The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn Part 13

So the panther died.

Here are three proverbs:

The dog follows the fox and kills it, but then comes the panther and kills the dog.

Nothing spurious can be good.

The little feather flies more swiftly than the great one.

In his religious beliefs the Tehuelche is as interesting as in other matters. There is one good G.o.d and from him all good things come. He is so good and kind that he is never offended. He does not require worship from the Indians, but according to the gauchos they have a ceremony of thanksgiving peculiarly interesting. In the early summer, when the young of the guanaco and the ostrich are numerous and easy to take, ostrich eggs still to be had and pasture is at its best, the Tehuelche cacique gathers his clan and decrees an offering to the good G.o.d. Thereat a young mare is la.s.soed, brought to a convenient spot, and there thrown down and secured on her back so that she cannot thrash around with her hoofs. Then all the people gather around while the man who is handiest with a knife draws his keenest blade, slashes open the breast of the mare, cuts out the heart, and holds it, still quivering, up in the presence of all, that it may become the offering by all of a living heart to the G.o.d to whom they give thanks.

They believe in evil spirits and there are medicine men and medicine women among them. Curiously enough, the medicine women are commonly young and the handsomest of their clans. These medicine mixers drive away evil spirits by incantations, but if the ordinary medicine fails, then all the men a.s.semble, and, mounting their horses, ride furiously around the camp, firing guns into the air and waving their war-like implements about their heads. Apparently here is a field in which the Salvation Army missionaries would be very successful. The home of the soul after death is in the sky--somewhere in the blue vault they see by day, and the road to it lies by the way of the glories of the west at sunset. Of old they used to burn all the effects of the deceased that he might have them in the other world, but now a small outfit of horses and dogs is sufficient.

With them the witch and the sorcerer are stern realities, but the Tehuelches never torture their supposed witches to death. The desert air never trembles with the moans of old women whose misfortune it is to be sullen or insane. But when one cuts his hair or trims his finger nails the clippings are carefully burned. So, too, are all effects left behind when moving the wigwams. The witch is supposed to obtain a devilish power over any one when she can get hold of any such part of him.

In dreams--"when the heart sleeps, the mind sees a glimmer of the things to come," they say.

In music the Tehuelche is not much of an artist. The skin of a guanaco stretched over a hoop or bowl makes a drum. The bone of an ostrich leg, with holes cut into it, makes a sort of flute, which in turn is used to make the sinew cord of a bow to vibrate with a tum-tum noise.

The Tehuelche year begins in September, and the lapse of it is noted by the position of Orion. The four seasons are known as the fat time, or the fall; the cold time, the season of new gra.s.s, and the season of ostrich eggs. The moon measures the months, and one word serves for the name of the day and the sun.

In his astronomy the Tehuelche has named the Southern Cross the track of the ostrich, and therein has shown himself superior to the whites in at least one matter. The milky-way is the path of the guanaco, and the clouds of Magellan are the guanaco wallowing places, while Mars is the carancho, a conspicuous, eagle-like vulture common on the desert.

Following the tendencies of the age, the Tehuelches have become republicans. There are chiefs now, but in the old days the chief was a deal more of a ruler than now. In these days the chief is to the clan what the ablest and most experienced of a party of hunters in the Adirondacks is to his a.s.sociates. He knows the woods and woodcraft better than the rest, and the rest therefore listen to his advice. In the quarrels over trivial matters in camp the head man will often serve as peacemaker, because where a quarrel spreads a division of the clan follows, and the chances of success in hunting are greatly diminished.

It takes a good many people to draw a circle around a bunch of guanacos in an open desert.

The marriage ceremony begins with an exchange of presents between the bridegroom and the girl's parents. Then a small tent is erected for the young couple and they are placed in it until night, when all the people gather around as big a fire as they can make near the tent. As the fire burns up at its brightest the males, beginning with the chiefs and ending with the boys, dance, in sets of four, while the squaws look on critically. The dress of the dancers includes a breech clout, a sash about the shoulders, and two feathers in the hair. The divorce ceremony consists in leading the woman back to the tent of her relatives, a ceremony rarely known, however. As the head of a family, the Tehuelche is kind and considerate to the woman and very affectionate to the children. They pet and fondle and kiss each other and use words of endearment. Sometimes they quarrel in the family, of course. There are white men a plenty--even Americans, alas, who beat their wives. So there are Tehuelches who do so.

On the other hand, although the story of it may seem like a fable to the reader, the truth is, that hen-pecked husbands are found in as great proportion among the Tehuelches as among the whites. But, on the whole, it is agreed by all who know the Tehuelches that in their homes they are the happiest people imaginable.

A CIDER FESTIVAL.

The one vice--rather the root of all evil--among the Tehuelches is the love of liquor. Robes, weapons, horses, daughters, and wives will all be exchanged for rum, and there are traders crossing the desert every day of the year seeking out their camps to sell the stuff to them. Then, too, there are apple orchards on Lake Nehuel-Huapi. In the season great festivals are held at the orchards. Then the apples are made into cider in skin-lined pits, and the fermented stuff is consumed in vast quant.i.ties. The Tehuelche, when drunk, becomes quarrelsome, and murders are then common, although the squaws hide all weapons before a festival begins.

The weapons of the Tehuelche are like those of the gaucho--la.s.soes, bolas, and knives. They also make bows and arrows, spears and what the gauchos call "the lost bola." The lost bola is simply a stone of convenient weight at the end of a three-foot cord. It is intended for battles only, and is called lost bola because when thrown it is not usually recovered again. The effective range of this lost bola is ordinarily 100 yards, and in some hands twice that. Iron bolas are the favorites, because being smaller for the weight they have a longer range, and because, too, they are more easily seen and recovered after a cast across the dull-colored desert than pebbles are. The Tehuelches carry guns and pistols to some extent, but chiefly for use against the spirits.

Because of his use of the bola the Tehuelche is, in a sense, a sportsman as distinguished from a pot hunter. The game has a running chance for life. However, the usual way of capturing game is for the men to draw a circle about a bunch of guanacos when pumas and ostriches are often enclosed and killed. When on the march the women with the pack train serve as a part of the enclosing circle.

The tent of the Tehuelche is a large affair. It is what would be called in this country a shelter tent, or a lean-to open in front. It is of rounded exterior, like the fourth part of an orange. It has a frame of forks and ridgepoles, and is covered with guanaco skins. Other skins serve to divide the interior of the tent into rooms. Whole families and their guests go to bed in a single room in the out-of-the-way parts of the United States, such as the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, but the Tehuelches are modest enough to divide their sleeping places so that parents and children, boys and girls, and guests are separated by curtains of horsehide. For beds they have cushions made of coa.r.s.e blankets stuffed with guanaco wool, and they know the comfort of pillows, which are made of soft skins stuffed with guanaco hair.

They are very modest in dress. From the time they are five years old they wear a cloth secured about the loins by a belt. To this the women add a gown in these days, and the inevitable robe of guanaco skins, while the men and women both wear the robe and boots made of the skin of a colt's hind legs. The old style of boots stuffed with straw that gave the name of Patagones to this really small-footed race was abandoned soon after horses were introduced.

In s.e.xual morality, it is said, when the subject is first broached to the gauchos, that the Tehuelches are a bad lot, but when one asks for details he finds that in their natural state they were by no means lascivious. They have been corrupted terribly by the traders who swap rum for furs, but all the whites agree that the Tehuelche women were by nature modest and delicate, and, when compared with other aboriginal women, at once most patient, bright, cheerful, and helpful companions, and faithful as well.

For cooking the Tehuelches use the long steel bar common among gauchos for suspending a roast over the fire. The gauchos say the Indians are always in such a hurry to begin eating that time to cook a roast through is never allowed. The outside of the meat will be crisp, and even burned, while the centre is still raw. No matter; steaming slices are slashed off, and, dripping with hot juices, conveyed to the mouth. But having tried some of these slices myself, I can advise the reader to wait a like opportunity before condemning the Tehuelche's taste in roasts. Besides that, one must keep in mind that they are greedy only after a long fast, and that under such circ.u.mstances even the lordly white man has been known to eat half-raw meat. They also carry big kettles for boiling, and a rather better outfit of dishes than the gauchos use. These things they get of the whites in exchange for ostrich plumes. In the old days they used to broil their meat on the coals, and even now they fill small animals with hot stones and then bury them (hides on) in the embers, and so make a right good dish.

They are called dirty--even vile--because they oil themselves all over with the marrow of ostrich bones. As a matter of fact they are in most matters cleanly. They bathe daily when near a lake or stream (the men separate from the women), and when the floor of a tent is by accident fouled the careful squaw always cuts out the earth to a depth of two inches and throws it away. They are also called dirty because they eat the viscera of animals, the lungs, stomach, etc. They also eat unborn guanaco kids and unhatched ostriches. One can tell about such doings in a way that will make the Tehuelches seem to be a very disgusting lot.

And so the descriptions generally run. But when one remembers some kinds of food the most civilized white men eat, there is found to be very little difference in such matters between the two races.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TEHUELCHES IN CAMP.]

Indeed, when one has seen these Indians--has noted their self-restraint, their dignity, and gracefulness of looks and bearing, their gentleness and consideration one for the other, the utter lack of servility among them; more than all, when one has noted the brightness of their minds, the ease, for instance, with which they learn a foreign language and grasp ideas entirely new and foreign to their environment and habits of thought--one all but loses patience with the pride of race and egotism of religion that have named them savages.

A visitor to the meeting place of the Societe d'Ethnographie of Paris, sees upon the wall above the President's chair this motto:

_Corpore diversi, sed mentis lumine fratres._

The truth of that motto is never more apparent than in a contemplation of the Indians of Patagonia.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE WELSH IN PATAGONIA.

A most remarkable colony is that which the Welsh have made in Patagonia.

Rarely, if ever, in the history of the Americas have emigrants from the old country been surrounded by conditions and circ.u.mstances so discouraging as those to be described in this story of that colony, and rarely, if ever, has a colonizing project originated as did this the Welch colony that is now flourishing on the banks of the Chubut River, 750 miles southwest of Buenos Ayres. Although one must really see the country to appreciate fully what the colonists endured and have achieved, yet I fancy that some of the facts are of sufficient human interest to make the story fully worth the telling.

The colony is known by the name of the river on which it is located--Chubut. It was formed by immigrants who left their homes, paradoxical as it may seem, because they were patriots. They were all Welshmen, who, because the laws of Great Britain have compelled the use of English in Welsh schools since the year 1282, when Prince Llewellyn fell, determined to found a colony in such an out-of-the-way part of the world that they could, unmolested, perpetuate the mother tongue of Wales. The prime mover in this matter was Dr. Michael Jones of Bala College, and he was a.s.sisted by Mr. Lewis Jones, who is now a resident of the colony.

These gentlemen looked the maps of the world over, and they read the descriptions of all the unsettled parts which travellers out of the way had written, the ultimate conclusion being that no habitable country in the world could offer such complete isolation as the Patagonia region of the Argentine Republic. There came a time afterward when they began to doubt whether the land they had chosen was really habitable, but it was then too late to turn back.

An appeal for a grant of land was made to the Argentine Government, and that is an appeal that is never made in vain by any colony acting in good faith to any Latin-American Government. It is true that efforts were made to dissuade the Welshmen from going to Patagonia, but those efforts were intended for the good of the colonists. They were asked to take the fertile lands of the north instead of the desert of the south.

No one but the promoters of the colony believed that any settlement could exist in the desert, and never did promoters come nearer to losing heart and yet succeed.

It was on July 28, 1865, that the Welsh pilgrims first landed in the region they had chosen. At that time the whole of Patagonia, between Rio Negro and the Strait of Magellan, was in precisely the same condition that it was when Pedro Sarmiento's colony starved to death in the strait, when Cavendish discovered Port Desire, and when Darwin explored a part of the remarkable Santa Cruz River. Nor was that all. War was incessantly waged between the people of the republic (who were pleased to call themselves Christians) and the people of the desert plains, who were called savages by the self-styled Christians. And the savages, as has been told, had the best of the fights. The whites occupied one settlement on the Rio Negro, but only by favor of the red men. What could a handful of Welshmen, unused to plains life and wholly ignorant of savage warfare, do with such fierce warriors?

The time came, however, when the Welshmen were asking each other, "What would we have done without the Indians?"

As said, it was in the last week of July, 1865, when the Welshmen first saw the land where they intended to perpetuate their mother tongue in its purity. July in Patagonia is the mid-winter month. A sailing ship took them to the southeast corner of New Gulf, a nearly circular bay in the coast, seven hundred miles southwest of Buenos Ayres. Here it put them out on the gravelly beach, gave them some food and water, and then sailed away. There were 150 souls all told. How utterly alone they were, and how far away from civilization can be better appreciated when we remember that in those days no merchant steamers had yet gone down the coast to pa.s.s the Strait of Magellan, and that the only white men living south of the struggling settlement on the Rio Negro were a disconsolate gang of convicts, guarded by an equally forlorn squad of soldiers in a stockade on the strait just mentioned. The Welshmen were separated from all civilization, even the Argentine kind--a kind to which they were not accustomed--by the stormy sea on one hand and by hundreds of miles of desert on the other, a desert that was utterly impa.s.sable save by the Indians, who alone, in those days, knew where the widely-separated springs of fresh water were to be found.

Nor were their immediate surroundings any more cheerful than a contemplation of the region that lay between them and the far-away settlement on the Rio Negro.

They had landed on a pebbly beach near the foot of a low, white alluvial cliff into which the elements had eaten holes large enough to be called caves. Beyond the cliffs the arid desert, a mixture of sand and pebbles, rose in sweeping undulations to a crest perhaps six miles away and four hundred feet above the sea. They were walled in by desert ridges. There was not a green thing in sight, but only ragged brown desert brush and an occasional yellow, dry bunch of gra.s.s. There was neither house nor hut for their reception or shelter, and, worse than all else, there was neither stream nor pool nor spring of water fit to drink anywhere within fifty-one miles. That was the kind of a country to which these 150 Welshmen came to plant a colony that should live by agriculture.

The Pilgrims who came to Plymouth Rock because they could not make the world elsewhere worship according to the dictates of their consciences, had a tolerably bleak time of it according to the orators on New England Society days, but if one wants to hear stories of real hardships endured by pioneers, let him go to Chubut and talk to one of the older Welshmen.

The first thing done was, of necessity, to dig a well for water. They found water, and the well is still there. A drink from its depths will carry a Yankee cowboy back to his old haunts on the plains of Southwest Kansas and No Man's Land, instantly; that is, it will carry his thoughts there. He will say "gypsum" or "alkali" with something verbally stronger still, as soon as he gets his mouth empty. Indeed, one need not look five minutes anywhere around New Gulf to find plenty of gypsum.

Nevertheless, the water would support life after a fashion, and the Welshmen turned from the well to make shelters of the caves nature had provided.

From the work of arranging their scanty household goods in the caves these pioneers went forth, not to sow and plant, but to make a road.

They were in the region where they were to find homes, but the actual home sites--the farms of 240 acres that were to be theirs--lay fifty-one miles away over and beyond the crest of the desert amphitheatre within which they had landed. They had to mark the trail lest they get lost, clear it of brush and level its irregularities, and then they must needs transport themselves and their belongings over it to the banks of the Chubut River.

And all this they did to find at last that, save for a deposit of black loam in parts of the valley of the stream, they had come to a land as desolate as the sh.o.r.es of New Gulf. The desert walled them in. The wells filled with alkali water. The north wind was like a blast from the furnace in which Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego fell down, and almost every wind came laden with a brown fog of sand. They had sought isolation; they had found it with a vengeance.