Recovery was impossible. One day, while the doctor was at the side of the dying patient, these warlike natives attacked the hut, and barely gave the doctor time to escape. The death of the sufferer was hastened by the Indians, and they triumphantly carried away his clothes and bedding. Nearly the whole tribe died in consequence; the few that survived have ever since regarded the occurrence as a manifestation of divine wrath, and let the white men carefully alone. Frank and Fred heard so much about the undeveloped sources of wealth in Bolivia that they were inclined to form stock companies for various enterprises out of which enormous amounts of money could be made. But as their previous dreams of this sort had amounted to nothing, they wisely forbore even going so far as to put their ideas on paper. They heard of vast numbers of cattle on the _pampas_, or plains of eastern Bolivia, which could be bought for a few shillings each, and converted into beef and leather, at a great advance on the original cost. Their informant said they would yield a profit on their hides alone, while the beef could be sent to London, or other places of large demand, by some of the preservative processes that have been recently invented. Then they learned that Bolivia could supply fine woods for cabinet purposes, in inexhaustible quantities, from the forests on the lower slopes of the Andes, and the banks of the Beni and other rivers. They found, on consulting the statistics, that the country could export the following articles if it only had the means of transporting them: Gold, silver, tin, copper, lead, quicksilver, chinchona bark, rubber, coffee, cacao, sugar, vanilla, balsams, copal, wax, dyes, sarsaparilla, tobacco, farina, cotton, llama and alpaca wool, cattle, hides, horns, tallow, dried meat, tiger and deer skins, furs, feathers, hammocks, and hats. Glancing at the history of the country, Frank found that Bolivia was formerly a province of Peru, under the Spanish domination. It joined in the revolution in the early part of the present century, and, in common with the other dependencies of Spain on the west coast of South America, achieved its independence. In 1825 it was made a separate republic, and named Bolivia, in honor of General Bolivar, the leader of the revolution. It has had the usual checkered career of South American republics, with perhaps fewer insurrections than some of its fraternity. It formerly had a strip of sea-coast, but at present it has none; its coast possessions were annexed to Chili as one of the results of the late war, and for the future its must seek its commercial outlet through another country or by way of the Amazon River.