“On the other hand, I knew that either Juan or Pablo could travel through their land at night, they knew their place inside out and had been practicing since before they could walk, riding double with their dad or one of the experienced gauchos working at their place. Also, they were always well equipped, fully dressed for the occasion, with a pack horse following carrying gear and supplies for a week and, most important of all, knowledge.
As far as I knew, there was only one kind of people that could travel this land on foot, in this weather, without so much as a sock or a piece of bread, but they had been gone for over a hundred years. The native Fuegians could, easily, and what’s fascinating to me is that they basically wore no clothes, traveling through snow covered ground barefoot, essentially naked, wearing nothing more than a healthy smearing of seal oil or sea lion fat on their bodies, sometimes carrying a stiff guanaco hide to cover themselves at night during sleep. These were people supremely well adapted to their surroundings and it would have been interesting to see what modern science could have learned had we been able to study their ways, their methods: how they managed to survive in conditions that would exterminate just about anybody else in a matter of hours, if not minutes. They not only survived, but thrived for thousands of years, and were it not for late nineteenth century man hunting them down like animals, including paying a reward for their ears or their heads, they would be here and we could ask them.
I remember reading a letter once from an army commander in Patagonia circa 1910 or thereabouts, to his boss, the secretary of the interior of Argentina, in Buenos Aires. At the time, the national policy with the native population was of outright extermination, and this commander was reporting his totals for a period of time, possibly two weeks or a month, I don’t exactly recall, while promising to do better in the months to come. Something like 425 men and older boys, 340 women and children as well as 80 or so miscellaneous older people for a total of 845. I remember the letter because until then I had never seen what in effect was the de-facto national policy of a sovereign country dealing with its native population: there it was, same as in many parts of the world, finally in unadorned black and white.
I’m not one to judge men out of their time and place. The way things were done in the past were oftentimes wrong and nobody can justify it, but I preferred not to condemn people I never met under circumstances unknown to me. At the time, however, I remember it brought tears to my eyes.”
From book 2 in Tierra del Fuego, not yet published.
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