After leaving Bontoc we travelled down through Nueva Viscaya and into Benguet, the southermost division of the Mountain province. At Cabayan we had for camping quarters a large presidencia and schoolhouse combined, while a tent was put up and rudely equipped for bathing purposes. This was luxury indeed, and we began to think that we had left all hardship behind us; but the next night, after a seven hours’ “hike” over a terrible trail, we found shelter in a miserable hut with only one room which we all had to occupy, with Igorrote blankets for partitions.
The Igorrotes grew less and less interesting as we went along and displayed few evidences of the industry and thrift which characterise the more northern tribes. The mountains are higher and the scenes are broader and more wonderful at the southern end of the range, but the only cultivation we came upon was in the villages and along the banks of the little rushing streams. It was evident that we were approaching “civilisation.” Here and there we went through small groves of coffee trees, beautiful in a wealth of snow-white blossoms, but evidently deserted, and wretchedly ragged and unkempt.
Baguio, now the summer capital of the Philippine Islands, the “Philippine Simla,” as it is so often called, lies at the top of what has become justly celebrated as “the magnificent Benguet Road,” the building of which has been the subject of more controversy than almost any other one thing that American authority and enterprise has accomplished in the Islands. The Benguet Road when I first saw it was known as “Mead’s Trail,” so named in honour of the engineer who made the original survey for it, and in some places it was nothing more than a thin line drawn against perpendicular cliffs to indicate where cutting was to be done.
Let somebody else argue the question as to whether or not this road has justified the faith of the men who built it. My husband and his colleagues were responsible for the beginning of it and Mr. Taft authorised the payment of the large sums of money which went into it, but he does not in the least object to honest criticism of the project. His only question is: “How else could we have accomplished what we did?” For which there is no satisfactory answer. I have ridden over it since it was completed and, in common with a majority of those who have enjoyed this privilege, I am strongly prejudiced in its favour. There are few, if any roads in the world more spectacular, or which represent a greater triumph of engineering skill. Fairly hewn out of the almost solid, but too crumbling, walls of the Bued River Canyon, it winds for about seventeen miles through constantly changing scenes of extraordinary grandeur, then it strikes the foothills of the mountains and rises in a succession of splendid upward sweeps to an altitude of more than five thousand feet in less than six miles.
The Benguet Road was originally a railway project and was to have been built by the British company which owns the Manila and Dagupan Railway. But this syndicate wanted a perpetual grant and a guarantee from the government which could not then be given. It was necessary, in any case, to build a wagon-road before railway construction could be started and Captain Mead, who was sent out at the head of a surveying party, reported that such a road would cost at least $50,000, or $75,000. The Commission appropriated the $50,000 and issued orders to have the work begun, fully expecting to have to add another $25,000 before the road was finished. Nobody knows what character of road Captain Mead had in mind when he made his estimate, but it transpired that nothing short of first-class construction would last through even one heavy rain. Besides, the Bued River Canyon had to be spanned six or eight times with tremendous suspension bridges, and before the project was completed an unwilling government had spent something like $2,500,000 on it. This was spread over a period of years, of course, and much of it went for necessary improvements or for the replacement of storm-wrecked bridges and graded sections, but its enemies like to refer to it as our two and a half million dollar road.
The Manila and Dagupan Railway company extended its road up to the point where the Benguet Road begins and thus a way was opened into the only region in the Philippines where one may find really invigorating air. And while the road was building Baguio development began. A United States Army Camp was established on a ridge overlooking a wide range of pine-covered hills, and a hospital
