There is not a "sight" of the slightest importance in Uruapan. But the place itself is a sight worth long travel, with its soft climate like the offspring of the wedded North and South, a balmy, gentle existence where is only occasionally felt the hard reality of life that runs beneath, when man shows himself less kindly than nature. A man offered to sell me for a song a tract bordering the river, with a "house" ready for occupancy, and had the place and all that goes with it been portable we should quickly have come to terms. For Uruapan is especially a beauty spot along the little Cupatitzio, where water clearer than that of Lake Geneva foams down through the dense vegetation and under little bridges quaint and graceful as those of Japan.
The sanitary arrangements, of course, are Mexican. Women in bands wash clothes along the shady banks, both sexes bathe their light-chocolate skins in sunny pools, there were even horses being scrubbed in the transparent stream, and below all this others dipped their drinking water. Here and there the water was led off by many little channels and overhead wooden troughs to irrigate the gardens and to run little mills and cigarette factories.
In the outskirts I passed the city slaughter-house. A low atone wall separated from the street a large corral; with a long roof on posts, a stone floor, and a rivulet of water down through it occupying the center of the compound. The cattle, healthy, medium-sized steers worth fifteen dollars a head in this section, were lassoed around the horns and dragged under the roof, where another dexterously thrown noose bound their feet together and threw them on the stone floor. They were neither struck nor stunned in any way. When they were so placed that their throats hung over the rivulet, a butcher made one single quick thrust with a long knife near the collarbone and into the heart. Boys caught the blood in earthen bowls as it gushed forth and handed it to various women hanging over the enclosing wall. The animal gave a few agonized bellows, a few kicks, and died. Each was quickly skinned and quartered, the more unsavory portions at once peddled along the wall, and bare-headed Indians carried a bleeding quarter on their black thick hair to the hooks on either side of pack horses which boys drove off to town as they were loaded. There the population bought strips and chunks of the still almost palpitating meat, ran a string through an end of each piece, and carried it home under the glaring sun.