Argentine Republic; destroyed Sorata, killed the Spanish proprietors and miners, and practically put an end to the business that made them slaves.
It was not until 1805 that work was again undertaken in this district. Señor Yriondo, a Spaniard, then led a new expedition into this field and began work at a point called Ancota. Despite the primitive methods employed, Ancota steadily yielded for the next sixty years a net annual profit of from 40 to 60 per cent on the invested capital. One of the best known and most successful miners who ever entered this district, however, was Señor Yldefonso Villamil, of La Paz, whose proprietorship in Tipuani continued from 1818 until his death in 1867, but whose actual mining operations, in which was associated with him his friend Señor Zabala, were confined to fourteen years of that time and constitute the closing chapter in the history of organized gold-mining in the province of Larecaja. While he secured large quantities of gold, the current stories of his success are the purest fiction. One of these commonly accepted stories represents that he secured 36 arrobas, or 900 pounds, of gold in a single year. For the true history of Señor Villamil's mining operations in Tipuani I am indebted to his venerable son, Gen. Pedro Villamil, of La Paz. Señor Villamil first worked that portion of the gravel banks of Tipuani known as "Salomon." In the absence of pumps and windlasses he substituted a bucket brigade of Indians, who, equipped with rude cowskin buckets and distributed in two divisions along the notched poles that served as ladders, quickly passed the water and gravel from hand to hand to the top of the shafts, a work so fatiguing that a fresh gang was required every few hours. As fast as the bowlders were displaced by digging, drilling, or blasting, a third division, equipped with rawhide ropes, dragged them up the wooden skids that rested against the sloping walls of these shallow shafts. So steep was the incline of these sloping shafts, or, more properly speaking, "sumps," that it often required
