‘But, John,’ he said, ‘the Indians are our friends. They’d never kill a Welshman.’
Then Lewis Jones learned of an Argentine patrol that had trespassed on Indian land and he knew that it was true. Evans led a party of forty Welshmen to the place. Hawks flew off as they came near. The bodies were not yet picked clean and their sexual organs were in their mouths. Lewis Jones said to John Evans: ‘Heaven hath saved thee, John, from a horrible death.’
They took up the remains and buried them. A marble monument marks the spot. Its name is Biddmyrd os syrfeddod ‘There will be a myriad wonders...’—a line from the hymn of Anne Griffith, the mystic girl from Montgomery who lived on a remote hill-farm and also died young.
‘You’re not looking for a job, I suppose?’ Milton Evans asked. It was lunch time and he presented me with a slab of meat on the end of a small sword.
‘Not particularly.’
‘Funny, you remind me of Bobby Dawes. Young Englishman, same as yourself, wandering about Patagonia. One day he walks up to an estancia and says to the owner: “If you give me work, you’re a saint, and your wife’s a saint, and your children are angels, and that dog’s the best dog in the world.” But the owner says, “There is no work.” “In which case,” Bobby says, “you’re the son of a whore, your wife is a whore, your children are monkeys, and if I catch that dog, I’ll kick its arse till its nose bleeds.” ’
Milton laughed a lot as he told this story. Then he told another he once heard from the Cooper sheep-dip man. The second story was about a cure for scab. The punch line was ‘Put a lump of sugar in the sheep’s mouth and suck its arse till it tastes sweet.’ He repeated the story twice to make sure I’d get the point. I lied. I couldn’t face it a third time.
I left Milton to his hay-making and went north of Esquel to a small settlement called Epuyen.
18
THE NIGHT was hot and it was getting late and the owner of the one shop in Epuyen was swabbing down the counter which also served as a bar. Señor Naitane was a small creased man with unusually white skin. He eyed his customers nervously and wished they would go. His wife was waiting for him in bed. The rooms around the courtyard were in darkness. Only in the shop a single electric bulb smeared its thin yellow light over the green walls and the lines of bottles and packets of maté. From the roof-beams hung strings of peppers, garlic, saddle-trees, bits and spurs, which cast jagged shadows on the ceiling.
Earlier, the eight gauchos present had shown signs of leaving. Their horses, tied to the fence, were chomping and stamping. But whenever Naitane swabbed the counter clean, one of them slammed down a wet glass or bottle and called for another round. Naitane let his boy serve. He took a duster of ostrich feathers and flicked, agitatedly, at the things on the shelves.
Once you get a drunk gaucho in the saddle, he won’t fall off and his horse will get him home. But this presupposes a dangerous moment while you seat him. Naitane thought this moment was approaching. The youngest gaucho was bright red in the face, propping himself against the bar on his elbows. His friends watched to see if his legs would hold. All had knives stuck into their waistbands.
Their leader was a scrawny rough in black bombachas and a black shirt open to his navel. His chest was covered with a fuzz of ginger hair and the same ginger bristles sprouted all over his face. He had a few long, sharp, brown teeth and a shark’s fin of a nose. He moved with the grace of a well-oiled piece of machinery and leered at Naitane with a teasing smile.
Then he crunched my hand and introduced himself as Teófilo Breide. The words slurred through his teeth and he was hard to follow, but from something he did say, I realized he was an Arab; the nose had explained itself. Epuyen, in fact, was a colony of Arabs, Christian Arabs, but whereas I could picture Naitane as a shopkeeper in Palestine, Teófilo Breide belonged in the black tents.
‘And what,’ he asked, ‘is a gringito doing in Epuyen?’
‘I want to know about an American called Martin Sheffield who lived here forty years back.’
‘Bah!’ said Teófilo Breide. ‘Sheffield! Fantasista! Cuentero! Artista! You know the story of the plesiosaurus?’
‘I do.’
‘Fantasía!’ he roared and launched into an anecdote that made the gauchos laugh.
‘Funny you should mention him. You see this?’ He handed me a rebenque, the Argentine riding whip, with a silver-sheathed handle and leather strap. ‘This was Martin Sheffield’s.’
He directed me to the lagunita where the American once had his camp. Then he smacked the rebenque on the counter. The young man’s knees did hold. The gauchos drained their glasses and filed out.
Señor Naitane, in whose house I had hoped to pass the night, pushed me out into the street and bolted the door. The generator cut out. From all directions I heard the sound of hooves dwindling into the night. I slept behind a bush.
19
THE lagunita lay under a mountain of red screes. It was little bigger than a pond and not more than a metre deep. Its unruffled surface reflected the black conifers that grew round the edge. Coots were swimming in the reeds. It was hardly a place to attract world headlines.
On a January morning in 1922, Dr Clemente Onelli, the Director of the National Zoological Gardens in La Plata, found this letter on his desk:Dear Sir,
Knowing of your concern to keep the Zoo in the public eye, I would like to draw your attention to a phenomenon, which is certainly of great interest and could lead to your acquiring an animal unknown to science. Here are the facts: Some nights ago I noticed some tracks on a pasture near the lake where I pitched my hunting camp. The tracks resembled those left by a heavy cart. The grass was completely flattened and hasn’t stood up yet. Then, in the middle of the lake, I saw the head of an animal. At first sight it was like some unknown species of swan, but swirls in the water made me think its body must resemble a crocodile’s.
The purpose of this letter is to request your material aid for an expedition i.e. boat, harpoons, etc. (The boat we could build here.) Furthermore, in case it proves impossible to capture the beast alive, you should send embalming fluid. If you are interested, please send to the house of Perez Gabito funds to realize the expedition.
I hope for a reply as soon as possible, With my kindest regards,
Martin Sheffield.
The writer was an adventurer from Tom Green County, Texas, who styled himself sheriff and wore a star and sheriff’s hat to prove it. Around 1900 he appeared in Patagonia looking rather like Ernest Hemingway, roaming the mountains ‘poorer than Job’ with a white mare and an Alsatian for company. He persisted in the illusion that Patagonia was an extension of the Old West. He panned the streams for gold. Some winters he stayed with John Evans at Trevelin and swapped dirty nuggets for flour. He was a crack shot. He shot trout from the rivers; a cigarette packet from the police commissioner’s mouth; and had the habit of picking off ladies’ high-heels.
Sheffield offered his services, as fellow drinker and guide, to any explorer who appeared in this part of the Andes. On one expedition he helped unearth the fossilized skeleton of a plesiosaurus, a small dinosaur related to the modern turtle, which had indeed a neck like a swan. Now he was proposing a live specimen.
Onelli called a press conference and announced the forthcoming plesiosaurus hunt. An upper-class lady subscribed 1,500 dollars for the purchase of equipment. Two old age pensioners escaped from the Hospital de la Mercedes to fight the monster. The plesiosaurus also lent its name to a tango and a brand of cigarettes. When Onelli suggested it might have to be embalmed, the Jockey Club hoped to have the privilege of exhibiting, but this brought a denunciation from Don Ignacio Albarracín, of the Society for the Protection for Animals.
Meanwhile the country was paralysed by a general election which would decide whether to unseat its Radical President, Dr Hipólito Yrigoyen, and somehow the plesiosaurus managed to insert itself into the campaign as emblematic beast of the Right.
Two newspapers whose policy was to welcome foreign c
apital adopted the plesiosaurus. La Nación confirmed preparations for the hunt and wished it well. In La Prensa enthusiasm was even greater: ‘The existence of this unusual animal, which has roused the attention of foreigners, is a scientific event, which will bring to Patagonia the definitive prestige of possessing so unsuspected a creature.’
Foreign cables buzzed into Buenos Aires. Mr Edmund Heller, Teddy Roosevelt’s hunting companion, wrote asking for a piece of skin for the American Museum of Natural History in memory of his old friend. The University of Pennsylvania said a team of zoologists was ready to leave for Patagonia at once, adding that if the animal were caught, the proper place for it was the United States. ‘It is clear,’ commented the Diario del Plata, ‘that this world has been created for the greater glory of the North Americans, viz. The Monroe Doctrine.’
The plesiosaurus was an electoral gift to the Left. Clemente Onelli, the Beast-Slayer, was presented as a new Parsifal, a Lohengrin or a Siegfried. The journal La Montaña said that, domesticated, the animal might prove of service to the blighted inhabitants of the Tierra del Diablo, a reference to the revolt of the peons in Southern Patagonia, whom the Argentine Army had brutally massacred the month before. Another article bore the title ‘The Cappadocian Dragon’; and the nationalistic La Fronda wrote: ‘This millenarian, pyramidal, apocalyptic animal makes a noise like a Madonna and usually appears in the opaline stupors of drunken gringos.’
There is a difference of opinion as to whether the expedition, equipped with an enormous hypodermic, actually reached the lake. But the animal’s non-existence must have been evident to whoever stood on its bank. And with the plesiosaurus died the hope of finding, in Patagonia, live dinosaurs like those described by Conan Doyle, stranded on their plateau in The Lost World.
Martin Sheffield died in 1936 in Arroyo Norquinco, a place he believed was his personal Klondike, of gold-fever, starvation, and D.T.s. A wooden cross with the initials M.S. marked the grave, but a souvenir hunter from Buenos Aires stole it. His son, by an Indian woman, lives drunkenly at El Bolsón, believing himself a Texas sheriff by inheritance and wearing his father’s star.
From Epuyen, I walked to Cholila, a settlement close to the Chilean frontier.
20
‘FEEL IT,’ she said. ‘Feel the wind coming through.’
I put my hand to the wall. The draught blew through the chinks where the mortar had fallen out. The log cabin was the North American kind. In Patagonia they made cabins differently and did not chink them with mortar.
The owner of the cabin was a Chilean Indian woman called Sepúlveda.
‘In winter it’s terrible,’ she said. ‘I covered the wall with materia plastica but it blew away. The house is rotten, Señor, old and rotten. I would sell it tomorrow. I would have a concrete house which the wind cannot enter.’
Senora Sepúlveda had boarded up the living-room windows when the glass fell out. She had pasted newspapers over the cracks, but you could still see scraps of the old flowered wallpaper. She was a hard-working, covetous woman. She was short and stout and had a bad time with her husband and the rotten cabin.
Señor Sepúlveda was grogged out of his mind, half-sitting, half-lying by the kitchen stove.
‘Would you buy the house?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but don’t sell it for nothing. There are North American gentlemen who would pay good money to take it away piece by piece.’
‘This table comes from the Norteamericanos,’ she said, ‘and the cupboard, and the stove.’
She knew the cabin had a certain distinction for being North American. ‘It must have been a beautiful place once,’ she said.
As well as show me round, she was trying to get her eldest daughter off with a young road engineer. He drove a new pick-up and might be good for some cash. He and the girl were in the yard holding hands and laughing at the old nag tied to a willow. Next day, I passed her walking home to Cholila, alone across the pampas, crying.
21
THE BUILDER of the cabin was a sandy-haired and rather thick-set American, no longer young in 1902, with tapering fingers and a short roman nose. He had likable easy-going manners and a mischievous grin. He must have felt at home here, the country round Cholila is identical to parts of his home state, Utah—a country of clean air and open spaces; of black mesas and blue mountains; of grey scrub breaking into yellow flowers, a country of bones picked clean by hawks, stripped by the wind, stripping men to the raw.
He was alone that first winter. But he liked reading and borrowed books from an English neighbour. Sometimes in Utah he would hole up in the ranch of a retired teacher. He especially liked reading English mediaeval history and the stories of the Scots clans. Writing did not come easily to him, yet he did find time to write this letter to a friend back home:
Cholila., Ten Chubut
Argentine Republic, S.Am.
August 10 1902
Mrs Davies
Ashley, Utah
My Dear Friend,
I suppose you have thought long before that I had forgotten you (or was dead) but my dear friend, I am still alive, and when I think of my Old friends you are always the first to come to mind. It will probably surprise you to hear from me away down in this country but U.S. was too small for me the last two years I was there. I was restless. I wanted to see more of the world. I had seen all of the U.S. that I thought was good. And a few months after I sent A—over to see you, and get the Photo of the rope jumping ... another of my Uncles died and left $30,000 to our little family of 3 so I took my $10,000 and started to see a little more of the world. I visited the best cities and best parts of South A. till I got here. And this part of the country looked so good that I located, and I think for good, for I like the place better every day. I have 300 cattle, 1500 sheep, and 28 good saddle horses, 2 men to do my work, also a good 4 room house, wearhouse, stable, chicken house and some chickens. The only thing lacking is a cook, for I am still living in Single Cussideness and sometimes I feel very lonely for I am alone all day, and my neighbours don’t amount to anything, besides the only language spoken in this country is Spanish, and I don’t speak it well enough to converse on the latest scandals so dear to the hearts of all nations, and without which conversations are very stale, but the country is first class. The only industry at present is stockraising (that is in this part) and it can’t be beat for that purpose, for I have never seen finer grass country, and lots of it hundreds and hundreds of miles that is unsettled and comparatively unknown, and where I am is good agricultural country, all kinds of small grain and vegetables grow without Irrigation but I am at the foot of the Andes Mountains. And all the land east of here is prairie and deserts, very good for stock, but for farming it would have to be irrigated, but there is plenty of good land along the mountains for all the people that will be here for the next hundred years, for I am a long way from civilization. It is 16 hundred miles to Buenos Aires the Capital of the Argentine, and over 400 miles to the nearest RailRoad or Sea Port but only about 150 miles to the Pacific Coast. To get to Chile we have to cross the mountains which was thought impossible until last summer when it was found that the Chilean Gov. had cut a road almost across so that next summer we will be able to go to Port Mont, Chile in about 4 days, where it used to take 2 months around the old trail. and it will be a great benefit to us for Chile is our Beef market and we can get our cattle there in 1/10th the time and have them fat. Also we can get supplies in Chile for one third what they cost here. The climate here is a great deal milder than Ashley valley. The summers are beautiful, never as warm as there. And grass knee high everywhere and lots of good cold mountain water. but the winters are very wet and disagreeable, for it rains most of the time, but sometimes we have lots of snow, but it don’t last long, for it never gets cold enough to freeze much. I have never seen Ice one inch thick ...
The dead Uncle was the Wild Bunch Gang’s robbery of the First National Bank at Winnemucca, Nevada, on September 10th 1900. The writer was Robert Leroy Par
ker, better known as Butch Cassidy, at that time heading the Pinkerton Agency’s list of most wanted criminals. The ‘little family of 3’ was a ménage à trois consisting of himself, Harry Longabaugh the Sundance Kid, and the beautiful gun-moll Etta Place. Mrs Davies was the mother-in-law of Butch’s greatest friend, Elza Lay, who was languishing in the pen.
22
HE WAS a nice boy, a lively friendly-faced boy, who loved his Mormon family and the cabin in the cottonwoods. Both his parents came out from England as children and trekked the Plains, with Brigham Young’s handcart companies, from Iowa City to the Salt Lake. Anne Parker was a nervous and highly strung Scotswoman; her husband, Max, a simple soul, who had a hard time squeezing a living from the homestead and made a little extra in timber haulage.
The two-room cabin is still standing at Circleville, Utah. The corrals are there, and the paddock where Robert Leroy rode his first calf. The poplars he planted still line the irrigation ditch between the orchard and the sage. He was the oldest of eleven children, a boy of precise loyalties and a sense of fair play. He chafed under the straitjacket of Mormonism (and smelled corruption there). He dreamed of being a cowboy and, in dime novels, read the ongoing saga of Jessie James.
At eighteen he identified as his natural enemies the cattle companies, the railroads and the banks, and convinced himself that right lay the wrong side of the law. One June morning in 1884, awkwardly and ashamed, he told his mother he was going to work in a mine at Telluride. She gave him her father’s blue travelling blanket and a pot of blueberry preserves. He kissed his baby sister, Lula, crying in her cradle, and rode out of their lives. The truth came out when Max Parker returned to the homestead. His son had rustled some cattle with a young outlaw called Mike Cassidy. The law was after them both.
Bob Parker took the name Cassidy and rode into a new life of wide horizons and the scent of horse leather. (Butch was the name of a borrowed gun.) His apprentice years, the 1880s, were years of the Beef Bonanza; of Texas longhorns peppering the range; of cowboys ‘livin’ the life of a buck nun’ (one woman to ten men); of the Cattle Barons who paid miserly wages and dividends of 40 per cent to their shareholders; of champagne breakfasts at the Cheyenne Club and the English dukes who called their cowboys ‘cow-servants’ and whose cowboys called them ‘dudes’. There were plenty of Englishmen knocking round the West: one cowboy wrote to his Yankee employer: ‘That Inglishman yu lef in charge at the other ranch got to fresh and we had to kil the son of a bitch. Nothing much has hapened since yu lef ...’
In Patagonia Page 7