Through Five Republics on Horseback Part 13

CHAPTER XI.

CHACO SAVAGES.

The Gran Chaco, an immense region in the interior of the continent, said to be 2,500,000 square miles in extent, is, without doubt, the darkest part of "The Darkest Land." From time immemorial this has been given up to the Indians; or, rather, they have proved so warlike that the white man has not dared to enter the vast plain. The Chaco contains a population of perhaps 3,000,000 of aborigines. These are divided into many tribes, and speak numerous languages. From the military outposts of Argentina at the south, to the Fort of Olimpo, 450 miles north, the country is left entirely to the savage. The former are built to keep back the Tobas from venturing south, and the latter is a Paraguayan fort on the Brazilian frontier. Here about one hundred soldiers are quartered and some fifty women banished, for the Paraguayan Government sends its female convicts there. [Footnote: The women are not provided with even the barest necessities of life. Here they are landed and, perforce, fasten themselves like leeches on the licentious soldiery. I speak from personal knowledge, for I have visited the "h.e.l.l" of Paraguay.] Between these forts and Bolivia, on the west, I have been privileged to visit eight different tribes of Indians, all of them alike degraded and sunken in the extreme; savage and wild as man, though originally made in the image of G.o.d, can be.

The Chaco is a great unknown land. The north, described by Mr. Minchin, Bolivian Government Explorer, as "a barren zone--an almost uninterrupted extent of low, th.o.r.n.y scrub, with great scarcity of water," and the centre and south, as I have seen in exploring journeys, great plains covered with millions of palm trees, through which the astonished traveller can ride for weeks without seeing any limit. In the dry season the land is baked by the intense heat of the tropical sun, and cracked into deep fissures. In the rainy season it is an endless marsh--a veritable dead man's land. During a 200-mile ride, 180 lay through water with the sun almost vertical. All this country in past ages must have been the bed of a great salt sea.

As I have said, the Chaco is peculiarly Indian territory, into which the white man steps at his peril. I accepted a commission, however, to examine and report on certain parts of it, so I left the civilized haunts of men and set foot on the forbidden ground.

My first introduction to the savages in Chaco territory was at their village of Teepmuckthlawhykethy (The Place Where the Cows Arrived).

They were busy devouring a dead cow and a newly-born calf, and I saw their naked bodies through such dense clouds of mosquitos that in one clap of the hands I could kill twenty or thirty. This Indian _toldo_ consists of three large wigwams, in which live about eighty of the most degraded aborigines to be found on earth. When they learned I was not one of the _Christians_ from across the river, and that I came well introduced, they asked: Did I come across the _big water_ in a dug-out?

Was it a day's journey? Would I give them some of "the stuff that resembles the eggs of the ant?" (their name for rice).

I was permitted to occupy a palm hut without a roof, but I slept under a tiger's skin, and that kept off dew and rain. They reserved the right to come and go in it as they pleased. The women, with naked babies astride their hips, the usual way of carrying them, were particularly annoying. A little girl, however, perhaps ten years old, named Supupnik (Sawdust), made friends with me, and that friendship lasted during all my stay with them. Her face was always grotesquely painted, but she was a sweet child.

These Indians are of normal stature, and are always erect and stately, perhaps because all burdens are borne by straps on the forehead. The expression of the savage is peculiar, for he pulls out all the hair on his face, even the eyelashes and eyebrows, and seems to think the omission of that act would be a terrible breach of cleanliness. These same individuals will, however, frequently be seen with their whole body so coated with dirt that it could easily be sc.r.a.ped off with a knife in cakes, as the housewife would sc.r.a.pe a burnt loaf! The first use to which the women put the little round tin looking-gla.s.ses, which I used for barter, was to admire their pretty (?) faces; but the men, with a sober look, would search for the detested hair on lip or chin.

That I was so lost to decency as to suffer a moustache to cover my lip was to them a constant puzzle and wonder, for in every other respect the universal opinion was that I was a civilized kind of "thing." I write _thing_ advisedly, for the white man is to them an inferior creation--not a _person_.

In place of a beard or moustache, the inhabitant of the Chaco prefers to paint his face, and sometimes he makes quite an artistic design.

These wild inhabitants of Central South America generally wear a skin around the loins, or a string of ostrich feathers. Some tribes, as, for example, the Chamacocos, dispense with either. The height of fashion is to wear strings of tigers' teeth, deer's hoofs, birds' bills, etc., around the neck. Strings of feathers or wool are twisted around ankles and wrists, while the thickly matted hair is adorned with plumes, standing upright.

The men insert round pieces of wood in the lobe of the ear. Boys of tender age have a sharp thorn pushed through the ear, where more civilized nations wear earrings. This hole is gradually enlarged until manhood, when a round piece, two inches in diameter and one and a half inches thick, can be worn, not depending from the ear, but in the gristle of it. The cartilage is thus so distended that only a narrow rim remains around the ornament, and this may often be seen broken out.

Sometimes three or four rattles from the tail of the rattlesnake also hang from the ear on to the shoulder.

These tribes of the Chaco were all va.s.sals of the Inca at the advent of the Spaniards. They had been by them reclaimed from savagery, and taught many useful arts, one or two of which, such as the making of blankets and string, they still retain. The Inca used the ear ornaments of solid gold, but made in the form of a wheel. The nearest approach to this old custom is when the wooden ear-plug is painted thus, as are some in the author's possession.

I was fortunate in gaining the favor of the tribe living near the river, and because of certain favors conferred upon them, was adopted into the family. My face was painted, my head adorned with ostrich plumes, and I was given the name of Wanampangapthling ithma (Big Cactus Red Mouth). Because of this formal initiation, I was privileged to travel where I chose, but to the native Paraguayan or Argentine the Chaco is a forbidden land. The Indian describes himself as a _man_; monkeys are _little men_; I was a _thing_; but the Paraguayans are _Christians_, and that is the lowest degree of all. The priests they see on the other side of the river are _Yankilwana_ (neither man nor woman); and a _Yankilwana_, in his distinctive garb, could never tread this Indian soil. So abhorrent to them is the name of Christian, that the missionaries have been compelled to use another word to describe their converts, and they are called "Followers of Jesus." All the members of some large expeditions have been ma.s.sacred just because they were _Christians_. Surely this is convincing corroboration of my remarks regarding the state of Roman Catholicism in those dark lands.

A few miserable-looking, diminutive sheep are kept by some tribes, and the blankets referred to are made from the wool, which is torn off the sheep with a sharp sh.e.l.l, or, if near the coast, with a knife. The blankets are woven by hand across two straight branches of tree, and they are sometimes colored in various shades. A bulbous root they know of dyes brown, the cochineal insect red, and the bark of a tree yellow.

String is made from the fibre of the _caraguatai_ plant, and snail sh.e.l.ls are used to extract the fibre. This work is, of course, done by the women, as is also the making of the clay pots they use for cooking.

The men only hunt.

All sleep on the ground, men, women, children and dogs, promiscuously.

The wigwams are nothing more than a few branches stuck in the ground and tied at the top. The sides are left open. Very often even this most primitive of dwellings is dispensed with, and the degraded beings crawl under the shelter of the bushes. Furniture of any kind they are, of course, wit-out, and their dest.i.tution is only equalled by the African pigmy or the Australian black.

The Chaco is essentially a barren land, and the Indians' time seems almost fully taken up in procuring food. The men, with bows and arrows, hunt the deer, ostrich, fox, or wolf, while the women forage for roots and wild fruit.

One tribe in the north of the Chaco are cannibals, and they occasionally make war on their neighbors just to obtain food.

A good vegetable diet is the cabbage, which grows in the heart of certain palms, and weighs three or four pounds. To secure this the tree has perforce to be cut down. To the Indian without an axe this is no light task. The palm, as is well known, differs from other trees by its having the seat of life in the head, and not in the roots; so when the cabbage is taken out the tree dies.

Anything, everything, is eaten for food, and a roasted serpent or boiled fox is equally relished. During my stay among them I ceased to ask of what the mess was composed; each dish was worse than the former.

Among the first dishes I had were mandioca root, a black carrion bird, goat's meat, and fox's head. The puma, otter, ant-bear, deer, armadillo, and ostrich are alike eaten, as is also the jaguar, a ferocious beast of immense size. I brought away from those regions some beautiful skins of this animal, the largest of which measures nearly nine feet from nose to tail.

In the sluggish, almost salt, streams, fish are numerous, and these are shot by the Indian with arrows, to which is attached a string of gut.

Lakes and rivers are also filled with hideous-looking alligators of all sizes. These grow to the length of twelve or fifteen feet in these warm waters, and the tail is considered quite a delicacy. Besides these varied dishes, there is the electric eel; and, sunk in a yard depth of mud, is the _lollock_, of such interest to naturalists The lollock is a fish peculiar to the Chaco. Though growing to the length of three and four feet, it has only rudimentary eyes, and is, in consequence, quite blind; it is also unable to swim. The savage prods in the mud with a long notched lance, sometimes for hours, until he sticks the appetizing fish.

The steamy waters are so covered with aquatic plants that in some places I have been able to walk across a living bridge. Once, when out hunting, I came upon a beautiful forest glade, covered with a carpet of green. Thinking it a likely place for deer, I entered, when lo, I sank in a f?tid lake of slime. Throwing my gun on to the bank, I had quite a difficulty to regain dry land.

In my journeyings here and there I employed one or another of the braves to accompany me. All they could eat and some little present was the pay. No sooner was the gift in their hand, however, after supper, than they would put it back in mine and say, "Give me some more food?"

I was at first accompanied by Yantiwau (The Wolf Rider). Armed with a bow and arrows, he was a good hunter for me, and a faithful servant, but his custom of spitting on my knife and spoon to clean them I did not like. When my supplies were getting low, and I went to the river for a wash, he would say: "There's no _kiltanithliacack_ (soap)--only _clupup_ (sand)." Yantiwau was interested in pictures; he would gaze with wondering eyes at photos, or views of other lands, but he looked at them _the wrong side up_, as they all invariably do. While possessed of a profound respect for me in some ways, he thought me very lacking in common knowledge. While I was unable to procure game, through not seeing any, he could call the bird to him in a "ducky, ducky, come and be killed" kind of way; and my tongue was parched when he would scent water. This was sometimes very easy to smell, however, for it was almost impossible to drink out of a waterhole without holding the nose and straining the liquid through my closed teeth. Chaco water at best is very brackish, and on drying off the ground a white coat of salt is left.

My Indian's first and last thought was of his stomach. While capable of pa.s.sing two or three days without eating, and feeling no pangs of hunger, yet, when food was to hand, he gorged himself, and could put away an incredible amount. Truly, his make-up was a constant wonder to me. Riding through the "hungry belt" I would be famishing, but to my question: "Are you hungry?" he would answer, "No." After a toilsome journey, and no supper at the end: "Would you like to eat?" "No." But let an ostrich or a deer come in sight, and he could not live another minute without food! Another proof to Yantiwau of my incapacity was the fact that when my matches were all used I could not light the fire. He, by rubbing a blunt-pointed hard stick in a groove of soft wood, could cause such a friction that the dust would speedily ignite, and set fire to the dry twigs which he was so clever in collecting. Although such a simple process to the Indian, I never met a white man who could use the firesticks with effect.

Sitting by the camp-fire in the stillness of evening, my guide would draw attention to a shooting star. "Look! That is a bad witch doctor,"

he would say. "Did you notice he went to the west? Well, the Toothlis live there. He has gone for vengeance!"

The wide palm plains are almost uninhabited; I have journeyed eighty miles without sighting human being or wigwam. In the rainy season the trees stand out of a sea-like expanse of steaming water, and one may wade through this for twenty miles without finding a dry place for bivouac. Ant hills, ten and fifteen feet high, with dome-shaped roofs, dot the wild waste like pigmy houses, and sometimes they are the only dry land found to rest on. The horses flounder through the mire, or sink up to the belly in slime, while clouds of flies make the life of man and beast a living death. Keys rust in the pocket, and boots mildew in a day. At other seasons, as I know by painful experience, the hard-baked ground is cracked up into fissures, and not a drop of water is to be found in a three days' journey. The miserable savages either sit in utter dejection on logs of wood or tree roots, viewing the watery expanse, or roam the country in search of _yingmin_ (water).

Whereas the Caingwas may be described as inoffensive Indians, the inhabitants of the Chaco are _savages_, hostile to the white man, who only here and there, with their permission, has settled on the river bank. Generally a people of fine physique and iron const.i.tution, free from disease of any kind, they are swept into eternity in an incredibly short s.p.a.ce of time if _civilized_ diseases are introduced. Even the milder ones, such as measles, decimate a whole tribe; and I have known communities swept away as autumn leaves in a strong breeze with the _grippe_. I was informed that the hospital authorities at Asuncion gave them the cast-off fever clothing of their patients during an epidemic to sweep them off the face of the earth!

The Indians have been ill-treated from the beginning. Darwin relates that, in their eagerness to exterminate the red men, the Argentine troops have pursued them for three days without food. On the frontier they are killed in hundreds; by submitting to the white man they die in thousands. Latin civilization is more terrible to them than war. Sad to state, their only hope is to fight, and this the savage affirms he will do for ever and ever.

Francia, the Dictator of Paraguay, ordered every Indian found--man, woman or child--to be put to death! Lopez, a later ruler, took sport in hunting Indians like deer. We are told that on one occasion he was so successful as to kill forty-eight! The children he captured and sold into slavery at fifteen and twenty dollars each. The white settler considers himself very brave if he kills the savage with a rifle sighted at five hundred yards, while well out of range of the Indians'

arrows, and I have known them shot just "for fun"! The Indians retaliate by _cutting off the heels_ of their white captives, or leaving them, _in statu naturae_, bound with thongs on an anthill; and a more terrible death could not be devised by even the inquisitor, Torquemada, of everlasting execration. The Indian is hard and cruel, indifferent to pain in himself or others. A serpent may sting a comrade, and he takes no notice; but let one find food and there is a general scamper to the spot. The Chaco savage is barbarous in the extreme. The slain enemies are often eaten, and the bones burnt and scattered over their food. The children of enemies are traded off to other tribes for more food.

The Chaco Indian is a born warrior. Sad to say, his only hope is to fight against the Latin paleface.

Most of us have at times been able to detect a peculiar aroma in the negro. The keen-scented savage detects that something in us, and we "smell" to them. Even I, _Big Cactus Red Mouth_, was not declared free from a subtle odor, although I washed so often that they wondered my skin did not come off. _They never wash_, and in damp weather the dirt peels from them in cakes. Of course they _don't_ smell!

When a man or woman is, through age, no longer capable of looking after the needs of the body, a shallow grave is dug, the aged one doubled up until the knees are pressed into the hollow cheeks, and the back is broken. This terrible work done, the undesired one is dragged by one leg to the open tomb. Sometimes the face and whole body is so mangled, by being pulled through thorns and over uneven ground, that it is not recognizable, and the nose has at times been actually torn off. While sometimes still alive, the body is covered up with mother earth.

Frequently the grave is so shallow that the matted hair may be seen coming out at the top. The burial is generally made near a wood, and, if pa.s.sible, under the _holy wood tree_, which, in their judgment, has great influence with evil spirits. Wild beasts, attracted by the odor of the corpse, soon dig up the remains, and before next day it is frequently devoured.

An _ordinary_ burial service may be thus described: A deep cut is first made in the stomach of the departed one. Into this incision a stone, some bone ash, and a bird's claw are introduced. The body is then placed over the grave on two sticks, a muttering incantation is said by the witch doctor, and the sticks are roughly knocked from under the body, so as to permit it to fall in a sitting posture. A bow and arrows, and some food and cooking utensils, are dropped into the grave.

All shooting stars, according to the Indian belief, are flying stones; hence the custom of placing a stone in the stomach of the dead. It is supposed to be able to mount heavenward, and, a.s.suming its true character, become the avenging adversary, and destroy the one who caused the death--always a bad witch doctor. The bird's claw scratches out the enemy's heart, and the ashes annihilate the spirit. One of the missionaries in the Lengua tribe stated that he a.s.sisted at the burial of a woman where the corpse fell head foremost into the grave, the feet remaining up. Four times the attempt to drop her in right was made, with similar results, and finally the husband deliberately broke his dead wife's neck, and bent the head on to the back; then he broke her limbs across his knee, and so the ghastly burial was at last completed!

Truly, "the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty." Let the one whose idea is to "leave the pagan in his innocency" visit these savages, and, if he lives to tell it, his ideas will have undergone a great change. They are _lost!_ and millions have not yet heard of the "Son of Man," who "came to seek and to save that which was lost."

At the death of any member, the _toldo_ in which he lived is burnt, all his possessions are destroyed, and the people go into mourning. The hair of both s.e.xes is cut short or pulled out, and each one has the face blackened with a vegetable dye, which, from experience, I know hardly ever wears off again. As I have said, everything the man owned in life is burnt and the village is deserted; all move right away to get out of the presence of the death-giving spirit. To me the _toldo_ would not only seem abandoned, but the people gone without leaving a trace of their path; but not so to Wolf Rider, my guide. By the position of the half-burnt wood of the fire, he could tell the direction they had taken, and the number gone--although each steps in the other's footprints--whether they were stopping to hunt on the way, and much more he would never tell me. Some of the missionaries have spent ten years in the Chaco, but cannot get the savage to teach them this lesson of signs.

In some tribes the aged ones are just _"left to die"_ sitting under a palm-leaf mat. All the members of the tribe move away and leave them thus. Many are the terrible things my eyes have witnessed, but surely the most pathetic was the sight of an old woman sitting under the mat.

I was one day riding alone, but had with me two horses, when I caught sight of the palm-leaf erection and the solitary figure sitting under it. Getting down from my horse, I approached the woman and offered to take her to a place of safety, promising to feed her and permit her to live as long as she chose. Would she come with me? I begged and entreated, but the poor woman would not so much as lift her eyes to mine. The law of her tribe had said she must die, and the laws are to them unalterable. Most reluctantly, I left her to be eaten later on by the wild beasts.

Terrible as this custom is, other tribes kill and eat their aged parents "as a mark of respect." Another tribe will not permit one member to go into the spirit world alone, so they hang another one, in order that there may be two to enter together.

Whereas the Caingwas are a religious people, even attributing their custom of piercing the lip to divine commandment, the Chaco aborigines have no G.o.d and no religion. Missionaries in the solitary station I have referred to, after ten years' probing, have been unable to find any approach to worship in their darkened minda. "The miserable wretches who inhabit that vast wilderness are so low in the scale of reasoning beings that one might doubt whether or not they have human souls." [Footnote: Washburn's "History of Paraguay."] These "lost sheep" have no word to express G.o.d, and have no idols. "The poverty of the Indian dialects of the Chaco is scarcely surpa.s.sed by that of the dumb brutes."

These wretched tribes have perfect community of goods; what is secured by one belongs equally to all. A piece of cloth is either torn up and distributed, or worn in turns by each one. The shirt which I gave my guide, Yantiwau, for much arduous toil, was worn by one and another alternately. Much as the savage at first desires to possess some garment, it does not take long for him to tire of it. All agree with Mark Twain, that "the human skin is the most comfortable of all costumes," and, clothed in the sunlight, the human form divine is not unlovely.

Sometimes the Indians of the interior take skins, etc., to the Paraguayan towns across the river. Not knowing the use of money, their little trading is done by barter. Their knowledge of value is so crude that on one occasion they refused a two-dollar axe for an article, but gladly accepted a ten-cent knife. The Chaco Indian, however, is seldom seen in civilization. His home is in the interior of an unknown country, which he wanders over in wild freedom. While the Caingwas are homekeeping, these savages are nomadic, and could not settle down. The land is either burnt up or inundated, so they do not plant, but live only by the chase. So bold and daring are they that a man, armed only with a lance, will attack a savage jaguar; or, diving under an alligator, he will stab it with a sharpened bone. The same man will run in abject terror if he thinks he hears _spirits_.

Though not religious, the savages are exceedingly superst.i.tious, afraid of ghosts and evil spirits, and the fear of these spectral visitants pursues them through life. During a storm they vigorously shake their blankets and mutter incantations to keep away supernatural visitors.

All diseases are caused by evil spirits, or the moon; and a comet brings the measles. The help of the witch doctor has to be sought on all occasions, for his special work is to drive away the evil spirit that has taken possession of a sick one. This he does by rattling a hollow calabash containing stones. That important person will perform his mystic _hocus pocus_ over the sick or dying, and charm away the spirits from a neighborhood. I have known an Indian, when in great pain through having eaten too much, send for the old fakir, who, after examination of the patient and great show of learning, declared that the suffering one _had two tigers in his stomach_. A very common remedy is the somewhat scientific operation of bleeding a patient, but the manner is certainly uncommon--the witch doctor sucks out the blood. One I was acquainted with, among the Lengua tribe, professed to suck three cats out of a man's stomach. His professional name was thereafter "Father of Kittens." The doctor's position is not one to be envied, however, for if three consecutive patients die, he must follow them _down the dark trail!_