Interesting, could explain why to this day Dominicans refer to that town as Juana Mendez, despite it’s across the border from Dajabón.
“Ouanaminthe is the Haitian “creole” name for a town which the Spaniards founded under the more euphonious title of Juana Mendez.” (Chapter VIII)
Further down it says:
”The change from one civilization to another—or should I call them two attempts toward civilization?—was as sudden, as astonishingly abrupt, as the dash through the apparently unfordable stream. Dajabón, strewn from the sandy crest of the eastern bank to the arid plains beyond, reminded us at once of Cuba; to my own mind it brought back the memory of hundreds of Spanish-American towns scattered down the western hemisphere from the Rio Grande to Patagonia.”
“Unlike the Haitian shacks behind us, the dwellings of Dajabón were almost habitable, even to the exacting Northern point of view. Instead of tattered and ludicrously patched negroes of bovine temperament lolling in the shade of as ragged hovels of palm-leaves and jungle rubbish, comparatively well-dressed men and women, ranging in complexion from light brown to pale yellow, sat in chairs on projecting verandas or leaned on their elbows in open windows, staring with that fixed attention which makes the most hardened stranger self-conscious in Spanish-America, yet which, contrasted with the vacant black faces of Haiti, was an evidence at least of human intelligence and curiosity. The village girls, decked out in their Sunday-afternoon best, were often attractive in appearance, some undeniably pretty, qualities which only an observer of African ancestry could by any stretch of generosity grant to the belles of the Haitian bourgs behind us.
Even the change in landscape was striking. Whether the Spaniard colonized by choice those regions which remind him of the dry and rarely shaded plains of his own Castille and Aragón, or because he makes way with a forest wherever he sees one, he is more apt than not to be surrounded by bare, brown, semi-arid vistas. Haiti had, on the whole, been densely wooded; luxuriant vegetation, plentifully watered, spread away on every hand. The great plain that stretched out before us beyond Dajabón was almost treeless; except for a scattering of withered, thorny bushes, there was scarcely a growing thing. The rainfall that had been so frequent in the land of the blacks behind us seemed not to have crossed the frontier in months. In contrast to caco-impoverished Haiti, large herds of cattle wandered about the brown immensity, or huddled in the rare pretenses of shade; but what they found to feed on was a mystery, for there was nothing in the scarce, scanty patches of sun-burned herbage that could have been dignified with the name of grass. Even where something resembling a forest appeared farther on it turned out to be a dismal wilderness of dwarf trees with spiny trunks and savage thorny branches without a suggestion of undergrowth or ground plants beneath them. Dead, flat, monotonous, made doubly mournful by the occasional moan of a wild dove, a more dreary, uninspiring landscape it would be hard to imagine; the vista that spread away as far as the eye could see seemed wholly uninviting to human habitation.”
