seven of them
dying before even reaching the telegraph line. The survivors did succeed
in clearing seventy-five miles of right-of-way before Captain Lopes de
Souza contracted malaria. He fled the region and the campaign was aban-
doned.58

Conclusion
Force alone motivated many of the soldiers of the Rondon Commission.
Judging from the figures from the Brazilian army as a whole, it is clear
that up to one-half of the commission’s soldiers were involuntary recruits
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dragooned into military service. Perhaps an equal percentage or more

were urban men who had never seen the jungle. Many responded by flee-
ing the desperate conditions almost as soon as they arrived. The others
suffered illness and injury, along with backbreaking labor, and many of
them died.
Brazilians or, better yet, Brazilian scholars, criticize the legacy of the
commission’s telegraph line through the Amazon, seeing it as the first
salvo in a war of environmental destruction and ethnocide that continues
to this day. Be that as it may, such criticisms should not obscure the heroic
efforts of countless unnamed men and women, who worked against their
will on telegraph construction. Whether their product was good or bad
is not the question. What is to be admired is their very survival in a land
that was strange and foreign and mightily dangerous.
If force motivated the workers, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon’s
motivation rested elsewhere. In part, dreams of national unification, of
a greater, integrated Brazil, pushed him to labor endlessly in the wilds of
Mato Grosso. By his own admission, however, another calling gave him
the strength to lead seemingly endless expeditions and work campaigns.
That calling was what today seems like a rather odd, maybe even comical,
religion, one born in France but grown largely in Brazil.
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Chapter Four: t h e p ow e r o f p o s i t i v i s m

O n a rainy winter day in Rio de Janeiro the building dis-

appears into the grayness of its surroundings. To get
there one takes the subway to the Gloria Station, then walks
three or four blocks up Benjamin Constant Street. From the
mist of the morning emerges what appears to be a Greek
temple, albeit one covered with faded green paint: the Temple
of Humanity, home of the Positivist Church of Brazil.
On any given Sunday at 10:00 a.m. a half dozen casually
dressed and mostly aged people slowly collect on the front
steps of the temple. With a nod from a gray-haired gentle-
man (the congregation’s leader, Mr. Danton Voltaire), the first
notes of the ‘‘Marseillaise’’ play over an ancient loudspeaker
while the French flag slowly climbs an impressive mast near
the street. The music from the loudspeaker then turns into
the Brazilian national anthem, and in front a man hoists the
Brazilian flag up another mast. A handful of pedestrians stop
to stare at the spectacle. Some, but not all of them, come to
attention and sing when the Brazilian anthem is played.
A century ago the exact same ceremony played to a de-
cidedly larger and more boisterous crowd. As described by
João do Rio, a famous chronicler of the time, crowds of well-
dressed ladies entered the temple accompanied by gentlemen
clad in fine coats and top hats. Their carriages clogged the nor-
mally deserted street in front of the temple. Military men in
uniform herded their children into the building. Without fail,
Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon was among these parish-
ioners when he was home in Rio de Janeiro.1
To note that Rondon was a Positivist is to state something
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as obvious as the fact that man is a biped. Positivism was everything to

him. It shaped his outlook on life. It provided a blueprint for national
development that he followed in the planning and construction of the
telegraph line. It also shaped his ideas about Indian–white relations in
Brazil. Positivism gave Rondon the spiritual strength to carry on his ac-
tivities in the Amazon. It comforted him during the long months of sepa-
ration from his family and encouraged him when the trials and tribu-
lations of the telegraph campaigns eroded his confidence. Simply put,
Rondon built the successes of his career on the foundation of Positivism.
Yet Rondon’s Positivism was also a principal source of the troubles he
encountered during the course of his telegraph campaigns, leading him
to engage in unnecessary disputes with public officials over issues of faith
and to antagonize Catholic Church officials, which then caused their sup-
porters to challenge Rondon and his project in northwest Brazil. Thus,
the very thing that gave meaning to his life and strengthened his resolve
and character also limited the impact of his work and his influence in
Brazil.

Positivism: The Religion of Humanity

What was this philosophy/religion that was able to cast such a powerful
and decisive spell over Rondon? Founded by Auguste Comte, best known
today as the father of sociology, Positivism grew out of Comte’s search
for ways to ensure order and progress in the aftermath of the French
Revolution.2 Comte’s goal was to prevent social unrest, rebellions, and
revolutions by convincing the proletariat to accept the domination of the
bourgeoisie in exchange for material benefits, guidance, and improve-
ment. He believed that he had uncovered the natural laws of the uni-
verse and that this allowed him to develop an objective and neutral social
theory. As Brazilian philosopher Lelita Benoit notes, for Comte the uni-
verse was ‘‘the perfect paradigm of order,’’ which led to ‘‘the fundamental
tenet of positivist sociology: the notion of a natural social order.’’ Scien-
tific thought and observation were the keys to uncovering this natural
order, and thus Comte emphasized the importance of studying the sci-
ences, mathematics, and engineering.3
Using these natural laws, Comte divided human experience into three
stages through which he felt all of mankind passed in the course of
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social evolution. In the theological stage humans could only explain

natural phenomena through the mediation of spirits, because they were
so reduced in their ability to observe natural phenomena. During this
stage societies passed through three successive periods. In the fetishis-
tic period man believed that supernatural spirits were responsible for all
phenomena. Then came the polytheistic period, followed by the mono-
theistic, or final, period of the theological stage. In that stage society
gradually came to believe that one supernatural being was responsible
for all providential actions.
The monotheistic period prepared societies for the second stage of
social evolution, the metaphysical stage. In this stage humans began to
search for the causes of phenomena through observation and rational
thought, which prepared them for the final stage of social evolution,
the positivist stage, wherein the true causes of and relations between
diverse phenomena would be discovered through the identification of
natural laws. A few enlightened individuals would guide society in this
period, leading to human progress and the unification of all mankind into
Humanity. Because of the emphasis on the social, on what Comte termed
‘‘the Universal Order,’’ Positivists were to work for the public good, for
solidarity, with Positivism as a technical guide for moral behavior.
Late in his life, beginning in 1847, Comte developed the so-called Reli-
gion of Humanity to teach and spread the ideas of Positivism. To his
faith in science Comte added the importance of emotions and affection.
Humanity replaced the Christian god. The religion’s primary mission,
therefore, was to complete the pact between social classes so that one,
unified Humanity could unite all people on earth. Here the architecture
of the Positivist Church in Rio de Janeiro is instructive, for while the front
looks like a Greek temple, the sides, in rough red brick, represent the ar-
chitecture of the factory and express Comte’s goal of uniting all peoples,
from the learned elite to the proletariat, into one social unit.4
Comte’s religion recognized as saints those historical figures that
represented key phases in the social evolution of Humanity, including
Moses, Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, and Dante. He developed his own cal-
endar (which Rondon used in much of his personal correspondence, as
well as in numerous official documents). Women were central to the new
religion, for Comte believed that they possessed certain innate qualities,
such as affection and goodness, that would help mankind reach the Posi-
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tivist stage. Women were to be venerated as the chief representatives of

Humanity, for they were responsible for transmitting Positivist beliefs
to the family. Comte’s maxim, which is inscribed above the doors of the
Positivist Church in Rio de Janeiro, proclaims ‘‘Love as the Principle,
Order as the Base, and Progress as the End.’’ 5

Positivism and the Religion of Humanity in Brazil

In the aftermath of the Paraguayan War (1865–1870), many Brazilians
questioned the foundations of their society.6 Positivism’s emphasis on in-
dustrialization, modernization, and reform found an appreciative audi-
ence among members of the middle class in Brazil, who, according to
Robert Nachman, ‘‘tended to feel divorced from traditional, national in-
stitutions such as the Roman Catholic Church and the oligarchically-
controlled government.’’ 7 Furthermore, the paternalistic Positivist plan
to incorporate the proletariat by providing for their material and moral
well-being (in order to create a unified Humanity) offered these mem-
bers of the middle class a way to reform Brazil without unleashing social
unrest and violence. Not only were the first Positivists in Brazil drawn
from the middle class, but they were drawn from a particular segment of
that class: those schooled in the sciences and engineering. Nearly 80 per-
cent of the 400 Positivists studied by Nachman were employed as army
officers, professors, engineers, and physicians.8
Beginning in the 1870s Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães
played the key role in the spread of Positivism in Brazil by teaching it to
his students at the Military Academy in Rio de Janeiro. Constant, who
established the Positivist Society in 1876, began to rally cadets to the
cause of republicanism in Brazil, and he played a crucial role in the decla-
ration of the republic in 1889. According to Brazilian scholar José Murilo
de Carvalho, the peak of Positivist influence came during the first months
of the Republic, when Positivist-inspired proposals such as the separa-
tion of church and state were adopted into law, and the Positivist motto
‘‘Order and Progress’’ was included on the new, Positivist-designed na-
tional flag.9
Benjamin Constant was what has come to be known as a heterodox
Positivist. That is, he followed Comte’s philosophy but did not subscribe
to the rituals and teachings of the religion of Humanity. In 1881 Miguel
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Lemos, who had encountered Positivism as a student in engineering

school, established the Positivist Church of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro after
a visit to Paris to study the religion. As opposed to the heterodox Positiv-
ists, members of the Positivist Church were much stricter in their inter-
pretations of Comte’s writings. They became known as orthodox Posi-
tivists.10
The leadership of the Positivist Church (first Lemos, then engineer
Raimundo Teixeira Mendes) made heavy demands on its members.
Given its especially narrow interpretation of Comte, leaders prohibited
the practice of certain professions and discouraged their members from
practicing others. They pressed a strict moral code through which they
hoped that, as Robert Nachman notes, ‘‘mankind [would] develop an in-
ward harmony that would establish an unending reign of both spiritual
and material peace.’’ The strictness of this code led many Positivist sym-
pathizers, Nachman continues, to avoid the church. It is because of their
zeal that José Murilo de Carvalho calls the Orthodox Positivists ‘‘the Bol-
sheviks of the middle class.’’ 11
João Cruz Costa makes the interesting assertion that the enthusiasm
for Positivism was already in decline by 1891. In part this was due to the
fact that many Brazilians were attracted to it as an intellectual fad and
thus were quickly alienated by the rigors of the religion and its moral
code. Teixeira Mendes’s Sunday ‘‘conferences’’ (sermons) lasted three to
four hours. He could be, according to Ivan Lins, intolerant and unforgiv-
ing. He demanded of believers total subordination to his spiritual guid-
ance, and he could be merciless in his attacks against those who disagreed
with him.12
Indeed, as early as 1882, Benjamin Constant, in many ways the piv-
otal figure in Brazilian Positivism, broke with Miguel Lemos, Raimundo
Teixeira Mendes, and the Positivist Church over their fanaticism. Per-
haps Constant had a point. In 1883 Miguel Lemos clashed with Pierre
Lafitte, Comte’s successor in Paris and leader of the Positivist religion
in France. In essence Lemos excommunicated the Positivist Church in
Paris for what he saw as doctrinal sloppiness in preaching Comte’s laws.
Such intensity led many to abandon the church in Rio de Janeiro, and the
number of dues paying members declined thereafter, so that to this day
the church faces ongoing financial difficulties.13
In spite of this, some scholars argue that orthodox Positivists re-
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mained an important political force in Brazil, at least through the first

decade of the twentieth century. Their influence resulted from the con-
siderable power of the intellects of Miguel Lemos and Raimundo Teixeira
Mendes, and from the orthodox Positivists’ dogged assertion of the cor-
rectness of their doctrine, as well as their influence as an organized pres-
sure group. Lemos, and especially Teixeira Mendes, engaged in ‘‘inter-
ventions,’’ which were aggressive Positivist pronouncements on matters
of politics and governance. Such interventions usually began as opinion
pieces written by Teixeira Mendes and published in the Jornal do Comér-
cio. These pieces were then collected and reprinted as Positivist Church
publications.14

Rondon the Orthodox Positivist

Rondon first encountered Positivism in 1885 as a student at the Military
Academy in Rio de Janeiro. There he studied mathematics with Benjamin
Constant, converted to Positivism, and became part of a growing Posi-
tivist group of officers and cadets.15 Rondon was a lifelong member of the
Positivist Church and was very much orthodox. Indeed, it would be fair
to say that although he became a Positivist when the movement was in
vogue and growing, he nevertheless continued in the religion long after
the church possessed any real influence in Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil.
As did the orthodox Positivists he so admired, Rondon adopted Posi-
tivism as a worldview. For him it was a blueprint for what should be
done in Brazil and in the world. According to Arthenzia Rocha, Ron-
don followed the Positivist idea of liberty: that subordinating one’s life
to a moral order and that serving ‘‘Family,’’ ‘‘Patria’’ (the nation), and
Humanity meant true liberty, because doing so would help establish fra-
ternity and universal peace. ‘‘It is really quite telling,’’ the famous Brazil-
ian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda once noted, ‘‘to see the certainty
with which these men [Positivists] believed in the ultimate triumph of
their ideas.’’ ‘‘The world would end up accepting them,’’ Positivists be-
lieved, ‘‘because they were rational, and because their perfection was be-
yond debate.’’ 16
According to Ivan Lins, Rondon’s entire professional career was
shaped by and led according to Positivist principles. The Positivist call
to serve mankind by bringing scientific progress to the world led to Ron-
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don’s manic dedication to integrating the Brazilian west through infra-

structure development and to his commitment to biological and geologi-
cal surveys of the region. As an orthodox Positivist, Rondon was called
to study and use nature to serve Humanity. Positivism gave Rondon the
discipline necessary to (in the words of Miguel Lemos) ‘‘reconcile the
biological need to live for oneself with the social need to live for others.’’ 17
Positivism, it seems fair to argue, gave Rondon the strength to pursue
telegraph construction under the most difficult of circumstances and in
the most difficult places for more than twenty years. For him, it was both
a religious compulsion and a guide to the creation of a modern Brazil.
The nation-building aspect of Rondon’s Positivism is best observed
in his actions and orations in the field, where he explained the commis-
sion’s mission in Positivist terms to his troops. His lecture to gathered
soldiers on 1 January 1912 is instructive in this regard. New Year’s Day,
the most important Positivist holiday, is known as the Day of Humanity.
That day in 1912 found Rondon and his men deep in the forest of north-
west Brazil, where they were building the telegraph line while Rondon
surveyed the remaining right-of-way.
Rondon explained the Positivist inspiration of his telegraph project to
his captive audience. ‘‘This date,’’ he told his men, ‘‘reminds us of the pos-
sibility of one day realizing the political utopia envisioned by the most
brilliant of the Philosophers, Augusto Comte: the utopia of Universal
Peace.’’ The soldiers’ sacrifices, Rondon told them, would contribute to
Family, Patria, and Humanity. Building the line would facilitate needed
research, which would then aid in the evolution of Humanity, for the
1,100 kilometers of line now in service had ‘‘already allowed us to connect
the thoughts of those who live in the desert with those more developed
on this Earth.’’ Thus, Rondon concluded, ‘‘I celebrate the universal Festi-
val of Humanity, and I congratulate all . . . on their service to the Family,
to the Patria, and to Humanity.’’ 18
Such speeches were the rule rather than the exception. Early in his
telegraph career, at the inauguration of the telegraph station at Coxim,
Mato Grosso, in 1902, Rondon spoke to those gathered on ‘‘the mission
of women in society according to the teachings of Augusto Comte.’’ Nor
did Rondon limit his Positivist preaching to public events. He discusses
in his diary the conversion of a telegraph worker to Positivism in 1905.
Rondon met several times with the man in camp, at night, at which time
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Raising the flag. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual,

Museu do Índio.

he discussed Positivism and answered the worker’s questions. After sev-

eral such meetings, the man ‘‘spontaneously converted’’ to Positivism.
Even much later in his life, Rondon was still writing to public officials in
order to explain the Positivist position on key issues.19
The importance of these Positivist positions, combined with the
nation-building messages, helps explain some of the more curious as-
pects of daily life in the construction zone. Rondon ordered a wooden
mast to be fashioned and the national flag to be raised every night no mat-
ter what the weather, no matter how late at night the men built the camp.
He went to great lengths to celebrate national holidays such as Brazilian
Independence Day and the Day of the Republic. He played the Brazilian
national anthem in camp on a gramophone and never tired of photo-
graphing indigenous peoples parading the Brazilian flag or wrapped in it.
He never failed, that is, to bring ‘‘his’’ country and nation to the peoples
and places of the hinterland.20
Along these lines the best of the recent Brazilian literature explains
such actions in terms of nation building and national integration. That
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is, scholars argue that Rondon’s primary goal was to define areas and
peoples as ‘‘Brazilian.’’ His goal was to incorporate peoples and regions
in an elite-led project aimed at producing a single, republican Brazil. At
the same time, this incorporation was to be carried out by the central
state, so that both nation and state building informed Rondon’s actions
in the interior. ‘‘These rituals and their daily repetition,’’ Laura Maciel
concludes, ‘‘can be thought of explicitly as a national power under con-
struction.’’ 21
A greater appreciation of the force of Positivism in Rondon’s life and
work, however, demonstrates that what was under construction in the
interior was as much a Positivist message as a nationalist one. Indeed,
the importance of civic ritual is a hallmark of Positivism, because for
Comte such ritual socialized the proletariat, making them aware ulti-
mately of the universal, or Humanity. Stated another way, Comte viewed
civic rituals as the best mechanism for connecting individuals (Family)
with society (Humanity), for in the middle was the nation (Patria).22
So the nation, or in this case the Patria, could carry a Positivist as well
as Brazilian connotation. The Brazilian flag flying above camp symbol-
ized a certain kind of Brazil, but it was also a Positivist flag. It was de-
signed by a Positivist, proposed by the Positivist leader Teixeira Mendes,
and included the Positivist motto ‘‘Order and Progress.’’ Furthermore,
commission photographs housed in the Museum of the Indian in Rio de
Janeiro show the particular care taken to insure that this Positivist motto
appeared prominently in photographs.
According to Carvalho, another symbol carried this kind of dual mean-
ing for Brazilian Positivists. The idealized female form represented both
the republic and the Positivist concept of Humanity. Brazilian Positivist
artists, he continues, promoted just such a double meaning in the paint-
ings and statues they created in the 1890s. Flag and female figure, na-
tion and Positivism again came together most dramatically in the photo-
graphs Rondon staged in the field. In one such photograph an indigenous
woman stands in front of a national flag that is clearly draped to highlight
the Positivist slogan.23
Even seemingly more straightforward examples of nation building in-
cluded a Positivist message for Rondon, demonstrating clearly that for
him the two were the same. Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima asserts that
the renaming of local, indigenous places demonstrated powerfully the
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Positivist-Indian shrine,
probably in the central office
of the Rondon Commission.
Courtesy of Comissão Rondon,
Serviço de Registro Audio-
Visual, Museu do Índio.

process of national incorporation, and indeed this appears to have been

the case. However, what is one to make of the fact that Rondon often re-
placed indigenous place names with Positivist names, such as when he
renamed a river north of Vilhena the Festival of the Flag River in honor
of the Brazilian (Positivist) flag, or when he named another river after
the Positivist (and republican) hero Benjamin Constant?
In honoring national heroes who lived long before Comte, Miguel
Lemos, Teixeira Mendes, and Rondon created a Positivist palimpsest.
Comte honored the great men of Humanity whom he judged to have con-
tributed to the evolution of human society. In Brazil Positivists especially
celebrated José Bonifácio, one of the architects of Brazilian independence
in 1821–1822, in part as a founder of the Brazilian nation but also as a kind
of proto-Positivist.24 Furthermore, as noted earlier, Rondon placed the
greatest importance on a day that was a holiday only for Positivists: New
Year’s Day, or, in Positivist parlance, the Day of Humanity.
Rondon’s honoring of the quintessential national holiday, the Day of
the Republic (15 November) drew on the twin themes of nation building
and Positivism. On 15 November 1901, when Rondon renamed a river in
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honor of Benjamin Constant, he presented a decidedly Positivist inter-

pretation of the national holiday by explaining to his assembled troops
that they were celebrating the day that ‘‘a select group of Humanity’’ de-
clared the Republic. He further noted that for the Republic to prosper
‘‘all that needs to be done is to apply the political principle [Comte’s prin-
ciple] inscribed on our flag [Order and Progress].’’ 25
The next year Rondon was in Rio de Janeiro for this holiday and noted
in his diary that he began the day by visiting Benjamin Constant’s grave,
at which time ‘‘Mr. Mendes [the Positivist leader in Rio] gave an oration
worthy of such a Great Ancestor.’’ Almost as an afterthought he added
that ‘‘Rodrigues Alves was installed as the President of the Republic.’’
Similarly Rondon celebrated Independence Day in 1909 by playing the
national anthem and by raising the national flag to a salute of twenty-one
sticks of dynamite. He then began his speech to soldiers by explaining
that the idea of the ‘‘civic celebration is peculiar to modern civilizations,
and is a system of commemoration founded by A. Comte . . . in order to
reconstruct the West.’’ 26 For Rondon the promotion of Positivism was
nation building. In the same vein, Rondon clearly believed that the Posi-
tivists were the only true republicans and that the greatness of the Bra-
zilian Republic depended on a solid, Positivist foundation, which is pre-
cisely the argument he made in a long letter to his friend and Positivist
colleague Luis Bueno Horta Barbosa in 1927.
Rondon wrote this bitter letter, which he dated ‘‘17 Shakespeare, 139’’
according to the Positivist calendar, in part to discuss splits in the Posi-
tivist Church in Rio de Janeiro. His larger point, however, was that the
decline of the Positivist Church had contributed to the degeneracy of the
Brazilian republic. No longer were intellectual giants such as Benjamin
Constant, Miguel Lemos, and Raimundo Teixeira Mendes around to edu-
cate Brazil’s youth in the philosophy of Auguste Comte. The result was
a country led by ‘‘so-called statesmen, many of who lacked the funda-
mentals of an elementary school education.’’ Such politicians, Rondon
lamented, attempted to ‘‘resolve social and political problems without
knowing even arithmetic.’’ 27
Such strident rhetoric could alienate politicians and army officials,
and it reminds us that while Postitivism was a source of Rondon’s
strength, it could also limit the impact and scope of his activities. In terms
of army politics in particular, Rondon’s Positivism generated opposition
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from other officers and increased hostility toward his projects in north-
west Brazil. It also led to fights with members of the Catholic clergy and
their political supporters in Brazil.

The Positivist Dialectic

Most of the officers of the Rondon Commission graduated from the Mili-
tary Academy in Rio de Janeiro during the era in which Benjamin Con-
stant and other Positivist professors moved the curriculum away from
traditional military instruction in favor of Positivist teachings in the
natural sciences and mathematics. A principal reason for the shift was
the Positivist opposition to militarism. Science and technology, Positiv-
ists believed, would bring progress to all mankind and eliminate the need
for armies. Progress would, in the words of Benjamin Constant, ‘‘relegate
the weapons of destruction to a museum of armaments.’’ 28
This antimilitarism—or, from another perspective, this pacifism—
was a hallmark of Brazilian Positivist thought. Teixeira Mendes, the
leader of the Positivist Church after 1903, tirelessly pressed this point
in regular letters to the editor, which were then reprinted in Positivist
Church pamphlets. Following Comte’s teachings, Teixeira Mendes ex-
plained that wars, be they defensive or wars of conquest, were relics
of a previous stage of social evolution. He noted that given the ‘‘irrevo-
cable growth of universal friendship no one now planned, nor would they
ever plan, to attack Brazil.’’ To those who considered his pacifism to be
utopian, he responded that at one time abolition had seemed a utopian
dream, but that in his lifetime slavery had been abolished.29
Positivists argued that militarism prevented countries like Brazil from
developing the kinds of infrastructure that would most benefit the lives
of its citizens. Thus, Teixeira Mendes, Constant, and Rondon believed
that the armed forces eventually should be reorganized into a simple
police force. In the future army engineers would be in charge of infra-
structure development instead of warfare, and, indeed, Rondon’s Com-
mission was cited as a model of such a strategy. In the meantime, Tei-
xeira Mendes argued, Positivist officers should continue to serve in the
military as their presence would assure citizens that the army would not
oppress them. Most importantly, Positivist officers would also ‘‘strive to
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dissipate the passions, prejudices, and war-like habits of their [army] col-
leagues and the general public.’’ 30
Following the teachings of Auguste Comte, Positivists predicted that
pacifism would lead to the decline of nationalism and even of the nation.
These outworn political loyalties and forms would be replaced by univer-
sal brotherhood and a unified Humanity. Comte argued that in the future
the largest nations would be no larger than Portugal and would possess
populations not in excess of three million inhabitants. Teixeira Mendes
predicted that as a very large nation Brazil ‘‘would disappear in the near
future.’’ 31
This incendiary position among countrymen proud of Brazil’s colossal
size was matched by Teixeira Mendes’s and the Positivists’ public con-
demnations of the Brazilian military victories that were so celebrated
by officers and nationalists. According to José Murilo de Carvalho, Bra-
zilian Positivists ‘‘denounced military heroics and considered the Para-
guayan War a disaster.’’ Teixeira Mendes referred to Brazil’s conduct in
this war as the ‘‘most monstrous attack against the Family, the Patria, and
Humanity yet perpetrated in South America.’’ He then ridiculed a 1906
proposal to build a monument in honor of the famous Brazilian victory at
Riachuelo in the Paraguayan War because it would be nothing more than
a monument to Brazilian backwardness. Likewise, Rondon Commission
Lieutenant Severo dos Santos was quoted in 1916 in a Rio newspaper as
saying that ‘‘this work [of the Rondon Commission] certainly honors the
Brazilian Army more than all of the battles of the Paraguayan War, and
in part makes up for the errors and crimes of the Canudos, Rio Grande,
and Contestado [rebellions].’’ 32
In contrast to such Positivist partisanship, the historian Frank D.
McCann asserts that increasingly the army could not ‘‘tolerate its offi-
cers being philosophers who knew Auguste Comte’s Positivism but not
how to shoot, ride, or function in the field.’’ In 1908 one young officer de-
nounced in public the Positivist Military Academy professors ‘‘who have
dedicated themselves almost exclusively to science with prejudice to the
military part of training.’’ An officer who attended the Military Academy
during the height of Positivist influence later noted that his lessons pre-
pared him for nothing but the life of a dilettante.33
Opponents labeled Positivists as religious fanatics. Within the army
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special venom was reserved for the Positivists’ critique of militarism and
their call for the end of national militaries. Writing in 1914, General Tito
Escobar denounced the tendency of the Positivist military professors
to produce ‘‘entrenched bureaucrats, literary figures, philosophers, . . .
[and] mathematicians’’ who were ‘‘friends of universal peace, of general
disarmament, [and were] enemies of war, and permanent armies.’’ Posi-
tivist military officers preferred to be called ‘‘Dr. General’’ or ‘‘Dr. Lieu-
tenant,’’ another officer sneered. Even General Tasso Fragosso, a Positiv-
ist sympathizer and friend of Rondon, noted the depth of anger toward
and distrust of the Positivists’ and, in particular, Constant’s pacifism.34
Critics often turned their general dislike of Positivism into an attack
against Rondon and the Rondon Commission. Sometimes the tone was
sarcastic, as when the editorialist ‘‘C.L.’’ spoke of Rondon’s ‘‘Positivist
trumpet of proselytism,’’ or when another newspaper reporter spoke of
Rondon as ‘‘the illustrious Colonel and Positivist—that is to say, much
more Positivist than Colonel.’’ This latter remark was the crux of the mat-
ter, for some in the military argued that Rondon’s work was not related
directly to the army’s mission. According to one newspaper, Minister of
War Caetano Faria disliked the commission and had been heard to refer
to Rondon and his men as mere ‘‘missionaries to the Indians.’’ Rondon, it
is worth remembering, was appointed commander of the telegraph com-
mission by a civilian minister of transportation and public works, and
that bureaucracy, and not the army, paid his salary.35
The press regularly condemned Rondon’s pacifism and the Positiv-
ists’ stated goal of turning the army into a Brazilian civilian conservation
corps. Rondon and his men were engaged in civil engineering, his crit-
ics claimed, instead of doing what they were trained to do, which was
to defend the country. In one particularly strong attack in the Jornal do
Brasil, longtime Rondon critic Antonio Pimentel began by presenting a
pamphlet by Teixeira Mendes that he said ordered all Positivists in the
military to avoid displays of militarism. This proved, Pimentel argued,
that the Positivists within the army were working for its very destruc-
tion. Such Positivist harangues, he continued, were weakening the mili-
tary and thus the country. Furthermore, Teixeira Mendes had called for
soldiers to engage not in military activities but in ‘‘pacific-industrial’’ pur-
suits. This was exactly what Rondon and his men were doing in the in-
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terior, Pimentel charged, and as such they should retire from the mili-
tary.36
‘‘It is time,’’ one commentator wrote in 1911 concerning the Rondon
Commission, ‘‘to insist that the Army recall to the barracks the officers
who have abandoned their duties, for they prefer to wander in the middle
of the jungle fishing for the souls of savages and country bumpkins.’’ This
‘‘fishing for souls’’ remark refers to the standard criticism that the Ron-
don Commission was little more than a Positivist missionary society. Al-
most without exception Rondon’s officers were Positivists. Almost all of
them belonged to the Positivist Church in Rio de Janeiro. Researching
Positivist Church archives, Robert Nachman uncovered letters from Tei-
xeira Mendes to Rondon requesting jobs for Positivists. From one promi-
nent Positivist family alone, the Horta Barbosa family, Rondon hired four
brothers as officers in the commission. His most trusted officer, Amilcar
Botelho de Magalhães, was Benjamin Constant’s nephew.37
In a 1911 exposé the Jornal do Comércio presented the case of an un-
named lieutenant who it claimed was well known within the army but
was not a Positivist. Assigned to the Rondon Commission, he was sent
to a commission camp on the Madeira River. The officer returned to Rio
de Janeiro ‘‘poisoned by malaria’’ and reported for duty in the commis-
sion’s central office. The Positivists shunned him, the article claimed, and
Rondon eventually placed the unnamed lieutenant on unpaid leave until
his appointment with the commission expired. The reporter claimed
to know of several other non-Positivist officers who had been similarly
shunned.38
Rondon and his officers were well aware of these opinions and attacks,
and believed that they robbed the commission of the credit and praise it
deserved for its hard work and accomplishments in the interior. Amil-
car Botelho de Magalhães made this point most forcefully in a special
article he wrote for Correio do Povo in 1925. His goal, he explained at the
outset, was to attack ongoing official hostility toward the Rondon Com-
mission. It pained him to say that government officials had shown little
interest in publishing and publicizing commission reports. What reports
did appear ‘‘robbed the Commission of its heroic vitality’’ by listing only
construction numbers without explaining the dreadful conditions under
which such construction had taken place.
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‘‘The moral and heroic side of the Commission, which would allow
the public to understand the difficulties overcome and the sacrifices
made,’’ he continued, was ignored and even ridiculed by ‘‘pencil pushers
[homens de gabinete] incapable of surviving even one month in the in-
terior.’’ Botelho de Magalhães singled out the ministry of war in particu-
lar for failing to report adequately the commission’s accomplishments in
the ministry’s annual reports. The 1909 annual report, he noted specifi-
cally, included just two pages on the commission, as if that were enough
to ‘‘capture the grandiose Amazon’’ and the commission’s equally grandi-
ose accomplishments. Some sort of official conspiracy against the com-
mission, he claimed ominously, was underway.39
More plainly hostile than some vague conspiracy was the army’s
policy on promotions for those serving in the Rondon Commission. Ron-
don himself was most concerned about the slow pace of promotion for
his officers, which he interpreted as a sign of official hostility toward his
‘‘pacific-industrial’’ project. In a candid letter to his colleague Francisco
Jaguaribe Gomes de Mattos, Rondon condemned the army’s decision to
‘‘remove from consideration for merit promotion officials who serve in
commissions.’’ He then confided that an important general once told a
Rondon Commission officer seeking a merit promotion that ‘‘the record
of an officer in the Rondon Commission is a blank record!’’ Many weaker
officers had been promoted, Rondon charged, while commission officers
languished in their respective ranks. At best, his officers received pro-
motions for time served, but such promotions, he concluded, ‘‘always
represent an injustice and even a punishment for those who deserve a
merit promotion.’’ In 1919 Botelho de Magalhães confided in a private
note that there were those in the military who wished to prevent Ron-
don’s promotion to general ‘‘because his duties are not exercised with
troops stationed in the cities.’’ Earlier, Rondon had archly observed in an
official government report that his 1908 promotion to lieutenant colonel
‘‘must have disappointed many of my colleagues.’’ 40
Moreover, the government repeatedly refused Rondon’s requests to
grant hazardous duty (combat) pay to the soldiers and officers in the
Rondon Commission. In 1911, and perhaps one other time, army leaders
mounted opposition to the Rondon Commission because they did not
consider it to be a military endeavor. In the 1911 case they pressed for
the removal of all military personnel from the telegraph project, which
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would have scuttled the mission. In reaction to this campaign Ron-

don and his officers voluntarily surrendered their military per diem
payments.41
The Rondon Commission survived these attacks, but opponents
continued to harp at Rondon, and the commission’s budgets suffered
throughout the years.42 Given these battles within the army over his Posi-
tivism and his ‘‘pacifist’’ project, it was probably unwise for Rondon also
to have ruffled the feathers of Brazil’s only other truly national institu-
tion, the Catholic Church. And yet, this is precisely what he did.
Positivists recognized Catholicism’s historic contribution to man-
kind, but it was, Teixeira Mendes argued, a doctrine that was ‘‘fatally
antagonistic to the spirit of modern civilization.’’ In reaction to Positiv-
ist denouncements of Catholicism and to the early influence of Comte’s
religion in republican Brazil, Catholic officials worked to solidify their
political support in Brazil. Positivist and Catholic leaders clashed in the
media, such as in 1912 when Bishop Leme of Rio de Janeiro criticized
Positivists for their lack of patriotism and morality, following which Tei-
xeira Mendes responded with his own attacks.43
For his part Rondon attacked, and often mocked, Catholic doctrine
and Catholic officials in both his private and public correspondence.
Such exchanges increased dramatically after Rondon pressed for the cre-
ation of a government agency to administer Indian affairs in Brazil and
was named the first director of this agency, known as the Indian Protec-
tion Service (spi), in 1910. He continued to challenge Catholic officials
and the power of the Catholic Church in Brazil until his dying days.44
Rondon regularly engaged in very public and very bitter disputes with
Catholic officials and especially with the Salesian missionaries who oper-
ated a network of Indian missions in Mato Grosso. In letters, telegrams,
newspaper articles, and speeches, Rondon and his officers denounced
the federal government’s subsidy of these Salesian missions and the Sale-
sians’ treatment of mission residents.45 Rondon’s and his officers’ incen-
diary language is noteworthy. ‘‘The supreme aspiration of the psuedo-
policy of Christianization of the jungle,’’ Rondon was quoted as saying
in a Rio newspaper, ‘‘is to exploit indigenous labor on the missions.’’ He
denounced what he termed the policy of holding the Bororo people ‘‘as
prisoners on Salesian lands.’’ Rondon asked a friend to ‘‘respond to those
Senators allied with the Church [in order to unmask] the injustices that
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these men practice in the service of Priests.’’ Later he celebrated the de-
feat of what he termed an ‘‘attempt to transform [the spi] into a false reli-
gious Mission, as was so desired by national and foreign clergymen.’’ 46
Catholic supporters in the media and in government fought back. An
article published in the Jornal do Comércio condemned ‘‘the morbid ori-
entation [of Rondon and the Positivists], which is the result of their
philosophical and religious stereotypes.’’ Catholic officials and support-
ers denounced what they saw as Positivist attempts to take over the Bra-
zilian interior via the (Positivist) Rondon Commission. Rondon’s con-
gressional detractors defended the Salesian missions, and government
subsidies to the Catholic missions were maintained even as Congress
slashed the budget of the Rondon Commission.47
During these unsettled times Rondon went out of his way to provoke
Catholic officials and their supporters. One such provocation, which
took place in 1917, began when Rondon enrolled an orphaned Nambi-
kwara child in the Baptist School of Rio de Janeiro. His decision ignited
a firestorm of protest and several months of debate in the press. An un-
named reporter discovered the boy’s case and quickly denounced Ron-
don’s brazen decision to enroll the child in a Protestant school. ‘‘Alert
the Judge and Supervisor of Orphans,’’ the reporter wrote, ‘‘for everyone
knows that the Baptist School is an unabashed and tenacious institution
of religious propaganda.’’ He questioned why the child was not enrolled
in a public school. ‘‘Mr. Rondon does not have the right,’’ the article con-
tinued, ‘‘to kidnap our Indians and pervert their spirit by subjecting them
to false doctrines.’’ ‘‘It is necessary for Mr. Rondon to know,’’ the reporter
concluded, ‘‘that he will not be allowed to do anything he wants.’’ 48
Reading between the lines, it is clear that Rondon’s Positivist dislike
of Catholicism outraged the writer, as did the deliberate act of doctri-
nal provocation. Certainly Rondon Commission Central Office Director
Captain Botelho de Magalhães read the attack as such, for he quickly con-
demned the journalist’s attempt ‘‘to transform into religious propaganda
a Positivist’s decision to enroll an Indian into a Protestant school.’’ Cer-
tainly no protest would have occurred, the captain continued, if the boy
had been enrolled in a Catholic school.49
Subsequent barbs demonstrate that this affair emerged out of the
larger issues of religion and religious affiliation in Brazil. For his part
Botelho de Magalhães used the immediate events to hammer home Posi-
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t h e p ow e r o f p o s i t i v i s m * 97

tivist criticisms of Catholic Indian missions and Catholic religious in-

struction of indigenous peoples. Joining the battle, the Tribuna repeat-
edly noted that Rondon, a firm supporter of the separation of church and
state, had decided as a public official to favor one religion over another
by enrolling the boy in a Baptist school.
Rondon refused to back down in the face of the controversy. Two
months after the Tribuna broke the story he ordered the publication of a
telegram he had sent recently to Botelho de Magalhães. In the telegram,
which newspapers in Rio de Janeiro published, Rondon announced that
he was sending a second Nambikwara child to Rio and that he too was to
be enrolled in the Baptist School. Later Botelho de Magalhães explained
to the media that Rondon was the legal guardian of this second child, a
boy named Parriba, and that his tuition was to be paid by contributions
raised by the Indian Protection Service.50

Conclusion
Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon spent his entire adult life promoting
the Positivist religion of Humanity. The religion shaped his daily life and
activities, as well as his ideas about progress, Indian affairs, and, thus, the
future of the nation. It led him to expend precious time and energy clash-
ing with Catholic officials, their supporters in government, and army
leaders precisely when he was most deeply involved with the demand-
ing tasks of telegraph construction in the interior. Positivism inspired
Rondon and strengthened his resolve, but it also led him into myriad dis-
putes that distracted his focus and damaged the political fortunes of his
telegraph project.51
Rondon’s diary and other personal correspondence confirm the cen-
trality of Positivism in his life. In his diary Rondon took pains to note his
attendance at Positivist services, dinners, and celebrations while in Rio
de Janeiro. Copies of telegrams to his wife and children, which Rondon
included in the diary, are full of Positivist exhortations. Mostly these are
stern but agreeable appeals, as when he honored his son Benjamin on
his birthday by noting that ‘‘if you lead your life in accordance with your
Faith you will one day become a dignified Son of Humanity.’’ At times,
however, they seem obsessive and out of place, such as in a tragic 1925
telegraph to his wife after Rondon was informed of the death of their
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98 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

Rondon and his wife, Francisca Xavier da Silva Rondon. Courtesy of Comissão Ron-
don, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.

daughter. In it he expressed his love for the departed child and for his wife
and other children, but also focused at some length on the overarching
need for a Positivist, rather than Catholic, burial service.52
There can be no doubt that scholars are correct to discuss Rondon’s
work and vision in terms of nation building and the expansion of cen-
tral state power in Brazil. Especially later in life, Rondon emphasized
more and more the need for the government to assert its authority over
Catholic missionaries in Mato Grosso, and in true nationalist fashion he
condemned the mostly foreign-born Salesian priests as a potential fifth
column in Brazil. And yet, in far more cases Rondon stressed the ap-
propriateness and infallibility of Comte’s teachings when defending his
work and attacking his opponents. Rondon’s unshakable vision of a mod-
ern Brazil included the incorporation of distant lands and peoples into
that nation, but this was primarily a Positivist vision, one shaped as much
by the writings of a thinker in France as by the realities of Brazil.
Perhaps some scholars have ignored the obvious—Rondon’s Posi-
tivism—because that religion quickly became anachronistic in early-
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t h e p ow e r o f p o s i t i v i s m * 99

twentieth-century Brazil. By 1910 the Positivists’ presence at the Military

Academy was largely gone, having been replaced by the ‘‘Young Turks’’
who emphasized military science and the art of war rather than Comt-
ean science and philosophy. By the 1920s and especially the 1930s Brazil’s
leading officers were openly hostile to Rondon, his Positivism, and his
ongoing activities in the interior. In the meantime membership in the
Positivist Church quickly plummeted to a mere handful of disciples.53
Rondon, however, never abandoned the faith or its vision of the future
for Brazil. He continued to devote his life to Positivism and to his other
great passion: indigenous Brazilians.54
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Chapter Five: l i v i n g w i t h ot h e r s
o n t h e l o n e ly l i n e

T he scholar seeking to study the indigenist policies of

Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon immediately faces a
divide, a chasm really, between a vast hagiographic literature
on one side and a rapidly expanding revisionist oeuvre on the
other. Binary opposites such as humane/exploitative and en-
lightened/barbaric confront each other like pieces on a chess-
board. It is, indeed, as if each side were describing a com-
pletely different individual. One literature portrays Rondon
as a forward thinker, a man ahead of his time, a leader who
deserved the Nobel Prize for his efforts to improve Indian–
white relations in Brazil during the first decades of the twen-
tieth century. The other literature portrays a man bent on the
extermination of indigenes, a man who, despite his sophisti-
cated use of a humane discourse, was little different from the
slave hunters who preyed on Indians during the colonial era.1
As wide as the chasm is between the two schools, and
indeed it is very wide, one thing nevertheless unites them,
a shaky bridge that spans the divide but does not, unfortu-
nately, help one to better understand Rondon’s work. Both
the hagiography and the revisionist literature are united by
the failure to present and explain adequately the theoretical
underpinning of Rondon’s policies: Positivism. To be sure,
everyone mentions Positivism, and indeed it would be im-
possible not to mention it, given its importance for under-
standing Rondon. And yet in both literatures there are, almost
without exception, only very short (one- to three-paragraph)
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102 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

descriptions of Positivism and the Positivist plan for Indian–white rela-

tions in Brazil.2
A far broader and deeper range of sources, including unpublished
letters, diaries, army records, and newspaper accounts produce a more
complex reading of the man and his policies. The result is a better
understanding of the historical context of Rondon’s policies and a more
solid bridge across the interpretive chasm. Such reevaluation identifies
the ultimate and most damaging contradiction in Rondon’s indigenist
thought: his belief that he could ‘‘protect’’ Indians while at the same time
fomenting development in their homelands in northwest Brazil.3

Positivism and Indian Policy

Brazilian Positivist leaders, especially Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, and
Rondon himself, relied on their doctrine when developing a plan to gov-
ern relations with indigenes. In a series of letters to the editors of news-
papers, which were then reprinted in a series of pamphlets and annual
reports, Teixeira Mendes presented a Positivist Indian policy based on
protection and assimilation. He drew from Comte’s writings on Africa,
in which the founder of Positivism argued that Africans lived in the ‘‘fe-
tishistic age’’ of social development, which he (Comte) considered to be
the original human condition.4
Teixeira Mendes believed that the scientific study of civilizations dem-
onstrated that the correct strategy was to establish peaceful relations
with Indians, then to wait for their social evolution into, eventually, the
Positivist stage of Humanity. Protection of indigenes, especially the pro-
tection of their lands, was thus the first Positivist policy, for it would
allow such social evolution to take place. ‘‘No human being,’’ he wrote,
‘‘can deny that it is the savages [selvagens] who are the rightful owners of
the lands they occupy, with titles every bit as valid as those that any west-
ern nation could invoke.’’ 5 Elsewhere he insisted that indigenous groups
be recognized as sovereign nations, and underlined the term nações livres
in the original. Usurped lands should be returned, he felt, or, where this
was impossible, new lands should be given to the inhabitants of these
indigenous nations. Teixeira Mendes also criticized the government for
favoring the property interests of European immigrants over those of the
Indians. He further argued that Indians had every right to resist incur-
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l i v i n g w i t h ot h e r s * 103

sions onto their lands and noted wryly that the armed defense of these
lands could hardly be considered a crime, for ‘‘no one considers the Span-
ish and Portuguese as being criminals for having expelled the Arabs from
the Iberian peninsula.’’ 6
Protection would then allow for the implementation of the second
part of the Positivist policy: assimilation (or ‘‘the civilizing process,’’
as Positivists sometimes called it). This ‘‘civilizing’’ of indigenes would
consist of ‘‘elevating’’ them from the fetishistic stage to the scientific-
industrial stage of Positivism. Teixeira Mendes felt strongly that with
Positivist tutelage indigenes could bypass the theological stage of social
evolution which, he said, was anarchic and in the process of extinction.7
Assimilation, which in Positivist lingo would lead to the evolution of
indigenous society, was to be gradual, nonviolent, noncoercive, and en-
couraged via demonstration and example rather than by force. Teixeira
Mendes wrote that the fruits of science and industry ‘‘would demon-
strate to the savages the grandiose power of the West. . . . It will amaze
them and convince them of the benefits Humanity possesses.’’ 8 Positiv-
ists trumpeted social evolution because Comte wrote of the impossibility
of revolutionary change (as this would violate natural laws). Thus, what
Positivists believed to be the highest form of civilization, Positivism, had
to be adopted by the free will of indigenes (livre aceitação), otherwise one
would not know if the evolutionary process had truly transpired or if
force had merely created the illusion of change.9
Given these beliefs, Teixeira Mendes and other Brazilian Positivists
firmly opposed past and current efforts to convert indigenes forcibly to
Christianity, for such force again violated the evolutionary laws of nature.
Rondon’s friend and colleague Armando Amilcar Botelho de Magalhães
argued that forced conversions ‘‘represente[ed] jumps that Nature does
not accept,’’ for Positivism demonstrated that ‘‘one should not intervene
in, nor abolish tribal rituals, but should instead allow Indians to evolve
gradually via regular contact with civilized people.’’ As one Positivist put
it as late as 1966 in a letter to then Brazilian President Castelo Branco,
Christian missionaries ‘‘seek to break with the normal course of evolu-
tion, forcing [on indigenes] a monotheism and sedentary lifestyle that is
inconsistent with their cultural development.’’ This abrupt transforma-
tion, he continued, degraded Indians.10
Rondon and other Positivists opposed Christian, and especially
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104 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

Catholic, missionaries because they represented an evolutionary stage,

the theological stage, that Positivists believed was near extinction. In-
deed, this formed the heart of the Positivist critique of Christian mission-
ary work. In the opinion of Teixeira Mendes it simply made no sense to
force Indians to abandon their beliefs ‘‘in favor of a faith [Christianity] in
which we no longer believe and which is in the process of dissolution.’’ 11
Drawing on the teachings of their religion, Brazilian Positivists ar-
gued for the protection of indigenes and the defense of their lands, in-
sisting that indigenes were not racially inferior but merely living in a
different (earlier) stage of social evolution. ‘‘All men are brothers regard-
less of their race,’’ Teixeira Mendes argued in 1910. In 1911 he noted that
Positivists ‘‘recognize the universal fraternity of man . . . regardless of
all distinctions based on family, class, nationality, race or religion.’’ Late
in his life Rondon quoted Comte’s praise of miscegenation (mestiçagem):
‘‘The growing combination of races will give us, under the direction of
the [Positivist] sacred priesthood, the most precious of all perfection . . .
[and man] will thus become even more capable of thinking, acting, and
even loving.’’ 12
Positivists sought to transform Indians gradually into Westerners and,
more specifically, into Positivists, by exposing them to what the Positiv-
ists considered to be the obvious benefits of modern industry and society.
Meanwhile, Positivists argued, indigenes should be allowed to practice
their own religions, speak their own languages, and follow existing cus-
toms. Perhaps First Lieutenant Severo dos Santos, who served under
Rondon, best summarized this highly paternalistic program when intro-
ducing Rondon at a 1915 public lecture in Rio de Janeiro. Addressing him-
self to Rondon, the young officer proclaimed, ‘‘Your mission was inspired
by scientific faith based on the unchangeable laws of positive sociology,
which shows us the various people of the earth, from the most primi-
tive . . . up to the most enlightened . . . as being fundamentally constituted
of the same organic elements . . . [and] this being the case, what we have
to do is not exterminate the Indian, in the same way that one does not
exterminate a child: one educates [him], that is to say that we must lift
[him] up to the level in which we live ourselves, peacefully and humanely
placing within his reach the improvements of which we may dispose.’’ 13
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l i v i n g w i t h ot h e r s * 105

Rondon’s Indian Policy in Word and Deed

In public lectures, private correspondence, and lectures to soldiers Cân-
dido Mariano da Silva Rondon tirelessly promoted both Positivism and
the Positivist Indian policy, developing the latter by drawing on his ex-
periences constructing telegraph lines in Mato Grosso. In both word and
deed Rondon constantly and consistently stressed protection (including
Indian land rights), assimilation, and the superiority of Positivism and
Positivist policies toward indigenes.
In public lectures Rondon relentlessly pressed his agenda, especially
when important public officials were present in the audience. In three
highly publicized and well-attended lectures given in Rio de Janeiro in
1915 Rondon addressed the president and vice-president of Brazil, along
with key government ministers and foreign officials (he had already given
a similar series of lectures in Rio and São Paulo in 1910). In typical fashion
Rondon the Positivist began the first lecture praising Comte and Posi-
tivism (and Comte’s Religion of Humanity) as if he were preaching to
the gathered officials, most of whom were Catholic. Much of what he
said in the three lectures was then devoted to lengthy, emotional stories
condemning the past and current treatment of Indians in Brazil and the
power of his policies to rectify this abuse.14
In private correspondence with public officials Rondon likewise
pressed his Positivist agenda for Indian–white relations. In 1910 he wrote
to Minister of Agriculture Rodolfo Miranda accepting the latter’s invi-
tation to become the first director of Brazil’s Indian Protection Service
(spi). In this long letter Rondon presented the Positivist blueprint for
regulating relations with indigenous peoples. That he was presenting the
Positivist plan is beyond doubt, for he noted early in the letter that, ‘‘As a
Positivist and member of the Positivist Church of Brazil, I am convinced
that our indigenes should incorporate themselves into the West without
passing through the Theological stage [of human evolution], which they
will do as soon as Positivism has triumphed sufficiently [in Brazil].’’ 15
He ended this letter by repeating the Positivist influence on his thinking,
going as far as to enclose Positivist pamphlets so that Miranda ‘‘could ap-
preciate the fundamentals of the teachings of Augusto Comte, . . . whose
ideals have constituted the key to my successes vis-à-vis Indians during
the last twenty years.’’ 16
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106 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

Outlining the policies he would pursue as director of the spi, Rondon

stressed protection of indigenes against attack, their right to guaranteed
titles to the lands they occupied, and the need to restore lands previ-
ously usurped by whites. The heart of the letter outlines Rondon’s and
the Positivists’ plan for acculturation based on example not force. This
gradual process, he noted, would respect the internal organization of in-
digenous communities, ‘‘relying only on fraternal and peaceful demon-
strations [of Western manners], while always respecting the will of those
consulted.’’ 17
Rondon likewise stressed Positivism and his Positivist Indian policy
while commanding the Fifth Engineering Battalion’s construction of tele-
graph lines in Mato Grosso. He preached Positivism and the workings
of his Indian policy in lectures to troops on Brazilian and Positivist holi-
days. Indeed, during the decades of telegraph construction Rondon spoke
on these matters seemingly on every such holiday. In August 1912, for
example, Rondon celebrated the anniversary of the promulgation of the
Brazilian Constitution with a speech at the José Bonifácio telegraph sta-
tion. In the speech he praised his telegraph commission’s efforts vis-à-
vis indigenes and stressed the need to incorporate peacefully ‘‘tribes into
modern society.’’ Earlier that year, on the Positivist Day of Humanity, he
delivered a lengthy address, reprinted as an ‘‘Order of the Day,’’ celebrat-
ing Comte, Positivism, and the assimilation of indigenes, among other
things. In honor of the Positivist holiday he freed all soldiers then incar-
cerated in the camp stockade.18
Rondon is best remembered in Brazil as the first director of the Indian
Protection Service, a post he held for five years (1910–1915). In those years
he devoted much energy and attention to the spi, but his was largely a
directorship in absentia, because at that time he was, of course, heavily
involved with efforts to build the telegraph line. Because of his fame as
founder of the spi, many authors have examined at length the spi and
Rondon’s term as its director, but it is also important to examine his de-
velopment and implementation of an Indian policy while supervising
telegraph construction. The records of the Rondon Commission provide
extensive testament to these efforts and allow the historian to present
and evaluate Rondon’s policies and actions.19
Given Comte’s belief in the natural evolution of societies, Rondon and
the Positivists emphasized the need to protect Indian landholdings in
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l i v i n g w i t h ot h e r s * 107

order for this social evolution to take place. Hence, even in a mundane
commission document that seemingly had nothing to do with Indians
or his Indian policy, Rondon nevertheless stressed this policy. In 1910
Rondon issued instructions creating a new personnel section to maintain
the road from the commission warehouse at Tapirapuã to the Utiariti
telegraph station. Filled with numerous articles mandating construction
types and procedures, the instructions also included, in article 9, orders
to protect Indian holdings and to convince latex gatherers operating in
the region to do the same. Likewise, in a letter to the minister of agri-
culture that had nothing to do with Indian landholdings, Rondon argued
that ‘‘Indian holdings must be respected, especially given that ‘civiliza-
dos’ have violently invaded them for years.’’ 20
But it was in the initial instructions Rondon sent to spi personnel one
month after the inauguration of the Indian Protection Service that he
most forcefully pressed for the defense of Indian landholdings. These ini-
tial instructions dealt first and foremost with precisely the issue of pro-
tecting Indian lands, which suggests that Rondon saw this as the first
priority of his Indian policy. In the instructions he demanded that each
employee conduct a tour of his assigned region ‘‘in order to describe in
detail the current situation Indians find themselves in with regards to
their landholdings.’’ He then ordered each agent to submit a detailed re-
port on these lands ‘‘so that later we can call for a proper survey and
titling of these lands.’’ Rondon also stressed the need to survey lands
usurped by whites so that both the lands currently occupied by Indians
and lands usurped by whites could be ‘‘legalized for Indian occupation.’’ 21
A draft of the enabling legislation that accompanied the creation of
the spi also emphasized the primary need to protect Indian holdings.
The first article of the first chapter directed Rodolfo Miranda to enter
into contact with state governors in order to ‘‘legalize the holdings actu-
ally occupied by Indians.’’ Where such lands were found to be public
lands the minister was to encourage governors to donate them to their
indigenous occupants. In the second chapter of the draft there is an-
other call for efforts to ‘‘guarantee the effective control of lands already
occupied by Indians.’’ In addition, spi personnel were instructed to ‘‘op-
pose energetically the invasion of Indian lands by whites.’’ Similarly, in
his annual report Miranda noted that the first order of business was
to secure Indian land rights, saying that ‘‘it will be necessary to estab-
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lish as the foundation [of spi policy] the defense of lands they [Indi-
ans] already occupy, surveying them [and] preventing the intrusions of
whites.’’ 22
An interesting complaint from Miranda’s successor as minister of agri-
culture suggests that Rondon and his men did indeed spend their initial
energy defending indigenous land holdings. Pedro de Toledo was much
less supportive of Rondon’s Indian protection efforts. In 1911 he observed
that Rondon was spending too much time defending Indian land rights
and too little time establishing agricultural centers for white settlers.
Indians, he noted, were left on the lands they occupied ‘‘out of respect for
their natural wants.’’ Yet these settlements were far removed from mar-
ket centers, he complained, and thus made it difficult for the government
to profit from the sale of foodstuffs produced on Indian lands, which ap-
parently was more important to the new minister than was the defense
of holdings.23
Rondon’s emphasis on land rights often combined with a second
theme of protection: protection of indigenes from invasions, attacks, and
local landowner attempts to force Indians to labor against their will on
area properties. Given that Rondon operated in northwest Brazil at the
turn of the twentieth century, this meant in particular the need to inter-
vene against the owners of rubber estates and against latex gatherers.
Typical was this 1909 telegram, reprinted in the Journal do Comércio, in
which he blasted ‘‘the inhumane rubber gatherers who burn Indian vil-
lages and assassinate the legitimate owners of the land [Indians], robbing
them of their tranquility and destroying their legitimate traditions.’’ 24
Rondon denounced the abuse of Indians throughout his career in
Mato Grosso. In a series of unsuccessful interventions he condemned the
seizure of indigenous lands and pleaded with local and state officials to do
something about it. For example, in October 1904 Rondon was supervis-
ing the construction of telegraph lines in what is today the state of Mato
Grosso do Sul. Angered by the massacre of Ofaié Indians, Rondon spoke
with José Alves Ribeiro, owner of the Fazenda Tobôco, the landowner
who allegedly had ordered the attack. Ribeiro responded with what Ron-
don termed an ‘‘evasive’’ letter, more attacks followed, and so Rondon
sent an angry telegram to the governor of Mato Grosso requesting that
state troops be sent to protect the Ofaié. Little was accomplished, how-
ever, for Rondon’s report on the incident ends with the comment that
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‘‘in spite of the Governor’s favorable attitude, more killings occurred six
months later, and were done by the same individuals.’’ 25
Fifteen years later an officer with the Rondon Commission once again
condemned landowner José Alves Ribeiro’s treatment of these same
Ofaié people. Referring first to the events of 1904, Captain Botelho de
Magalhães noted that ‘‘in certain far-off regions it is nearly impossible [to
bring people to justice] . . . especially when the accused is a local poten-
tate.’’ Turning to the case pending in 1919, he told of the ‘‘Indian José’’
who had fled Ribeiro’s fazenda because of mistreatment, only to be re-
turned by local authorities. José fled yet again, this time seeking protec-
tion at an spi post. Ribeiro’s son ‘‘violently removed him from the post,’’
but José escaped again and was again recaptured. Botelho de Magalhães
admitted that Ribeiro was able to retake the boy ‘‘against the wishes of
the Indian Protection Service,’’ and he was reduced to observing that at
least Ribeiro would now suffer the censure of the public for his acts: ‘‘At
least he [Ribeiro] will now be known as an executioner of Indians [algoz
dos índios], and this at least satisfies our secondary wish, given that we
were unable to liberate the victim.’’ 26
Rondon’s desire to protect Indians and his general inability to enforce
his policy highlight a case from 1910. Near Rosário, in northern Mato
Grosso, Kayabi men attacked and killed the labor contractor known as
Manoel Velho. Explaining the attack to the minister of agriculture, Ron-
don noted that rubber-tappers under Velho’s employ had been attacking
the Kayabi for some time and that Velho’s death was an act of retaliation.
‘‘I can assure you,’’ Rondon wrote, ‘‘that Indians never attack without a
reason; they attack for no other reason than to defend themselves against
treason and falsehoods.’’ 27
The murder of Manoel Velho generated calls for an armed expedition
against the Kayabi. Rondon telegraphed Minister Miranda, asking him
to intercede on the Indians’ behalf with the governor of Mato Grosso.
Miranda telegraphed the governor as well, but the result was not the de-
sired one: the governor already had authorized local landowners to con-
tract hired gunmen (jagunços) at the state’s expense. Two months later
a telegram from another commission officer confirmed the result: Alex-
andre Adder, the owner of a rubber estate near Rosário, hired twenty-
six men who then attacked Indians along the Arinos River. They de-
stroyed villages, killed ‘‘many people,’’ and kidnapped several children.
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At this point the documentation ends with an exasperated Rondon tell-

ing Miranda that he would soon be meeting with the governor of Mato
Grosso to press for at least the return of the kidnapped children.28
‘‘You Can’t Kill Indians with Impunity Anymore’’ shouted the head-
line of the newspaper A Noite of Rio de Janeiro. Yet in spite of the title, the
subsequent story suggested that indeed one could do just that in north-
ern Mato Grosso. According to the newspaper, rubber-tappers attacked
Indians near Santo Antonio do Madeira, the terminus of the telegraph
line and home of the commission’s regional headquarters. Despite the
best efforts of the Rondon Commission, the article continued, the per-
petrators had yet to be brought to justice.29
The Noite article included the reprint of a note from General Rondon
to the governor of Mato Grosso. In it Rondon complained of the murder
of Indians ‘‘who were under the protection of this Commission’’ (emphasis
added) and explained that in September 1920 he submitted to the mu-
nicipal judge of Santo Antonio a detailed report on the matter, along with
a request for the prosecution of the case. Furthermore, Rondon offered
commission monies to pay for the transportation and housing of wit-
nesses and the accused. The local judge agreed to the offer, the witnesses
were sent to Santo Antonio, but it became apparent, according to Ron-
don, that the judge was biased in favor of the unnamed suspect(s). In the
end the judge refused to try the case.30
Rondon and his officers even failed to bring to justice the murderers of
one of their colleagues. In October 1915 Major Heitor Toledo disappeared
somewhere near Cáceres, Mato Grosso. His body was never found, but
his clothes and personal effects were. Toledo, cousin of the important
federal official André Gustavo Paulo de Frontin, was the son-in-law of
Marshal Conrado Jacob de Niemeyer. There was some suggestion that he
was having an affair with the sister of the Torquato brothers, who were
owners of the Fazenda Jacutinga.
Local officials arrested and jailed Benedito Torquato in Cáceres in
early 1916. However, he later escaped, apparently with the aid of these
same local authorities. In May 1916 Captain Botelho de Magalhães ad-
mitted in a letter to A Noite that the federal officials of the Rondon Com-
mission had once again confronted their lack of authority in Mato
Grosso: ‘‘Even given the pain this has caused me, and even given the re-
spect and sympathy I have for the officials of Mato Grosso, I must never-
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theless condemn the release of Major Toledo’s assassin. . . . Apparently

the civil authorities in Cáceres deemed it unjust to punish the criminal. I
thus request that you, Mr. Editor, . . . publish this condemnation of these
arbitrary acts . . . so that I might be comforted by the knowledge that at
least in the nation’s capital this will enrage popular opinion.’’ 31
The Rondon Commission’s inability to intervene successfully on be-
half of indigenes demonstrates the real limits to the power of the national
government at this time. Never numbering more than 350 to 600 soldiers
and officers, the commission was often divided into units and subunits,
then distributed throughout the vast territory of Mato Grosso. Further-
more, commission members were always on the move, especially during
the most intense era of telegraph construction (1907–1915). Commission
officers and soldiers simply were not concentrated in any one location
for more than a few weeks, or at most a few months, at a time.
The radically decentralized political system of the Old Republic fur-
ther narrowed the prospects for successful intervention vis-à-vis local
potentates. After the overthrow of the centralized monarchy in 1889,
state residents now elected their own governors and legislators. They
also maintained their own militias, which often rivaled federal garrisons
in troop strength and matériel. Furthermore the federal government was
unwilling, and often unable, to intervene against private interests oper-
ating within the states, as the above examples from Mato Grosso vividly
demonstrate. A decentralized system with a weak federal government
and strong states rights combined with the isolation of northern Mato
Grosso to limit the power of federal agents such as Rondon.32
One should not assume, moreover, that Rondon’s soldiers shared his
vision of Indian–white relations. In fact, the opposite appears to have
been true. Most of the common soldiers in the Brazilian army at this
time were poor, uneducated citizens pressed into service against their
will. The same was true for most of the soldiers of the Fifth Engineering
Battalion, and Rondon had of course admitted to the corporal punish-
ment of them and faced an official investigation into the treatment of his
troops.33
Ever fearful of the attitudes of his subordinates, Rondon explained and
ordered the implementation of his policy of nonviolent relations with
indigenes in lectures to his soldiers, in orders to his officers, and in official
reports. In one speech to troops he spoke of the past exploitation of Indi-
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ans and of the need to make amends. He condemned the bandeirantes, the
colonial-era explorers and slavers, for their barbaric campaigns against
indigenes. ‘‘Now,’’ he continued, ‘‘it is we who are the invaders, but this
time we are inspired by the principles of Justice that a new civilization
[Positivism] has inculcated in us. We feel profoundly the weight of our
historic errors, understanding that the time has arrived to atone for our
past sins.’’ 34
Rondon warned his troops of possible attacks by the Nambikwara
people on the eve of the historic expedition across northwest Mato
Grosso in 1908. ‘‘Even if we are wounded by the warriors of the Juruena’’
he told them, ‘‘absolutely no reprisal against our attackers will be al-
lowed.’’ 35 Later, in his report on the expedition Rondon noted that his
troops had found it hard to accept his orders. ‘‘This theory contrasted
with the bellicose sentiments of our soldiers . . . for whom Indians were
but ferocious animals that should be attacked.’’ 36
Notice the orders Rondon issued to his officers before leaving the
construction zone in 1912. On them he conferred ‘‘the protection of the
Tribal Families that periodically visit us along the [telegraph] line.’’ Then,
in the same orders, he warned against improper behavior vis-à-vis indi-
genes, and especially women, saying that ‘‘from each functionary I expect
the purest sentiments of patriotism and chivalry, and that each soldier
will defend Indian women, and their pure innocence, from the gross mas-
culinity and brutality [of men].’’ 37
Rondon often described Indian attacks against telegraph station per-
sonnel as legitimate reprisals against those who had violated commission
rules by engaging in improper behavior. Over the years the Nambikwara
launched several lethal strikes against stations built in what is today
the border region between the states of Rondônia and Mato Grosso. In
April 1919 one such raid at the Juruena station killed two telegraph em-
ployees. As Rondon later explained it, the Nambikwara men attacked
in response to the earlier actions of one of the commission employees.
Antonio Pereira was crossing the Juruena River in a canoe with two
Nambikwara passengers when one of the passengers demanded a piece of
Pereira’s plug tobacco. He refused, and the men argued, causing Pereira
to push them out of the canoe and into the river. Days later Pereira and
his colleague were dead.38
Less than two years later members of the Nambikwara nation killed
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two more commission employees in a gruesome attack near the Juruena

telegraph station. Guided by a gathering of vultures above the forest,
a search party discovered the smashed skulls and dismembered bodies
of commission members Raul Avila de Araujo and Vicente Paulinho da
Silva. So many of their body parts were heaped together that the search
party buried them together in a common grave.39
After conducting an extensive inquiry, Captain Alencarliense Fernan-
des da Costa concluded that the Nambikwara were not to blame for the
attack. It was, he noted in his report, a legitimate response to the im-
proper actions of the station personnel, who for some time had been
visiting the nearby Nambikwara village in search of women. In the after-
math of this attack Rondon energetically repeated his orders that com-
mission personnel were to avoid Indian settlements, and he reminded
officers that they could enter such places only with his personal permis-
sion.40
Aside from their largely unsuccessful attempts at protection, Rondon
and his officers also worked to implement the heart of his Indian policy:
the attraction of indigenes and their gradual assimilation. Rondon had
developed his attraction strategy over time, beginning first in the 1890s
while serving in Mato Grosso under Major Antonio Ernesto Gomes Car-
neiro. His efforts to attract indigenous populations evolved into the prac-
tice of leaving presents, the gradual establishment of contacts, and a strict
policy of nonviolence and avoidance of conflicts. While there is now no
doubt that Rondon exaggerated the number of groups he ‘‘pacified,’’ no
one doubts that he was the first to establish peaceful relations with the
Nambikwara.41
The Nambikwara occupied the lands Rondon crossed when building
the telegraph line between Cuiabá and Santo Antonio. Few whites lived
in the area, and there were no roads and no maps of the region. At the
same time that commission personnel explored, surveyed, and mapped
these lands and built the line across the territory, Rondon and his offi-
cers set about establishing peaceful relations with the Nambikwara.42 At-
traction meant leaving presents of machetes, thread, cloth, matches, and
other items along indigenous hunting trails. At times Rondon left uni-
forms, paintings, and even firecrackers. Gradually Rondon, who taught
himself the language of the Nambikwara, began to visit villages and invite
residents to commission camps.43
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Attempts to assimilate indigenes occupied much of the commission’s

time and budget. As per Rondon’s Positivist beliefs, the emphasis was
on respecting indigene social organization and cultural practices, and
on respecting the use of indigenous languages, even while introducing
various Western practices. Assimilation essentially meant transforming
indigenes into Brazilians. It meant turning them into small farmers, and
especially into cattle ranchers, as Rondon felt that ranching was appro-
priate for existing indigenous communal practices. It meant supplying
indigenes with modern tools and agricultural machinery, and encourag-
ing the construction of houses with internal walls to replace indigenous
one-room huts.44
Rondon speculated on the length of the assimilation process. Turn-
ing hunter-gatherers into ranchers would not take long, he opined, given
that indigenes soon would adopt voluntarily the use of Western tools
and agricultural practices. However, the evolution of their social prac-
tices and beliefs, including religion, would, he argued, take much longer.
Indeed, at one point he mentioned that a hundred years might pass (he
also mentioned several generations) before indigenes abandoned their
religions. As a Positivist he expected Indians to bypass monotheism on
their way to the Positivist stage of social evolution. But again, force could
not be used to speed the process, for to do so would violate Comte’s laws
of nature and would be reminiscent of the practices of those caught in
the theological stage. ‘‘Given that the incorporation of the Indians must
follow certain scientific laws,’’ Rondon noted in a 1940 speech,
1. We must not remove the Indian from his environment, as we all
know the disastrous impact this produces;
2. We must not force [them] to labor in ways that would alter their
tribal organization;
3. We should create in them, by providing useful items, the need
for new necessities;
4. [We should] induce them, without coercion, to accept work that
agrees with them, and provide them with the funds necessary to
purchase their new necessities;
5. [We should] present them, through free and adequate education,
with new horizons, taking pains to select the most appropriate
[Indians] to serve as guides for the others;
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6. [We should] keep in mind the communal nature of these soci-

eties when encouraging them to engage in certain kinds of labor
. . . and because of this [communal nature] we should oppose
any attempt to divide lands into separate holdings.45
The commission established and operated two núcleos, or residen-
tial posts, to implement Rondon’s assimilation policy. Interestingly, al-
though Rondon thought such núcleos should be established on lands
indigenes already occupied, the two posts were inhabited by the Pareci
families that Rondon moved from northern Goiás and Mato Grosso to
along the telegraph line in northwest Mato Grosso. The núcleos operated
next to the telegraph stations at Ponte de Pedra and at Utiariti.46
Usually around 100 Parecis lived in each post between the years 1912
and 1927. Children (both boys and girls) attended classes taught by the
wife of the station telegrapher, in which they learned reading, writing,
and arithmetic. In addition, boys learned shoe repair and telegraph skills
while girls received instruction in sewing and crochet. Children of both
sexes also practiced calisthenics, or ‘‘Swedish gymnastics,’’ as Rondon
called them.47
Several of the boys went on to become commission telegraphers,
maintenance workers, and line inspectors. Their parents, meanwhile,
learned to cultivate crops using seeds and tools provided by the commis-
sion, so that in 1927, for example, the Pareci living at Utiariti produced
165 liters of beans, 7,366 liters of corn, 26,087 liters of manioc flour, and
1,550 kilos of sugar. Both adults and children were also taught to be ‘‘good
Brazilians.’’ This meant learning the Brazilian national anthem and other
patriotic songs, which they sang especially during daily flag raising and
lowering ceremonies.48
In 1910 Rondon’s Indian pacification techniques became, with the
establishment of the Brazilian Indian Protection Service, the official
policy of the federal government. His ideas and policies then shaped
and directed government–Indian relations for at least the next four de-
cades. They earned him great fame in Brazil and abroad, and he basked
in the praise of geographers and anthropologists. Indeed, ‘‘Rondon’’ and
‘‘Indian policy’’ became synonymous in Brazil. Even today discussions of
indigenist policy in Brazil focus on Rondon and his work, albeit with a
dramatically different interpretation.49
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The Recent Debate Over Rondon

For decades Rondon’s associates and scholars praised his policies and
actions vis-à-vis indigenes. However, a new group of Brazilian scholars,
most of them anthropologists, have recently produced a cogent, pene-
trating, complex, and harshly critical analysis of Rondon’s indigenist
policies. Most of these studies, written by scholars associated with the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, condemn Rondon, his telegraph
commission, and the Indian Protection Service.50
The revisionist argument, as seen especially in the work of Antonio
Carlos de Souza Lima, is that Rondon, the spi, and the Rondon Com-
mission sought primarily to expand state power rather than to assist
indigenes. Furthermore, it is argued, euphemisms such as ‘‘assistance,’’
‘‘protection,’’ and ‘‘pacification’’ hide the essentially violent nature of
Rondon’s project: the conquest of indigenes. In the view of the revision-
ists, the extinction of indigenous peoples and cultures, not protection,
was the final goal of Rondon’s assimilationist policy.
In impressive fashion Lima develops his argument that Rondon and
the spi were concerned primarily with expanding the power of the cen-
tral state and, perhaps more important, with expanding the authority of
the spi and the ministry of agriculture within the federal bureaucracy.
The development and application of an indigenist policy, the myriad ex-
peditions and explorations, the generation of knowledge about indigenes
and the flora and fauna of the northwest, were done primarily to im-
pose state power in the hinterlands. Most important, this state building
reduced the heterogeneity of indigenous peoples into a generic, state-
created ‘‘Indian’’ category. Second, by asserting an expertise that only
they possessed, Rondon and his associates justified state intervention in
the interior and as central state representatives began to insert them-
selves between indigenes and members of the local, white society. They
built, to use Lima’s favorite metaphor, ‘‘a great wall’’ of state power be-
tween Indians and local whites.51
The most dramatic revisionist assertion is Lima’s oft-repeated claim
that Rondon practiced a form of warfare that constituted the conquest
of indigenes. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Lima notes that
‘‘power is essentially repressive. . . . It represses individuals, instincts,
[and] classes.’’ 52 Rondon, his commission, and the spi warred against
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Rondon with Pareci men and women in front of Utiariti Falls. Courtesy of Comissão
Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.

indigenes by constructing a particular kind of state power over them, one

that Lima calls poder tutelar (tutelary power). Contact with the ‘‘other,’’ in
this case ‘‘Indians,’’ became a form of conquest for it imposed a particu-
lar image on the other. By redefining and reorganizing this other Rondon
and his cohort sought to conquer indigenes, for ‘‘conquest is . . . also a
cognitive endeavor, one oriented by semiotic procedures.’’ 53
For Lima this was nowhere more the case than in the residential posts
(núcleos indígenas) the Rondon Commission and, to a greater extent, the
spi operated. Here the state builders extracted Indian wealth and labor
power in the same extra-economic fashion as local landowners, such that
for Lima the post director ‘‘occupied the social position previously filled
by the labor broker or rubber-estate owner.’’ 54 With seemingly great effi-
ciency, post personnel robbed indigenes of their languages, altered their
dress and even posture, and succeeded ‘‘beyond a doubt in attacking the
totality of native activities, inserting them [Indians] in times and spaces
quite different than the rhythms and limits of indigenous life.’’ 55
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Lima forcefully asserts that Rondon’s policies were not any more pro-
gressive than, or even fundamentally different from, the days of armed
conquest. ‘‘During the first two decades [of the twentieth century],’’ he
suggests, ‘‘they [Rondon et al.] not only desired, but also acted to dissolve
and destroy, at even the most basic level, the socioeconomic and political
forms of native organization.’’ 56 Rondon and his men thus ‘‘mounted a
war of conquest by imagining a mono-national political community.’’ 57
Or, as Laura Maciel puts it in even more dramatic fashion, ‘‘To explore
and tame the wilderness and all that was in it, including Indians, was
similar to what one does to domesticate wild animals. . . . These were po-
litical decisions of conquest and the occupation of space, translated into
acts of force, with an eye towards subjugation and domination.’’ 58

The Historical and Comparative Context

There is much to admire in the revisionist literature and much to criticize
in the policies and actions of General Cândido Mariano da Silva Ron-
don. The Positivists and Rondon were by definition paternalistic in their
attitudes toward indigenes, with all the attendant problems such an at-
titude carried for the objects of their attention. As Positivists they felt
that they alone understood the ‘‘laws of Humanity’’ and that they alone
could integrate indigenes into modern society. Positivism was very much
a doctrine in which a small group of national leaders asserted their right
to rule over the rest of the population. Indeed, Positivists applied this
attitude not only to indigenes but to the urban Brazilian proletariat as
well.59
The 1916 Civil Code codified this vision of state paternalism vis-à-vis
indigenes. It proclaimed Indians to be ‘‘relatively incapable,’’ and thus
in need of state protection. Indians could not purchase, sell, or transfer
lands without the federal government’s approval. They could not sign
labor contracts or myriad other contracts. Indians became wards of the
state, and Rondon and the spi became their tutors in a system of state
wardship known as tutela in Brazil.60
Revisionist scholars offer a powerful critique of Rondon’s policies
through their discussions of the ramifications of tutela. Tutela meant
that Rondon and the state determined the essence of Indians. Govern-
ment officials defined Indians as childlike in order to protect them from
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Rondon distributing presents and clothes to Parecis men, women, and children at
the Utiariti telegraph station. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro
Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.

Rondon dressing a Nambikwara man. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de

Registro Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.
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rapacious whites. By asserting the sole right to define the future of these
people, the central state, Lima notes, claimed total power over Indians.
Tutela, Seth Garfield observes, promised aid and protection, but ‘‘on the
flip-side . . . lurked the specter of government heavy-handedness.’’ Its
biggest flaw, he continues, was that the state decided what was best for
Indians but did so based on its ‘‘own narrow-minded views about Indians
and their future.’’ ‘‘Tutela was, above all,’’ Nádia Farage and Manuela Car-
neiro da Cunha assert, ‘‘an instrument for the defense of Indian lands by
the state, but [it] eventually came to emphasize more the infantile nature
of Indians and their societies.’’ 61
The contradictions of tutela point to the key contribution of the re-
visionist literature. As Alcida Ramos notes, ‘‘Brazilians—that is, adults—
know what is best for the infantile Indians, and for Indians to reach
adulthood they must relinquish their Indianness.’’ Certainly Rondon’s
oft-stated goal was the transformation of indigenes into Brazilians (‘‘na-
tionalization,’’ as he put it), and the residential posts were indeed to be
the primary site for this transformation. Commission photographs and
reports document the schoolwork, the teaching of trades, the Western-
ization of dress that, as Lima eloquently puts it, altered native rhythms
and limits.62
Indeed, it is tempting to accept Lima’s assertions that the logical con-
clusion of assimilation would be extermination. Even the anthropologist
Darcy Ribeiro, Rondon’s friend and admirer and the favorite target of
revisionist venom, criticized this aspect of Rondon’s policy. The Positiv-
ist model, Garfield notes, did indeed dictate a solution or a specific end
point to Indian evolution. As such, he concludes, it lacked the cultural
relativity practiced by today’s ethnographers.63
There also is no denying that Rondon was much engaged in the at-
tempt to expand state power. His telegraph commission and the spi were
long-lived, nationwide bureaucracies. Commission and spi personnel
did indeed intervene in the hinterland. They certainly attempted to place
a ‘‘great wall’’ of state authority between indigenes and local society. They
also used the power of the state to redefine identities or, as Lima writes,
to redefine the other.
That having been said, however, there is for the historian a gnawing
incompleteness, or perhaps one-sidedness, especially to Lima’s revision-
ist portrait. This is the result of the refusal to assign any credibility to or
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find any complexity in the language, intentions, acts, and rhetoric of Ron-
don and his associates. Lima deftly employs his Foucauldian sword to
skewer those who consider it at least possible that protection and assimi-
lation could carry with them positive, if contradictory, meanings, lead-
ing to both positive and negative actions, not to mention the possibility
of Indian resistance (a topic Lima ignores completely, thus portraying
indigenes as powerless victims).64 No doubt power is repressive, as Lima
asserts, again borrowing from Foucault. Yet power can also be contradic-
tory, can it not? Is one not allowed to consider at least the possibility of
a dialectic?
For example, Lima’s assertion of state building grossly exaggerates
the de facto power exercised by the Rondon Commission in the Brazil-
ian interior. On paper, in federal documents (which are the only sources
Lima examines), commission officers certainly asserted their expertise
and power. But more thorough research reveals a far different reality—
that of a federal agency that never, in any real sense, succeeded in im-
plementing state authority over local landowners. What on paper might
seem like a ‘‘great wall of state power’’ to Lima looks, on a deeper exami-
nation, more like a leaky net of little more than federal discourse.65
It is certainly fair to note that the ultimate goal of assimilation was the
disappearance of Indians. But one also should acknowledge the ambigu-
ous nature of Rondon’s thoughts on this matter. While calling for assimi-
lation he nevertheless urged his personnel to respect indigenous social
and religious practices until they were ‘‘ready’’ for Positivism. Further-
more, Egon Schaden claims, based on a 1949 interview with Rondon,
that late in his life Rondon abandoned the idea of assimilation altogether.
And while the idea of assimilation is objectionable today, Rondon’s for-
mulation of it prepared him to wait for generations, for a century, for it
to occur.66
It is the job of the historian to provide evidence of the complexities of
this situation. Lima writes that Rondon and spi personnel forced indi-
genes to abandon their languages. Certainly in myriad speeches, letters,
and reports Rondon argued just the opposite. But what about in deed?
In 1920 Captain Alencarliense Fernandes da Costa began his inspec-
tion of the telegraph line in northwest Brazil. At the Ponte de Pedra sta-
tion he also visited the school attended by Pareci children, which by that
point was operated by the ministry of education of the state of Mato
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Grosso. ‘‘Examining the guest registry of the school,’’ he later wrote in a

report to General Rondon, ‘‘I noticed an entry from the [state of Mato
Grosso] school inspector recommending that the Indian students be pro-
hibited from speaking their language.’’ Without explaining exactly how,
or to whom he did so, the commission officer noted, ‘‘I disagreed with
this opinion, given the understanding that we should teach the children
the official language [Portuguese], without discouraging the use of the lan-
guage of each tribe’’ (emphasis mine).67
It also is worth noting that Rondon generated dogged opposition from
locals who thought his assimilation process was ineffective, too toler-
ant of indigenous practices, and too drawn-out. This does not make the
policy right, of course, but it suggests the complexities of that time and
place. In 1918 newspapers in the state of Mato Grosso carried a series of
complaints landowners and editors made against Rondon and his Indian
policy. At the heart of the matter was their belief that Rondon’s policies
were destined to fail because they did not force Indians to become ‘‘re-
sponsible citizens.’’ 68
In the opinion of one editor, Indians were unproductive because Ron-
don protected them but left their lives and cultures alone.69 The flaw was
that Rondon prevented locals from ‘‘introducing the kinds of policies
that would modify their [the Indians’] primitive habitat.’’ Another article
chastised spi personnel for attracting Indians with presents ‘‘without
obliging them to practice the necessary obligations [of proper behav-
ior].’’ In Rio de Janeiro a Jornal do Comércio article criticized Rondon for
learning the language of the Parecis, instead of forcing them to learn Por-
tuguese.70 Emphasizing precisely these points ‘‘a few rubber plantation
owners’’ sent a letter to A Cruz in response to a meeting between Rondon
and the governor of Mato Grosso. ‘‘He who allows his soldiers to die of
hunger while distributing food to the savages,’’ they charged, ‘‘is Colonel
Rondon.’’ 71
In the heat of the 1918 attacks against Rondon and his policies the local
press in Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, referred to Rondon’s indigenous ances-
try (of which Rondon was quite proud) as one source of his errors. ‘‘The
colonel,’’ a local contributor noted, ‘‘possesses the temperament of the
savage. In the centers of civilization he feels out of place.’’ Thus, ‘‘the
colonel is a lost cause . . . because he has a high percentage of Indian blood
mixed with the worst habits the centers of civilization have to offer.’’ 72
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This language and this opposition illuminates the context in which

Rondon and the Positivists developed their theory that indigenes were
not racially inferior, were every bit as capable as whites, but were simply
living in an earlier stage of social (but not racial) evolution. For many
prominent Brazilians in this era scientific racism explained the ‘‘prob-
lems’’ of nonwhites in Brazil, with all the attendant ‘‘solutions’’ such an
attitude entailed.73 Indeed, the French writer Arthur de Gobineau, one of
the founders of racial determinism, lived in Brazil from 1869 to 1870 and
concluded that ‘‘the native population was destined to disappear, due to
its genetic ‘degeneracy.’ ’’ 74
Thus, while Rondon was in the hinterland developing policies that
discounted the importance of race, urban intellectuals such as Sílvio
Romero were writing about the racial inferiority of indigenes, who
Romero regarded as ‘‘certainly the lowest [race] on the ethnographic
scale.’’ 75 In 1911, again while Rondon was in the interior implementing
his policies, Afrânio Peixoto was writing of the inevitable disappear-
ance of ‘‘sub-races’’ such as indigenes in his widely read novel A Esfinge
(The Sphinx).76 In contrast, it was one of Rondon’s greatest admirers and
closest associates who most strongly attacked the racial determinists.
Edgar Roquette-Pinto, who accompanied Rondon on an ethnographic
expedition through northwest Brazil in 1912, used his position as director
of the National Museum to ‘‘question the racist assumptions of anthro-
pogeography.’’ 77
In short, Rondon’s policies were far more respectful of indigenous
ways than the policies proposed by others of that era, and nowhere is this
more evident than in the most famous of the debates over Indian policy
during those years: the debate between Rondon and Herman von Ihering,
the director of the Museu Paulista.78 Pro-Rondon scholars argue that in
1908 and 1909 von Ihering proposed the extermination of indigenes and
that Rondon and others condemned this proposal, the Indian Protection
Service being born out of the commotion that followed.79 In his revision-
ist work Lima argues that von Ihering never proposed extermination.
Rather, he says, Rondon, his associates, and later scholars invented the
charge of extermination in order to justify their calls for increased state
intervention in Indian affairs, doing so under the guise of ‘‘protection.’’
Von Ihering thus became a convenient straw man for the state builders to
attack in order to justify their own expansion of authority over Indians.
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Indeed, Lima repeatedly refers to the ‘‘supposed’’ extermination policies

of von Ihering.80
While von Ihering may not have called directly for extermination, he
did propose policies essentially designed to produce that end. Yes, he
proposed that reservations be established to protect indigenes, but, in
contrast to Rondon he also stressed that Indians were largely incapable of
learning in a Western sense and that they ‘‘were indolent and indifferent
and would not make a minimum contribution to our [Brazilian] culture
and progress.’’ 81 Because of their inferiority, von Ihering argued, Indians
were destined to disappear no matter what Rondon and his associates
did to protect them.82
Given his analysis von Ihering felt it important to promote progress
and civilization by sponsoring European colonization and by protecting
immigrant colonists from Indian attacks. He strongly condemned the
government’s slowness to protect colonists from Indian attacks in west-
ern São Paulo state and in the state of Santa Catarina. He worried that
these attacks would create an unfavorable impression in Europe, which
then might slow emigration to Brazil.83 Thus, ‘‘Indians in São Paulo are an
obstacle to progress. We cannot hope for serious and capable work from
civilized Indians, and, therefore, like the savage Cangangs [Kaingângs,
in western São Paulo] they are an obstacle to the colonization of the in-
terior and there appears to be no solution other than extermination.’’ 84
Von Ihering ended another article by noting that ‘‘it is worth registering
here what the American General Custer said: ‘the only good Indian is a
dead Indian.’ ’’ 85
This attitude was not limited to von Ihering. In a 1911 article published
in a prominent Rio daily, an unnamed writer also condemned what he
saw as Rondon’s and the spi’s defense of indigene rights over those of
the European colonists. Referring specifically to conflicts between Ger-
man colonists and the Xokleng in the state of Santa Catarina, the author
complained that ‘‘Brazil prefers the bugre (savage) over the foreign colo-
nist.’’ The reporter continued, saying, ‘‘[Go] ahead and protect the Indi-
ans, even though they are of no use to the country, if you want to, but
keep in mind our first obligation to protect the colonists.’’ 86
The clearest statement of these attitudes appears in an anonymous
1917 editorial published in Rio’s Correio da Manhã. Written in response to
reports of rubber-tapper atrocities against indigenes along the Madeira
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l i v i n g w i t h ot h e r s * 125

River (in other words, precisely where the Rondon Commission oper-
ated), the piece began by noting that coastal Brazilians held a romanti-
cized view of indigenes because they never came into contact with such
people. Rondon’s actions, no matter how impressive and altruistic, re-
inforced this naïve attitude, giving the public ‘‘the erroneous notion that
the Indian problem could be solved by constructing an idyllic peace and
fraternity with the Indians.’’ However, the editorial continued, a rubber
estate could not serve ‘‘simultaneously as hunting ground for the savages
and the source of precious latex.’’ Conflict was inevitable, for ‘‘to order
the civilized man to respect the land of the Indians is the same as ask-
ing that civilization cease.’’ And because the author could not conceive
of this he ended his editorial by noting that ‘‘here, as in other countries,
the victory of the civilized is certain.’’ 87
At least at the time, then, a number of prominent Brazilians recog-
nized the qualitatively different nature of Rondon’s policies, and they
opposed them. Thus, while the revisionist deconstruction of Rondon’s
language does provide new insight into Indian policy and the attempts
to expand state power, it fails to consider fully the context of that lan-
guage and to consider just what was possible in that era. Indeed, there
is an anachronistic tone to the revisionist argument. The very real abuse
and exploitation of Indians by spi personnel in the 1950s and later seems
to be one source of the revisionist condemnation of acts committed and
policies pursued decades earlier.88
Significantly, a recent comparative history of state policies toward in-
digenous peoples in Mexico, Canada, the United States, and Australia
confirms this. Rondon’s policies at the turn of the twentieth century used
less force, were less violent, and were less abusive of indigenous prac-
tices than those of other national governments.89 The revisionists are cor-
rect to point out the contradictions, ramifications, problems, and deeper
meanings of Rondon’s indigenist policies. They fail, however, to ade-
quately place such policies in their historical context.

The Dilemma of Development

Both sides of this historical debate are largely silent on what is possibly
the ultimate contradiction of Rondon’s policies. Rondon firmly believed
that he could both protect Indians living in the Brazilian northwest and
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at the same time develop the region through infrastructure expansion,

colonization, and support for the rubber industry. Instead, the Rondon
Commission’s telegraph activities, its construction of roads in the region,
and its general presence produced pressures inimical to the commission’s
stated goal vis-à-vis indigenes. Indeed, at times commission members
themselves recognized this contradiction.90
The instructions relevant to the creation of the Rondon Telegraph
Commission specifically ordered the collection of information for use in
the development of the region. Later, when accepting the offer to head
the spi in 1910, Rondon stressed his belief that in addition to defending
indigenous populations and their lands, his personnel could nonethe-
less encourage the extraction of natural resources in the northwest. ‘‘Ex-
perience teaches us,’’ he noted, ‘‘that if we don’t threaten their [Indian]
settlements and gardens they won’t oppose the work of those wishing to
exploit the mineral and other resources that are of no interest to them.’’ 91
Commission employees regularly observed with pride that rubber-
tappers and estate owners quickly moved to exploit areas the commis-
sion recently had explored. In the years before telegraph construction,
rubber-tappers worked along only the banks of major rivers, such as
the Madeira River, the lower Jiparaná (near where it empties into the
Madeira), and the lower reaches of the Jamari River (where it also emp-
ties into the Madeira). These lands, occupied since colonial times, were
well to the north and west of the lands Rondon explored during his three
famous expeditions between 1907 and 1909. Indeed, when he and his
men marched across the region between Cuiabá and the Madeira River
in 1909, Rondon encountered rubber-tappers on the banks of the Jamari
only in the traditional area of occupation, near where the river empties
into the Madeira. By 1915, he later noted with pleasure, latex gatherers
operated along the entire length of the river (and thus far to the east of
the previous zone of exploitation). Likewise, tappers began to move up
the banks of the Jiparaná River, establishing a ‘‘trading post [far up the
river] shortly after the Commission’s expedition of 1909.’’ 92
By 1914 there were rubber trading posts all along the Jiparaná River,
with a post opening near the river’s headwaters in 1915. In fact, some
of the trading posts even operated on the grounds of commission tele-
graph stations, such as at the Presidente Pena and Pimenta Bueno sta-
tions. Furthermore, one commission associate was quick to note the
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l i v i n g w i t h ot h e r s * 127

expansion of the rubber trade caused by the construction of a commis-

sion road through part of this region. This road connected the commis-
sion’s riverine port at Tapirapuã with the Utiariti telegraph station. Soon
rubber-tappers crowded onto the road to deliver their product south to
the town of São Luis de Cáceres.93
At times commission members admitted that there was a correlation
between this expansion of the rubber business and attacks against indi-
genes. Nicolau Bueno Horta Barbosa wrote that attacks against indigenes
along the upper Jiparaná River began in 1910, shortly after Rondon’s third
expedition and shortly after the inauguration of an Asensi and Com-
pany trading post. To the press in Rio de Janeiro, another commission
employee forcefully denounced Asensi and Company–sponsored attacks
against Indians. This was especially significant because at that very mo-
ment, and for several years thereafter, the commission relied on that
same company for mail delivery, food and other supplies, and troop
transport.94
This fundamental contradiction between a policy of protection that
was quite enlightened for its day and a prodevelopment policy that even-
tually led to new attacks against indigenes in regions ‘‘opened’’ by Ron-
don would continue to plague those associated with the Indian Pro-
tection Service, and indeed does so to this day. In 1945, for example,
‘‘Manuelão,’’ the director of the spi post at Tabatinga (Acre), began orga-
nizing manioc and sugarcane cultivation by Ticuna peoples on lands
white residents believed to be of marginal quality. When Ticuna agricul-
tural production proved quite successful, the Ticuna’s white neighbors
took an interest in these lands, invaded them, and began their own culti-
vation. Local officials supported white claims to these lands, and thus an
spi initiative, no matter how well intentioned (and there was consider-
able indigenous support for Manuelão), led to new assaults against the
Ticuna.95
Especially instructive is the emotional and contradictory report of
spi agent José de Mello Fiuza, who was sent to investigate Karitiana
and Karipuna attacks against rubber-tappers along the Jiparaná River
in 1966. Fiuza reported on the death of one rubber-tapper and on Kari-
tiana/Karipuna plans to kill more, for these tappers had recently begun
to collect rubber on indigenous lands. In his report Fiuza clearly blamed
the tappers, condemning them for forcing indigenes from their settle-
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ments and lands ‘‘in a flagrant show of disrespect for both the principles
of humanity and the laws that insure the right to own land.’’ 96
In an impressive display of the contradictions of development, Fiuza
then turned his attention to describing the natural riches to be exploited
in the region. He noted the quality of the forests that, he thought, could
easily be exploited commercially. He commented on the fertility of the
soil and its appropriateness for commercial agriculture. He even reported
with satisfaction that his arrival had encouraged rubber-tappers to re-
sume their activities, which they had abandoned after the attacks. Like
those in the Rondon Commission before him, Fiuza also relied on the
owner of the rubber estate to provide the motorized canoes for his inves-
tigation.97 Perhaps sensing the weight of this contradiction, Fiuza ended
his report by recognizing a growing impasse: ‘‘If on the one hand the spi
has as its number one priority the protection of these Indians, on the
other hand there is no less a desire on the part of the government to . . .
exploit forest and mineral reserves. The two [goals] are in conflict, and
they call for our urgent attention.’’ 98

Conclusion
Two images nicely capture the complexities of Rondon’s indigenist poli-
cies. The first is a black-and-white photograph taken in the 1940s. A
smiling, bare-chested man poses for the camera. A leather headband
keeps his black, shoulder-length hair in place, and he wears what ap-
pear to be army pants. On the reverse side the subject of the photograph
thanks Rondon for providing protection, friendship, and an education
for him and his people.99
The other image is a map of the state of Rondônia. A thick, red, diago-
nal line cuts across the map. Running from the southeast to the north-
west, this represents highway br364. This red line (and the very real high-
way it represents) conjures the annual forest fires, the ecological damage,
and the costs of the ‘‘development’’ of the Amazon given that land-hungry
migrants invaded the region shortly after the paving of this road in the
early 1980s.100
The photograph of the unnamed individual, a man with indigenous
features but clothed in western pants, reflects Rondon’s problematic as-
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l i v i n g w i t h ot h e r s * 129

similation policy. It indicates that, as Lima has argued, the ultimate goal
of this policy was the elimination of ‘‘Indians’’ by turning them into
‘‘Brazilians.’’ Darcy Ribeiro has likewise acknowledged that ‘‘integration’’
ultimately meant ‘‘disappearance.’’ The policy was, he says, the one glar-
ing flaw in Rondon’s work, and it was later abandoned in practice by
the spi. This policy was, David Price asserts, immoral, for it dictated to
indigenes the terms of their incorporation into Western society. It was
ethnocentric, Seth Garfield notes, because ‘‘Indians could only be con-
ceptualized and valued in so far as they served white goals and embodied
white ideals—never on their own merit.’’ 101
The revisionists have supplied a helpful, alternative reading of Ron-
don’s policies. And yet, Rondon’s ideas were more complex than re-
visionist analysis indicates. While his policies were often ambiguous,
they were, given the context of the times, surprisingly respectful of in-
digenous practices. Yes, his ideas may have been misguided, and his
ethnocentricity did misrepresent indigenes and their histories. Never-
theless, this Brazilian general defended indigenous land rights publicly
and energetically. He and his Positivist colleagues openly called for the
recognition of the sovereignty of indigenous groups. They condemned
the racial determinism of the era. Despite the now objectionable goal of
assimilation, Rondon conceived of this as a long, slow process, and he
ordered his men to respect indigenous religious practices in the mean-
time. Clearly, this was paternalism, and it was ethnocentric, but there
were worse alternatives proposed at the time.
The map provides further commentary on the policies of Rondon.
br364 cuts through towns such as Vilhena, Pimenta Bueno, and Ari-
quemes. Ninety years ago these towns did not exist. In each case they
began, between 1910 and 1915, as telegraph stations. They represented the
Rondon Commission’s entrance into a region that at the time contained
virtually no residents of European descent. Today, br364 highway follows
the route of the telegraph line. Just as building that line first suggested
the possibilities of developing the region, the paving of br364 opened the
region to the ill effects of the latest round of development.102
It was Rondon’s mistaken belief that migration, mineral extraction,
and commercial agriculture could be managed in such a way as not
to threaten indigenous holdings and lives. He and his officers pressed
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130 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

this belief and defended commission activities in general via a modern,

sophisticated, and well-staffed public-relations office in Rio de Janeiro.
This promotion of the commission kept Rondon and his projects firmly
in the thoughts of educated Brazilians in the cities. But as with Positiv-
ism, this public-relations work both helped and harmed the fortunes of
the cltemta.
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Chapter Six: selling a person

a n d a p ro d u c t: p u b l i c r e l at i o n s a n d
t h e ro n d o n t e l e g r a p h c o m m i s s i o n

C ommission officers thought that their work was all about

testing the limits of physical endurance. Wading through
swamps, hacking paths through dense forests, braving the
elements, and confronting wild men and beasts: these were
the stock and trade of the Rondon Commission. One could
argue, however, that the project’s most important activities
took place not in the wilds of Mato Grosso but in the chaotic
streets of Rio de Janeiro. One could argue that blazing a trail
to the offices of important public officials was as vital as blaz-
ing a trail through the wilderness. In short, one could argue
that the activities of those assigned to the commission’s cen-
tral office in downtown Rio de Janeiro were as important as
those taking place thousands of miles away.
The central office began operation in May 1910. Office
workers composed official reports, managed personnel, pur-
chased supplies, and authorized payments. Those in the de-
sign section processed and cataloged photographs and films
and drew maps. But most important, central office person-
nel sold the commission to politicians, civic leaders, and the
general public.1
Rondon’s most trusted officer, Amilcar Armando Botelho
de Magalhães, directed the office and tirelessly promoted the
commission. He did so by sending stories to local newspapers
and writing letters to editors any time the commission re-
ceived even the slightest negative mention in the media. He
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did so by meeting with public officials, especially when pressing for in-
creases in the commission’s budget. He did so by mounting exhibitions
and by arranging and giving speeches about the commission’s activities.
Largely because of Botelho de Magalhães’s efforts, if you were edu-
cated and lived in a major Brazilian city, you were probably quite aware of
what Rondon was doing in the interior.2 In this sense the public-relations
activities of the central office were a rousing success, due in large measure
to two central arguments developed to promote the project’s activities.
First, officers justified the project’s existence by doggedly stressing their
efforts to develop the lands crossed by the telegraph lines. Second, in the
media, in published reports, in speeches and publications, and in face-to-
face conversations with leaders, Rondon and others stressed their heroic
sacrifices and their seemingly superhuman successes in the hinterlands.
And yet, each argument contained an inherent contradiction or weakness
that threatened, or at least limited, crucial support for the project.

Developing Brazil
The first telegraph construction campaigns in the west followed the logic
of military strategy. The oft-stated goal was to connect key settlements
and forts in Mato Grosso in order to facilitate troop movements in the
event of war. A further goal was to secure Brazil’s borders. Rondon him-
self stressed this strategic necessity when in early 1904 he celebrated
the inauguration of a telegraph line to the Bolivian border. He touted
the ‘‘connection of the Bolivian border with the Federal Capital [Rio de
Janeiro]’’ and crowed that ‘‘this tour de force will make it possible to . . .
maintain communications in a theater of war.’’ 3
Nevertheless, Rondon quickly moved beyond a purely strategic ratio-
nale for telegraph construction. For him the key was to develop the re-
gion, to populate it with small farmers, and to build thriving towns where
none currently existed. He noted of telegraph construction that ‘‘more
than the military defense of the Nation that every government seeks to
secure, . . . we have come to promote the principal necessities of popu-
lating and civilizing our Brazil.’’ 4
Just as it was Rondon’s goal to develop northwest Brazil by blanket-
ing it with migrants who would settle and prosper, it was the commis-
sion’s goal to blanket urban Brazilians with publicity celebrating this
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s e l l i n g a p e r s o n a n d a p ro d u c t * 133

agenda. For the next quarter of a century Rondon, Botelho de Magal-

hães, and other officers pressed this developmentalist agenda when ad-
dressing public officials. In their reports commission personnel argued
that only the central government was prepared to develop the interior,
for private investors could not hope to complete such an extensive and
expensive undertaking. Of course, as Lima notes, this was in part a self-
serving argument, as the Rondon Commission was already the govern-
ment’s leading representative in the region, so that asserting the federal
government’s role in Mato Grosso was also a way to assert the promi-
nence of the commission within the federal bureaucracy.5
Commission reports and letters are crowded with figures and discus-
sions trumpeting its successes in developing the region. Lists of houses
built, fields sowed, roads completed, and bridges erected fill commis-
sion publications. Rondon spent as much time discussing these improve-
ments in his reports on telegraph construction as he did on the construc-
tion of the line itself. In one such document he stressed that officers at
recently inaugurated telegraph stations had planted cereals and vege-
tables, and were raising goats, cattle, and pigs, not only to supply the
commission’s needs but also to act as an example, as a magnet, to attract
others to settle the region. In page after page of his 1926 report Rondon
listed bridges built, docks constructed, fences erected, and corrals com-
pleted. In this report he proclaimed, ‘‘The hope of emancipation in the in-
terior resides in the development of farms created by the Commission.’’
Almost as an aside he noted that the commission still maintained the
telegraph line. Central Office Director Botelho de Magalhães also evoked
such evidence of development when writing to officials in Rio de Janeiro.6
Commission reports were eventually published, though it is unlikely
that they received much attention from the general public. What did cap-
ture the public’s imagination was a series of highly publicized lectures by
Rondon. These lectures, given mostly in Rio de Janeiro, but in São Paulo
as well, were dramatic, even theatrical, presentations of commission ac-
tivities. They were choreographed galas in which Rondon took his case
for development (and thus for the commission) to the people.
Rondon raced back to Rio de Janeiro shortly after his dramatic explo-
ration of and journey to the Madeira River in late 1909. He did so in part
to give lectures (two in Rio de Janeiro and one in São Paulo) about all
three of his expeditions to the Madeira. Important officials, including
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Hermes da Fonseca, the president of Brazil, attended. In these lectures

Rondon entertained his audiences with tales of danger, examples of com-
mission triumphs, and discussions of the project’s development goals.7
The 1910 lectures were a warm-up for the very elaborate series of
lectures Rondon delivered in Rio de Janeiro in 1915. Having recently
returned from the inauguration of the main telegraph line between
Cuiabá and the Madeira River, for one week in October Rondon spoke to
standing-room-only crowds at the Fenix Theater. The official reason for
the occasion was the honoring of Rondon by the Geographical Society of
Rio de Janeiro. One newspaper described the opening night’s festivities
as ‘‘a manifestation of remarkable brilliancy.’’ 8
All of Rio’s powerful people attended. The president and vice-
president of Brazil, important generals, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, sena-
tors and congressmen, and several foreign ambassadors, including the
U.S. ambassador, were present at all three lectures. They witnessed a
multimedia extravaganza that illustrated Rondon’s words with an ex-
tensive slideshow and the screening of a commission-made documen-
tary film.9
The first two of the 1915 lectures covered the Roosevelt-Rondon expe-
dition, but Rondon used them to describe and celebrate the commission’s
successes and to press his case for development. The third lecture focused
exclusively on commission activities, and in it Rondon preached the gos-
pel of settling and developing northwest Brazil. He talked at length about
commission-built roads and other infrastructure projects. He lectured on
the day-to-day concerns of the project but always took pains to link these
to the larger goal of state-led development.
Planting pasture, raising livestock, and increasing crop production on
commission-owned lands were the activities that would serve as a beacon
to attract ‘‘new elements of our civilization’’ dedicated ‘‘to the develop-
ment of those wilds’’ so that the Brazilian northwest would soon be filled
‘‘with agricultural establishments and cattle farms, besides other centers
devoted to the extraction of the resources of the forest.’’ Indeed, earlier
in his lecture Rondon had quoted no less an authority than Theodore
Roosevelt, claiming that ‘‘Mr. Roosevelt talked enthusiastically of the
natural beauty [along the line] and with penetrating insight . . . he took
pleasure in . . . [noting how] the industry of man would shape this piece of
our country, as soon we shall be disposed to benefit from the facilities af-
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s e l l i n g a p e r s o n a n d a p ro d u c t * 135

forded by its healthy and mild climate, by its fertile lands, . . . by its means
of river communications . . . and by using the almost unlimited hydrau-
lic power capable of moving innumerous factories and operating elec-
tric railways which can be laid out with almost no trouble whatever . . .
towards Cuiabá and the other centers of commerce or interchange with
the rest of the world.’’ 10
The 1915 lectures sparked a media frenzy in Rio and were a publicity
coup for the commission. The Correio da Manhã’s coverage began with
the banner headline ‘‘The Unknown Brazil’’ and included a front-page
photograph of Rondon. The Jornal do Comércio reprinted Rondon’s lec-
tures in their entirety. One Comércio da Tarde headline read ‘‘Rondon: The
New Apostle of the Jungle.’’ For its part the O País newspaper gave exten-
sive coverage of Rondon’s immediate departure from Rio de Janeiro after
his last lecture, and noted that an enthusiastic crowd of more than a hun-
dred supporters said goodbye to him as he boarded a steamer for Mato
Grosso. The crowd, which included Antonio Azeredo, the vice-president
of the Senate, as well as General Thaumaturgo de Azevedo, was reported
to have ‘‘given him a rousing send-off, shouting ‘long live Rondon’ while
waving handkerchiefs and hats.’’ 11
These and other newspaper stories reported on commission activities
in Mato Grosso. To be sure, they reported at length on the Roosevelt-
Rondon expedition, but the stories also emphasized the commission’s
efforts to develop northwest Brazil. Articles celebrated commission road-
building efforts in addition to its telegraph activities. One article noted
that the commission had built ‘‘thousands of kilometers of roads that
are so smooth that rubber-tappers now prefer them instead of rivers.’’
Another series of talks by Rondon in 1924 brought a similar round of
coverage. In that year the Jornal do Comércio reprinted in full one of his
speeches, and several newspapers used the speeches as a reason to update
readers on Rondon’s activities.12 The commission’s central office did not
wait passively, however, for journalists to report on its activities. Employ-
ees actively promoted the commission through press releases and aggres-
sive responses via letters to the editor any time a criticism of the commis-
sion appeared in print. In July 1916, for example, Botelho de Magalhães,
‘‘by order of Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Head of this
Commission,’’ sent copies of the just-published collection of Rondon’s
1915 speeches to all of Rio’s major newspapers.13
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Central office–authored articles routinely appeared in print. In 1913,

for example, the O País newspaper printed a lengthy article that appar-
ently was written by Francisco Jaguaribe Gomes de Matos, the head of
the commission’s cartographic unit. The article updated readers on the
pace of telegraph construction but spent more time justifying the entire
project in terms of development and state and nation building. At one
point the article asserted that government officials did not yet appreciate
the impressive scope of the commission’s activities. A 1925 series Botelho
de Magalhães authored for the Porto Alegre newspaper O Correio do Povo
also celebrated the commission’s accomplishments, including its efforts
to develop northwest Brazil.14
The Botelho de Magalhães-authored summary published in 1925 also
emphasized nontelegraph activities and accomplishments. In an earlier
article defending commission budgets, he finished by stressing develop-
ment and urging readers to ‘‘remember that the telegraph line includes
a long road that is bringing to civilization the riches that have long been
ignored.’’ If the development of the zone crossed by the telegraph con-
tinued, he argued, then the considerable expense of the project would
be more than made up for by an increase in federal revenues. As late as
1926 Rondon himself was still justifying the commission’s existence (this
some eleven years after the inauguration of the main telegraph line) in
terms of the potential for development. The continued lack of private
initiative in the northwest, he noted, meant that it was still his job to
encourage settlement via commission-sponsored agricultural colonies.15
Commission officers asserted the lasting importance of the telegraph
project by emphasizing its role in developing the interior. By emphasiz-
ing development these officers asserted a place for the Rondon Telegraph
Commission even after all telegraph construction ended. Thus, they took
a finite project, the construction of telegraph lines, and transformed it
into an ongoing affair.
This very strategy, however, contained within it a nagging weakness,
for it gave opponents a handy cause when criticizing the commission.
These critics noted, for example, that the telegraph itself was an outdated
technology. According to a 1917 newspaper report, the invention of the
two-way radio, and, furthermore, its successful operation in Manaus and
in the territory of Acre, demonstrated just how wrong the government
had been to ‘‘spen[d] rivers of money building useless telegraph lines in
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Mato Grosso, . . . when the radiotelegraph would have provided ideal

service at a fraction of the cost.’’ 16
Rondon and other officers argued in part that radio technology was
still in its infancy and was, hence, unreliable. But they and others were
also quick to note that the radio would not bring development to the re-
gion. Far more important than the line itself was the development that
building it brought to the interior. Telegraph stations had to be built,
and towns and agricultural colonies were growing up around them. The
use of two-way radio technology, commission defenders asserted, would
spark no such growth.17
Others directly criticized the commission’s development strategy. Ac-
cording to the Jornal do Comércio newspaper, the Rondon Commission
tried to do too many things at once. It was part geographical service, part
cartographic service, part zoology department, and so on. Too much time
was spent interacting with Indians. The newspaper further observed that
other army officers challenged the assertion that the line was a strate-
gic necessity. The article concluded by urging the army to ‘‘call for the
[Rondon Commission] officers to return to the barracks they deserted
when they began to move about like priests in the middle of the jungle,
where with big salaries they fish for the souls of country bumpkins and
savages.’’ A final line cried ‘‘Enough with this clowning around with the
monies of the Treasury.’’ 18 This ‘‘clowning around’’ with the monies of
the government became an oft-repeated phrase. The federal government
had spent untold sums of money on Rondon’s telegraph project. Yet there
was little to show for such an enormous outlay of funds. Telegraphic traf-
fic remained light after the line’s inauguration, and revenues were sparse.
Indeed, ‘‘rivers of money,’’ it seemed, had disappeared in the northwest.19
The commission’s own figures made it difficult to refute the charge
that the line had failed to transform the region. Official reports noted
telegraph traffic, but the vast majority of the telegrams sent and received
along the line originated with the commission itself. In 1921, six years
after the line’s inauguration, 5,320 private telegraphs were sent on the
line, compared to 22,774 official messages. In 1924, during the entire year,
the Presidente Hermes station sent just thirty-eight private telegrams
and received just fifteen. Even the Parecis station, which was located
much closer to the urban center of Cuiabá, sent only eighty-three private
telegrams that year, while receiving just twenty-one.20
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The line’s revenue figures likewise contradicted the assertion that its
construction was leading to the development of the region. At the very
least, people in the area were not telegraph users. The Diamantino sta-
tion, which was the second station north of Cuiabá, witnessed virtually
no growth in its revenues between 1909 (the first full year after the sta-
tion’s inauguration) and 1914. Two full years after the line’s inauguration
the Presidente Hermes station generated no revenues for the first three
months of 1917, while the Pimenta Bueno station failed to generate reve-
nues during the month of February. The nearby Barão de Melgaço station
was closed during these months. All three stations were in the zone the
commission most sought to develop.21
In fact, revenues for the line between Cuiabá and the Madeira River
did nothing but decline after its inauguration. In 1917 revenues reached
nearly U.S.$10,000, but by 1927 they had plummeted to U.S.$6,840. In
1930, the last year of the commission’s existence, revenues dropped fur-
ther still, to just U.S.$3,520. The disastrous decline in the region’s rubber
trade, one officer noted, explained this dismal performance.22
Historian Laura Maciel argues that the commission continued to oper-
ate in spite of such paltry performance figures precisely because of the
public-relations activities of the central office. At no time were the public-
relations talents of the officers more in demand than during yearly bud-
get hearings. Especially intense budget battles erupted in 1911–1912, 1914–
1915, and 1916–1917. At several points politicians sought to close down
the commission. It did survive, but budget cuts and a series of flat bud-
gets essentially thwarted the commission’s dream of developing the in-
terior via a network of commission-sponsored agricultural colonies and
indigenous posts.
Budget deliberations began late in each calendar year and continued
into the early part of the next. Invariably these months sparked a flurry
of pro- and anticommission comments in the press. For its part the com-
mission scheduled Rondon’s appearances and speeches to coincide with
these deliberations.
In late 1911 a campaign to reduce the commission’s budget, or to even
eliminate it, reverberated through Rio de Janeiro. In one of a series of
articles critical of the project, a journalist with Jornal do Comércio bel-
lowed, ‘‘The Government is too ashamed to release the exact amount of
funds wasted on this craziness.’’ Given the size of its budget, at roughly
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U.S.$320,000, the commission understandably became a tempting target

for budget cutters. And even though line construction was in full swing,
Congress slashed that budget by 60 percent (from 1,000 contos in 1911 to
400 in 1912).23
Congress then slashed another 50 percent from this budget in
1915, meaning that in five years the commission’s budget fell from
U.S.$320,000 to roughly U.S.$50,000. By that time the line had been in-
augurated, so presumably less money was needed. But in part the cuts
were to punish Rondon, who overspent his 1914 budget by a whopping
1,400 contos (some U.S.$400,000) during the final push to inaugurate the
line. At one point Minister of Transportation Tavares de Lyra argued that
all commission activities should be suspended so that the ministry could
conduct a thorough investigation. Even the commission’s supporters in
Congress were upset by the size of this deficit.24
The central office’s public-relations campaigns may have saved the
commission, but subsequent requests for funding increases to imple-
ment the developmental projects failed. Proof of this was failure of an all-
out central office blitz to increase the commission’s 1917 budget from 240
contos to 350 (roughly U.S.$60,000 to U.S.$87,000). The director of the
central office sent numerous letters and telegrams to key public officials
in support of the request. In them he argued that the commission could
barely meet its maintenance responsibilities, not to mention its larger
development goals for the region. He invited senators, deputies, and key
army officials to the central office and told them the same thing. Con-
gress, however, cut the commission’s budget by 40 contos, and thereafter
funding essentially remained flat at nearly U.S.$50,000 a year.25
These budget cuts forced the commission to scale back its plans. It
trimmed personnel roles. Sometimes two or more positions were com-
bined into one. Officers shut down commission-run Indian posts (nú-
cleos indígenas). The 1917 reduction forced Botelho de Magalhães to
write a pathetic letter describing ways to store food now that the com-
mission could no longer afford to purchase expensive glass jars. ‘‘Just dig
a hole,’’ he instructed an officer in the field, ‘‘and mix two parts beans
with one part clean sand, and then cover. Turn the mixture twice or three
times a week.’’ 26
Such was the fate of the project that had begun in 1906 as a grand exer-
cise in state building and development. To build the line, Rondon once
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argued, meant to ‘‘explore lands . . . , to study mineral riches, the fer-

tility of the soil, the climate, and the forest.’’ It meant ‘‘the building of
roads and the opening of new population centers, [and] the creation of
farms and ranches.’’ It also meant managing a publicity blitz to sell these
dreams to a far-off coastal, and urban, population.27
Yet such a project proved to be too time-consuming and too expensive
for many of these same urbanites. Dismayed by the expense of the line,
critics in the public and in the government were increasingly unmoved by
the dramatic, but unmet, promises of fertile farms and powerful indus-
tries in the hinterlands. Perhaps, then, the reformist army officer Juarez
Távora best captured a new mood when he criticized the Rondon Com-
mission in 1930 (and again in 1956): the project had been too costly and
ambitious.28

The Dialectic of the Superhero

The commission’s other public-relations theme celebrated Rondon and
his men as titans. Only a man of Rondon’s character could have built a
telegraph line through the wilds of Brazil. Only a man with Rondon’s
intelligence, patience, and strength could have succeeded. In spite of
all the obstacles of bad weather, budget cuts, impenetrable forests, and
deadly waterfalls, Rondon built the line and integrated Brazil.
The adulation in the press continued for years, and at times it seemed
as if this superhero was from another planet. ‘‘Never has there been
among us,’’ a 1915 Comércio da Tarde editorial shouted, ‘‘a more perfect
hero than Rondon.’’ In Rondon, a correspondent claimed in 1913, Brazil
could claim ‘‘the first world explorer’’ who possessed ‘‘a dynamic organ-
ism resistant to whatever attacked it.’’ When other men his age were re-
tired and resting, Rondon was besting his much younger officers in feats
of strength. ‘‘If Brazil had half a dozen men like Colonel Rondon,’’ an
article in A Noite proclaimed, ‘‘it would be, without a doubt, the most
prosperous nation on earth.’’ 29
In reports and speeches Rondon trumpeted his and his men’s heroic
exploits. He wrote repeatedly not only of the obstacles they overcame but
also of the depths of difficulty and despair they encountered. Of the sec-
ond, but ultimately unsuccessful, expedition to the Madeira River, Ron-
don noted that ‘‘our physical resistance nearly collapsed under the weight
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of the hunger, and all the other sorts of privations, that tormented us
during our journey.’’ Passages describing the expedition are filled with ac-
counts of desperate times when Rondon and his men ate insects, rats, and
monkeys to survive. Life and work in northwest Mato Grosso, Rondon
noted, ‘‘require[d] a notable physical resistance, a tenacious character,
and a love of the Patria.’’ 30
Rondon issued his strongest heroic pronouncements in public ad-
dresses. In 1910 he lectured in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo about his re-
cently concluded expeditions to the Madeira River. In the introduction to
one lecture he noted that he would speak on his ‘‘incessant battles against
privations and danger,’’ but then claimed that he would omit many of
the details ‘‘for fear of being accused of exaggeration.’’ 31 When reading
these speeches it is hard to believe that he omitted any details. He dra-
matized the trek through the forest northwest of Juruena by telling his
audience, ‘‘Upon seeing the colossal trees we now realized the enormous
effort it had taken to march the 51 kilometers we had done so far. What
was worse was the realization that there was no end in sight. It [the for-
est] probably extended all the way to the Madeira [River].’’ 32 In effect,
he noted, ‘‘we had to brave the interior by land, crossing forests, moun-
tains, plateaus, and rivers.’’ Moreover, this had to be done ‘‘both under
a piercing and debilitating sun, and during horrendous thunderstorms.’’
He and his men had to ‘‘descend into deep canyons only to be faced next
with the scaling of a steep cliff or the crossing of a raging river.’’ 33
The quintessential heroic commission tale was one Rondon told about
himself. In the speeches he gave in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1910,
Rondon offered a dramatic reading of events during the second of the
Madeira River expeditions. Returning from the Juruena River, Rondon
and his men were exhausted, ill, and famished. Their supplies had given
out weeks earlier. In this desperate state the crew arrived at the banks of
the Papagaio River, where, during the first leg of the exploration, Ron-
don had left several canoes to cross the fast-moving waters. The canoes
were now gone. ‘‘My brave men were devastated by this turn of events,’’
Rondon told his audience. Most of his men could not swim! 34
Thinking quickly, before his men lost all hope, Rondon fashioned a
crude raft out of a large piece of stiff leather that floated. Then, ‘‘throw-
ing myself into the water I began to pull the raft back and forth across
the river. On each trip it was loaded with even more bags and equip-
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ment . . . and in the same fashion I also carried all of our sick men to
the other side.’’ 35 By his own account Rondon swam the Papagaio for
five straight hours. Exhausted and nearly broken, his spirits nonetheless
soared as troop morale improved. Inspired by his example, Rondon told
his audience, the men ‘‘revived their spirits . . . and thus I was able to
save the expedition.’’ 36 Years later this story became a staple of Rondon
hagiographies.37
Rondon’s supporters in the press and in Congress proclaimed their
hero’s exploits when defending the commission during yearly budget
talks. No other human being, they asserted, could have done so much
with so little, and in such a short time. Senator Alcindo Guanabara
asserted shortly after the inauguration of the Cuiabá-Madeira River
telegraph line that ‘‘in less than one year Rondon . . . accomplished
something [the completion of the line] that normally would take two.’’
Another O País article noted that not only had Rondon completed the
line in record time, but that he had done so for less money than had ever
been imaginable.38
This very emphasis on Rondon the hero, however, furnished his crit-
ics with ample opportunity to criticize him and his work. It gave them
the opportunity to poke fun at the exaggerations emanating from the
commission’s public-relations department and from Rondon himself.
Rondon’s supporters even admitted as much. Army officers ridiculed
Rondon’s claims and activities. In Congress there were those who op-
posed the commission because, as one journalist sympathetic to the com-
mission noted, they simply couldn’t believe that Rondon was capable
of doing, and was actually accomplishing, all that he and his officers
claimed they were doing. Rondon, one newspaper noted in 1924, chroni-
cally exaggerated his exploits and simply could not be trusted.39

Making the Inhospitable Hospitable

Two final examples further demonstrate that the commission’s public-
relations activities, while successful in many ways, nevertheless carried
within them contradictions that generated negative publicity. The first
example concerns ongoing central office efforts to convince the gen-
eral population of the healthiness of northwest Brazil. The second ex-
ample comes from the all-out publicity blitz that accompanied public
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screenings of the commission’s documentary film ‘‘In the Wilds of Mato

Grosso.’’
Selling the public on the healthiness of northwest Brazil was vital for
a commission bent on populating and developing the lands crossed by
the telegraph lines. Vital, perhaps, but it would not be easy. For coastal
Brazilians the Amazon conjured up images not of telegraph lines and de-
velopment but of illnesses and danger. A Rio de Janeiro–based soldier
chosen for duty in the commission became, an officer noted, ‘‘the target
of the most sincere and saddest expressions of sympathy.’’ 40
Images of illness and death in the Amazon bombarded urban Brazil-
ians on a variety of fronts. The writer Euclydes da Cunha, famous in Bra-
zil for his stirring account of the Canudos Rebellion, next applied his
considerable skills to an extended discussion of the Amazon. In articles
and speeches beginning in the early 1900s, da Cunha described the re-
gion as a powerful and dangerous foe of those mere mortals who dared
to enter it. In one account he pictured the Amazon as a ‘‘sovereign and
brutal region . . . that is the enemy of man.’’ In a famous speech delivered
in Rio de Janeiro in 1906 he spoke of the Amazon as a fecund but danger-
ous, and even prehistoric, place. The Amazon, he told his audience, was
‘‘an unpublished, contemporary page of the Book of Genesis.’’ 41
Da Cunha’s remarks mirrored images presented in the then boom-
ing fictional work on the Amazon. Sparked by the dramatic expansion
of the rubber trade in the 1890s, this literature also emphasized the dan-
gers of the region. Most famous, the powerful image of the Amazon as a
‘‘Green Hell’’ jumped from the pen of Alberto Rangel in his novel Inferno
verde (Green Hell) (1904). In this literature the Amazon was described
as a place of exile, as a place where an ever-present Nature destroyed
intruders.42
Public-health expeditions to the Amazon by members of Rio’s Os-
waldo Cruz Institute further focused the public’s attention on the region.
Researchers worked to improve public health through sanitary cam-
paigns and by combating tropical diseases through scientific research.
Like Rondon, they sought to transform the Amazon, to make it healthier
for development. And yet, as a recent study notes, what caused the great-
est impression among urban Brazilians was not the promise of improve-
ments but rather the region’s shocking unhealthiness.43
Oswaldo Cruz himself noted that in the Amazon ‘‘one found pre-
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carious [health] conditions perhaps without parallel in the world.’’ En-

tire crews of latex gatherers took ill, and many died, so that the re-
gion gained fame as an ‘‘unchallenged place of death.’’ Cruz Institute
researcher Carlos Chagas gave a prominent lecture in Rio de Janeiro in
1913 about his recent tour of the Amazon. His primary point was that
conditions in the Amazon could be improved, but nearly three-fourths
of his address described illnesses and death in graphic detail. In the Ama-
zon, he noted, even common illnesses exhibited new and baffling symp-
toms. He described his visit to a town of some 900 residents, where 400
had died during the first six months of 1911. Chagas estimated that 30
to 40 percent of the region’s rubber-tappers died in any given year, and
he admitted to his audience that ‘‘the picture of unhealthiness makes the
Amazon seem uninhabitable.’’ 44
Given all this, it would have been silly for commission officers to
deny that a gnawing fear of unhealthy conditions and Indian attacks
gripped most Brazilians, and that this fear caused urban Brazilians to
‘‘look upon the hinterlands with repugnance.’’ Nevertheless, Rondon
Commission officers complained that the most absurd rumors seized
the public’s imagination. ‘‘It is considered suicide,’’ one disgusted offi-
cer noted, ‘‘to be sent to such an unhealthy place.’’ And when Rondon’s
Parecis Indian guide Toloiry contracted pneumonia and died in 1909, one
commission doctor complained that ‘‘our worst critics are now saying
that not even an Indian can survive in such an unhealthy environment.’’ These
were mere stereotypes, commission officers asserted, but such stereo-
types were damaging the commission’s efforts to populate and develop
the region.45
Nevertheless, at other moments commission officers candidly ad-
mitted that there was indeed something to these stereotypes and rumors.
No one who knew anything about the line’s construction could deny the
alarming numbers of workers and officers felled by malaria and other ill-
nesses, with sickness sometimes decimating entire crews. At times one-
third or more of a unit’s workers were bedridden with malaria. In addi-
tion, workplace injuries, especially machete wounds to the feet and legs,
placed yet more men in the infirmary.
Thus, commission officers, all of whom at times claimed that the
region was healthy, elsewhere admitted that it was not. Commission
physician José Antonio Cajazeira considered the area surrounding the
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Utiariti telegraph station to be dangerously unhealthy. The Papagaio

River flooded regularly, leaving large, standing pools of water. Malaria
ran rampant, ‘‘leaving the saddest memories of ill health imaginable.’’
Dr. Joaquim Augusto Tanajura thought that the wide temperature swings
in northwest Mato Grosso damaged his men’s health. Captain Meira de
Faria, a man who at one point belittled popular fears concerning illness
and disease in the northwest interior, nevertheless noted in the very same
document that ‘‘we have to admit that the Amazon valley is not a healthy
region.’’ 46
A commission geologist who accompanied the Roosevelt-Rondon ex-
pedition readily described the diseases awaiting those who traveled along
the telegraph line. Past the Juruena station, he noted, one found ‘‘a re-
gion awash in beriberi and malaria.’’ A telegraph employee writing much
later, in 1932, spoke dramatically of the ‘‘terrible malaria that saps one’s
vital strength, thus leading to either chronic exhaustion, or a shallow
grave next to the telegraph line.’’ Commission physician Armando Cala-
zans noted that during the rainy season waist-high water covered lands
crossed by the line, ‘‘leaving the soldiers exhausted and susceptible to
deadly diseases.’’ 47
Officers admitted to health dangers in private documents and corre-
spondence, but they rarely did so in public, except when doing so called
attention to their heroic work. For example, in his lectures in Rio de
Janeiro in 1915 Rondon praised the work of his brave crew, who fought off
illnesses to continue building the line. Others praised Rondon’s heroic
perseverance in the face of his own battles with malaria, such as when
he suffered intermittent fevers of more than 102 degrees during the last
of the Cuiabá–Madeira River expeditions in 1909. According to the story
told by a sympathetic officer, on one day when Rondon was especially ill
he agreed to ride an ox, rather than walk alongside his men. He did so,
however, for only four kilometers, before insisting on walking again. As
Rondon himself explained, ‘‘I felt humiliated, and diminished, in front
of my men. Such a sign of weakness was too much for me, and I would
have preferred to die [rather than continue on the ox].’’ 48
Most of the time, however, officers denied any systemic health prob-
lems in the region. Instead, Rondon spoke at length about the healthiness
of northwest Brazil in his 1915 lectures. In addition, the Jornal do Comércio
published excerpts from a speech Theodore Roosevelt gave in London
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about his experiences with Rondon in Brazil. In the speech Roosevelt

noted the healthiness and fertility of the region crossed by the telegraph
and went on to opine that the region would become a center of coloniza-
tion and industry. Apparently Roosevelt had forgotten his own dramatic
health problems and brush with death during the expedition! 49
In addition to citing such authorities as Rondon and Theodore Roose-
velt, the central office developed myriad explanations for why the region
only appeared to be unhealthy, and they argued that the commission was
making it an even healthier place. Their chief argument was that most
of the soldiers sent to serve on the line were already sick when they ar-
rived in the region. For example, when Dr. Tanajura examined soldiers
selected for commission duty in Rio de Janeiro in 1909, he found that
twenty-three out of thirty-six men were already suffering from malaria.
When these men arrived in Mato Grosso they were hospitalized with
soldiers suffering from syphilis and hepatitis.50
For his part Botelho de Magalhães remembered that unit commanders
turned over the weakest and sickest men when ordered to transfer some
of their soldiers to the Rondon Commission. In Mato Grosso, Dr. Cala-
zans, reporting on an outbreak of measles among soldiers recently ar-
rived from Rio de Janeiro, complained that ‘‘60% of the soldiers sent from
Rio are extremely poor and sick . . . [and thus] most of them lack the
physical strength necessary for our service.’’ In an interview with O País,
Dr. Cajazeira likewise observed, ‘‘The numerous deaths suffered during
the work on the telegraph line . . . have generated the notion that this
far-off place is a ‘region of death.’ However, the soldiers sent to those
zones are comprised of the most incorrigible and inveterate alcoholics . . .
who are then subjected to the exhausting labor [and this is why they be-
came ill].’’ 51
According to official commission explanations, then, soldiers took ill
and even died while serving on the line not because the region was un-
wholesome but because the soldiers were. Or, alternatively, soldiers took
ill because they and the region’s few native residents did not practice
good hygiene. ‘‘The proclaimed unhealthiness of the region,’’ Dr. Caja-
zeira argued, ‘‘is not due to the nature of the region itself, but rather re-
sults from the absence of good hygiene.’’ Another commission physician
agreed, saying that health problems were ‘‘not endemic to the region,
but [were] due to the lack of proper sanitary practices.’’ To combat these
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problems the commission’s sanitation department distributed mosquito

netting, inspected food, and lectured soldiers on proper hygiene.52
Whatever the explanation, commission officers wanted to develop the
region, and fear of disease and illness threatened that goal. Officials thus
chose to personalize illnesses in order to limit negative publicity. If a sol-
dier took ill, it was likely his own fault. If an officer, such as Rondon
himself, took ill, he demonstrated his heroic dedication to the cause by
working bravely through the pain. Alternatively, one former commission
officer heralded the region’s wholesomeness by denying that officers ever
got sick. Botanist F. C. Hoehne participated in several important com-
mission expeditions. How, he wondered aloud in the 1950s, could the
region be so dangerous to one’s health if he and Rondon were still alive
and healthy after all the years they spent in the jungle? 53
Central office personnel aggressively questioned the strength, the
courage, and especially the masculinity of those who complained about
threats to their health while engaged in commission service. This strat-
egy, as well as all of the commission’s concerns about northwest Brazil,
exploded onto the pages of Rio’s newspapers in 1917. The case of Domin-
gos Jacometti Mattea highlights commission efforts to address the health
issue and serves as a final example of the central office’s desperate efforts
at spin control.
Jacometti, an employee of the federal government’s telegraph bureau,
had been loaned to the Rondon Commission in 1916 for work on the
Cuiabá–Madeira River line. Wracked by illness, he returned to Rio de
Janeiro after what he claimed were four months of service in northwest
Mato Grosso. Safely back in the city, he quickly gave several interviews
to protest the appalling conditions and health hazards he encountered
on the line. Sensing a hot story, Rio’s newspapers soon published the
worker’s claims, accompanying them with banner headlines and photo-
graphs of Jacometti.
As reported by A Noite, Jacometti brought back ‘‘devastating impres-
sions of the vast Amazon region . . . where malaria, beriberi, and other
tropical maladies claim hundreds of victims.’’ A Razão carried the tele-
graph worker’s photograph, along with his observation that ‘‘this is a
terrible, mosquito-infested zone, [full of] malaria, beriberi, and other
illnesses.’’ The account stirred the press’s interest for nearly an entire
month.54
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Central office personnel, of course, reacted quickly and routinely to

limit any kind of negative publicity concerning the Rondon Commis-
sion. In the Jacometti case the publicity touched an especially sore point:
the issues of health and disease in northwest Brazil. Central Office Di-
rector Botelho de Magalhães leapt into action. In response to the cover-
age in A Rua, he wrote a letter to the editor that began by wondering if
Mr. Jacometti had been misquoted. Or, his letter continued, ‘‘I suppose
the worst possibility is that you did quote him correctly, which means
that Mr. Jacometti might still be suffering from an especially high fever.’’
Jacometti, Botelho de Magalhães continued, did not serve in the region
for four months. Instead, he lasted only eight days at the commission’s
Presidente Pena telegraph station before he took ill and asked to be re-
turned to Rio de Janeiro.
Malaria, Botelho de Magalhães continued, is only fatal when con-
tracted by weak individuals or by those already suffering from some
other illness (was Botelho de Magalhães suggesting that Jacometti suf-
fered from some other illness, such as syphilis?). Furthermore, he noted,
there was no beriberi in the region. Sometimes beriberi is confused with
polyneuritis, he noted, but ‘‘this [latter] illness is only dangerous when
contracted by organisms weakened already by intemperance.’’ 55
Botelho de Magalhães made these same observations and assertions
in a letter to the editor of the Gazeta de Notícias. He repeated his claim
about polyneuritis, noting that ‘‘it is fatal only among inveterate alco-
holics.’’ He questioned Jacometti’s stamina and manliness by noting, as
he had done in the earlier letter to A Rua, that only people who were
already unhealthy and weak became ill in Mato Grosso. Indeed, he blus-
tered, other telegraph workers had served on the line for up to seven
years without taking ill, and they loved working and living in the region.
These dedicated commission employees, Botelho de Magalhães asserted
further, had served ‘‘since the first [commission] explorations and the
initiation of construction—which [was] much more difficult and danger-
ous than the work now faced by those who are merely sent to operate a
telegraph station that has already been inaugurated.’’ An employee like
Jacometti, he continued, ‘‘didn’t even have to blaze his own trails and
chart his own course’’ in the wilderness.56
Another commission worker, J. de Aquino, likewise celebrated the
strength and manliness of commission personnel while ridiculing the
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s e l l i n g a p e r s o n a n d a p ro d u c t * 149

weaknesses of Jacometti. In a letter to A Noite Aquino noted that he was

in the eleventh month of his service in the Madeira River region. ‘‘I am in
the best of health,’’ he claimed. ‘‘I have forded rivers and have felt armies
of ticks scurrying across my back.’’ Jacometti, he noted, lasted only one
week in the region. ‘‘The four months of service he [Jacometti] mentions
is merely the time it took him to get here and then get the Hell back
to Rio!’’ 57
The conclusion of Botelho de Magalhães’s letter to A Rua summarized
commission public-relations efforts regarding the development of the
interior and the threat that rumors of disease and illness posed for the
endeavor. As he wrote in his signature style,
To the careless reader this kind of news leads to an absolutely false
impression of life in the interior, when that life is now experienc-
ing the first civilizing elements of the telegraph—‘‘the sound of
progress’’ in the words of Colonel Rondon; this kind of misinfor-
mation would be dangerous if we weren’t allowed to tell the truth
and set the record straight. However, we know that you will re-
establish the truth, Mr. Editor, when you realize that the telegraph
line crosses the most wholesome pastures and lands [salubérrima
zona] . . . the likes of which are as healthy and productive as those
found in Goiás, Minas [Gerais], and Rio Grande do Sul.58
The Jacometti case demonstrates that Botelho de Magalhães still
needed to combat images and stereotypes of the northwest interior long
after telegraph construction began and even long after the inauguration
of the line. News about the unhealthiness of northwest Brazil still carried
credibility and importance in Rio de Janeiro, personal attacks and ques-
tions of strength and manliness notwithstanding. The central office still
had not replaced images of death and disease with those of the telegraph
line and development.
The attempt to fix a particular image of the telegraph and of the de-
velopment of a healthy northwest Brazil reached its zenith with the pro-
duction and exhibition of commission documentary films. Civilian film-
makers and their cameras first accompanied Rondon in 1907. By 1912
filmmaking had become a permanent part of the commission’s activities,
with the expansion of the central office’s design section to include film.
And yet, as with the other publicity efforts, filmmaking proved to be a
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double-edged sword that brought not only positive publicity but contro-
versy as well.59
Recent Brazilian studies have examined the commission’s filmmaking
unit. All of them focus on the meanings of commission films. They ana-
lyze in great detail the messages of the films, their techniques, their goals,
and their authenticity, and those readers interested in these issues and
the authors’ conclusions are encouraged to consult this literature. But
the public’s reaction to the films was just as important as their content,
as was evident with the commission’s documentary film ‘‘Os sertões de
Mato-Grosso,’’ which toured Brazil in 1915 and 1916.60
The Central Office’s advance publicity generated a media frenzy
around the exhibition of the film. Articles about and advertisements for
the film filled local newspapers before showings in towns and cities. A
prominent article about the film in A Notícia in São Paulo included a large
photograph of an indigenous women breastfeeding a child. An advertise-
ment for the film read,
Os Sertões de Matto Grosso: a marvelous national, feature-length
film made during the work on the telegraph lines of Matto Grosso
and Amazonas by the illustrious and intrepid colonel Rondon and
his dignified officers. . . .
Sensational revelation of the strength and tenacity of our [Bra-
zilian] race. The immense and uncharted jungles crossed by the
telegraph line. The discovery of eleven important rivers. Paci-
fication of many savage Indian tribes.61
In Rio de Janeiro the public fought to gain access to the film’s show-
ings. It played for several days in some eight theaters, and as many as
20,000 people viewed it. Four thousand people viewed the film in one
theater alone in São Paulo. There the commission exhibited the film
again in 1916 because so many patrons had been turned away during the
initial showings.62
One wonders, however, how many people decided to view the film
not because of their interest in commission activities but because of a
much-publicized controversy that was unanticipated and unwanted by
the central office: naked Nambikwara men, women, and children ap-
peared in the film’s final two reels. Numerous schools and museums also
had been scheduled to screen the documentary, but the nudity caused
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s e l l i n g a p e r s o n a n d a p ro d u c t * 151

them to cancel. This outraged the filmmaker, Lieutenant Thomaz Reis,

who for his part denounced what he termed ‘‘these excessive displays of
timidness.’’ 63
Reis was outraged, but the controversy refused to disappear. Soon the
central office was forced to include warnings about the nudity, such as
this one that appeared in a São Paulo newspaper: ‘‘notice–This film was
seen by more than 20,000 people in five days in Rio de Janeiro. Ladies and
Gentlemen: . . . in order to attend to the complaints made by overly sensi-
tive people, we have separated the fifth and sixth reels with a warning,
so that those who do not wish to see naked indians can leave the the-
ater. We ask you not to attend with girls [meninas] and children [crian-
ças].’’ 64
Gendered norms and expectations of the era explain why the notice
discouraged girls but not boys from attending. Nevertheless, filmmaker
Reis found the opposition infantile. ‘‘There is nothing,’’ he wrote in a
sarcastic letter to the editor of Tribuna in Santos, ‘‘that will unsettle the
dignity of our noble Mesdames and Mademoiselles.’’ As he explained it,
‘‘The naked Indian causes no scandal because the naked Indian has no
significance in terms of morality. . . . He’s an ethnographic type and not
a man without clothes.’’ 65
Others in the media supported the film and repeated Reis’s arguments.
‘‘The appearance of nudity,’’ an article in O Estado de São Paulo noted,
‘‘implies no offense to morals. The film was shown in Rio, and the pub-
lic greatly appreciated it.’’ In the state of São Paulo a local newspaper in
Guaratinguetá likewise criticized both those who found the film offen-
sive as well as those ‘‘who are incapable of controlling their most basic
instincts.’’ 66
Nevertheless, the film continued to spark protests. A rowdy protest
against the scenes of nudity disrupted the first showing of the film in
Guaratinguetá and led to calls for police intervention. Much the same
happened when Frederico Ortis do Rego Barros attempted to screen the
film in the state of Minas Gerais in 1916. Regos Barros had mounted
the equipment and was preparing to show the movie in Alfenas, Minas
Gerais, when at the last moment Dr. Francisco Faria Bastos, the local
police delegate, climbed the stage and cancelled the showing in defer-
ence to the good morals of the town. The police delegate proposed the
showing of the film without the offending sections, but Rego Barros re-
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fused on principle, and once again the commission’s tightly crafted plans
for positive publicity ran aground.67

Conclusion
The central office, it should now be clear, struggled to create a particular
image of the commission and its work. But emphasizing the long-term
development goals of the commission allowed its critics to focus on the
ongoing cost of the project. Emphasizing the healthiness of the region led
others to reaffirm the myriad stories of disease and death in northwest
Brazil. Capturing the heroic actions and accomplishments of the com-
mission on film offended the morals of many of Brazil’s urban residents.
Thus, the results of the central office’s and the commission’s public-
relations campaigns were mixed at best. Still, the publicity, along with a
slew of later hagiographies of Rondon, seem to have fixed a heroic image
of Rondon in the minds of many, if not most, Brazilians born and raised
during the early to mid-twentieth century. In the 1980s the Brazilian gov-
ernment celebrated Rondon the hero, the brave man of the sertão who
famously claimed in the face of Indian attacks that he would ‘‘die if nec-
essary; but kill, never,’’ with a 1,000 cruzeiro note bearing his likeness on
one side and those of Indians on the other. However, and perhaps this is
fitting, inflation quickly eroded its value, and the government withdrew
the note from circulation.68
Rondon always had his critics. Furthermore, a recent generation of
Brazilian scholars has reacted against the positive portrayals and hagiog-
raphy by presenting a far darker picture of the man and his commission.
Instead of Indian protection, these scholars speak of conquest and de-
struction. Instead of development, these scholars write about exploita-
tion. They speak of Rondon’s efforts not in terms of self-sacrifice but in
terms of self-aggrandizement.69 But all of these revisionist studies view
the Rondon Commission as a juggernaut, speaking of the entirely effi-
cacious activities of commission personnel. Rondon’s Indian policy was
really one of conquest as state building, Lima forcefully asserts, and it
was, he says, dreadfully successful. If Rondon’s project was first and fore-
most a military assault, as Laura Maciel argues, it was, she says, depress-
ingly effective. Films and photographs, she and others argue, asserted
‘‘modern’’ man’s technological and cultural superiority over indigenes.
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s e l l i n g a p e r s o n a n d a p ro d u c t * 153

And in this, the revisionists argue, Rondon and his men unfortunately
were all too successful.70
The failures and contradictions of the commission’s public-relations
work, however, belie the revisionist image of an all-powerful Rondon. He
indeed may have wanted to do certain things, and his actions may have
been designed primarily to assert his power, his commission’s power, and
the federal government’s authority. But reality was much more contra-
dictory than that, and the Rondon Commission never came close to being
the juggernaut of the Old Republic. The commission’s assertions of its
goals and accomplishments were one thing, but how the public accepted
these assertions and evaluated these accomplishments was quite another.
Herein, then, rests the ironic legacy of the commission’s public-
relations campaigns. They promoted Rondon and created an image that
grew throughout the twentieth century, until they sparked the recent re-
visionist attempts to discredit the man and his work. Yet both the hagi-
ographers and the revisionists share the assumption that Rondon and
his work powerfully and completely altered Brazil, be it for the better or
for the worse. For both sides Rondon continues to be a larger-than-life
figure, whether it be in glory or in infamy. Perhaps, then, the commis-
sion’s public-relations work was a success after all, for its assumptions
continue to shape our understanding and evaluations of the man and his
work to this day.
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Chapter Seven: t h e l e g ac y
o f t h e l o n e ly l i n e

T ucked between two busy streets in the neighborhood of

Botafogo, in Rio de Janeiro, the Museum of the Indian
provides scholars with a lovely place to study Rondon and his
legacy. Once the mansion of a coffee baron, the museum sits
in the shadow of the Christ statue on Rio’s famous Corcovado
Mountain. Outside its gates angry drivers honk their horns in
a futile fight against traffic jams. Inside those gates schoolchil-
dren play games of tag while they wait to tour the museum’s
exhibits with their teachers. Birds serenade scholars working
in the archives. On hot summer days workers and researchers
take their breaks in the cool shade of tall, green trees. In the
winter they relax on benches strategically located to capture
the sun’s rejuvenating rays.
In the museum’s library, shelves sag under the weight of
two full sets of the fifty or so published volumes of the Stra-
tegic Telegraph Commission of Mato Grosso to Amazonas.
The volumes pay silent homage to the grandiose plans of Ron-
don’s project. Geographic studies, accounts of mineral explo-
rations, early ethnographies, botanical surveys, medical re-
ports, and general construction updates compete for shelf
space. At first glance they give the impression of a vital, suc-
cessful, and powerful central state incursion into the farthest
interior lands of Brazil. Viewed from the comfortable sur-
roundings of Rio de Janeiro and the library reading room at
the Museum of the Indian, these studies suggest that Cândido
Mariano da Silva Rondon did indeed incorporate (or conquer,
depending on one’s interpretation) far off lands and peoples.
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156 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

Three unpublished commission reports, stored under much more pre-

carious circumstances a few miles away in the Army’s Historical Museum
in the Copacabana Fort, however, tell a much different story. Reporting
on the line’s condition in the 1920s and early 1930s, these reports, one of
which was penned by Rondon himself, describe an especially precarious
situation in which line maintenance failed to keep the ever-advancing
Amazon jungle at bay. Instead of the thousands of migrants Rondon pre-
dicted would settle along the line, only tens of lonely telegraph workers
led difficult lives filled with hunger, illness, and fear of Indian attacks. If
not for the telegraph line, an employee wrote in 1932, the region would
be abandoned completely. One could only hope, he noted, that the coun-
try’s leaders who took power in the Revolution of 1930 would rectify this
sad situation.1
With typical panache the famous French anthropologist Claude Lévi-
Strauss described a similarly forlorn situation along the telegraph line.
‘‘Those who live on Rondon’s [telegraph] line,’’ he wrote after his visit in
1938, ‘‘might as well be living on the moon.’’ Yes, the line still functioned,
but just barely. Sometimes it took days to send a telegram from one sta-
tion to another. The line itself, according to Lévi-Strauss, sagged from
rotten poles, and even ran along the ground in many spots. ‘‘As strange
as it may seem,’’ he continued, ‘‘the line heightens the loneliness of the
region, rather than reducing it.’’ 2
‘‘The birth of the radiotelegraphy,’’ the anthropologist noted bitterly,
‘‘instantly turned the telegraph project into an enormous archeological
vestige the moment the line was completed.’’ The condition of the line’s
handful of workers shocked the Frenchman. It had been years since they
had received any supplies from the federal government. At most, a hun-
dred people scratched out a subsistence-level existence along 800 miles
of line, just twenty-three years after Rondon returned to Rio de Janeiro
in triumph after its inauguration. ‘‘No one bothers to close the line,’’
Lèvi-Strauss concluded, and the station employees, ‘‘without the energy
to move, and without the means to do so,’’ would eventually ‘‘die slow
deaths, weakened as they are by disease, hunger, and loneliness.’’ 3
After reading the published works of the commission, the numerous
hagiographies of Rondon, and especially the recent spate of revisionist
studies condemning Rondon’s work, the reader today is shocked by these
reports of abandonment, isolation, and failure. And this is precisely the
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l e g ac y o f t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 157

Unidentified telegraph station. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro

Audio-Visual, Museu do Índio.

ultimate contradiction of the Rondon Commission. It failed largely to ac-

complish its goals of incorporating lands, fomenting development, and
assimilating indigenous peoples. But why, then, do both supporters and
detractors present Rondon’s work as efficacious and powerful, when in
reality it was neither?
It is worth repeating the argument that the contradictions of Rondon
and his project fundamentally weakened the activities of the commis-
sion. Granted, Rondon was able to secure funding, sometimes massive
amounts of funding, for more than a decade. Furthermore, he and his
men did build the line, and given the circumstances, logistics, and envi-
ronment of the region, this was no small accomplishment. However, the
project collapsed and literally receded back into the jungle just twenty
years after its inauguration. This was due in part to Rondon’s Positivism,
for while it furnished him with the internal strength to carry on, it also
led him into sectarian activities that alienated officials within the army,
government leaders, and Catholic church officials, thus limiting his and
his project’s influence in the halls of power. Likewise, the commission’s
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The telegraph line. Courtesy of Comissão Rondon, Serviço de Registro Audio-

Visual, Museu do Índio.
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l e g ac y o f t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 159

public-relations activities indeed did capture the public’s attention, but

they also exposed that public to the contradictions and excesses of the
project.
There is no denying, however, the lasting legacy of Cândido Mariano
da Silva Rondon in spite of commission failures and the early, de facto
abandonment of the line. In addition to the tens of thousand of pages
written about him and his work, he was once nominated for a Nobel
Peace Prize, and in the 1930s Harvard University considered offering him
an honorary degree.4 Rondon’s legacy is in part due to the successes of his
publicity machine, which fixed in the minds of Brazilians the image of the
heroic, tireless, and fearless pioneer. His legacy also continued because it
captured the increasingly patriotic and nationalistic themes of national
incorporation and state building. ‘‘Brazil: The country of the future’’ was
the nation’s developmentalist slogan of the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury. This image of a vast Brazil, rich with minerals just waiting to be
exploited, began in part with the cltemta.5
Indeed, one prominent veteran of the Rondon Commission energeti-
cally continued Rondon’s blueprint for state-led development and thus
helped solidify his legacy. Commission officer Júlio Caetano Horta Bar-
bosa directed bridge and road construction projects in Mato Grosso at
a time when Rondon argued that such infrastructure development was
necessary for the construction of national sovereignty in the Brazilian far
west. In the 1940s and 1950s General Horta Barbosa led an emotional and
controversial campaign to create a state petroleum monopoly in Brazil
for essentially the same reason, for he sought ‘‘to ensure national sover-
eignty defined in the broadest possible sense.’’ Not surprisingly, Positiv-
ists supported these efforts and organized a national civic campaign in
support of Horta Barbosa, who was their coreligionist.6
Rondon’s powerful legacy is also the result of his lengthy career and
long life, for he was ninety-two years old when he died. Forced into re-
tirement as a result of the Revolution of 1930, he remained extremely
active as the longtime director of the National Council for the Protection
of Indians (Conselho Nacional de Proteção aos Índios, or cnpi), and he
maintained a public presence by promoting such projects as a national
Day of the Indian. Even in the last years of his life Rondon still took time
to write to national leaders and foreign diplomats to mark important na-
tional and foreign holidays and political events.7
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160 * st r i n g i n g to g e t h e r a nat i o n

Rondon’s legacy continues to shape Brazilians and Brazilian intellec-

tuals primarily because of his involvement with the emotional issues of
nation building. Rondon’s indigenist policies, his writings and speeches,
and his promotion of Positivism addressed the vital issue of Brazil’s na-
tional identity. It sought to fashion a united Brazilian ‘‘people’’ out of a
diverse array of ethnic groups, races, and cultures. And, to be sure, the
problematic aspects of this quest, which current scholars are now ex-
amining and criticizing (quite fairly in many respects), have continued
to keep Rondon in the public’s eye nearly fifty years after his death and
nearly ninety years after the inauguration of the Cuiabá–Madeira River
telegraph line.
At the start of her delightful collection of essays on Indians in Brazil,
Alcida Rita Ramos asks, ‘‘Why [do] Brazilian Indians, being so few, have
such a prominent place in the national consciousness [of Brazil]?’’ In-
deed, Indians are today, and have been for centuries, a tiny minority in
the country. They comprise, she notes, ‘‘the smallest indigenous popula-
tion in the Americas,’’ with the exception of Argentina. Put another way,
Doris Sommer asks, ‘‘Why does an Indian identity survive in a culture
that keeps killing off the real thing?’’ 8
Rondon’s legacy remains powerful because his vision of the nation
grew out of his vision of Indians as a symbol of Brazilianness. As both
Sommer and Ramos note, Indian identity (and whether or not it was ‘‘in-
vented’’ is unimportant) became a foundation of the modern Brazilian
nation. And as David Treece writes, there has never been a time, since
1835 or so, when elite attempts to define Brazil as a nation have not re-
ferred to its original inhabitants. Whether Indians are ‘‘good’’ and repre-
sent the American essence of Brazil, or whether they are ‘‘bad’’ and retard
modernization, one’s image of the Brazilian nation is either way tied to
one’s image of Indians. That this is the case is due in part to Rondon’s
career, and it helps explain his lasting legacy.9
‘‘Either in disparaging remarks, . . . or in laudatory Edenic terms,’’
Alcida Ramos notes, ‘‘the Indians are held responsible for some of the
best qualities as well as the worst vices of Brazilianess.’’ In truth, the same
thing could be said about Rondon. His legacy, for many Brazilians, is that
of a hero and a beacon for a stronger, more prosperous, and unified Brazil.
Yet for other Brazilians he is a prominent source of the country’s cur-
rent troubles with authoritarianism, military rule, racism, and environ-
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l e g ac y o f t h e l o n e ly l i n e * 161

mental degradation. That neither opinion is based on the actual accom-

plishments and failures of this man is no coincidence, for nations depend
not on what is or what was but on what is remembered. The invention
and reinvention of Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon will continue to
accompany the invention and reinvention of the Brazilian nation.10
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6952 Diacon / STRINGING TOGETHER A NATION / sheet 175 of 242

n ot e s

Introduction
1 This correspondence, conducted by Rondon between June and September
1956, is contained in an unmarked file in the ar.
2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities.
3 Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 621.
4 The best source for information on Rondon’s life is Viveiros, Rondon conta a
sua vida. See also Macaulay, The Prestes Column, chap. 3.

one A People and a Place

1 Eakin, Brazil, 2. Also see Skidmore, Brazil, 2–3; and Pulsipher, World Regional
Geography, 108–10, 137–40, 161–65.
2 cltemta, Relatório dos trabalhos realizados, 18–19.
3 Diário de Rondon, 29 [de agosto de 1902], p. 341; 30 [de setembro de 1902],
p. 350, 01008.002, ar. Diário de Rondon, 28 [de março de 1906], p. 1,145;
18 [de abril de 1906], p. 1,185, 010118.006, ar. Bigio, ‘‘Linhas telegráficas e
integração de povos indígenas,’’ 13. Lesser, Negotiating National Identity, 97.
Foweraker, Struggle for Land, 39. Frank, ‘‘The Brazilian Far West,’’ 4–5. Gar-
field, Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil, 91. Bieber, Power, Patronage,
and Political Violence, 7–8.
4 I first discussed this incident in Diacon, ‘‘Bringing the Countryside Back In,’’
169–70. For more on this rebellion see Diacon, Millenarian Vision, Capitalist
Reality.
5 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, new college ed.
(1976), s.v. ‘‘country.’’
6 For a discussion of state and nation for nineteenth-century Brazil see Bar-
man, Brazil and Citizen Emperor.
7 Viotti da Costa, ‘‘Brazil,’’ 727. Dean, ‘‘The Brazilian Economy,’’ 685, 691, 693.
Foweraker, Struggle for Land, 41, 47, 55–57, 59–60, 62. Skidmore and Smith,
Modern Latin America, 42–47. For a history of the role played by agricul-
ture and agricultural elites in constructing the Brazilian nation see Eduardo
Rodrigues Gomes, ‘‘Campo contra cidade.’’ For a discussion of economic
changes and their impact on elite composition in Mato Grosso see Frank,
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164 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 1

‘‘Elite Families and Oligarchic Politics,’’ 55, 61–70. Barman, Citizen Emperor,
243–45, 247, 250.
8 Skidmore, Brazil, 64. Calvalcante and Rodrigues, Mato Grosso e sua história,
47–54. Beattie, ‘‘Conscription Versus Penal Servitude,’’ 848, 856. For an inter-
esting study of the recruitment and experiences of Afro-Brazilian soldiers
during the war see Kraay, ‘‘Soldiers, Officers, and Society’’; see also his recent
book, Race, State, and Armed Forces in Independence-Era Brazil.
9 Skidmore, Brazil, 62. Marilena de Souza Chaui quoted in Maciel, ‘‘A nação
por um fio,’’ 19. Helpful sources on nation building in Brazil include Antonio
Carlos de Souza Lima, Um grande cerco de paz; Seyferth, ‘‘Construindo a
nação,’’ 41–59; Lesser, Negotiating National Identity; Chasteen, Heroes on Horse-
back; Peard, Race, Place, and Medicine; Motta, A nação faz 100 anos, esp. 11–40.
For a suggestive examination of the relationship between nation building
and sexuality in the works of a generation of Brazilian intellectuals see Rago,
‘‘Sexualidade e identidade.’’ For Latin America and elsewhere, useful start-
ing points for research are Sommer, Foundational Fictions; Mallon, Peasant
and Nation; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Hobsbawm, Nations
and Nationalism; Anthony D. Smith, ‘‘The Myth of the ‘Modern Nation’ ’’ and
‘‘The Problem of National Identity.’’
10 Peard, Race, Place, and Medicine, 3.
11 Seyfirth, ‘‘Construindo a nação,’’ 41.
12 Eakin, Brazil, 120. For two studies that examine these issues for Rio de Janeiro
see Meade, ‘‘Civilizing’’ Rio; and Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro.
13 Seyfirth, ‘‘Construindo a nação,’’ 41–51; Lesser, Negotiating National Identity,
2–5; Skidmore, Brazil, 77–78; Eakin, Brazil, 114–22, 157–58; Schwarcz, O espetá-
culo das raças, 18–19, 240–50; Peard, Race, Place, and Medicine, 6–7. Two foun-
dational texts on this subject are Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics, and Skidmore,
Black into White. João Batista de Lacerda, of the National Museum of Rio de
Janeiro, was one of the most famous proponents of the ‘‘whitening’’ thesis.
14 Schwartz, O espetáculo, 244, 249. This book appears in English as The Spec-
tacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870–
1930, trans. Leyland Guyer (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). The works of
Thomas E. Skidmore and Nancy Leys Stepan (see n.13) are useful starting
points for the study of race and nation in Brazil. See also Eakin, Brazil, 117,
158; Maio and Santos, ‘‘Apresentação,’’ 9; Monteiro, ‘‘As ‘raças’ indígenas,’’
16; Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 147, 151. For a useful discussion of recent
works on race and race relations in Brazil see Dávila, ‘‘Expanding Perspec-
tives.’’
15 Fausto, ‘‘Brazil,’’ 797–800. For an example of how Brazilian army officers re-
flected on their role in nation building see Diacon, ‘‘Bringing the Countryside
Back In.’’
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 1 * 165

16 Eakin, Brazil, 38–39, 171–73; Skidmore, Brazil, 75; Foweraker, Struggle for Land,
84–85, 209–10; Dean, ‘‘The Brazilian Economy,’’ 690; Fausto, ‘‘Brazil,’’ 790–
94; Frank, ‘‘The Brazilian Far West,’’ 425, 431–32. For a brief suggestion that
the federal government did exercise considerable power in this period see
Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil, 3.
17 Fausto, ‘‘Brazil,’’ 792; Foweraker, Struggle for Land, 65, 210–16; Skidmore and
Smith, Modern Latin America, 42–47. I have explored in depth the issue of
expanding central state power during the Old Republic in ‘‘Bringing the
Countryside Back In’’ and in ‘‘Searching for a Lost Army.’’ For key works on
this topic for Brazil see Topik, ‘‘The State’s Contribution’’ and The Political
Economy of the Brazilian State; Font, Coffee, Contention, and Change; Saes, A for-
mação do estado; Frank, ‘‘The Brazilian Far West.’’ The most recent assertion
of the importance of central state power during the Old Republic is Perissi-
notto, ‘‘Estado, Capital Cafeeiro e Politica Tributaria.’’ Other key works on
the state and the expansion of state power include Abrams, ‘‘Notes on the
Difficulty of Studying the State’’; Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch; Sayer,
‘‘Everyday Forms of State Formation’’; Skocpol, ‘‘Bringing the State Back
In’’ and Protecting Soldiers and Mothers; Tilley, Coercion, Capital, and European
States; Brewer, Sinews of Power; Skowronek, Building a New American State.
18 Lima and Hochman, ‘‘Condenado pela raça,’’ 25; see also 23–25, 30, 32. Peard,
Race, Place, and Medicine, 8–9. Skidmore, Brazil, 77–82. For more on nation
and state building as they relate to public health see Benchimol, Dos micróbios
aos mosquitos; Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science and The Hour of Eugen-
ics; Carvalho, Os bestializados, chap. 4; Needell, ‘‘The Revolta Contra Vacina of
1904.’’ For an interesting discussion of nation and state building as they relate
to public health policies along the Texas-Mexico border see Stern, ‘‘Build-
ings, Boundaries, and Blood.’’
19 Lima and Hochman, ‘‘Condenada pela raça,’’ 23–36. For participant accounts
of the 1910s health expeditions to the Amazon see Cruz, Chagas, and Peixoto,
Sobre o saneamento da Amazônia.
20 ‘‘Transforming Enlisting Army Service,’’ 282; see also 250–252, 279–283, 476,
493.
21 Beattie, Tribute of Blood, 231; see also 228–37.
22 McCann, ‘‘The Nation in Arms.’’
23 Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 28, 31–32, 74; Langfur, ‘‘Myths of Pacification.’’
Indeed, on 18 November 1889 the provincial assembly of Mato Grosso, un-
aware of the declaration of the republic, passed a resolution congratulating
Emperor Pedro II on his birthday (Cavalcante and Rodrigues, Mato Grosso,
85–86).
24 Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 25, 30. ‘‘Carta, Affonso Penna ao Ruy Barbosa,
Belo Horizonte, 7 de outubro de 1906,’’ cr 1127.1 (16), crb. Rondon quoted in
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166 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2

Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 73. cltemta, Relatório dos trabalhos realizados,
11–13.
25 Berthold, History, 4, 9, rg 259 e30, box 1, na. Coordinator of Inter-American
Affairs for the Interdepartmental Committee, ‘‘Confidential Report: Inter-
American Communications,’’ Washington, D.C., 30 January 1942, p. 16, rg
259 e28, box 1, na. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 132. For an entertaining history
of the telegraph and for a useful comparison of the private development of
the telegraph in the United States as opposed to the state ownership of it in
Brazil, see Standage, Victorian Internet. For a further discussion of state-led
versus private development of infrastructure in the United States see Larson,
Internal Improvement. On the strategic importance of the telegraph in Brazil
see Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 10, 18, 80; and Bigio, Cândido Rondon, 5–8.
26 Brasil, Ministério de Indústria, Viação e Obras Públicas, Relatório, 1907, 497–
98. Berthold, History, 4–16. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 27–31.
27 cltemta, Relatório dos trabalhos realizados, 11–13, 29. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por
um fio,’’ 74–78. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 61–63, 91, 116–17.
28 cltemta, Relatório dos trabalhos realizados, 164–66. Bigio, Cândido Rondon,
5–8. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 74–78.
29 For more on Rondon and the Bororo see Langfur, ‘‘Myths of Pacification.’’
30 cltemta, Relatório à Directoria Geral, no date, 5–6, 11–14. Diário de Rondon,
1 de abril [de 1907], pp. 1,667–1,671, 010118.011, ar.
31 cltemta, Relatório à Directoria Geral, 6.

two Building the Lonely Line

1 Diário de Rondon, 24 [fevereiro de 1908], 010118.015; 11 [março de 1908],
010118.015, pp. 2198–2201, ar. cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres
3–4, 6–7. Capitão Francisco Raul Estillac Leal, ‘‘Relatório, primeiro secção,’’
in cltemta, Relatórios diversos, 37–64. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 252.
2 Brasil, Ministério da Viação e Obras Públicas, Relatório, 1909, 496. Brasil,
Ministério da Viação e Obras Públicas, Relatório, 1910, 10. cltemta, Relatório
à Diretoria Geral, 37, 41, 45, 65. cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado à Directo-
ria Geral dos Telégraphos pelo General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon,
31 de dezembro de 1926,’’ p. 99, ar. The quote is from Price, ‘‘Nambiquara
Society,’’ 52.
3 For the publicity surrounding these explorations and Rondon’s account of
them, see cltemta, Conferências realizadas. See also chapter 6 herein.
4 The Brazilian scholars Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima and Laura Maciel de-
nounce Rondon for exaggerating the novelty of his explorations in this re-
gion. Their criticism itself is exaggerated, for Rondon clearly acknowledged
the presence of Portuguese explorers in the region centuries earlier but ex-
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2 * 167

plained that he was exploring headwaters the Portuguese had never visited
and that he was the first to survey and map most of these places. Indeed,
as head of the cltemta, Rondon commissioned a brief (forty-page) history
of Portuguese explorations of the area, as well as a subsequent history of
explorations from 1795 through 1921 (cltemta, ‘‘Explorações; vocabulários
de diversas tribus,’’ 1919?, spi-ac, filme 316, fot. 0751–92, mi; cltemta, un-
titled, spi-ac, filme 316, fot. 1,270–1,319, mi). Late in his life Rondon ex-
plained his claim of ‘‘discovering’’ the Juruena River thus: ‘‘I say discover be-
cause vague notions and indications were all that existed [about the river]’’
(quoted in Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 233; see also 401 for further ex-
amples of how Rondon specifically acknowledged Portuguese explorations
of the region). Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Um grande cerco de paz, espe-
cially chap. 7. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 116. See also Price, ‘‘Nambiquara
Society,’’ 4–24.
5 cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 43–48. cltemta, Conferências, 1910, 17.
Diário de Rondon, 30 [de agosto de 1908], 010118.017, pp. 2,502–4; 21 [de
outubro de 1907], 010118.012, p. 1,978, ar.
6 Diário de Rondon, 20 [de outubro de 1907], 010118.012, pp. 1,968, 1,970, 1,973,
ar.
7 Diário de Rondon, 22 [de outubro de 1908], 010118.012, pp. 1,982–87, ar.
8 Diário de Rondon, 22 [de outubro de 1908], 010118.012, p. 1,984, ar.
cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 58–59. cltemta, Conferências realizadas
em 1910, 26–27.
9 Diário de Rondon, 23 [de outubro de 1908], 010118.012, pp. 1,990–97, ar. See
also Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do dia no. 77, 24 de fevereiro
de 1908,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 800, mi.
10 cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 58, 60. cltemta, Conferências realizadas
em 1910, 29. Diário de Rondon, 11 [de novembro de 1907], 010118.012, pp.
2,053–54, ar. Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do dia no. 27, 24
de fevereiro 1908,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 798–805, mi. Viveiros, Rondon conta
a sua vida, 234–42.
11 cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado ao Directoria Geral dos Telégraphos pelo
General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de Dezembro de 1926,’’ pp.
51–59, ar. O Jornal do Comércio (Manaus), 8 de abril de 1914. Ornig, My Last
Chance, 95–96.
12 Diário de Rondon, 21 [de maio de 1908], 010118.016, pp. 2,280–81; 6 [de junho
de 1908], 010118.016, pp. 2,305–6, ar. Capitão Alencarliense Fernandes da
Costa, ‘‘Relatório do 27° Distrito Telegráphico comprehendendo os annos
de 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, e o primeiro semestre do 1920 apresentado à
Chefia da Comissão,’’ pp. 4, 6, ar. cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão
de Engenharia, 31–32. cltemta, Geologia, 29–33. Botelho de Magalhães, Im-
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168 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2

pressões, 65–67. Roquette-Pinto, Rondônia, 108, 116, 300. Construction on the

main telegraph line west of Utiariti stopped between July and December of
1909 in order for workers to finish the road between Tapirapuã and Juruena
(Brasil, Ministério de Viação e Obras Públicas, Relatório, 1910, 387). To place
the construction of this road in its national context see Vianna, História da
viação brasileira, chap. 20.
13 Diário de Rondon, 22 de abril [de 1908], 010118.015, p. 2,250; 3 [de maio de
1908], 010118.015, pp. 2,260–61; 26 [de junho de 1908], 010118.016, pp. 2,341–
42; 29 [julho de 1908], 010118.016, p. 2,389, ar. cltemta, Relatório apresen-
tado à Divisão de Engenharia.
14 Diário de Rondon, 31 [de julho de 1908], 010118.016, p. 2,393; 4 [de augusto
de 1908], 010118.016, pp. 2,406–8, ar. cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral,
75–76, 81, 84, 87, 129, 137–39. Levi Grant Monroe, ‘‘Candido Mariano da Silva
Rondon, Distinguished Son and Most Beloved Man of Brazil: History of His
Life Work,’’ Brazilian American, 20 January 1923, p. 32.
15 The quote is from Diário de Rondon, 7 [de setembro de 1908], 010118.017,
p. 2,527, ar. cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910, 36. For a work that em-
phasizes the nation building activities of the Rondon Commission see Tacca,
‘‘O índio ‘pacificado,’ ’’ 81–101.
16 cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 136–37, 151. Diário de Rondon, 16 [de
setembro de 1908], 010228.018, pp. 2,587–88; 17 [de setembro de 1908],
010118.018, pp. 2,588–90, ar. The quote is from cltemta, Relatório à Direto-
ria Geral, 118. By and large the soldiers who deserted would make their way
back down the path, taking care to skirt the base camp at the Juruena River
to avoid capture.
17 Diário de Rondon, 3 [de outubro de 1908], 10118.018, pp.2,655–58, ar. Major
Custódio de Senna Braga, ‘‘Ordem do Dia, Acampamento no rio do Sangue,
22 de outubro de 1908,’’ ‘‘Ordem do Dia . . . 23 de outubro de 1908,’’ and
‘‘Ordem do Dia . . . 28 de outubro de 1908,’’ CRcx3-filme 1, fot. 2505–2510,
mi. cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 151–59.
18 cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910, 42–43, 46–47, 72–73, 106–9. Vi-
veiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 283. cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 175–
77, 189. The relationship between power and the gathering of information is
a main theme in Lima, Um grande cerco de paz.
19 cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910, 17, 51–52. Viveiros, Rondon conta a
sua vida, 205, 284, 287.
20 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Instrucções pelas quaes se deverá guiar
o Sr. Capitão Manoel Teophilo da Costa Pinheiro, Chefe da turma da explora-
ção do Rio Jacy-Paraná,’’ reprinted in Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 209–
13. cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910, 47, 62–63. cltemta, Relatório
à Diretoria Geral, 76, 89.
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2 * 169

21 cltemta, Geologia, 29–33. Roquette-Pinto, Rondônia, 172. Price, ‘‘Nambi-

quara Society,’’ 50–62. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 285, 288, 291, 294,
303. cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910, 57–58. cltemta, Relatório à
Diretoria Geral, 217–18. One commission officer noted that it rained almost
every day during the rainy season and that he once saw it rain nonstop
for fourteen days. Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 33–34. Ornig, My Last
Chance, 112–13. For an extended discussion of the difficulties of working in
the forest see Nicolau Bueno Horta Barbosa, ‘‘Diário,’’ 20 de novembro de
1912, ar.
22 cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 13. cltemta, Conferências reali-
zadas em 1910, 56. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 296–97, 303. The mem-
bers of the Jaciparaná River expedition all took ill with malaria while waiting
for Rondon. On their return descent of the river they were attacked by a local
indigenous group.
23 cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 300–316.
24 cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 14–21. For an extended descrip-
tion of the difficulties of navigating the Jiparaná River see Nicolau Bueno
Horta Barbosa, ‘‘Diário,’’ pp. 1–16, ar.
25 cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 20–21, ar. cltemta, Conferên-
cias realizadas 1910, 72.
26 cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910, 72. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua
vida, 280, 283. Rondon had been ill since the beginning of the expedition.
While still in Tapirapuã in May 1909, Dr. Tanajura examined Rondon and
suggested that he cancel the expedition and return to Rio de Janeiro for
treatment. Rondon, of course, refused (cltemta, Serviço sanitário Secção de
Cáceres, 6; Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 100–103).
27 It was probably the first time that some of these residents had encountered
the national flag, let alone the anthem of the Fifth Battalion of Engineers.
cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 323. cltemta, Conferências realizadas
em 1910, 73–75. cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro
de 1915, 221–22. cnpi, ‘‘Fé de Ofício . . . Rondon,’’ pp. 12–16, cnpi-ag, cx5,
mi.
28 cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 15. cltemta, Serviço
sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 23–25. Levi Grant Monroe, ‘‘Candido Mariano da
Silva Rondon, Distinguished Son and Most Beloved Man of Brazil: History
of his Life Work,’’ Brazilian-American, 20 January 1923. pp. 47–48. Viveiros,
Rondon conta a sua vida, 321–25, 352–53.
29 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do dia no. 1, 1 de janeiro de
1915,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 1,335, mi. cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos
dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 154–62. cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado ao
Cidadão Coronel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, D.D. Chefe da Commis-
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170 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2

são de Linhas Telegráphicas de Matto-Grosso ao Amazonas, pelo Primeiro

Tenente do 5° Batalhão de Engenharia Sebastião Pinto da Silva, Ajudante
d’esta Commissao,’’ reprinted in cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de
Engenharia, 27, 293. cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado ao Directoria Geral
dos Telégraphos pelo General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de De-
zembro 1926,’’ pp. 41, 43, 46, ar. ‘‘Carta, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon
ao Sr. Ministro d’Estado dos Negócios da Viação e Obras Públicas Augusto
Tavares de Lyra, 16 de julho de 1915,’’ spi-ac, filme 327, fot. 1,499, mi. Roose-
velt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 263. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 98–
99.
30 Tenente João Bernardo Lobato Filho, ‘‘Commissão de Linhas Telegráphicas-
Secção do Norte (Ligeiras informações sobre o serviço),’’ in cltemta, Rela-
tórios diversos, 149–52. cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado ao Directoria Geral
dos Telégraphos pelo General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de De-
zembro 1926,’’ p. 33, ar. Roquette-Pinto, Rondônia, 163.
31 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Dados históricos da pacificação dos
Nhambiquaras,’’ ar. Conselho Nacional de Proteção aos Índios, ‘‘Fé de
Ofício . . . Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon,’’ pp. 16–20, cnpi-ag, cx5, mi.
cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 15–16, 19, 27–28, 31.
Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 360–61, 365.
32 ‘‘Telegrama, Coronel Rondon ao Sr., Dr. Lauro Muller, Ministro do Exterior,
Barão de Melgaço, 3 de outubro de 1913,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,493, mi.
Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 1–6. O Imparcial, 17 de outubro de
1913. Ornig, My Last Chance, 4, 18–20.
33 ‘‘Telegrama, Rondon ao Tenente Jaguaribe [Francisco Jaguaribe Gomes de
Matos], 7 de outubro de 1913,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,494, mi. cnpi, ‘‘Fé de
Ofício . . . Rondon,’’ pp. 18–20, cnpi-ag, cx5, mi. A Noite, 11 de novembro
de 1913.
34 ‘‘Telegrama (urgente), Rondon ao Tenente Jaguaribe, Pimenta Bueno, 12 de
outubro de 1913,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,495, mi. ‘‘Telegrama, Coronel Ron-
don ao Sr., Dr. Lauro Muller, Ministro de Exterior, Barão de Melgaço, 3 de
outubro de 1913,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,493, mi. ‘‘Telegrama, Rondon ao
Tenente Jaguaribe, Barão de Melgaço, 7 de outubro de 1913,’’ spi-ac, filme
373, fot. 1,494, mi.
35 Father Zahm quoted in Ornig, My Last Chance, 48. Jornal do Comércio, 16
de outubro de 1913. Gazeta de Notícias, 21 de outubro de 1913. O País, 21 de
outubro de 1913. Correio da Manhã, 22 de outubro de 1913, 25 de outubro de
1913. O Imparcial, 23 de outubro de 1913, 25 de outubro de 1913. Rondon’s ar-
rival in Rio in November sparked another round of media coverage of Roose-
velt’s visit and Rondon’s telegraph project. O País, 11 de novembro de 1913,
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2 * 171

13 de novembro de 1913, 2 de dezembro de 1913. O Imparcial, 12 de novembro

de 1913. A Noite, 11 de novembro de 1913.
36 A Noite, 3 de novembro de 1913. Jornal do Comércio, 22 de outubro de 1913.
O Imparcial, 21 de outubro de 1913.
37 O Imparcial, 29 de janeiro de 1914. O País, 22 de outubro de 1913. For its part
the newspaper A Noite mocked Roosevelt’s interest in safaris, referring to him
always as ‘‘the hunter.’’ A Noite, 3 de novembro de 1913, 12 de novembro de
1913, 2 de dezembro de 1913, 15 de dezembro de 1913.
38 ‘‘Telegrama, Rondon ao Tenente Jaguaribe, Ceará, 3 de novembro de 1913,’’
spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,496, mi. Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Notas
organizadas para o relatório da chefia da Commissão Brasileira, desenvolvi-
das sob as bases do schema transmittido pelo próprio Chefe Sr. Coronel Cân-
dido Mariano da Silva Rondon,’’ n.d., spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,664. cltemta,
Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 10–13. Correio da
Manhã, 22 de outubro de 1913. Ornig, My Last Chance, 29, 49–50.
39 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Schema geral dos trabalhos da Expe-
dição Scientífica Roosevelt-Rondon,’’ n.d., spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,480. Cân-
dido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Notas organizadas,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot.
1,674, mi. Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 53–54. Ornig, My Last
Chance, 77, 106. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 383–88.
40 Roosevelt quoted in Ornig, My Last Chance, 79.
41 Frederico Hoehne, ‘‘Introducção e observações phytogeographicas, physio-
nomia e aspecto da vegetação em geral,’’ 25 de março de 1914, spi-ac, filme
373, fot. 1,609, mi. Rondon, ‘‘Notas organizadas,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,686–
87, mi.
42 Hoehne, ‘‘Introducção e observações phytogeographicas, physionomia e as-
pecto da vegetação em geral,’’ 25 de março de 1914, spi-ac, filme 373, fot.
1,607–9, mi. Kermit Roosevelt quoted in Ornig, My Last Chance, 101. For the
numerous telegrams traded between Rondon and Muller over the finances
of the expedition see the contents of spi-ac, filme 373, mi.
43 cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe, 97. ‘‘Telegrama, Rondon ao Tenente
Lauriodó [de Sant’ Ana], Corumbá, 27 de Dezembro de 1913,’’ spi-ac, filme
373, fot. 1,508; ‘‘Telegrama, Rondon ao Capitão Amilcar [Armando Botelho de
Magalhães], Vilhena, no date,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,514; Cândido Mariano
da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Relação dos volumes pertencentes à Expedição Scientífica
Roosevelt-Rondon embarcados no vapor Amazon,’’ n.d., spi-ac, filme 373,
fot. 1,578; Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Tabela organizada para as
refeições diárias dos 30 pessoas,’’ n.d., spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,581, 1,593, mi.
Ornig, My Last Chance, chap. 7.
44 Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 256, 261, 265–66. Ornig, My Last
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172 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2

Chance, 108–9, 114–15, 140. For an interesting analysis of Roosevelt’s writings

on the Amazon see Slater, Entangled Edens, 44–48.
45 cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe, 20–27, 35–38. ‘‘Telegrama, Júlio
[Caetano Horta Barbosa], ao Sr. Coronel Rondon, Cuyabá, 3 de janeiro de
1914,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,523; ‘‘Telegrama, Júlio ao Sr. Coronel Rondon,
Cuyabá, 3 de janeiro de 1914,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,524; ‘‘Telegrama, Júlio
ao Sr. Coronel Rondon, Cuyabá, no date,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,525, mi.
Ornig, My Last Chance, 95–96, 100.
46 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Notas organizadas,’’ spi-ac, filme 373,
fot. 1,687; ‘‘Telegrama, Júlio ao Sr. Coronel Rondon, Cuyabá, 3 de janeiro de
1914,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,523, mi.
47 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do dia, no. 8, 1 de fevereiro de
1914,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,563, mi. cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao
Chefe, 16–17, 24–25. Ornig, My Last Chance, 104–5, 108, 111–12, 114–15. Viveiros,
Rondon conta a sua vida, 394.
48 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Notas organizadas,’’ spi-ac, filme 373,
fot. 1,688, mi. Ornig, My Last Chance, 113. cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao
Chefe, 13–35. Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 266, 294.
49 Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 243, 255. ‘‘Telegrama, Coronel
Rondon ao Dr. Lauro Muller, Ministro Exterior, Corumbá, 24 de dezembro
de 1913,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,506; ‘‘Telegrama, Tenente Pyrineus ao Coro-
nel Rondon, Càceres, n.d.,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,516, mi. Foreign Minister
Muller at first refused to pay for this relief crew on the Aripuanã River, given
that his ministry’s budget for Roosevelt was exhausted.
50 Ornig, My Last Chance, 127. Theodore Roosevelt to John Scott Kelly, 15 Feb-
ruary 1915, quoted in ibid., 128. ‘‘Telegrama, Rondon ao Capitão Amilcar,
Vilhena, no date,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,514, mi. In their major published
works neither Rondon nor Roosevelt addressed the conflicts discussed in this
section. Ornig found them discussed by Roosevelt in letters and by Kermit
Roosevelt and George Cherrie in letters and diaries. In his last ‘‘Order of the
Day’’ before the descent of the River of Doubt Rondon took pains to praise
the very transport crew that the Americans maligned, noting that they had
‘‘demonstrated tremendous physical resistance’’ and had maintained a posi-
tive attitude in spite of the difficult conditions created by the rains (Cândido
Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do dia, no. 11, 23 de fevereiro de 1914,’’
spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,567, mi). Rondon later claimed that he had always
planned to supplement the expedition’s provisions with food to be hunted
and gathered while on the journey (Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 400).
51 Ornig, My Last Chance, 133. Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Relação do
pessoal que desceu o Rio da Dúvida em 27 de fevereiro de 1914,’’ spi-ac, filme
373, fot. 1,490; ‘‘Telegrama, Coronel Rondon ao Dr. Lauro Muller-Ministro
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2 * 173

Exterior-Porto do Campo, 7 de janeiro de 1914,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,512;

Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia, no. 13, 23 de fevereiro
de 1914,’’ spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,490, mi. Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian
Wilderness, 263. The American naturalist Leo Miller accompanied another
Brazilian crew, which descended the Comemoração and Jiparaná Rivers.
Lieutenant Lyra died in April 1917, when his canoe capsized on the Sepotuba
River. Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 164–65.
52 Ornig, My Last Chance, 134. Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 244–
45. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 407–8.
53 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 77. Or-
nig, My Last Chance, 132, 138–40. Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness,
251–55.
54 Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 270. Roosevelt did not comment
on his son’s disregard of Rondon’s orders. cltemta, Conferências realizadas
nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 82. Ornig, My Last Chance, 146–48. In Ron-
don’s later memoir his anger over the episode is not mentioned. Viveiros,
Rondon conta a sua vida, 410.
55 Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wildnerness, 274, 262–68. cltemta, Conferên-
cias realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 77–102. Ornig, My Last
Chance, 150. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 407–13.
56 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 91–93.
Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 280–83. Ornig, My Last Chance,
154–58.
57 The index to the ‘‘Notas organizadas’’ report on the expedition clearly dem-
onstrates that Rondon included a day-to-day account of the descent of the
River of Doubt. The pages corresponding to this section are missing. The
last ‘‘Order of the Day’’ is for 23 February 1914 (the last day before the actual
descent of the River of Doubt) (spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,567, mi).
58 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 92, 11–13,
57–70.
59 Roosevelt quoted in Ornig, My Last Chance, 157. Roosevelt, Through the Bra-
zilian Wilderness, 290–310.
60 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 96. Roose-
velt, Through the Brazilian Wildnerness, 290–310. Ornig, My Last Chance, 160–
71. As opposed to Rondon, commission physician Dr. Cajazeira also worried
about supplies. Most of the canned foods disappeared when canoes were
swamped. Men were now subsisting on honey, palm hearts, monkeys, and
wild fruits. (cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe, 92–102).
61 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do dia, no. 21, 1 de maio de 1914,’’
spi-ac, filme 373, fot. 1,574–75, mi. cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe,
38–45. Ornig, My Last Chance, 168–75.
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174 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 2

62 Cherrie quoted in Ornig, My Last Chance, 182.

63 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 127–28.
cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe, 38–45. A Rua, 20 de maio de 1914.
O País, 30 de maio de 1914. Ornig, My Last Chance, 196–97. Roosevelt, Through
the Brazilian Wilderness, 319–20. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 419–23.
64 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 127–28.
cnpi, ‘‘Fé de Ofício (Rondon),’’ pp. 18–20, cnpi-ag-cxs, mi. Ornig, My Last
Chance, 199, 201–6. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 421–23.
65 The return of expedition member Lieutenant Lyra to Rio in May 1914
touched off the first round of stories. See, for example, A Rua, 20 de maio de
1914, 24 de maio de 1914, and 17 de junho de 1914. O Imparcial published a
full, front-page montage of photographs of the expedition on 13 de julho de
1914. For articles on Roosevelt’s lectures in England see A Rua, 17 de junho
de 1914; Jornal do Comércio, 17 de junho de 1914, 13 de julho de 1914. The third
round of publicity accompanied the series of lectures about the expedition
that Rondon offered in Rio de Janeiro in October 1915. See, for example,
O Correio da Manhã, 6 de outubro de 1915; Jornal do Comércio, 9 de outubro de
1915; O País, 9 de outubro de 1915. For an example of how Rondon himself
cited Roosevelt’s support for the telegraph project see cltemta, Conferências
realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 41–42.
66 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia, no. 87, 6 de setembro de
1914,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 973–74, mi. cltemta, Geologia, 49.
67 cnpi, ‘‘Fé de Ofício (Rondon),’’ cnpi-ag-cx5, mi. cltemta, Conferências
realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 191, 194–98. Jornal do Comér-
cio (Manaus), 8 de abril de 1914. cltemta, Geologia, 50. The Northern and
Southern Sections met at the Presidente Pena station to connect the entire
line on 15 November 1914 (Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 426–32).
68 For a summary of commission accomplishments see cltemta, ‘‘Relatório
apresentado à Directoria Geral dos Telégraphos pelo General Cândido Mari-
ano da Silva Rondon, 31 de dezembro de 1912,’’ ar. A Noite, 25 de outubro de
1915. Mattos, Rondon merecia o prêmio Nobel de paz, 5.
69 Years later Rondon mentioned only that he inaugurated the line at the city
hall of Santo Antonio do Madeira and that a representative of the gover-
nor of Mato Grosso attended the ceremony (Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua
vida, 432).
70 Capitão Alencarliense Fernandes da Costa, ‘‘Relatório do 27° Distrito Tele-
gráphico, comprehendendo os annos de 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919 e o pri-
meiro semestre de 1920 apresentado À Chefia da Comissão,’’ vol. 1, pp. 7, 14,
ar. As late as 1919 the minister of public works admitted that ‘‘even though
the construction has concluded, the line is of little use given the difficulty of
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3 * 175

its upkeep, and due to the fact that it crosses a zone which is lacking com-
pletely in human and material resources’’ (Brasil, Ministério de Viação e
Obras Públicas, Relatório, 1919, 491). The phrase ‘‘electric buzz of progress’’
is from Cabo Merignac, ‘‘Linhas Telegráphicas Estratégicas de Matto Grosso
ao Amazonas,’’ O Pais, 2 de dezembro de 1911, reprinted in Brasil, Congresso
Nacional, Annaes da Câmara dos Deputados, 149. Within seven years more
than one-third of the original telegraph poles had to be replaced (Capi-
tão Alencarliense Fernandes da Costa, ‘‘Relatório do 27° Distrito Telegráfico
compreendendo o segundo semestre de 1920 e os anos de 1921 e 1922, apre-
sentado à Chefe da Comissão,’’ p. 21, ar).

three Living on the Lonely Line

1 cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 8–14.
2 These are the main concerns of Beattie’s The Tribute of Blood.
3 ‘‘Annexo N. VI (1° parte), Secção de Expediente, Relatório apresentado ao
Sr. Coronel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Chefe da Commissão, pelo
encarregado da Secção Capitão Luiz C. Franco Ferreira, 22 de janeiro de
1913,’’ in cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 248. João
Florentino Meira de Faria, ‘‘Relatório apresentado ao Sr. Coronel de Engen-
haria Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon,’’ 28 de maio de 1915, p. 5, ar.
cltemta, Serviço Sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 32–33. For soldiers’ belief that
assignment to the Amazon amounted to a death sentence see Beattie, ‘‘Trans-
forming Enlisted Army Service,’’ 311.
4 cltemta, Relatório à Directoria Geral, 12–13. ‘‘Carta, Cândido Mariano da
Silva Rondon ao Sr. Ministro d’estado dos Negócios de Viação e Obras Pú-
blicas Augusto Tavares de Lyra, 16 de junho de 1915,’’ spi-ac, filme 327, fot.
1,497, mi. Brasil, Ministério da Indústria, Viação e Obras Públicas, Relatório,
1908, 415. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 228. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um
fio,’’ 97n.46, 98n.48. Beattie, ‘‘Transforming Enlisted Army Service,’’ 303.
5 Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões da Comissão Rondon, 35–37. cltemta, Ser-
viço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 3–4. Meira de Faria, ‘‘Relatório,’’ 8–9. Accord-
ing to Frank McCann, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the
army’s Central Hospital in 1917 (‘‘The Nation in Arms,’’ 223–24).
6 The quote is from Beattie, ‘‘Transforming Enlisted Army Service,’’ 301; see
also 315–16, 318–19, 322, 327, 334–36. Beattie, ‘‘Conscription Versus Penal Ser-
vitude,’’ 848–49, 853–56. McCann, ‘‘The Nation in Arms,’’ 223–24. McCann,
‘‘The Military,’’ 55. Carvalho, ‘‘As forças armadas na Primeira República,’’ 190.
For more on recruitment and the unprotected poor see Meznar, ‘‘The Ranks
of the Poor,’’ 335–51.
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176 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3

7 Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 37. Beattie, The Tribute of Blood, 223–24.

The standard account of the Chibata Rebellion is Morél, A Revolta da Chibata.
The latest study of the rebellion is Morgan, ‘‘The Legacy of the Lash.’’
8 Carlos Brandão Story, ‘‘Relatório da viagem extraordinária feito pela paquete
‘Satellite’ deste porto ao de S. Antonio do Rio Madiera,’’ Rio de Janeiro, 5 de
março de 1911, crb. Story was the captain of the Satellite. ‘‘Carta, Belfort de
Oliveira ao Dr. Ruy Barbosa, Olinda, 30 de maio de 1911,’’ cr 1071/2(2), crb.
Morél, A Revolta da Chibata, 129–36. I thank Peter Beattie for informing me
of the Story and Oliveira sources.
9 I have been unable to locate official Rondon Commission documents on this
matter.
10 ‘‘Carta, Belfort de Oliveira ao Dr. Ruy Barbosa, Olinda, 30 de maio de 1911,’’
cr 1071/2(2), crb.
11 Bigio, Cândido Rondon, 6–7.
12 cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres. Diário de Rondon, 17 [de março
de 1906], 010118.006, pp. 1,143–44; 8 [de julho de 1908], 010118.016, p. 2,358,
ar. cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe, 14.
13 Diário de Rondon, 7 [de junho de 1908], 010118.016, p. 2,308; 16 [de junho
de 1908], 010118.016, pp. 2,328–37, ar. The first quote is from Botelho de
Magalhães, Impressões, 36. The second quote is from ‘‘Relatório apresentado
ao Cidadão Coronel Mariano da Silva Rondon, D.D. Chefe da Comissão de
Linhas Telegráphicas de Matto-Grosso ao Amazonas, pelo 1° Tenente do 5°
Batalhão de Engenharia Sebastião Pinto da Silva, ajudante d’esta Comissão,’’
in cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 291.
14 Diário de Rondon, 4 [de setembro de 1906], 010118.010, pp. 542–43; 13
[de setembro de 1906], 010118.010, pp. 1,560–67; 16 [de outubro de 1907],
010118.012, pp. 1,947–55; 18 [de outubro de 1907], 010118.012, pp. 1,957–62,
ar. cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 88. Botelho de Magalhães, Impres-
sões, 27–30.
15 Diário de Rondon, 18 [de abril de 1902], 010118.002, p. 255, ar. cltemta,
Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 8. Dr. Joaquim Pinto Rabello, ‘‘Exposição
do movimento sanitário occorrido de 6 de junho à 31 de dezembro de 1908 na
secção tronco da Comissão Constructora de Linhas Telegráphicas de Matto
Grosso ao Amazonas’’ in cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 27–28.
Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia, Cáceres, 7 de abril de
1908,’’ crcx3-filme 3, fot. 2488, mi. Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 201–2.
Women also accompanied the sailors sent to labor on the line as punishment
for the Chibata Rebellion. Carlos Brandão Story, ‘‘Relatório da viagem ex-
traordinária feito pela paquete ‘Satellite’ deste porto ao de S. Antonio do Rio
Madiera,’’ Rio de Janeiro, 5 de março de 1911, crb. ‘‘Carta, Belfort de Oliveira
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3 * 177

ao Dr. Ruy Barbosa, Olinda, 30 de maio de 1911,’’ cr 1071/2(2), crb. Morél,

A Revolta da Chibata, 131.
16 cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe, 18. cltemta, ‘‘Relação das Sen-
horas fallecidas nos acampamentos da construcção,’’ crcx3-filme 1, fot. 2535,
mi.
17 Diário de Rondon, 17 [de janeiro de 1908], 010118.014, pp. 2,155–57, ar.
cltemta, Relatório dos trabalhos realizados, 169–72. Roquette-Pinto, Ron-
dônia, 163. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 65, 315. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um
fio,’’ 78–80.
18 Diário de Rondon, 13 [de setembro de 1906], 010118.010, pp. 1,560–67, ar.
cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 83, 88. Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões,
27–30, 67–70. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 102.
19 Diário de Rondon, 24 [de maio de 1905], 010118.004, pp. 892–94; 31 [de maio
de 1908], 010118.016, pp. 2,290–91, ar. Ten. Cel. Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia
(cópia), no. 1, 1 de janeiro de 1912,’’ ar. cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral,
44–45. cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910, 22, 38, 67. 1° Tenente Car-
neiro Gondim, ‘‘Relatório, 23 de maio de 1909,’’ in cltemta, Relatórios diver-
sos, 109–13. Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 25–26.
20 Diário de Rondon, 12 [de agosto de 1901], 010118.003, pp. 334–35; 22 [de julho
de 1905], 010118.004, p. 951; 23 [de julho de 1905], 010118.004, p. 953, 24 [de
julho de 1905], p. 954, 010118.004, ar.
21 cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe, 23, 89–91. ‘‘Ancilostomose,’’
Biblioteca Virtual Carlos Chagas, www.prossiga.br/chagas/traj/links/textos/
ancilostomose.html. Bradbury, Guide to Brazil, 27–32. Thielen and Santos,
‘‘Introdução,’’ 17. Lima and Hochman, ‘‘Condenado pela raca,’’ 31–32. If left
untreated bicho de pé can cause massive foot infections. Mesgravis and Pin-
sky, O Brasil, 24–25.
22 cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe, 25–26. Roosevelt, Through the Bra-
zilian Wilderness, 53, 147, 226–27, 253–66. Bradbury, Guide to Brazil, 27–36; the
quote is on 31.
23 Antonio de Andrade, ‘‘Serviço sanitário,’’ 17–18, ar. Athanagildo Vil-
hena, ‘‘Observações meteorológicas, Estação do Jurena, maio de 1909,’’ in
cltemta, Relatórios diversos. cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres,
31–38. Diário de Rondon, 6 [de junho de 1905], 010118.004, pp. 908–909, ar.
Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 33–34.
24 ‘‘Carta, Francisco Eduardo Rangel Torre ao Cel. Amilcar Armando Botelho
de Magalhães, 25 de novembro de 1952,’’ ar. Diário de Rondon, 10 [de dezem-
bro de 1905], 010118.006, pp. 1,105–6, ar. Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões,
60–62, 65–67.
25 Capitão Alencarliense Fernandes da Costa, ‘‘Relatório da Inspecção Geral do
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178 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3

Distrito, 1920–1921, apresentado À Chefe da Comissão, 19 de dezembro de

1921,’’ pp. 10, 29–30, ar. Diário de Rondon, 21 [de maio de 1908], 010118.016,
pp. 2,280–81; 6 [de junho de 1908], 010118.016, pp. 2,304–7, ar. Botelho de
Magalhães, Impressões, 53–54, 70–72.
26 Thielen et. al., A ciência, 114–15. Thielen and Santos, ‘‘Introdução,’’ 17. Carlos
Chagas, ‘‘Notas sobre a epidemiologia do Amazonas,’’ in Cruz, Chagas, and
Peixoto, Sobre o saneamento da Amazônia, 113–15. Oswaldo Cruz quoted in
Thielen, et.al., A ciência, 114. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 97. Anderson,
Colonization as Exploitation, 104–8.
27 Thielen and Santos, ‘‘Introdução,’’ 17, 21. Bradbury, Guide to Brazil, 25–27.
World Health Organization, ‘‘Malaria,’’ www.who.int/inf-fs/en/fact094.html.
The quote is from the Center for Disease Control, ‘‘Malaria,’’ www.cdc.gov/
travel/malinfo.htm. For a recent history of malaria see Spielman and D’Anto-
nio, Mosquito. More than 1,000 cases of malaria are reported in the United
States every year.
28 Dr. Francisco Moritz, ‘‘Relatório da expedição dos Campos de Commemo-
ração de Floriano ao Rio Guaporé de 30 de setembro a 19 de dezembro de
1912,’’ pp. 8–12, ar. cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 16. For more
examples see chapter 2 herein.
29 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do dia, no. 1, 1 de janeiro de
1915,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 1,335, mi. cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos
dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 162. Berthold, History, 26. In addition to these
examples, consider this one from 1907, when soldiers were constructing the
branch telegraph line between Cáceres and the town of Matto Grosso: of
the 237 men working on the line in February 1907, 110 were too ill to con-
tinue. cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 6–9. A recent book on the
impact of malaria on the conduct of war is Bwire, Bugs in Armor.
30 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do dia no. 87, 22 de setembro
de 1914,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 974–75; ‘‘Ordem do dia no. 1, 1 de janeiro de
1915,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 1,336, mi.
31 Primeiro Tenente Cândido Sobrinho, ‘‘Ordem do dia,’’ nos. 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 15,
17, 22, 24, 25, 31, 36, 37, 43, 45, 47, spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 937–55, mi. Segundo
Tenente Eduardo de Abreu, ‘‘Ordem do dia,’’ nos. 65, 75, 77, 78, 80, 93, 105,
111, 119, spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 961–93, mi.
32 Diário de Rondon, 15–16 [de março de 1908], 010118.015, pp. 2,219–22, ar.
cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 5. Dr. Joaquim Pinto Rabello,
‘‘Exposição do movimento sanitário occorrido de 6 de junho à 31 de dezem-
bro de 1908 na secção tronco da Comissão Constructora de Linhas Tele-
gráphicas de Matto Grosso ao Amazonas’’ in cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Sec-
ção de Cáceres, 26. cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 39–43. Diário
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3 * 179

de Rondon, 23, 24, 25 [de novembro de 1900], 010118.001, pp. 23–25, ar.
Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 237–38.
33 cltemta, ‘‘Relação dos inferiores, soldados, e soldados regionaes fallecidos
na Comissão Linhas Telegráphicas Estratégicas de Matto Grosso ao Amazo-
nas,’’ crcx3 filme 1, fot. 2536–45, mi. cltemta, ‘‘Relação dos officiaes falleci-
dos, 1907–1919,’’ crcx3, filme 1, fot. 2528–34, mi. For examples of the burial
of a soldier see Diário de Rondon, 18–19 [de fevereiro de 1901], 010118.001,
pp. 126–27; 10 [de junho de 1908], 010118.016, p. 2,314, ar. Elias dos Santos
Bigio claims that 295 men died while serving under Rondon (‘‘Linhas tele-
gráficas,’’ 42).
34 cltemta, ‘‘Relação dos officiaes fallecidos, 1907–1919,’’ crcx3-filme 1, fot.
2538–34, mi. cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 5, 23–25. ‘‘Carta,
Francisco Eduardo Rangel Torres ao Cel. Amilcar Armando Botelho de
Magalhães, 25 de novembro de 1952,’’ ar. Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon,
‘‘Ordem do dia, Cáceres, 22 de abril de 1908,’’ crcx 3-filme 1, fot. 2496, mi.
35 Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 109–13; the quote is on 109. Botelho de
Magalhães, Impressões, 39–42.
36 cnpi, ‘‘Fé de Ofício Rondon,’’ pp. 3–4, cnpi-ag, cx5, mi. Viveiros, Rondon
conta a sua vida, 109–13. Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 39–42.
37 The first quote is from McCann, ‘‘The Military,’’ 55. The second quote is from
McCann, ‘‘The Nation in Arms,’’ 219. Carvalho, ‘‘As forças armadas,’’ 191.
Commission officer Amilcar Botelho de Magalhães noted that he regularly
employed corporal punishment while serving as an officer in the Rondon
Commission. He once severely beat a cook at the Parecis station, in front
of assembled troops, for the chef’s failure to prepare lunch for the soldiers
(Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 47–50).
38 Diário de Rondon, 7 [de novembro de 1905], 010118.005, pp. 1,075–78, ar.
39 Diário de Rondon, 25 [de fevereiro de 1908], 010118.015, p. 2,202; 26 [de
fevereiro de 1908], 010118.015, pp. 2,204–5, ar. For another example of
drunken disorder in camp see Diário de Rondon, 3 [de janeiro de 1901],
010118.001, p. 74, ar. Early in his career Rondon actually distributed wine
and cachaça to his soldiers (Diário de Rondon, 2 [de dezembro de 1900],
010118.001, p. 22; 26 [de maio de 1903], 010118.001, pp. 444–45, ar). In Tapi-
rapuã in 1911 commission physician Dr. Francisco Eduardo Rangel Torres
shot and killed a soldier during a drunken brawl. The physician and a lieu-
tenant then tied the remaining drunken soldiers to a tree (‘‘Carta, Francisco
Eduardo Rangel Torres ao Cel. Amilcar Armando Botelho de Magalhães,’’ 12
de novembro de 1952, ar).
40 Diário de Rondon, 19 [de abril de 1901], 010118.002, pp. 255–57; 20 [de abril
de 1901], 010118.002, p. 258; 22 [de abril de 1901], 010118.002, pp. 260–62;
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180 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 3

15 [de maio de 1901], 010118.002, p. 430; 27 [de maio de 1901], 010118.002,

p. 285, ar.
41 Diário de Rondon, 26 [de janeiro de 1908], 010118.014, pp. 2,173–74 (the quote
is on 2,174); 27 [de janeiro de 1908], 010118.014, pp. 2,175–77; 16 [de fevereiro
de 1908], 010118.014, p. 2,194; 20 [de fevereiro de 1908], 010118.014, p. 2,195,
ar. For a recent study of the relationship between national character and
cleanliness see Stern, ‘‘Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood,’’ 41–81.
42 Diário de Rondon, 10 [de junho de 1908], 010118.016, p. 2,314, ar.
43 Diário de Rondon, ? [de julho de 1908], 010118.016, pp. 2,379–80; the quote
is from 19 [de outubro de 1905], 010118.005, p. 1,059; 30 [de outubro de 1905],
010118.005, p. 1,068; 31 [de outubro de 1905], 010118.005, pp. 1,068–69, ar.
cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 48–49. Botelho de Magalhães, Impres-
sões, 54–55.
44 Diário de Rondon, 23 [de dezembro de 1900], 010118.001, p. 59; 20 [de setem-
bro de 1908], 010118.018, p. 2,599; 14 [de setembro de 1908], 010118.018,
p. 2,572, ar. There are many other references to Rondon’s dogs in the diaries.
45 Beattie, ‘‘Transforming Enlisted Army Service,’’ 311–12, 442–58. Beattie, The
Tribute of Blood, 186–94. McCann, ‘‘The Nation in Arms,’’ 217–18.
46 Fernandes da Costa, ‘‘Relatório, 1915–1920,’’ 5. Capitáo Alencarliense Fernan-
des da Costa, ‘‘Relatório do 27° Distrito Telegráphico comprehendendo os
annos de 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919 e o primeiro semestre do 1920 apresen-
tado à Chefia da Comissão,’’ ar. Capitão Francisco Raul de Estillac Leal, ‘‘Re-
latório, 1° secção,’’ 22 de abril de 1908, in cltemta, Relatórios diversos, no
date, 38. cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 151–59.
47 Capitão Custódio de Senna Braga, ‘‘Relatório, 31 de dezembro de 1907,’’ in
cltemta, Relatórios diversos, 5–12. Major Custódio de Senna Braga, ‘‘Ordem
do dia, acampamento no rio do Sangue,’’ 22, 23, 28 de outubro, 17 de novem-
bro de 1908, crcx3-filme 1, fot. 2505–10, mi. The quote is from ‘‘Carta,
Major Marciano [Alves?] ao Rondon, 5 de setembro de 1908,’’ reprinted in
cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 153. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 97.
Between October 1900 and April 1901, seventeen out of eighty-one soldiers
who were engaged in line construction near Corumbá deserted (cltemta,
Relatório dos trabalhos realizados, 26).
48 2° Tenente Virgílio Marones de Gusmão, ‘‘Relatório,’’ 28 de dezembro de
1908,’’ in cltemta, Relatórios diversos, 65–69; the quotes are on 66. Maciel,
‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 97. Diário de Rondon, 15 [de julho de 1908], 010118.016,
p. 2,367, ar. On the need to recapture troops gone awol, Armando Botelho
de Magalhães noted that he and his fellow officers hated being assigned this
task, but that if they did not do it ‘‘the desertions would multiply and we
would lack sufficient personnel for construction’’ (Impressões, 62).
49 Dr. Joaquim Pinto Rabello, ‘‘Exposição do movimento sanitário occorrido de
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 4 * 181

6 de junho à 31 de dezembro de 1908 na secção tronco da Comissão Construc-

tora de Linhas Telegráphicas de Matto Grosso ao Amazonas’’ in cltemta,
Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 27.
50 Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 62–64; the quote is on 64. This same situa-
tion torments ranch workers today in the Amazon forest; held as virtual
slaves in a violent system of debt peonage in the state of Acre, the thick
jungle prevents most victims from escaping the region (Larry Rother, ‘‘Bra-
zil’s Prized Exports Rely on Slaves and Scorched Land,’’ New York Times,
25 March 2002, section A, page 1, column 5).
51 The quotes are from Diário de Rondon, [agosto de 1906], 010118.009, p. 1,504,
ar, and cltemta, Relatório dos trabalhos realizados, 145. Diário de Rondon,
2 [de abril de 1908], 010118.015, p. 2,236, ar. It is possible that the army had
ordered the commander in Cuiabá to cede some of his men to Rondon, and
that this was commander’s way of regaining his command over these sol-
diers.
52 cltemta, ‘‘Boletim, no. 39, 6 de setembro de 1916,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot.
198; ‘‘Boletim do serviço, no. 68, 30 de setembro de 1915,’’ spi-ac-filme 326,
fot. 123; ‘‘Carta, Chefe do Escriptório Central ao Sr. Dr. Augusto Tavares
Lyra, Ministério de Viação e Obras Públicas, 4 de janeiro de 1917,’’ spi-ac-
filme 328, fot. 004–006, mi. On the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad see Conniff,
‘‘Madeira-Mamoré Railroad,’’ 486–87; and Hardman, Trem fantasma.
53 cltemta, ‘‘Boletim do serviço, no. 73, 16 de outubro de 1915,’’ spi-ac, filme
326, fot. 128, mi.
54 cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 27. ‘‘Carta, Cândido
Mariano da Silva Rondon ao Sr. Ministro d’Estado dos Negócios da Viação e
Obras Públicas Augusto Tavares de Lyra, 16 de junho de 1915,’’ spi-ac, filme
327, fot. 1,499, mi.
55 This account is based on Fernandes da Costa, ‘‘Relatório, 1915–1920,’’ 7–83.
56 Ibid., 10.
57 Ibid., 9.
58 Ibid., 11. cltemta, ‘‘Relatório, 1926,’’ pp. 81–83, ar.

four The Power of Positivism

1 João do Rio, quoted in Lins, História do Positivismo, 430–31. For more on João
do Rio see Chazkel, ‘‘The Crônica,’’ 90–95. The Positivist Church of Brazil
maintains a Web site at www.arras.com.br/igrposit.
2 This summary of Positivism and Positivist thought is based on the follow-
ing sources: Comte, Positivist Philosophy and Catechism of Positive Religion;
Benoit, Sociologia comteana; Giannotti, ‘‘Vida e Obra’’; Azzi, A concepção;
Manuel, Prophets of Paris; Loureiro, ‘‘Prefácio’’; Leite, ‘‘Proteção e incorpora-
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182 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 4

ção’’; Rocha, ‘‘Influência do Positivismo’’; Costa, O positivismo na República;

Carvalho, A formação das almas; Hale, ‘‘Political and Social Ideas’’; Collier,
‘‘Positivism.’’
3 Benoit, Sociologia comteana, 363. Castro, Os militares, 64.
4 Carvalho, A formação das almas, 130. Author’s oral communication with
Mr. Danton Voltaire, director of the Positivist Temple of Rio de Janeiro,
July 1996.
5 Benoit, Sociologia comteana, 374, 378. Carvalho, A formação das almas, 130.
Rocha, ‘‘Influência de Positivismo,’’ 17, 77–79. Leite, ‘‘Questão indígena,’’ 259.
Gianotti, ‘‘Vida e Obra,’’ xv.
6 Skidmore, Brazil, 64.
7 Nachman, ‘‘Brazilian Positivism,’’ 24. Frank D. McCann makes a similar as-
sertion about middle-class reformism in Brazil in ‘‘The Nation in Arms,’’
212. This section is based also on the following sources: Castro, Os militares;
Costa, History of Ideas and O positivismo; Giannotti, ‘‘Vida e Obra’’; Carvalho,
A formação das almas; Lins, História do Positivismo; Leite, ‘‘Questão indígena’’;
Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio’’; Meznar, ‘‘Benjamin Constant Botelho de
Magalhães,’’ 254.
8 Nachman, ‘‘Brazilian Positivism,’’ 29.
9 Carvalho, A formação das almas, 40–48, 110–21. Castro, Os militares, chap. 5.
Lins, História do Positivismo, 324. Costa, History of Ideas, 97, 108, 147–48. Gia-
notti, ‘‘Vida e Obra,’’ xvi. Nachman, ‘‘Brazilian Positivism,’’ x–xii. Meznar,
‘‘Benjamin Constant,’’ 254. Viveiros, Rondon conta a sua vida, 50–59. Carvalho,
‘‘As forças armadas,’’ 195–96.
10 Gianotti, ‘‘Vida e Obra,’’ xvi. Nachman, ‘‘Brazilian Positivism,’’ x–xii. Costa,
History of Ideas, 108.
11 Nachman, ‘‘Brazilian Positivism,’’ 38–39, 54. Carvalho, A formação das almas,
133. Carvalho, ‘‘A ortodoxia positivista.’’ Brazilian Positivists were to avoid
teaching in public schools, were not to accept employment with newspapers,
and in general were to reject all offers of public employment.
12 Costa, O positivismo, 13–14, 29. Lins, História de positivismo, 400–401. Lins ar-
gues further that Teixeira Mendes did not practice any flexibility in the ap-
plication of Comte’s teachings, even though Comte himself urged just that
when moving from the abstract to the concrete application of his ideas.
13 Costa, History of Ideas, 126–35, 181. Costa, O positivismo, 28–33, 48, 91n.1. Nach-
man, ‘‘Brazilian Positivism,’’ x–xii, 15–16, 22, 216–21, 224–26, 262, 264. Castro,
Os militares, esp. chap. 5. Skidmore, Brazil, 66.
14 For examples of Positivist interventions see Costa, O positivismo, 13–27, 37–
44, 67, 78, 113–21, 147n.1; Costa, History of Ideas, 228. Carvalho, A formação
das almas, 129.
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 4 * 183

15 Viveiros, Rondon, 44, 50–59, 609.

16 Rocha, ‘‘Influência de Positivismo,’’ 32–33, 38. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda,
quoted in Costa, O positivismo, 111.
17 Lins, História do positivismo, 536. Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, quoted in
Rocha, ‘‘Influência de Positivismo,’’ 38.
18 cltemta, ‘‘Ordem do Dia,’’ no. 1, 1 de Janeiro de 1912, spi-ac, filme 326, fot.
1,276–79, mi.
19 Diário de Rondon, 3 [de maio de 1902], 010118.002, p. 274; Diário de Ron-
don, 24 [de maio de 1905], 010118.004, p. 892, ar. In a letter to President
Getúlio Vargas, Rondon explained Positivism’s stance regarding Republi-
can dictatorships. ‘‘Carta, Marechal Rondon ao Presidente Getúlio Vargas,’’
[probably 1937], spi-ag-cx13, doc. 12, filme 1, fot. 3,777–81, mi.
20 According to commission officer Amilcar Botelho de Magalhães, if a soldier
returned to camp with a crooked pole for the flag, he was ordered to return to
the forest to fetch a straighter one (Impressões, 25–26). Some of the commis-
sion photographs of indigenes and the Brazilian flag are reprinted in Antonio
Carlos de Souza Lima, Um grande cerco de paz and ‘‘O governo,’’ 161; Maciel,
‘‘A nação por um fio’’; Tacca, ‘‘O índio ‘pacificado.’ ’’
21 Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 9, 132, 134, 168–71; the quote is on 171. Lima, Um
grande cerco de paz, chaps. 6–9. Freire, ‘‘Indigenismo e antropologia,’’ 195–97.
Bigio, ‘‘Linhas telegráficas’’ and Cândido Rondon.
22 Nachman, ‘‘Brazilian Positivism,’’ 116–20, 122–24. Leite, ‘‘Questão indígena,’’
262. Rocha, ‘‘Influência do Positivismo,’’ 81–82. Carvalho, A formação das
almas, 139–40.
23 Carvalho, A formação das almas, 81–86, 112–16. This photograph can be found
in Lima, ‘‘O governo dos índios.’’ By contrast, Lima writes of the flag as an
unequivocal symbol of the nation, given that it is ‘‘a sign of another totality
that transcends the immediate experiences of natives and local populations’’
(Um grande cerco de paz, 175).
24 Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 173. Nachman, ‘‘Brazilian Positivism,’’ 119–20.
Lemos, Jozé Bonifácio.
25 Commissão Constructora de Linhas telegráphicas no Estado de Matto
Grosso, ‘‘Ordem do dia #11, acampamento . . . rio Benjamin Constant, 15 de
Novembro de 1901,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 609, mi.
26 Diário de Rondon, 15 [de novembro de 1902], 010118.003, p. 368, ar.
cltemta, Relatório a Directoria Geral, 252.
27 ‘‘Carta, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon ao meu caro Luís [Bueno Horta
Barbosa], Quartel Geral na Fazenda Nacional de São Marcos, 17 Shakespeare,
139 [1927],’’ AHB, filme 387, mi.
28 Benjamin Constant, quoted in Carvalho, ‘‘As forças armadas,’’ 210–11; see also
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184 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 4

195–96. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 82–83. Nachman, ‘‘Brazilian Positiv-
ism,’’ 115, 133–37, 145. Nachman estimates that in 1892 27 percent of the pro-
fessors at the Military Academy were Positivists. He never explains, however,
how he determined this, except to note that he included numerous individu-
als who were not members of the Positivist Church.
29 Teixeira Mendes, A atitude dos pozitivistas, 8. Costa, O positivismo, 74–75. For
more on Teixeira Mendes’s thoughts on militarism see the following pam-
phlets he authored: A política pozitiva; A República e o militarismo; Ainda o
militarismo; Ainda a República; A actual agitação militarista. I obtained these
pamphlets at the Positivist Church in Rio de Janeiro.
30 Teixeira Mendes, A atitude dos pozitivistas, 9. Teixeira Mendes, A actual agita-
ção, 1–2. Carvalho, ‘‘As forças armadas,’’ 210–11. Bigio, ‘‘Linhas telegráficas,’’
27–37.
31 Costa, O positivismo, 78–81, 83–85; the quotation from Teixeira Mendes is
on 85.
32 Carvalho, ‘‘As forças armadas,’’ 197. Teixeira Mendes, quoted in Costa, O posi-
tivismo, 76n.16. Teixeira Mendes, A República e o militarismo, 3–8. First Lieu-
tenant Severo dos Santos, quoted in A Rua (Rio de Janeiro), 18 de julho de
1916.
33 McCann, ‘‘The Military,’’ 56. Djalma Polli Coelho, quoted in Nachman, ‘‘Bra-
zilian Positivism,’’ 145–46. Carvalho, ‘‘As forças armadas,’’ 195–96.
34 Carvalho, A formação das almas, 133. General Tito Escobar, quoted in Car-
valho, ‘‘As forças armadas,’’ 196. General Tasso Fragosso claimed that ‘‘certain
officers who were comfortably located far from the dangers of front lines de-
nounced Benjamin Constant for his pacifist ideas’’ (quoted in Lins, História
de positivismo, 415). For more on Fragosso’s thoughts on officer opposition to
Positivists in the military see Lins, ‘‘A obra educativa,’’ 41. Nachman, ‘‘Bra-
zilian Positivism,’’ 54n.77.
35 C.L., ‘‘Microcosmo,’’ O País, 22 de outubro de 1913. ‘‘Do que se vai falar esta
semana,’’ Journal do Comércio, 29 de maio de 1911. A Rua, 28 de junho de 1917.
Lins, ‘‘A obra educativa,’’ 41. cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 15.
36 Jornal do Comércio, 3 de novembro de 1911. ‘‘A Commissão Rondon: verdades
necessarias,’’ Jornal do Comércio, 30 de maio de 1911. Antonio Pimentel, ‘‘Ser-
viço de Proteção aos Índios,’’ Jornal do Brasil, 28 de novembro de 1912. This
article was part of a series Pimentel authored condemning Rondon.
37 Jornal do Comércio, 3 de novembro de 1911. Nachman, ‘‘Brazilian Positivism,’’
126. Lins, História do positivismo, 417. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 84. ‘‘A
Commissão Rondon: verdades necessárias,’’ Jornal do Comércio, 30 de maio
de 1911.
38 ‘‘A Commissão Rondon: verdades necessárias,’’ Jornal do Comércio, 30 de maio
de 1911.
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 4 * 185

39 Amilcar A. Botelho de Magalhães, ‘‘Em torno de Rondon,’’ Correo do Povo

(Porto Alegre), 14 de maio de 1925.
40 ‘‘Carta, Cândido M.S. Rondon ao Jaguaribe [Francisco Jaguaribe Gomes de
Mattos], Rio, 26 de março de 1928,’’ ar. Amilcar Armando Botelho de Magal-
hães, no title, 22 de fevereiro de 1919, spi-ac, filme 33, fot. 431, mi. cltemta,
Relatório à Directoria Geral, 136.
41 Brasil, Ministério de Viação e Obras Públicas, Relatório, 1910, 371. General
de Brigada Jaguaribe Gomes de Mattos, ‘‘Curriculum vitae do General de
Brigada Francisco Jaguaribe de Mattos,’’ [1955?], ar. Botelho de Magalhães,
Impressões, 120–21, 156–57. Bigio, ‘‘Linhas telegráficas,’’ 27–37.
42 Rondon attributed the survival of his project to the support of a handful of
(unnamed) supporters within the army. ‘‘Carta (cópia), Cândido M.S. Ron-
don ao Jaguaribe [Francisco Jaguaribe Gomes de Mattos], Quartel Geral na
Fazenda Nacional de São Marcos, 18 de setembro de 1927,’’ ar. ‘‘Carta, Cân-
dido M.S. Rondon ao Jaguaribe [Francisco Jaguaribe Gomes de Mattos], Rio,
26 de março de 1928,’’ ar. For the importance of the turma, or small network
of friends within the army, see McCann, ‘‘The Military,’’ 51–52.
43 Costa, O positivismo, 133–34, 142–46. Costa, History of Ideas, 88–95. Carvalho,
A formação das almas, 139. Serbin, ‘‘Priests, Celibacy, and Social Conflict,’’
111. Leite, ‘‘Questão indígena,’’ 260. Freire, ‘‘Indigenismo,’’ 180–81. Teixeira
Mendes, Vice Diretor da Igreja e Apostolado Positivista do Brasil, no title,
Jornal do Comércio, 22 de junho de 1913, spi-ac, filme 324, fot. 312–13, mi.
44 Examples of Rondon’s private and public attacks are too numerous to list, al-
though many such examples will be presented herein. An especially dramatic
example is from 1915, when Rondon denounced Catholic attitudes toward
indigenous people in front of an audience that included the president and
vice-president of Brazil, as well as most members of the president’s cabinet.
cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 45–50.
For an example from Rondon’s personal correspondence late in his life see
‘‘Carta, Rondon ao Sr. Dr. Manoel Neto Campelo Junior [Minister of Agri-
culture], 1946,’’ spi-ac, filme 380, doc. 145, fot. 274–82, mi.
45 ‘‘Telegrama, Coronel Rondon ao Sr. Ministro da Agricultura, Indústria e
Comércio,’’ reprinted in O País, 5 de novembro de 1912, spi-ac, filme 324,
fot. 333–36; ‘‘Telegrama, General Rondon à Nota,’’ reprinted in A Nota (Rio
de Janeiro), 8 de junho de 1936, spi-ac, filme 382, fot. 384, mi. ‘‘Telegrama,
Rondon ao Snr. Redactor d’A Cruz,’’ A Cruz (Cuiabá), 31 de dezembro de
1916 (this long telegram was reprinted in A Noite [Rio de Janeiro]). Amilcar
Armando Botelho de Magalhães, ‘‘ ‘A Cruz’ contra a cruz,’’ Jornal do Comér-
cio, 3 de maio de 1917. Freire, ‘‘Indigenismo,’’ 109n.1, 111–14. ‘‘A catachese no
Brasil: O revmo. Padre António Malan concede-nos uma entrevista sobre a
ação dos missionários salesianos em Matto Grosso (As campanhas contra as
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186 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 4

missões),’’ Correiro da Manha (Rio de Janeiro), 12 de abril de 1912, spi-ac,

filme 324; Dr. António M. A. Pimentel, ‘‘Serviço de Proteção aos Índios,’’ Jor-
nal do Brasil, 28 de novembro de 1912, spi-ac, filme 382, fot. 048–049, mi. For
more on the Salesian missions see Novaes, Play of Mirrors, chap. 5. Langfur,
‘‘Myths of Pacification,’’ 886–89.
46 ‘‘Telegrama, General Rondon à Nota,’’ 8 de junho de 1936, spi-ac, filme 382,
fot. 384, mi. Rondon quoted in Freire, ‘‘Indigenísmo,’’ 113. ‘‘Carta, Rondon ao
Meu Caro Luiz [Bueno Horta Barbosa], Rio, 7 de maio de 1928,’’ ahb, filme
387; ‘‘Carta, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon ao Meu Caro Luiz [Bueno
Horta Barbosa], 24 de Homero de 143; 21 de fevereiro de 1931,’’ ahb, filme 387,
mi. For other examples of the harshness of Rondon’s and his officers’ rheto-
ric see ‘‘Telegrama, Coronel Rondon ao Sr. Ministro da Agricultura, Indústria
e Comércio,’’ reprinted in O País, 5 de novembro de 1912, spi-ac, filme 324,
fot. 333–36, mi; ‘‘Carta, Amilcar A. Botelho de Magalhães, capitão de engen-
haria, chefe do Escriptório Central da Comissão Rondon ao Sr. redactor d’A
Tribuna,’’ A Tribuna (Rio de Janeiro), 9–20 de março de 1917.
47 Jornal do Comércio, 3 de novembro de 1911. Freire, ‘‘Indigenísmo,’’ 109–10. Bra-
sil, Congresso Nacional, Annaes da Câmara, 935–39. For more on the Rondon
Commission’s budgets see chapter 6 herein.
48 ‘‘Vida Religiosa,’’ A Tribuna (Rio de Janeiro), 3 de março de 1917. Enrolling
the child in a Positivist school was not an option as the Positivist Church did
not operate its own educational institutions.
49 ‘‘Carta, Amilcar A. Botelho de Magalhães, capitão de engenharia, chefe do
Escriptório Central da Comissão Rondon, ao Sr redactor d’A Tribuna,’’ A Tri-
buna, 10 de março de 1917. The debate spilled onto the pages of subsequent
Tribuna editions on 13–15 March, 17 March, 20–21 March, 23 March, 26–
28 March, 14 April, 7–8 June, and 11–12 June 1917.
50 A Noite (Rio de Janeiro), 10 de maio de 1917; O País, 11 de maio de 1917; Jornal
do Comércio, 11 de maio de 1917; R. J. Campos, Folha do Comércio, 12 de maio
de 1917. ‘‘Carta, Amilcar A. Botelho de Magalhães ao Sr. redactor da ‘A Tri-
buna,’ ’’ A Tribuna, 5 de junho de 1917. The two boys are probably the same
children Rondon mentioned in a lecture in Rio de Janeiro in 1915. cltemta,
Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 232–33. For the
thoughts of one Brazilian involved in the education of indigenes during this
time see Daltro, Da catechese.
51 As a source of strength consider the following diary article written when
Rondon was establishing his base camp at Juruena in 1908. The entry, the
only one for that day, was inspired by a Positivist holiday: ‘‘Master of Mas-
ters, Founder of the Religion of Humanity. Far from all of my brothers of the
Faith, I nevertheless find myself, at this moment with all the other believers
of all the other Nations, gathered around the Doctrine which unites us in a
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 5 * 187

Church, in all the lands of the world’’ (Diário de Rondon, sábado, 5 [de maio
de 1908], 010118.07, ar).
52 Diário de Rondon, 29 [de abril de 1908], 010118.015, ar. pp. 2254–56. ‘‘Tele-
grama, General Rondon à Senhora General Rondon, Guarapuava [Paraná],
29 de março de 1925,’’ spi-ac, filme 331, fot. 394, mi.
53 Mattos, ‘‘Curriculum vitae,’’ 5. Nachman, ‘‘Brazilian Positivism,’’ 133–37, 144–
47, 173. Carvalho, A formação das almas, 198–99, 217–18. McCann, ‘‘The Mili-
tary,’’ 59; see also n.13. The involvement of some cadets in the so-called Anti-
Vaccination Riot of 1904 led the army to close down the Military Academy
in Rio de Janeiro. In 1911 it reopened in the Rio suburb of Realengo largely
shorn of its Positivist character.
54 The single best examination of this latter phase of Rondon’s career is Freire,
‘‘Indigenismo.’’

five Living with Others

1 For the hagiography see, for example, Silva and Castello Branco, Rondon;
Botelho de Magalhães, A obra ciclópica; Mattos, Rondon merecia; Roquette-
Pinto, Rondônia; Coutinho, Rondon; Ribeiro, A política indigenista. The re-
visionists would add Ribeiro, Os índios to this list, although doing so simpli-
fies his argument. For the revisionist literature see note 50 below. Alcida Rita
Ramos defines indigenism (indigenist policies) as the state project of incor-
poration of Indians, plus ‘‘popular and learned imagery’’ (Ramos, Indigenism,
6). For more on what is meant by the term ‘‘indigenist policies’’ see Lima,
Um grande cerco de paz, 12–15.
2 See, for example, Ribeiro, Os índios, 154–55. Ribeiro, A politíca, 17–18. Ramos,
Indigenism, 80. Mércio P. Gomes, Indians and Brazil, 75–76, 118–119. Davis,
Victims, 2. Garfield, ‘‘ ‘Civilized but Discontent,’ ’’ 45–46. Garfield, Indigenous
Struggle, 41. Hal Langfur never mentions Positivism when discussing Rondon
and his policies in ‘‘Myths of Pacification.’’ Lima avoids any direct presen-
tation of Positivism in Um grande cerco but does refer to it at various points
in his book. At first glance another work by Lima seems to be an analysis
of Positivism; it is instead a Pierre Bourdieu–inspired meditation on the re-
lationship between the biographer and her/his subject, with very little spe-
cific information about Positivism (see, ‘‘O santo soldado’’). A suggestive ex-
ception to my generalization is Jurandyr Carvalho Ferrari Leite, ‘‘Proteção e
incorporação.’’
3 Throughout this chapter I will use the terms Indian and indigene interchange-
ably. As Ramos notes, the generic term Indian has been reappropriated for
use by indigenous peoples in Brazil today (Ramos, Indigenism, 5–6). Indi-
gene is employed for stylistic reasons, in order to avoid the repetitious use
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188 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 5

of only one term. For useful background information on the history of In-
dian policy in Brazil and on Indian–white relations in the Amazon see Wright
and Cunha, ‘‘Destruction, Resistance, and Transformation,’’ esp. 302–14,
345–73.
4 Teixeira Mendes, O sientismo, 1, 5. Teixeira Mendes, Em defeza, 4. Raimundo
Teixeira Mendes, ‘‘Igreja e Apostolado Positivista do Brasil,’’ Jornal do Comér-
cio, 22 de junho de 1913.
5 Teixeira Mendes, Em defeza, 11.
6 Teixeira Mendes, Ainda os indígenas, 8. Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, ‘‘Igreja
e Apostolado Positivista do Brasil,’’ Jornal do Comércio, 22 de junho de 1913.
Teixeira Mendes, Em defeza, 10–14. Teixeira Mendes, O sientismo, 3–4. Mércio
P. Gomes, Indians and Brazil, 75–76.
7 Teixeira Mendes, Ainda os indígenas, 7. José M. Gagliardi, O indígena, 176–77.
Ribeiro, A política, 17–18, 26. Mércio P. Gomes, Indians and Brazil, 117–19.
8 Texeira Mendes, Ainda os indígenas, 13; Texeira Mendes, A influência positi-
vista, 9. Ribeiro, A política, 26.
9 Castro, Os militares, 64. Teixeira Mendes, A influência positivista, 2. Raimundo
Teixeira Mendes, ‘‘Igreja e Apostolado Positivista do Brazil,’’ Journal do
Comércio, 22 de junho de 1913. Ribeiro, Os indíos, 160–61.
10 Botelho de Magalhães, A obra ciclópica, 22. ‘‘Carta, Ruyter Demaria Boiteux,
Diretor-secretário do Clube Positivista, ao Exmo. Sr. Presidente da República
Marechal Humberto Castelo Branco, 8 de Homero de 178 (5 de fevereiro de
1966),’’ spi-ac-filme 381, doc. 212, fot. 476, mi. Raimundo Teixeira Mendes,
‘‘Igreja e Apostalado Positivista do Brasil,’’ Jornal do Comércio, 22 de junho de
1913. Ribeiro, A política, 26.
11 Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, ‘‘Igreja e Apostalado Positivista do Brasil,’’ Jour-
nal do Comércio, 22 de junho de 1913.
12 Teixeira Mendes, Em defeza, 17. Teixeira Mendes, A influência positivista, 9.
Auguste Comte, quoted in Rondon, A etnografia, 10.
13 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, xvi. For a
similar summary see Barbosa, O problema indígena, 19–20. Luis Bueno Horta
Barbosa was a Positivist, a friend and associate of Rondon, and served as
director of the spi.
14 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 4–5,
45–50, 167–80, 192–95, 204–8, 222–33, 249–53, 260–70. For more examples see
cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910, 7–112.
15 ‘‘Carta, Tenente-Coronel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon ao Cidadão
Dr. Rodolpho Miranda, Ministro de Agricultura, Indústria, e Commércio,
Rio de Janeiro, 14 de março de 1910,’’ reprinted in Brasil, Ministério da Agri-
cultura, Indústria e Commércio, Relatório . . . 1910, 2: 8. This letter is also
reprinted in Teixeira Mendes, Em defeza.
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 5 * 189

16 Ibid., 12–13. Referring to Comte as ‘‘Augusto’’ rather than ‘‘Auguste’’ was stan-
dard practice among Brazilian Positivists.
17 Ibid., 10. This is but one of many examples of how Rondon ‘‘taught’’ Positiv-
ism to public officials. See also ‘‘[hand-delivered letter?], Tenente-Coronel
Rondon [ao Ministro da Agricultura], 19 de maio de 1910,’’ reprinted in Bra-
sil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório . . . 1910, 2:37; Cândido Mariano da
Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ofícios de Sr. General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon,
apresentando sugestões pedidios pelo Ministro das Relações Exteriores, em
memorandam, 11 de abril de 1932,’’ spi-ag-cx13, doc.2, filme 1, fot. 3,423–32;
‘‘Carta (sem data [1937]) . . . ao Presidente Getúlio Vargas,’’ spi-ag-cx13,
doc. 12, filme 1, fot. 3,777–81; Rondon, ‘‘Carta . . . ao Sr. Dr. Manoel Neto
Campelo Junior, Ministro da Agricultura, Rio de Janeiro, 7 de junho de 1946,’’
spi-ac, doc. 145, filme 380, fot. 274–82, mi.
18 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia, no.15, 15 de agosto de
1912,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot.1,308, mi. Ten. Cel. Cândido Mariano da Silva
Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia, no. 1, 1 de janeiro de 1912 [handwritten copy],’’
ar. For further examples see Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do
Dia, no.77, 24 de Fevereiro de 1908,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 800, mi; Cândido
Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia, 7 de setembro de 1909,’’ reprinted
in cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 253–54; Cândido Mariano da Silva
Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia, no.1, 1 de janeiro de 1915,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot.
1,331–36, mi; Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia, no. 2, 23
de maio de 1913,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 1,314–15, mi. In the latter ‘‘ordem’’
Rondon praises the efforts of two of his officers in establishing peaceful con-
tacts with members of the Nambikwara nation. In addition to speeches made
to troops on holidays, Rondon did the same at telegraph-station inaugura-
tions. See, for example, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia,
13 de junho de 1912,’’ reprinted in cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão
de Engenharia, 28–29.
19 For recent works that examine the spi and not the Rondon telegraph com-
mission see Lima, Um grande cerco, and Gagliardi, O indígena. A recent study
of the Rondon Commission largely ignores Rondon’s Indian policy: Maciel,
‘‘A nação por um fio.’’ See also, Stauffer, ‘‘Origin and Establishment.’’
20 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia, no.?, 4 de novembro de
1910,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 1,265; ‘‘Carta ao Sr. Dr. Manoel Neto Campelo
Junior, Minístro da Agricultura, Rio de Janeiro, 7 de junho de 1946,’’ spi-ac,
filme 380, doc. 145, fot. 279, mi.
21 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Instrucções para uso dos Inspectores do
Serviço de Proteção aos Indios e Localização de Trabalhadores Nacionaes,
na primeira expedição destinada à instalação da séde da Inspectoria e à visita
geral às terras habituadas pelos indios, 31 de outubro de 1910,’’ spi-ac, filme
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190 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 5

380, fot. 673, 674, 675, mi. For praise of Rondon’s efforts to defend indigenous
landholdings see Ribeiro, Os índios, 131–35. For chilling descriptions of the
impact of real-estate booms on Indian lands see Garfield, Indigenous Struggle,
chap. 6; and Garfield, ‘‘Where the Earth Touches.’’
22 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon(?), ‘‘Instrucções internas da Directoria
Geral do Serviço de Protecção aos Indios e Localização de Trabalhadores
Nacionaes, 14 de novembro de 1910,’’ spi-ac, filme 380, doc. 34, fot. 715, 719,
722, mi. Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório . . . 1910, 1:56. The ‘‘in-
strucções’’ document is typewritten, with handwritten notations in the mar-
gins. The notations appear to be from Minister Miranda. Gagliardi, O indí-
gena, 190–92.
23 Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório . . . 1911 (Rio de Janeiro: Officinas
da Directoria Geral de Estatísticas, 1911), 61.
24 ‘‘Telegrama, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon ao Sr. Dr. João Batista de
Lacerda, Director do Museu Nacional, 4 de fevereiro de 1909,’’ reprinted in
Journal do Comércio, 11 de fevereiro de 1909, p. 2.
25 cltemta, Relatório dos trabalhos realizados, 62. The report on this incident
is presented on pages 49–62.
26 Capitão Amilcar A. Botelho de Magalhães, ‘‘Os Indios do Matto Grosso: A
Missão Rondon.’’ Journal do Comércio, 25 de janeiro de 1919.
27 ‘‘Telegrama, Tenente-Coronel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon ao Exmo.
Sr. Minístro da Agricultura, Friburgo, 25 de abril de 1910,’’ Reprinted in
Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório . . . 1910, 2:29.
28 ‘‘Telegrama, 1° Tenente Nicolau Bueno Horta Barbosa ao . . . Rondon’’ and
‘‘Telegrama, Tenente-Coronel Rondon ao Sr. Ministro da Agricultura, 20 de
junho de 1910,’’ reprinted in Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório . . . 1910,
2:38. For his part Nicolau Bueno Horta Barbosa complained that reports of
these attacks had appeared in the local press but that the governor had done
nothing to stop the violence.
29 ‘‘Não se matam mais indios impunemente!’’ A Noite, 18 de abril de 192[?],
spi-ac, filme 324, fot. 435, mi. A copy of this article is located in the clippings
file of the Rondon Commission, but the year has been cut away.
30 ‘‘Offício no. 384, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, General de Brigada, ao
Exm. Sr. Presidente do Estado de Matto Grosso, 14 de setembro de 1921,’’
reprinted in A Noite, 18 de abril de 192[?], spi-ac, filme 324, fot. 435, mi.
31 Amilcar A. Botelho de Magalhães, ‘‘Carta ao Redator d’A Noite,’’ A Noite, 28
de maio de 1916. Newspaper accounts of the Toledo affair were collected in
the Rondon Commission’s clippings files, but I have yet to locate any further
documentary evidence. Included in the file are the following newspaper ac-
counts: A Noite, 20 de novembro de 1915; A Rua, 5 de novembro de 1915; A
Noite, 21 de novembro de 1915; Correio da Manhã, 21 de novembro de 1915;
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 5 * 191

A Noite, 29 de novembro de 1915; A Rua, 25 de janeiro de 1916; A Tribuna,

8 de abril de 1916; Jornal do Comércio, 12 de abril de 1916; A Rua, 15 de abril
de 1916; and A Noite, 18 de abril de 1916. These come from a volume of the
commission’s clippings files, ar.
32 Skidmore, Brazil, 75, 88, 105–7. For a brief review of the issue of decentraliza-
tion in the Old Republic see Diacon, ‘‘Bringing the Countryside Back In.’’ For
a delightful and now classic examination of local landowner power during
the Old Republic see Pang, Bahia.
33 Conselho Nacional de Proteção aos Índios, ‘‘Fé de Ofício . . . Rondon,’’ 3–4,
cnpi-ag, cx5, mi. Viveiros, Rondon conta sua vida, 112–13. Beattie, Tribute
of Blood.
34 Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia no. 12, 13 de junho de 1912,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot.
1,302, mi. Ribeiro, Os índios, 139.
35 Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia no. 1, 20 de julho de 1908,’’ reprinted in cltemta,
Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 76.
36 cltemta, Relatório à Diretoria Geral, 88.
37 Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia no.15, 15 de agosto de 1912,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot.
1,310, mi.
38 cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado à Directoria Geral dos Telégraphos pelo
General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de dezembro de 1926,’’ 88–91,
ar. For examples of other attacks see cltemta, ‘‘Relação dos Civis falleci-
dos na Commissão de Linhas Telegraphicas Estratégicas do Matto-Grosso
ao Amazonas (desde 1906 a 1919),’’ crcx3, filme 1, fot. 2,554–59, mi.
39 Capitão Alencarliense Fernandes de Costa, ‘‘Inquérito Administrativo, 20 de
janeiro de 1921,’’ crcx3, filme 1, fot. 2,718–48, mi.
40 Ibid. cltemta, ‘‘Fallecidos em 10/xii/1920.’’ crcx3, filme 1, fot. 2,548, mi.
‘‘Telegrama, Rondon ao Snr. Capitão Alencarliense, 2 janeiro, 1921, Vilhena.
Urgente. S. Lourenço,’’ reprinted in Capitão Fernandes da Costa, ‘‘Inquérito
Administrativo,’’ crcx3, filme 1, fot. 2,719, mi.
41 See cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado à Diretoria Geral dos Telégraphos pelo
General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de dezembro de 1926,’’ 83–86,
ar, for a list of seven nations Rondon claimed he ‘‘pacified.’’ Langfur, ‘‘Myths
of Pacification.’’ Lima, Um grande cerco de paz, 166. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um
fio,’’ 115. Gagliardi, O indígena, 165–66. Ribeiro, Os índios, 172–76. Bigio, Cân-
dido Rondon, 7. Viveiros, Rondon conta sua vida, 61–85.
42 David Price estimates a Nambikwara population of 5,000 in 1900 (‘‘Nambi-
quara Society,’’ 84). For his description of the lands occupied by the Nambi-
kwara see 50–58.
43 cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910, 35, 47. Roquette-Pinto, Rondônia,
111. Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, ‘‘Dados históricos da pacificação
dos Nhambiquaras,’’ (handwritten report), n.d., ar. For another example of
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192 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 5

commission attraction efforts see Gondin, ‘‘A pacificação dos Parintintins,’’

(unpublished ms., 1925), ar. cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7,
e 9 de outubro de 1915, 167–80, 184–89, 194, 205–8. Cândido Mariano da Silva
Rondon, ‘‘Ordem do Dia no.2, 23 de maio de 1913,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot.
1,314, mi. Price, ‘‘Nambiquara Society.’’ Gagliardi, O indígena, 147.
44 Rondon, ‘‘Carta . . . ao Getúlio Vargas’’ (sem data [1937]), spi-ag-cx 13, doc.
12, filme 1, fot. 3,779–80, mi. Rondon (?), ‘‘Instrucções internas . . . 1910,’’
spi-ac, doc. 34, filme 380, fot. 722, 739–40, mi. Rondon, ‘‘Instrucções para
uso . . . 31 de outubro de 1910,’’ spi-ac, doc. 31, filme 380, fot. 673–77, mi.
‘‘Telegrama, Tenente Coronel Rondon ao Dr. Pedro de Toledo, [1911],’’ re-
printed in Correio da Manhã, 22 de junho de 1911. cltemta, Conferências reali-
zadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 208. ‘‘A catequese no Brasil,’’ Correio
da Manhã, 12 de abril de 1913. Garfield, Indigenous Struggle, 124. Ribeiro, A
política, 26.
45 Rondon, Rumo ao Oeste, 30–31. ‘‘Carta, Tenente-Coronel Rondon ao Minis-
tro da Agricultura, 14 de março de 1910,’’ reprinted in Teixeira Mendes, Em
defeza do selvagens, 21–27. ‘‘A catequese no Brasil,’’ Correio da Manhã, 12 de
abril de 1913. ‘‘Integrando o Índio na civilização: uma entrevista com Gen-
eral Rondon,’’ O Paiz, 20 de maio de 1926. In the secondary literature the only
mention of the extended time it would take to achieve acculturation under
Rondon’s policies is in Garfield, ‘‘ ‘Civilized but Discontent,’ ’’ 182.
46 Rondon, ‘‘Instrucções para uso . . . 31 de outubro de 1910,’’ spi-ac, doc. 31,
filme 380, fot. 673, 676, mi. Rondon, ‘‘Instrucções internas . . . 1910,’’ spi-ac,
doc. 34, filme 380, fot. 739–740, mi. Miranda, ‘‘Regulamento . . . 20 de junho
de 1910,’’ reprinted in Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório . . . de 1910, 1:47.
According to Ribeiro, Rondon justified this move by claiming that the Pareci
were already threatened fatally by rubber-tappers, so that his decision to
move them to other lands was a protective measure. Ribeiro, Os índios, 137.
47 This discussion is based on the following sources: Capitão Alencarliense Fer-
nandes da Costa, ‘‘Relatório do 27° Distrito Telegraphíco, comprehendendo
os annos de 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919 e o primeiro semestre do 1920 apre-
sentado à Chefia da Comissão,’’ no date, vol. 1, 3, ar; cltemta, ‘‘Relató-
rio apresentado à Directoria da Repartição Geral dos Telégraphos pelo Gen-
eral Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Chefe da Comissão, 31 de julho de
1928,’’ 26–28, ar; cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado à Directoria Geral dos
Telegraphos pelo General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de dezem-
bro de 1926,’’ 62–65, ar; Capitão Alencarliense Fernandes da Costa, ‘‘Rela-
tório da Inspecção Geral do Distrito [27°], 1920–1921, apresentado à Chefia
da Comissão, 19 de dezembro de 1921,’’ 33–37, ar; ‘‘Relatório da inspecção
feita de Diamantino a Vilhena e o Diário a partir da cabaceira do Taman-
duá até Calama do rio Madeira. Apresentado ao Cidadão Coronel Cândido
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 5 * 193

da Silva Rondon, Chefe da Commissão pelo Tenente Nicolau Bueno Horta

Barbosa, 13 de janeiro de 1913,’’ in cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de
Engenharia, 192–201. Laurentino André de Sant’Anna, ‘‘Relação de Índios lo-
calizados em Ponte de Pedra e diversos relações de alunos da escola primaria
dessa estação, 2 de agosto de 1913,’’ ar. In 1917 Rondon turned the operation
of the two primary schools over to the state of Mato Grosso.
48 As mentioned in chapter 4 herein, Rondon furthered this identification with
national symbols by having commission photographers portray indigenes
wrapped in the Brazilian flag.
49 Two sources that strongly assert Rondon’s legacy are Ribeiro, Os índios and
A política indigenista. In addition, see the sources listed in note 1 above.
50 This literature owes most to Professor Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima and his
students enrolled in the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia So-
cial do Museu Nacional da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (hereafter
ppgas). See, for example, Lima, Um grande cerco de paz, ‘‘On Indigenism,’’
and ‘‘O governo dos índios’’; Erthal, ‘‘Atrair e pacificar’’; Machado, ‘‘Índios
de Rondon’’; Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio’’; and Ramos, Indigenism. See also
Polanco, Indigenous Peoples. In his 600-plus-page general history of Brazil the
distinguished historian Boris Fausto does not even mention Rondon (Histó-
ria do Brasil ). The following summary of this literature is limited due to space
constraints. Readers are urged to consult it for themselves.
51 Lima, Um grande cerco de paz, 18, 23, 55, 73–74, 101–12, 114, 124–25, 128–29,
160, 213, 233. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 9, 18–19, 130–35, 219–22.
52 Lima, Um grande cerco de paz, 44.
53 Ibid., 55. See also 42–43, 44–46, 48–53. In a similar vein, Polanco writes, ‘‘The
various indigenisms . . . are at once alien (with regard to ethnic groups) and
extremely homogenizing. . . . Indigenism employed as state policy may go
as far as genocide, ethnocide, ethnophagy, or a combination of these. . . . In
any event the solution to the ethnic problem lies . . . in escaping the very logic
of any indigenism’’ (Indigenous Peoples, 24; see also 66, 71–72).
54 Lima, Um grande cerco de paz, 185.
55 Ibid., 191.
56 Ibid., 184. See also 143.
57 Ibid., 229. Polanco comes to a similar conclusion for the colonial period
in Spanish America: ‘‘Overall, the activity of the clergy during the colonial
period amounted to a very efficient continuation of warfare, through other
means, against the indigenous sociocultural system’’ (Indigenous Peoples, 51).
58 Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 134. Polanco, Indigenous Peoples in Latin America,
65–77.
59 Costa, History of Ideas, 140–41. Skidmore, Black into White, 11–13. Kittleson,
‘‘A New Regime.’’ Like all Positivists, Rondon was against a broad, partici-
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194 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 5

patory democracy. Thus, after the creation of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo
dictatorship, Rondon wrote to Vargas saying, ‘‘As . . . a proponent of a strong,
stable government able to avoid parliamentary maneuverings that are almost
always inspired by electoral campaigns, I applaud . . . the situation Your Ex-
cellency created with the coup d’état of 10 November 1937, which was of
great benefit to our country.’’ ‘‘Carta, Marechal Rondon ao Presidente Var-
gas [1937 or 38],’’ spi-ag-cx13, doc. 12, filme 1, fot.3,777, mi). For a study of
the government of the Positivist Júlio de Castilhos in the state of Rio Grande
do Sul (which emphasizes Positivist opposition to participatory democracy),
see Freitas, O homen que inventou.
60 Ramos, Indigenism, 18–19, 80. Garfield, Indigenous Struggle, 24. Lima, Um
grande cerco de paz, chap. 3, 203–4, 209–10.
61 Garfield, Indigenous Struggle, 43. Garfield, ‘‘ ‘Civilized but Discontent,’ ’’ 110.
Farage and Cunha, ‘‘Caracter da tutela,’’ 114. Ramos, Indigenism, 82–83, 95–97.
Lima, Um grande cerco de paz, 73–74.
62 Ramos, Indigenism, 83. See also ‘‘História exemplar: de como índios orgul-
hosos passaram a integrar uma triba ainda maior-a dos excluidos,’’ Veja, 1 de
abril de 1988, p. 69.
63 Ribeiro, Os índios, 211–12. Garfield, Indigenous Struggle, 51, 124.
64 For an interesting assertion of Indian agency and resistance see Langfur,
‘‘Myths of Pacification.’’ In this article Langfur is much more critical of Ron-
don’s policies than I am, and indeed he sides with Lima’s interpretation of
Rondon and the spi. However, Langfur’s own information clearly demon-
strates that Rondon was much more respectful of indigenous rights than
were either the Salesian missionaries or local landowners (‘‘Myths of Paci-
fication,’’ 885–88, 893). Mércio P. Gomes, Indians and Brazil, x, 4, 78–79, 81.
Garfield, ‘‘ ‘All the Indians.’ ’’ Turner, ‘‘De cosmologia a história.’’ For an en-
gaging discussion of how Afro-Brazilians constructed and asserted their own
understandings of nationhood see Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won. For
an especially cogent discussion of agency in Africa see Larson, ‘‘ ‘Capacities
and Modes of Thinking.’ ’’ For a brief critique of Foucault’s concept of mod-
ern disciplinary power because it ignores resistance see Findlay, Imposing
Decency, 132–34. It bears noting that Polanco probably would also criticize
scholars such as Lima and Maciel for being ‘‘ethnicists’’ who ‘‘invert ethno-
centrism’’ and who, contrary ‘‘to the historical record, [posit] an unchanging
ethnic essence . . . as the necessary basis for the continuity of indigenous
societies’’ (Indigenous Peoples, 74). For a similar critique see Warren, Racial
Revolutions, 22–25. Garfield criticizes Lima for ‘‘perpetuat[ing] the view of
Indians as inconsequential actors in the making of their own history, over-
whelmed by the Brazilian leviathan’’ (‘‘ ‘Civilized but Discontent,’ ’’ 19). For
a critique of scholars who fail to see the environmental changes caused by
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 5 * 195

indigenes in the Amazon basin and who consider the Amazon to have been
unchanged until contact with Europeans, see Cleary, ‘‘Towards an Environ-
mental History.’’ These critiques also inform much of Mércio P. Gomes, Indi-
ans and Brazil, and Turner, ‘‘De cosmologia a história.’’
65 As Darcy Ribeiro notes, to implement successfully its program the spi would
had to have overcome the interests and power of local leaders, many of whom
benefited from access to indigenous lands and labor; this, he says, never hap-
pened (Os índios, 163–69, 396). For more on this theme of the limits of state
power but for a later period in Brazilian Indian–white relations, see Garfield,
Indigenous Struggle. For a critique of authors who stress the unlimited power
of the state see Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises, 13–16. For an extended
and fascinating meditation on the issue of state power see Scott, Seeing Like
a State.
66 Compare my assertion here with Langfur’s observation that for Rondon,
‘‘When Indians stood in the way of progress they would have to be incorpo-
rated into society as rapidly, if peacefully, as possible’’ (‘‘Myths of Pacifica-
tion,’’ 884). Egon Schaden, ‘‘O problema indígena,’’ 455.
67 Fernandes da Costa, ‘‘Relatório da Inspeccão Geral do Distrito [27°], 1920–
1921 apresentado À Chefia da Comissão, 19 de dezembro de 1921,’’ p. 34, ar.
68 ‘‘Serviço improfícuo,’’ O Matto Grosso, 10 de fevereiro de 1918.
69 ‘‘Serviço improfícuo,’’ A Cruz, 24 de março de 1918.
70 ‘‘Serviço improfícuo,’’ A Cruz, 14 de abril de 1918. ‘‘Serviço improfícuo,’’
O Matto Grosso, 10 de fevereiro de 1918. Jornal do Comércio, 30 de maio de 1911.
71 ‘‘Apedido,’’ A Cruz, 17 de março de 1918.
72 ‘‘Serviço improfícuo,’’ A Cruz, 14 de abril de 1918. Viveiros, Rondon conta sua
vida, 17–18. In letters to his wife Rondon sometimes signed his name as ‘‘seu
Pery,’’ in reference to the indigenous main character in José de Alencar’s
romantic novel O Guaraní. Examples of this can be found in the Arquivo Ron-
don.
73 Peard, ‘‘Tropical Disorders,’’ esp. pp. 25–26. Stepan, Hour of Eugenics. Lilia
Moritz Schwarcz offers a somewhat different view when she argues that by
1930 racism was no longer embraced officially in Brazil but was still a very
important component of popular culture (O espetáculo das raças, esp. 243–
50).
74 Skidmore, Black into White, 30. Mércio P. Gomes, Indians and Brazil, 107–10.
For a similar argument as to the need to consider the historical context of
treaties on race in Brazil, this time in regard to the work of Gilberto Freyre,
see Skidmore, ‘‘Raizes de Gilberto Freyre.’’
75 Romero, quoted in Skidmore, Black into White, 35. For more on Romero’s
thoughts on race and Indians see Dante Moreira Leite, O caráter nacional
brasileiro, 179–94.
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196 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 4

76 Skidmore, Black into White, 73–74.

77 Ibid., 186. In this sense I would argue that Rondon was one of the founders
of the movement to embrace mestiçagem. Leaders of this movement, as
Schwarcz discusses in O espetáculo das raças, asserted by the 1930s that Bra-
zil’s mixed racial composition no longer hindered Brazilian development
but was instead a source of national strength and identity. For more on
nineteenth-century Brazilian intellectuals and the Indian question see Mér-
cio P. Gomes, Indians and Brazil, 112–17. Garfield, Indigenous Struggle, 37–39.
78 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to compare Rondon’s policies with
those of the Salesian missionaries. For a helpful comparison see Garfield,
‘‘ ‘Civilized but Discontent,’ ’’ 111–19; Garfield, Indigenous Struggle, 124; Ri-
beiro, Os índios, 136–37. See also Langfur, ‘‘Myths of Pacification.’’
79 For an early English-language version of this dispute see Stauffer, ‘‘Origin
and Establishment,’’ esp. 50–75. Gagliardi, O indígena, 71–87, 157–58. Ribeiro,
Os índios, 149–51. Ribeiro, A política, 7–13.
80 Lima, Um grande cerco de paz, 18, 78, 113. Lima, ‘‘On Indigenism.’’ Lima,
‘‘O governo dos indios.’’
81 Dr. Herman von Ihering, ‘‘Extermínio dos indígenas ou dos sertanejos,’’ Jor-
nal do Comércio, 15 de dezembro de 1908.
82 Dr. Herman von Ihering, ‘‘O futuro dos Indígenas do Estado de S. Paulo,’’
O Estado de São Paulo, 20 de outubro de 1908.
83 Dr. Herman von Ihering, ‘‘Extermínio dos indígenas ou dos sertanejos,’’ Jor-
nal do Comércio, 15 de dezembro de 1908.
84 Dr. Herman von Ihering, ‘‘Os indios do Brasil meridional,’’ Correio Paulistano,
29 de outubro de 1908. A footnote at the end of this paragraph reads as fol-
lows: ‘‘When I speak of the extermination of the Indians naturally I am re-
ferring to those who truly are a roadblock to the expansion of our culture,
and this because of complications and assaults.’’ Von Ihering, of course, be-
lieved that Indians in reservations became degenerate and were destined to
disappear.
85 Dr. Herman von Ihering, ‘‘Extermínio dos indígenas ou dos sertanejos,’’ Jor-
nal do Comércio, 15 de dezembro de 1908. General Sheridan actually issued
these words.
86 ‘‘Protecção aos índios e perseguições aos trabalhadores nacionaes e colonos
estrangeiros,’’ Jornal do Comércio, 7 de agosto de 1911.
87 Correio da Manhã, 15 de janeiro de 1917. For more on urban, romanticized
views of Indians see Ramos, Indigenism, chap. 2; Ribeiro, Os índios, 148–49;
Maligo, Land of Metaphorical Desires, 1–95.
88 The growing abuse and exploitation of indigenes by spi personnel in the
1950s is discussed in Garfield, Indigenous Struggle, 102–8. According to Ri-
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 4 * 197

beiro, ‘‘considered in their historical context the Positivist policies were the
most advanced of that era’’ (Os índios, 161).
89 Perry, From Time Immemorial. Readers are especially encouraged to com-
pare Rondon’s assimilation policies with the much more abusive policies in
Canada and the United States. Mércio P. Gomes likewise recognizes Ron-
don’s accomplishments given the context of the period and criticizes Lima
for failing to do so (Indians and Brazil, 78n.27, 123–24).
90 An exception to this generalization is Hal Langfur’s recent article. He writes,
‘‘The greatest harm caused by the [Rondon] telegraph project was that it
accelerated the incorporation of the frontier, attracting new settlers whose
foothold in the region was strengthened by improved communication and
access via the broad paths opened by Rondon’’ (‘‘Myths of Pacification,’’ 886).
Sheldon Davis also mentions the issue briefly in Victims, 4. For a general his-
tory of such environmental degradation in Brazil see Dean, With Broadax and
Firebrand.
91 ‘‘Carta, Tenente-Coronel Rondon ao Ministro da Agricultura, Rio de Janeiro,
14 de março de 1910,’’ reprinted in Teixeira Mendes, Em defeza, 24. Maciel, ‘‘A
nação por um fio,’’ 120. For other examples of the promotion of development
by Rondon and others see cltemta, ‘‘Documento no.5,’’ 1917, spi-ac, filme
327, fot. 1,575; ‘‘Carta, Amilcar Armando Botelho de Magalhães aos Srs. Mem-
bros da Commissão de Finanças da Câmara dos Deputados, 11 de novembro
de 1916,’’ spi-ac, filme 327, fot. 1,590, mi. Celso Castro notes the Positivist
faith in development and technology. Indeed, a hallmark of the Positivist
stage of social evolution was to be man’s domination of nature (Castro, Os
militares, 64).
92 ‘‘Relatório da inspecção feita de Diamantino a Vilhena e o Diário a partir da
cabeceira do Tamanduá até Calama do rio Madeira. Apresentado ao Cidadão
Coronel Cândido da Silva Rondon, Chefe da Commissão pelo 1° Tenente
Nicolau Bueno Horta Barbosa, 13 de janeiro de 1913,’’ in cltemta, Relatório
apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 233. cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos
dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 221–22.
93 cltemta, Geologia, 12. Fernandes da Costa, ‘‘Relatório do 27° Distrito Tele-
gráphico Comprehendendo os annos 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919 e o primeiro
semestre do 1920 apresentado À Chefe da Comissão,’’ ar, 9–10. Roquette-
Pinto, Rondonia, 115.
94 ‘‘Relatório da inspecção feita de Diamantino a Vilhena e o Diário a partir de
cabeceira do Tamanduá até Calama do rio Madeira. Apresentado ao Cidadão
Coronel Cândido da Silva Rondon, Chefe da Comissão pelo 1° Tenente Nico-
lau Bueno Horta Barbosa,’’ Anexo N.V. in cltemta, Relatório apresentado
à Divisão de Engenharia, 2–5. A Rua (Rio de Janeiro), 10 de janeiro de 1917.
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198 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 6

A Noite, 10 de janeiro de 1917. A Razão (Rio de Janeiro), 11 de janeiro de

1917. For more on Commission relations with the Asensi and Company see
cltemta, ‘‘Crédito aberto por decreto 11.849 de 29 de dezembro de 1915,’’
spi-ac, filme 330, fot. 0040; cltemta, ‘‘Relatório do Escriptório Central
em 1916: Supplemento no.8—Documentos relativos à entrega de material
ao Museu Nacional,’’ spi-ac, filme 328, fot.1,134; ‘‘Carta, Cândido Mariano
da Silva ao Sr. Ministro d’Estado dos Negócios de Viação e Obras Públicas
Augusto Tavares de Lyra, 16 de junho de 1915,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 984;
cltemta (Segundo Tenente Eduardo de Abreu Botelho), ‘‘Ordem do Dia
no.74, 22 de agosto de 1914,’’ spi-ac, filme 326, fot. 964, mi. Ribeiro, Os índios,
142, 275.
95 Oliveira Filho, O nosso governo, 165–74.
96 José de Mello Fiuza, ‘‘Relatório das atividades da expedição do spi destinada
a pacificar os índios que atacaram o seringal São José,’’ 7 de fevereiro de 1966,
spi-ac, doc. 213, filme 380, fot. 2,025, mi.
97 Ibid., fot. 2,028–29.
98 Ibid., fot. 2,029.
99 This photograph, taken in Goiânia, is among the many items not yet cata-
logued in the Arquivo Rondon at the Copacabana Fort. No additional infor-
mation about the subject of the photograph is given.
100 The standard work on the disastrous impact of development on indige-
nous peoples in the Amazon is Davis, Victims. For works specifically about
Rondônia see Ricardo Grinbaum, ‘‘O novo eldorado verde: soja, dinheiro
e cidades brotam numa faixa de Rondônia ao Piauí que tem o tamanho da
Espanha,’’ Veja, 2 de abril de 1997, pp. 110–15; MacMillan, At the End of the
Rainbow? 15–23, 32–33, 53, 56–57, 63, 84, 128–34; Price, Before the Bulldozer,
177–94. See also Rabben, Unnatural Selection, 11–16. For the World Bank’s own
review of its participation in the polonoroeste project see Mahar and
Ducrot, Land-Use Zoning. This account includes figures on deforestation in
Rondônia. For background see Cleary, ‘‘Towards an Environmental History.’’
101 Ribeiro, Os índios, 211–12. Price, Before the Bulldozer, 151. Garfield, ‘‘ ‘Civilized
but Discontent,’ ’’ 49.
102 For a similar meditation on the costs and impact of Amazonian development
see Robin L. Anderson, Colonization as Exploitation, 131–44.

six Selling a Person and a Product

1 cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 52–53; Maciel, ‘‘A
nação por um fio,’’ 5–9; Viveiros, Rondon conta sua vida, 573. See Brasil, Minis-
tério da Agricultura, Católogo geral for a list of commission publications.
2 It is safe to say that in Rio de Janeiro hardly a week passed without some
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 6 * 199

mention of the commission in the local press. The central office maintained a
clippings file that, over the years, filled several large volumes. A few volumes
of this clippings file have been microfilmed and are housed at the Museu do
Índio. Two other volumes, neither of which has been catalogued, are housed
at the Museu do Exército. For examples of front-page stories on Rondon and
the telegraph, each of which included photographs, see A Noite, 11 Novem-
ber 1913, and O Imparcial, 23 de maio de 1914. For an example of a multipart
feature article Botelho de Magalhães wrote for a newspaper in Porto Alegre
see ‘‘Em torno de Rondon,’’ Correio do Povo, 14 de maio de 1925, 26 de maio
de 1925, and 11 de junho de 1925.
3 cltemta, Relatório dos trabalhos realizados, 80. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’
especially chaps. 1 and 2. Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima focuses on the stra-
tegic side of telegraph construction in Um grande cerco de paz.
4 cltemta, Relatório dos trabalhos realizados, 8.
5 Ibid., 8–10, 15–16, 80, 118–19. cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de
Engenharia, 33. cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado à Directoria Geral dos Tele-
graphos pelo General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de dezembro de
1926,’’ pp. 59–69, ar. Lima, Um grande cerco de paz, 55, 62, 87, 101–12. Viveiros,
Rondon conta sua vida, 315, 435–36.
6 cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 33. cltemta, ‘‘Rela-
tório apresentado à Directoria Geral dos Telégraphos pelo General Cândido
Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de dezembro de 1926,’’ pp. 2–4, 16–46, 69–72,
ar; the quote is on pp. 59–60. ‘‘Telegrama, Capitão Botelho de Magalhães,
Chefe do Escriptório Commissão Rondon, ao Exmo. Sr. Dr. Weneslau Braz,
digno Presidente da República, 29 de Novembro de 1916,’’ spi-ac, filme 327,
fot. 1,580; ‘‘Carta, Amilcar Armando Botelho de Magalhães aos Srs. Mem-
bros da Commissão de Finanças da Camara dos Deputados, 11 de Novembro
de 1916,’’ spi-ac, filme 327, fot. 1,587–1,590, mi.
7 cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910.
8 Jornal do Comércio, 6 de outubro de 1915, quoted in cltemta, Conferências
realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, v.
9 This section is based on cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de
outubro de 1915, v, xviii–xx, 3, 5–6, 8, 36, 39–40, 153–56, 159–61, 282–90. Correio
da Manhã, 6 de outubro de 1915. Jornal do Comércio, 7, 8, 9, and 10 de outubro
de 1915. Comércio da Tarde, 7 de outubro de 1915. O País, 9 de outubro de 1915.
Levi Grant Monroe, ‘‘Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Distinguished Son
and Most Beloved Man of Brazil: History of His Life’s Work,’’ Brazilian Ameri-
can, 20 January 1923, pp. 5, 7–9, 31–32, 47–48, 50–52.
10 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 159–60,
41–42.
11 Correio da Manhã, 6 de outubro de 1915. Jornal do Comércio, 8, 9, and 10 de
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200 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 6

outubro de 1915. Comércio da Tarde, 7 de outubro de 1915. O País, 11 de outubro

de 1915. A Noite, 11 October 1915.
12 A Rua, 6 de novembro de 1915. Jornal do Comércio, 8 de maio de 1924. O Jornal,
8 de maio de 1924. O País, 8 de maio de 1924. In one of his own reports Ron-
don claimed that the then current construction of a road running alongside
the line would result in ‘‘a grand artery over which a great interior exchange
would take place between the River Plate and Amazonas’’ (cltemta, Rela-
tório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 33).
13 O País, 15 de julho de 1916. A Noite, 17 de julho de 1916. Correio da Manhã, 15 de
julho de, 1916.
14 O País, 11 de novembro de 1913. In a volume of the central office’s clippings
collection (this one housed in ar) this article is followed by the signature
‘‘F. Jaguaribe de Matos.’’ One critic asserted that most of the articles about
the commission printed in O País came ‘‘directly from the Central Office’’
(Dr. Antonio M.A. Pimentel, ‘‘Serviço de Protecção aos Índios,’’ Jornal do Bra-
sil, 21 de novembro de 1912, spi-ac, filme 382, fot. 043, mi). Maciel likewise
notes that central office personnel generated reports, articles, and interviews
for public consumption (Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 5–7, 9). For further
examples of central office spin control see Jaguaribe de Matos’s response to a
criticism of the commission in A Noite, 20 de novembro de 1915; and Botelho
de Magalhães’s comments in a letter to A Noite, 3 de junho de 1917.
15 Botelho de Magalhães, ‘‘A Commissão Rondon,’’ 4–6. Reprint of a report by
Captain Amilcar Botelho de Magalhães, Jornal do Comércio, 25 de novembro
de 1916. The same report was also reprinted in A Noite, 23 de novembro de
1916. cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado à Directoria Geral dos Telégraphos
pelo General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de dezembro de 1926,’’
2–4, ar. Viveiros, Rondon conta sua vida, 315, 435–36.
16 Gazeta ne Notícias, 18 de março de 1917. For a similar argument see Jornal do
Comércio, 3 de novembro de 1911, spi-ac, filme 324, fot. 233–34, mi. Maciel
also makes this point in ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 219–20.
17 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 161.
‘‘Carta, Chefe do Escriptório Central ao Sr. Redactor da Gazeta de Notícias,’’
25 de março de 1917, spi-ac, filme 330, fot. 349–55, mi. José Bevilacqua,
‘‘Roosevelt-Rondon,’’ O País, 18 de dezembro de, 1912.
18 Jornal do Comércio, 3 de novembro de 1911, spi-ac, filme 324, fot. 233–34,
mi. A similar set of assertions can be found in ‘‘Vamos ter um batalhão de
coroaceiros boróros,’’ A Cruz, 17 de março de 1918.
19 An official response to just such charges, made in the A Tarde newspaper,
can be found in ‘‘Carta, Amilcar A. Botelho de Magalhães, ao Sr. redactor d’A
Tarde, 25 de abril de 1928,’’ spi-ac, filme 324, fot. 452–53, mi. Jornal do Comér-
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 6 * 201

cio, 13 de novembro de 1911. Gazeta de Notícias, 18 de março de 1917. A Rua,

24 de maio de 1924.
20 cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 297–15. cltemta,
‘‘Relatório apresentado à Directoria Geral dos Telegraphos pelo General Cân-
dido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de dezembro de 1926,’’ pp. 100–105, ar.
cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado à Directoria da Repartição Geral dos Tele-
graphos pelo General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Chefe da Comis-
são, 31 de julho de 1928,’’ no page number, ar.
21 Repartição Geral dos Telégraphos, ‘‘Quadro das importâncias recolhidas por
Diamantino proveniente das rendas das estações da Commissão das Linhas
Telegráphicas e Estratégicas de Matto Grosso ao Amazonas (cópia), 24 de
Setembro de 1917,’’ spi-ac, filme 327, fot. 1,559; ‘‘Carta, Chefe do Escriptório
Central ao Snr. Dr. Euclides Barboso, M.D., Director da Repartição Geral dos
Telégraphos, 25 de dezembro de 1917,’’ spi-ac, filme 330, fot. 0074, mi.
22 Brasil, Ministério da Viação, Departamento dos Correios e Telégrafos, ‘‘Rela-
tório annual do 3° Distrito Telégrafo de Mato Grosso apresentado à Direto-
ria Geral do Departamento [dos Correiros e Telégrafos] pelo Capitão Alvízio
Ferreira, 1 de fevereiro de 1932,’’ p. 11, ar. cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado
à Directoria Geral dos Telégraphos pelo General Cândido Mariano da Silva
Rondon, 31 de dezembro de 1926,’’ pp. 94b, 107–18, ar. cltemta, ‘‘Relató-
rio apresentado à Directoria da Repartição Geral dos Telégraphos pelo Gen-
eral Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Chefe da Comissão, 31 de julho de
1928,’’ no page number, ar. The dollar values are based on devaluation and
exchange rates published in Ludwig, Brazil, 431; and Holloway, Immigrants
on the Land, 181.
23 Jornal do Comércio, 3 de novembro de 1911, spi-ac, filme 324, fot. 233–34, mi.
cltemta, ‘‘Relatório, Escriptório Central, Secção de Contabilidade, Apre-
sentado ao Sr. Coronel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Engenheiro Chefe
da Commissão de Linhas Telegráficas Estratégicas de Matto Grosso ao Ama-
zonas pelo Pedro Malheiros, inspetor de 2° classe, 31 de dezembro de 1912,’’ in
Relatório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 281–85. ‘‘Relatório concernente
ao triennio 1910–1911–1912, apresentado ao Sr. Coronel Cândido Mariano da
Silva Rondon, Chefe da Commissão de Linhas Telegráphicas Estratégicas de
Matto-Grosso ao Amazonas pelo 1° Tenente Francisco Jaguaribe Gomes de
Mattos, encaregado da Secção de Desenho da mesma Commissão,’’ in Relató-
rio apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 260–61. Jaguaribe Gomes de Mattos,
‘‘Curriculum Vitae,’’ pp. 3–4, ar. ‘‘Carta, Francisco Eduardo Rangel Torres
ao Cel. Amilcar Armando Botelho de Magalhães, 25 de november de 1952,’’
ar. The first threat to shut down the commission came in 1909 when the
minister of transportation and public works, J. J. Seabra, opposed the line;
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202 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 6

President Hermes da Fonseca protected the project (Viveiros, Rondon conta

sua vida, 287–88).
24 ‘‘Carta, A. Tavares de Lyra ao Sr. Coronel Rondon, Engenheiro Chefe da Com-
missão de Linhas Telegráphicas Estratégicas de Matto-Grosso ao Amazonas,
6 de dezembro de 1915,’’ spi-ac, filme 330, fot. 0295–0296; ‘‘Carta, Cândido
Mariano da Silva Rondon ao Snr. Ministro d’Estado dos Negócios da Viação
e Obras Publicas, 16 de junho de 1915,’’ spi-ac, filme 327, fot. 1,495–1,503,
mi. O País, 26 de outubro de 1915. A Noite, 25 de outubro de 1915. A Notícia,
28 de outubro de 1915. O País, 1 de novembro de 1915. Rondon argued that
President Weneslão Braz had given him permission to buy supplies on credit
and that it made no sense to halt construction in late 1914 when the line was
just months away from completion. Minister Tavares de Lyra argued that
Rondon did not have prior permission to exceed his budget.
25 ‘‘Telegrama[s], Capitão Botelho de Magalhães, Chefe do Escriptório Com-
missão Rondon, ao Exmo. Sr. Dr. Weneslau Braz, Digno Presidente da Re-
publica, 18 novembro 1916, 20 novembro 1916, 29 novembro 1916,’’ spi-ac,
filme 3,270, fot. 1,578–80;. ‘‘Carta, Amilcar Armando Botelho de Magalhães,
Capitão de Engenharia, Escriptório, ao Snr. Senador Dr. A. Azeredo, 30 de
agosto de 1916,’’ spi-ac, filme 327, fot. 1,585–86; ‘‘Carta, Amilcar Armando
Botelho de Magalhães aos Srs. Membros da Commissão da Finanças da
Camara dos Deputados, 11 de novembro de 1916,’’ spi-ac, filme 327, fot.
1,587–90; ‘‘Carta, Chefe do Escriptório Central ao Snr. Dr. Augusto Tavares
de Lyra, M.D., Minístro d’Estado dos Negócios da Viação e Obras Públicas,
15 de janeiro de 1917,’’ spi-ac, filme 327, fot. 1,611; cltemta, ‘‘Carta Official
aos Srs. Senadores Dr. Antonio Azeredo, Dr. José Antonio Murtinho, e José
Maria Metello; ao Snr. Coronel Augusto Tasso Fragoso; ao Snr. Deputado
Dr. Alfredo Mavignier; ao Snr. Deputado Dr. Octavio da Costa Marques, 21
de fevereiro de 1917,’’ spi-ac, filme 330, fot. 316–19; ‘‘Carta, Chefe do Escrip-
torio Central ao Snr. Deputado Dr. Alfredo Mavignier, 17 de julho de 1917,’’
spi-ac, filme 330, fot. 361–32, mi. Jornal do Comércio, 5 de julho de 1916. O País,
8 de julho de 1916. A Noite, 23 de novembro de 1916. Jornal do Comércio, 25 de
novembro de 1916. In 1917 Botelho de Magalhães wrote, but never sent, a
letter to the editor of the Jornal do Comércio in which he defended the com-
mission in the face of attacks published in that newspaper ([no title], 27 de
fevereiro de 1917,’’ spi-ac, filme 330, fot. 429–32, mi).
26 ‘‘Carta, Chefe do Escriptório Central ao 1° Tenente Alencarliense Fernandez
da Costa, 15 de dezembro de 1917,’’ spi-ac, filme 360, fot. 411–12, mi. Capitão
Alencarliense Fernandes, ‘‘Relatório do 27° Distrito Telegraphíco compre-
hendendo os annos de 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919 e o primeiro semestre do
1920, apresentado A Chefia da Commissao,’’ no date; ‘‘Relatório do 27° Dis-
trito Telegráfico compreendendo o segundo semestre de 1920 e os anos de
Tseng 2003.12.9 07:11
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 6 * 203

1921 e 1922, apresentado à chefe da Comissão pelo Engenheiro-Chefe do Dis-

trito Capitão Alencarliense Fernandes da Costa,’’ no date, ar. ‘‘Serviço de
Protecção aos Índios,’’ O Matto-Grosso, 17 de março de 1918.
27 Rondon quoted in Viveiros, Rondon conta sua vida, 227.
28 Reprint of a letter from General Juarez de Tavora to Esther de Viveiros, 29 de
maio de 1956, in ibid., 578–79.
29 Comércio da Tarde, 7 de outubro de 1915. A Noite, 2 de dezembro de 1913.
A Noite, 11 de novembro de 1913. ‘‘Rondon is, at this moment, because of
his ideals and his ability to realize them, the Brazilian that we should most
venerate’’ (Comércio da Tarde, 7 de outubro de 1915). For other examples
of this kind of adulation see O País, 11 de novembro de 1915; and Botelho
de Magalhães, ‘‘Em torno de Rondon,’’ Correio do Povo, 14 de maio de 1925.
This Commission-authored article noted that Rondon had received praise
from General Gamelin, head of the French Military Mission to Brazil, from
Theodore Roosevelt, and from numerous European geographical societies.
30 cltemta, Relatório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 337–38. cltemta, Re-
latório dos trabalhos realizados, 80. One can open virtually any commission
report and find heroic language. For an especially powerful example see Re-
latório apresentado à Divisão de Engenharia, 273–75, 277–78, 280. For later ex-
amples see ‘‘Relatório apresentado à Directoria Geral dos Telegraphos pelo
General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de Dezembro de 1926,’’ ar.
31 cltemta, Conferências realizadas em 1910, 41.
32 Ibid., 54.
33 Ibid., 8, 30.
34 Ibid., 94.
35 Ibid., 28.
36 Ibid., 94.
37 Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 115. Lins, ‘‘A obra educativa,’’ 42. Viveiros,
Rondon conta sua vida, 245.
38 Senator Alcindo Guanabara quoted in O País, 31 de outubro de 1915. O País,
26 de outubro de 1915. A Rua, 4 de novembro de 1915.
39 A Rua, 24 de maio de 1924. A Gazeta de Notícias, 11 de abril de 1923. ‘‘As proto-
cas do Coronel Rondon [The Lies of Colonel Rondon],’’ Argos, 15 de março
de 1916. O País, 22 de outubro de 1913. Jornal do Comércio, 3 de novembro de
1911. Amilcar Armando Botelho de Magalhães, no title, 22 de fevereiro de
1919, spi-ac, filme 330, fot. 431, mi. Lins, ‘‘A obra educativa,’’ 41.
40 cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Relatório apresentado pelo Capitão, 5.
41 Euclydes da Cunha, quoted in Pedro Maligo, Land of Metaphorical Desires, 3,
39. Slater, Entangled Edens, 194–203.
42 Maligo, Land of Metaphorical Desires, chap. 3. Maligo claims that ‘‘it was the
literature of this period which shaped the image of Amazonia for the Bra-
Tseng 2003.12.9 07:11
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204 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 6

zilian public over the years’’ (51). For more on the competing images of the
Amazon as an earthly heaven or an earthly hell see Slater, Entangled Edens;
and Diacon, ‘‘From Green Hell.’’
43 Thielen et al., A ciência, 7, 117. For more on these expeditions see also Thielen
and Santos, Revisitando a Amazônia; and Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Sci-
ence. The original reports generated by the expeditions have been reprinted
in Cruz, Chagas, and Peixoto, Sobre o saneamento.
44 Oswaldo Cruz, quoted in Thielen, et.al., A ciência, 121. Carlos Chagas, ‘‘Notas
sobre,’’ 160–65; the quote appears on page 160. Chagas presented his lecture
on 17 October 1913 in the Palácio Monroe.
45 Thielen et.al., A ciência, 3. Hoehne, Índice bibliográfico, 5. cltemta, Serviço
Sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 7. Nicolau Horta Barbosa, ‘‘Diário, 13 janeiro
1913,’’ ar. cltemta, Serviço Sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 7. O País, 2 de outubro
de 1914.
46 cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe, 20. cltemta, Serviço Sanitário: Sec-
ção de Cáceres, 31–38. cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Relatório apresentado pelo
Capitão, 6.
47 cltemta, Geologia, 10. Brazil, Ministério da Viação, Departamento dos
Correiros e Telégrafos, ‘‘Relatório annual do 3° Distrito Telegráfico de Mato
Grosso apresentado à Diretoria Geral do Departamento pelo Capitão Alvízio
Ferreira, 1 de fevereiro de 1932,’’ ar. cltemta, Serviço Sanitário: Secção de
Cáceres, 6.
48 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915,181–84.
Rondon, quoted in Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 103. See also Tanajura,
Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres, 6, 23–25. Rondon did not mention this ill-
ness in his 1915 lectures (cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de
outubro de 1915, 161).
49 cltemta, Conferências realizadas nos dias 5, 7, e 9 de outubro de 1915, 41–42.
Jornal do Comércio, 19 July 1914.
50 This information is found in the printed tables ‘‘Relação das praças exami-
nadas e medicadas no destacamento do Rio de Janeiro no mez de maio de
1909’’ and ‘‘Relação das praças examinadas e medicadas no Porto de Tapira-
poan no mez de maio de 1909’’ (cltemta, Serviço sanitário: Secção de Cáceres,
no page number).
51 Botelho de Magalhães, Impressões, 35–36. cltemta, Serviço Sanitário: Secção
de Cáceres, 4. Dr. J. Cajazeira, quoted in O País, 2 de outubro de 1914.
52 cltemta, Relatório apresentado ao Chefe, 7. Dr. Francisco Moritz, ‘‘Relatório
da Expedição dos Campos de Commemoração de Floriano ao Rio Guaporé,
de 30 de setembro a 19 de dezembro de 1912, apresentado ao Sr. Coronel
Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon,’’ p.12, ar. ‘‘Instrucções para o serviço
sanitário das Secções do Norte e do Sul, 22 de maio de 1910,’’ in cltemta,
Tseng 2003.12.9 07:11
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n ot e s to c h a p t e r 7 * 205

Relatórios diversos, 110. See also Horta Barbosa, ‘‘Diário 13 janeiro 1913,’’ p. 10,
ar.
53 Hoehne, Índice bibliográfico, 5.
54 A Noite, 10 de janeiro de 1917. A Razão, 11 de janeiro de 1917. In addition, see
A Rua, 10, 13 de janeiro de 1917; A Gazeta de Notícias, 14 de janeiro de 1917;
and A Noite, 30 de janeiro de 1917.
55 A Rua, 13 de janeiro de 1917.
56 A Gazeta de Notícias, 14 de janeiro de 1917.
57 A Notícia, 30 de janeiro de 1917.
58 A Rua, 13 de janeiro de 1917.
59 Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 189–93.
60 In addition to Maciel, readers should consult Tacca’s ‘‘O índio ‘pacificado.’ ’’
See also his dissertation, ‘‘O abstrato.’’ Lima, Um grande cerco de paz.
61 These, and other articles and advertisements, are found in the volume of the
commission’s clippings collection that is housed in the ar.
62 Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio,’’ 215–16. O Estado de São Paulo, 11 de novembro
de 1915.
63 A Tribuna (Santos), 20 de novembro de 1915.
64 ‘‘Os sertões de Mato Grosso,’’ unidentified advertisement in the commis-
sion’s clippings collection, ar.
65 A Tribuna, 20 de novembro de 1915. To understand better the gendered ex-
pectations see Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy; Caulfield, In Defense of Honor.
66 O Estado de São Paulo, 6 de novembro de 1915. O Correiro Popular (Guaratin-
guetá, São Paulo), 2 de abril de 1916.
67 O Correio Popular, 2 de abril de 1916. ‘‘Carta, Frederico Ortis do Rego Barros,
inspector da Repartição dos Telegraphos, Alfenas, ao Illmo. Sr. redactor da
A Noite,’’ A Noite, 27 de julho de 1917.
68 Ramos, Indigenism, 5.
69 Lima, Um grande cerco de paz. Maciel, ‘‘A nação por um fio.’’ Tacca, ‘‘O índio
‘pacificado.’ ’’ In addition, for a more nuanced analysis of Rondon, but one
that nevertheless accepts many of the revisionists’ assumptions, see Langfur,
‘‘Myths of Pacification.’’
70 A recent and welcomed exception to this literature is Hal Langfur’s discus-
sion of Bororo resistance to Rondon’s incursions (‘‘Myths of Pacification’’).

seven Legacy of the Lonely Line

1 cltemta, ‘‘Relatório do 27° distrito telegráfico compreendendo o segundo
semestre de 1920 e os anos de 1921 e 1922, apresentado à Chefe da Comis-
são pelo Engenheiro-Chefe do Distrito Capitão Alencarliense Fernandes da
Costa,’’ ar. cltemta, ‘‘Relatório apresentado à Diretoria Geral dos Telé-
Tseng 2003.12.9 07:11
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206 * n ot e s to c h a p t e r 7

graphos pelo General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, 31 de dezembro

de 1926,’’ ar. Capitão Alvízio Ferreira, ‘‘Relatório annual do 3° distrito tele-
gáfico de Mato Grosso apresentado à Diretoria Geral do Departamento [do
Correios e Telégrafos], 1 de fevereiro de 1932,’’ ar.
2 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes trópicos, 256; an English translation by John and Doreen
Weightman is Tristes-tropiques. Slater, Entangled Edens, 49–53, 153–57.
3 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes trópicos, 246. At some point in the 1930s the operation of
the cltemta line was transferred to civilian administration via the General
Telegraph Office. According to David Price, the line was finally abandoned in
1960, and today all physical traces of it are gone (‘‘Nambiquara Society,’’ 41).
4 John Tazewell Jones, São Paulo, to Mr. Stephen Early, Secretary to the Presi-
dent, Washington, D.C., April 17, 1937, rg59 832.44/6, na. Mattos, Rondon
merecia. For a recent journalistic piece on Rondon see Dirceu Viana Júnior,
‘‘A aventura do herói da selva,’’ O Globo, 5 de janeiro de 1997.
5 The fact that Rondon operated in the Amazon basin is also crucial here,
given the importance of developmentalism and environmentalism there in
the past three decades (Slater, Entangled Edens, esp. chap. 6).
6 Smallman, Fear and Memory, 89, 94–100.
7 Copies of Rondon’s letters to national and international leaders are housed in
the ar. Carlos Augusto da Roca Freire, ‘‘Indigenismo e antropologia: o con-
selho Nacional de Proteção aos Índios na gestão Rondon (1939–1955)’’ (Tese
de mestrado, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Programa de pós-
graduação em antropologia social, 1990). Mércio Gomes, Indians and Bra-
zil, 79.
8 Ramos, Indigenism, 3. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 139.
9 Ramos, Indigenism, 284–88. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 139–61. Treece,
‘‘Victims, Allies, Rebels,’’ 56–98. Mércio Gomes argues that Indians have
always been central to the construction of the Brazilian nation because of
their ‘‘involvement with virtually every segment of the nation, from early
colonists, Jesuit priests, and royal administrators of colonial times, to the
poor backwoodsman, the manager of the modern agribusiness company, the
politicians and college students of today, and especially international pub-
lic opinion’’ (Indians and Brazil, 5). For more on this issue in contemporary
Brazil see Warren, Racial Revolutions. For an engaging analysis of Indians and
the nation in the nineteenth century see Green, ‘‘The Emperor’s Pedestal.’’
10 Ramos, Indigenism, 288.
Tseng 2003.12.9 07:11
6952 Diacon / STRINGING TOGETHER A NATION / sheet 219 of 242

bibliography

Archives
Arquivo Rondon (ar), Museu do Exército (Forte de Copacabana), Rio de Janeiro.
(Note: this collection is not yet organized and catalogued. It includes a hand-
written copy of Rondon’s diary for the years 1901–1908. Rondon wrote this
copy himself, from the original, in the 1950s. This collection also includes
several lengthy unpublished reports, in addition to personal correspondence,
telegrams, maps, and two volumes of the commission’s newspaper-clipping
service.)
Casa Rui Barbosa (crb), Rio de Janeiro.
Museu do Índio, Sector de Documentação (mi), Rio de Janeiro.
United States National Archives (na), College Park, Maryland.

Newspapers
Correiro da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro)
Correiro do Povo (Porto Alegre)
Correiro Paulistano (São Paulo)
A Cruz (Cuiabá)
O Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo)
Folha do Comércio (Campos, Rio de Janeiro)
Gazeta de Notícias (Rio de Janeiro)
O Imparcial (Rio de Janeiro)
O Jornal (Rio de Janeiro)
Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro)
Jornal do Comércio (Manaus)
Jornal do Comércio (Rio de Janeiro)
O Mato Grosso (Cuiabá)
New York Times
A Noite (Rio de Janeiro)
O País (Rio de Janeiro)
O Republicano (Cuiabá)
A Rua (Rio de Janeiro)
A Tarde (Rio de Janeiro)
A Tribuna (Rio de Janeiro)
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208 * b i b l i o g r a p h y

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Vols. 1–3. Rio de Janeiro: Oficinas da Diretoria Geral de Estatísticas, 1911.
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1916.
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index

agriculture, 11, 129, 132, 134–35, 137, 146 tégicas de Mato Grosso ao Amazonas
Alves, Francisco de Paula Rodrigues, (cltemta). See Rondon Commis-
89 sion
Comte, Auguste, 80–91, 102–6, 114
bandeirantes, 112 conscription, 15, 54–55. See also sol-
Barbosa, Júlio Caetano Horta, 159 diers
Barbosa, Luis Bueno Horta, 89 Costa, Alencarliense Fernandes da,
Barbosa, Nicolau Bueno Horta, 65, 127 29, 64, 75, 76, 113, 121
bicho do pé, 61. See also soldiers Cruz, Oswaldo, 14, 63, 143. See also
Bonifácio, José. See Silva, José Bonifá- public-health service
cio de Andrade e Cuiabá–Santo Antonio telegraph line.
Bororo, 6, 17, 95. See also Indians See Rondon Commission
Botelho de Magalhães, Armando Cunha, Euclides da, 143
Amilcar, 73–74, 93–96, 103, 109–10,
131–36, 139, 146–49. See also Rondon development, economic, 11, 125–30,
Commission 132–38, 149. See also state, central
Botelho de Magalhães, Benjamin Con-
stant, 79, 82–93. See also Positivism expeditions: expedition of 1908, 23–
Brazil: size of, 9–10; travel time 25, 112, 140–41; expedition of 1909,
across, 9–11, 15, 32, 56 25–30, 64, 133, 145; expedition of
1907, 20–22. See also Rondon, Cân-
Cajazeira, José Antonio, 37–46, 144, dido Mariano da Silva; Rondon
146. See also Roosevelt-Rondon Commission
Expedition
Calama, 29 Fonseca, Hermes Rodrigues da, 134
Catholicism, 13, 82, 90, 95–98, 103. See
also Indians; Positivism; Rondon, Gobineau, Arthur de, 123
Cândido Mariano da Silva Gomes Carneiro, Antonio Ernesto, 113
Chagas, Carlos, 14, 63, 143. See also government, federal. See nation build-
public-health service ing; state, central
Cherrie, George, 34, 41, 44, 46. See also
Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition Hoehne, Frederico, 36, 147
Chibata Rebellion, 55–57 hookworm disease, 62. See also sol-
Comissão de Linhas Telegráficas Estra- diers
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6952 Diacon / STRINGING TOGETHER A NATION / sheet 238 of 242

226 * i n d e x

Ihering, Herman von, 123–24 Nambikwara, 21–27, 53, 62, 71, 96,
Indian Protection Service, 30, 95, 112–13, 150. See also Indians
105–7, 115–29. See also Indians; National Council for the Protection
Rondon, Cândido Mariano da of Indians, 7, 159. See also Indians;
Silva Rondon, Cândido Mariano da Silva
Indians: assimilation of, 102–6, 113– nation building, 3–4, 11–12, 15–17,
29, 157; attacks against, 101–2, 26, 155–61; civic ritual as, 4, 23–25,
108–20, 124, 127; nation building 51, 61, 85–89, 106, 115; Positivism
and, 5, 13, 17, 87, 104–5, 115, 118, 120, and, 5, 82, 85–86; race and, 12–14,
123–24, 157, 160; poder tutelar and, 87, 104–6, 115–20, 123–24, 160. See
117–20; Rondon and, 4, 27, 87, 95– also Rondon, Cândido Mariano da
97, 101–30; Rondon Commission Silva; state, central
attack, 23–27, 53, 62, 71, 112–13
Ofaié, 108–9. See also Indians
Jacometti Matea, Domingos, 147–49
Paraguayan War, 3, 11, 15–16, 82, 91
Kayabi, 109. See also Indians Pareci, 21–22, 115, 121–22, 144. See also
Indians
Lemos, Miguel, 82–83, 84, 88–89. See Pena, Alfonso Augusto Moreira, 4, 14,
also Indians; Positivism 17
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 156 Positivism, 5, 7, 80–84, 114, 118, 157,
Lima, Antonio Carlos de Souza, 87, 160; Catholicism and, 5, 82, 90, 95–
116–24 98; criticism of, 90–99; Humanity
Lyra, João Salustiano de, 26, 30 and, 5, 81–82, 85, 91, 103; Indians
and, 87, 101–6, 114, 118, 121–23, 129;
Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, 74 militarism and, 5, 90–95; nation
malaria, 19, 29–31, 47, 57, 63–65, 144, building and, 5, 82, 85–89, 104, 118,
147–48. See also Rondon, Cândido 121; Positivist Church of Brazil and,
Mariano da Silva; soldiers 79, 81–84, 89, 93; technology and, 5,
Mato Grosso, 10, 17 87
Matos, Francisco Jaguaribe Gomes public-health service, 14, 143. See also
de, 94, 136 Chagas, Carlos; Cruz, Oswaldo
Military Academy (Rio de Janeiro), 7, public relations. See Rondon Commis-
90–91, 99 sion
Miller, Leo, 34. See also Roosevelt-
Rondon Expedition race. See Indians; nation building;
missionaries. See Catholicism Positivism
monarchy, Brazilian, 11, 13 radiotelegraphy, 5, 136–37, 156
Muller, Lauro, 32, 33, 36. See also Rangel, Alberto, 143
Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition Reis, Thomaz, 151
Tseng 2003.12.9 07:11
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i n d e x * 227

Republic, Brazilian Old, 7, 13–14, telegraph line, 18–19, 31–32, 47–51,

82–83, 98–99, 111 64–65, 75–76, 134, 147, 156; explo-
Rio da Dúvida. See rivers: of Doubt rations by, 20–26, 140; filmmaking
rivers: Arinos, 109; Aripuanã, 41, activities of, 143, 149–52; health
46; Cardoso, 46; of Doubt, 27, issues and, 142–49; Northern Sec-
34, 39, 41–47; Jaciparanã, 26, 29; tion of, 31, 49–51; public relations
Jamari, 30, 49, 126; Jaru, 29, 49; and, 131–53, 159; Southern Section
Jiparaná, 29, 32, 41, 49, 64, 76, 126– of, 32, 49–51; supplies and, 22–
27; Juruena, 20–25, 37, 70, 112; 28, 63. See also Roosevelt-Rondon
Madeira, 18–25, 29–34, 41, 46–47, Expedition
70–75, 93, 124–26, 133, 141, 149; Rondônia, 29, 128–30
Papagaio, 37, 142; Pimenta Bueno, Roosevelt, Kermit, 34, 37, 41–44, 64.
29; Urupá, 29 See also Roosevelt-Rondon Expedi-
Rondon, Cândido Mariano da Silva, tion
1, 3, 7, 9, 159; army officers and, 90– Roosevelt, Theodore, 30–47, 64, 134,
95, 137, 157; Catholicism and, 13, 80, 145–46; imperialism of condemned,
90, 95–98, 103–4, 157; criticism of, 33–34. See also Roosevelt-Rondon
116–18, 136, 142, 147–49, 152; as dis- Expediton
ciplinarian, 55–56, 67–69, 111, 122; Roosevelt River. See rivers: of Doubt
expansion of central state authority Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition, 32–39,
and, 15, 18, 30, 44, 85–87, 108–11, 46, 145; disputes during, 36, 39–
121, 132–34; health of, 30, 64–65, 46; illness and, 37, 41–47, 64, 146;
140, 145, 147; as hero, 132, 140–42, nation building and, 33, 36, 44, 134;
145, 152, 159; Indian policy and, 6, public relations and, 32, 47, 134,
17, 21–22, 27, 87, 95–97, 101–30, 152; 146; supplies and, 34–45
legacy of, 155–61; local potentates Roquette-Pinto, Edgar, 123
and, 108–11, 122, 126; love of dogs rubber industry, 3, 22, 30, 46, 76, 108,
and, 61, 70–71; nation building and, 126–27, 138, 144
6, 13, 17–18, 23–24, 44, 63, 85–89,
105, 115, 121, 155–61; Positivism and, Santo Antonio do Madeira, 31–32,
39, 61, 79–80, 84–99, 101–30, 157, 55–57, 63, 110
160. See also Positivism; Rondon Silva, José Bonifácio de Andrada e, 88
Commission slavery, 11
Rondon Commission, 3, 6, 55, 94, 113, soldiers: alcohol consumption by, 67–
116, 126, 155, 160; budgets of, 132, 68, 146; attacks against Indians,
138–40; Central Office of, 30, 96, 111–12; camp routines of, 57–58, 61,
131–53; civilian workers and, 31, 75– 111; deaths of, 59, 65–66, 69–70, 76;
76; construction routines of, 59–60; desertions by, 25, 54, 71–76; fears
criticism of, 136–38, 140–42, 147– of, 25–27, 54, 59–60, 63, 67, 144, 147–
50, 156–57; Cuiabá–Santo Antonio 49; hunger and, 25, 29, 63, 72, 141;
Tseng 2003.12.9 07:11
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228 * i n d e x

soldiers (continued ) Teixera Mendes, Raimundo, 83–

illness and, 19, 29–31, 39, 47, 57, 84, 89–90, 92, 95, 102–4. See also
62–66, 76, 141–48; Indian attacks Indians; Positivism
against, 21–22, 53, 62, 71; injuries telegraph, 3, 5, 149; integration of
suffered by, 29, 53, 61–62, 73, 144; nation and, 10, 15–17, 134. See also
officer attitudes toward, 54–55, 85, state, central
94, 123, 146; punishment of, 55–57, telegraph stations: Arikêmes, 49, 129;
67–68; women and children with, Barão de Capanema, 20; Barão de
57–59 Melgaço, 32, 49, 138; Jaru, 49; José
Souza, Antonio Pireneus de, 29, 46 Bonifácio, 32, 106; Juruena, 25–
state, central, 3, 16, 125; authority of, 27, 32, 37, 54, 59, 63, 113, 141, 145;
14–16, 44, 108–11, 116–17, 120–23, Nambikwara, 32; Parecis, 20, 53, 73,
132–33, 155; infrastructure devel- 137–38; Pimenta Bueno, 49, 65, 75,
opment and, 4, 125–40, 155, 159; 126, 129, 138; Ponte de Pedra, 20,
national integration and, 5, 10, 115, 121; Presidente Hermes, 49, 137;
14–16, 26, 30, 85–88, 125, 132–33, Presidente Pena, 49, 75, 126, 149;
157–59 Rosário, 109; Vilhena, 27, 32, 39, 64,
Strategic Telegraph Commission of 88, 129; Utiariti, 1, 20, 23, 34, 37–39,
Mato Grosso to Amazonas. See 66, 107, 115, 127, 145
Rondon Commission Terena, 6. See also Rondon, Cândido
Mariano da Silva
Tanajura, Joaquim Augusto, 29, 53, 54,
145 Zahm, Father John Augustine, 33–
Tapirapuã, 22–23, 26, 34–36, 56–57, 59, 34, 39. See also Roosevelt-Rondon
63, 71–73, 107, 127 Expedition
Távora, Juarez, 140
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Tseng 2003.12.9 07:11 6952 Diacon / STRINGING TOGETHER A NATION / sheet 241 of 242
6952 Diacon / STRINGING TOGETHER A NATION / sheet 242 of 242

todd diacon is the Head of the History Department at the

University of Tennessee. He is the author of Millenarian Vision,

Capitalist Reality: Brazil’s Contestado Rebellion, 1912–1916 (Duke

University Press, 1991).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Diacon, Todd A.

Stringing together a nation : Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon

and the construction of a modern Brazil, 1906–1930 / Todd A. Diacon.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 0-8223-3210-8 (cloth : alk. paper) —

isbn 0-8223-3249-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Rondon, Cândido Mariano da Silva, 1865–1958. 2. Brazil—

History—1889–1930. 3. Brazil. Comissão de Linhas Telegráficas

Estrágicas de Mato Grosso ao Amazonas. 4. Telegraph—Brazil—

History. 5. Indians of South America—Brazil—Government

relations. 6. Positivism. 7. Amazon River Valley—

Discovery and exploration. I. Title.

f2537.r66d53 2004

981'.05'092—dc21 2003013452
Tseng 2003.12.9 07:11

~StormRG~