Beyond the Pampas

by Imogen Herrad

  In 1883, a band of four young men left the Welsh settlement to go west and look for gold. One had grown up in Y Wladfa, the other three were recent arrivals one of whom had experience of panning for gold in Australia. They left in July, during the height of winter when the weather was cold but damp and there was a chance to capture rain water to drink. Each had several pack horses with provisions, and spare horses to ride. For months they travelled all over the desert. They found small but promising amounts of gold in several rivers; so promising indeed that they named one place after it: Hafn Aur, Gorge of Gold.61

  This was the same time that the ‘Desert Campaign’ of ethnic cleansing of the Indians of Patagonia was in full swing. Just before they departed that July, the four explorers would have signed the petition against the persecution and killing of Tehuelche which the Welsh sent to the government in Buenos Aires.

  It’s difficult to know how much the inhabitants of Y Wladfa knew about the extent of the ‘Desert Campaign’. For General Roca in Buenos Aires – and for us with hindsight – it was an orchestrated campaign to sweep the south clean of the ‘savages’ who possessed the effrontery to have lived there first. The Welsh knew, in some detail, about what was happening in the Chubut valley: they had heard about the attacks from the Indians themselves. It is unclear whether they were aware of the similar attacks on other indigenous peoples all over Patagonia.

  The fact is that, at the very time General Roca’s army was waging war against the Indians of Patagonia, the four young Welshmen were on an extended trip through the desert, looking for gold and new lands to settle. By the end of the year, when they had been travelling for about six months, they met a group of soldiers engaged in the ‘Desert Campaign’, who told them that the plains had now been cleared of Indians.

  In this the soldiers were wrong, because a few days later the Welshmen came across a couple of Indians. From this point, the accounts vary. Some identify them as Mapuche fleeing from the persecution of the Chilean military – which was engaged in its own war against the Indígenas, La Guerra de Arauco, the Arauco War – and bent on revenge. Of course, they might have been Mapuche fleeing from the persecution of the Argentine military. Other reports state that they were Tehuelche, but from a group who did not know the Welsh.62 The Günün A Künna, the Pampas Indians, appear to have vanished from history already at this point. There is no way of knowing, now. We possess no account from an Indian point of view.

  The four Welshmen had travelled up to 300 miles away from the Chubut valley, near the foothills of the Andes: a long, long way from home. They decided to return home with all speed. There were angry Indians about, and although the majority of the Welsh deplored the genocide and had taken no part in it, they were still white, like the soldiers; and the colony would still, in all likelihood, profit from the newly depopulated land. So they didn’t hang about.

  Some accounts say that the four had recently bought new clothes from a travelling merchant: and that at least some were parts of military uniforms. So perhaps the Indians who ambushed them thought the young men were soldiers. Perhaps they knew them for Welshmen and wanted to take revenge against those first white settlers, now that a whole army was mercilessly driving all Indians off their own land. Perhaps they didn’t care one way or the other. Eluned Morgan wrote in 1901; twenty years after the event, and still enraged:

  The illustrious senators who rule Argentina determined that the only way to bring development and progress to Patagonia was by completely eliminating the old Native peoples, and it was this end which the great campaign served, the campaign that happened just at the time of those four young men. The hunt had been merciless and the treatment given by the soldiers to their captives such that hundreds of Indians preferred to throw themselves off mountains into lakes and rivers, rather than fall into the hands of such terrible enemies. The few hundred who had managed to escape the soldiers were hiding in the mountains, maddened by fear, all their faculties possessed by the demon, their hearts filled with but one desire: to avenge the blood of their loved ones. And what Welshman could blame them?’63

  The four gold seekers were within a hundred miles of home when they happened into – what? An ambush? A group of Mapuche? Tehuelche? No-one knows, except that it was a group of Indians armed with spears – no guns – and that they were out for blood. The Welshmen tried to get away, but their horses were already tired. Only one of them escaped, because his mare managed to jump a wide trench which slowed his pursuers for long enough to allow him to get away. The other three were killed and their bodies mutilated beyond recognition.

  Bruce Chatwin reports that their genitals had been stuffed into their mouths.64 I have no idea where he got that interesting detail. It may be true. It may not be. After the end of the genocide, big hacienderos, land owners, would offer ‘piece payments’ per killed Indian, and there were a handful of professional hunters.65 Proof of a killing were ears, testicles or breasts, as scalps were in the North American West.66 It would make sense for Indians killing whites to mirror those mutilations on the corpses. But those ‘piece payments’ happened years later, after the end of the ‘Desert Campaign’.

  There is no doubt that the Indians vented their fury on the three victims. ‘The peaceful pagans of old had been converted, by the good works of civilisation, into ferocious, blood-thirsty outlaws,’ Eluned Morgan commented bitterly.67

  Communication and contact between Welsh and Indians was at this point effectively over. The eastern stretches of the province of Chubut were soon declared void of indigenous life. Survivors were driven hundreds of miles south, into what is today the province of Santa Cruz, where one single Tehuelche reservation was established; and west, into the foothills of the Andes. In the west, there were still skirmishes, and the Argentine army still sent out hit squads against groups of Indians many years after 1885, the official end of the ‘Desert Campaign’.68

  The story of the Welsh ‘martyrs’ is told to this day, but the many, many more indigenous martyrs are hardly ever mentioned.

  39

  THE FIRST WELSHMEN (to the best of my knowledge, they always were men) who rode off into the unknown depths of the desert, did so more or less haphazardly. One of the first – perhaps the very first – to put exploring on a more scientific footing was John Murray Thomas, an accountant latterly from Merthyr Tydfil. Not the most likely candidate, you would have thought, for saddling up and turning his horse’s head towards the sunset. But that was exactly what he did. (Not alone. Lone Ranger figures were always more fiction than fact. Incidentally, do you remember the name of the Lone Ranger’s Indian companion? When I learnt Spanish, I was astonished to find that tonto in Spanish means stupid. Nice.)

  John Murray Thomas would travel with a small group of men. They took with them several horses each, and large amounts of provisions. Being a systematic kind of bird – all that accountancy paperwork, no doubt – John Murray Thomas was the only one of them who kept a diary.

  Thursday, 2 August 1877

  Rose at 9 am and washed. Just in time. Since Friday 27 July, we had only been washing our hands on the Sunday. This morning at breakfast we used up the last of our bread.

  I caught a couple of the horses and went down the canyon together with Pugh, T.O.T. and Severo towards the River Chubut, a distance of some eight miles from our encampment. Near the river, we spotted the tracks of some horses which had passed there recently, some 18 to 20 days previously.

  Look at the Welsh. This is a mere twelve years after they have arrived in Patagonia, disoriented and frightened of the vastness of the unknown land. And here they are in the desert, reading tracks like Buffalo Bill.

  We cut our names into the bark of some trees.

  On the way back from the river, T.O.T. and I separated from Severo and Pugh in order to hunt a hare with “Guess”, which we managed to catch. Severo and Pugh attempted a rhea but failed to bring it down without their dogs. When we reached the camp once more, T. Roberts had the soup and meat ready.

&nb
sp; We found some pieces of petrified wood and some clay.

  Very cold last night with frost; today quite mild, we slept comfortably.69

  When I read this for the first time, I wondered why clay was worthy of mention in a diary. But when you live in a place where you have to make all your own crockery – and, indeed, all your own bricks – I suppose clay is a pretty exciting find.

  John Murray Thomas and his merry men didn’t have a map. None existed, yet, of the places they explored. They had compasses, and they knew that they weren’t going to fall off the edge of the South American continent because they had spoken to the Indians who’d travelled all over the steppe and knew it as they knew the backs of their own hands. But being told by someone who knows a place, and going there yourself without a map, are two very different things. How did they even know how to find the way back? How did they manage to find their way back?

  Then again, sometimes they did get lost, too.

  Friday, 24 August 1877

  Got up before dawn. Piercing cold with intense frost.

  Towards mid-day, much milder. Left camp late and went towards the coast, avoiding as much as possible the chasms. I made a detour towards NNE to see whether I could find any evidence that our companions had passed this way, but found that I had kept too far E, without allowing for the distance my companions would have covered.

  Night fell without my having caught up with them. I thought I saw smoke towards the East and went in that direction, until night fell and I was forced to make camp for the night, with only my dog for company. Nothing to eat or drink and not much fire wood, what there was being thorny and green. Very cold.70

  John Murray Thomas undertook three exploratory journeys, accompanied by assorted different companions who never play a huge role in his diary. The bulk of the entries describes the kind of territory they passed through, features of the landscape like rocks or streams, and the distance covered: between twenty and thirty miles each day.

  For the convenience of future explorers he drew up a list of what each traveller took for provisions:

  50 pounds flour

  2 cheeses of 15 pounds each

  10 pounds rice

  ½ pound bicarbonate of soda

  3 pounds salt

  6 pounds butter

  15 pounds maté

  15 pounds sugar

  15 pounds semolina

  ¼ mustard [a quarter? a quart?]

  2 dozen matches

  3 pounds ground coffee

  6 pounds tobacco

  1 flint and steel

  2 pipes

  3 pounds bacon

  1 comb

  1 towel

  1 whetstone

  2 spoons: one large, one small

  1 strong enamel mug

  1 kettle

  1 large cooking pot

  2 compasses

  2 knives

  1 revolver

  1 sail, in case of rain

  Fishhooks for fishing in summer; none in winter.

  Ropes, hobbles, bridles.

  Needles and thread.

  Small axe and strong saw.

  Sunglasses in summer

  Quantities of spurs, whips, leather straps.

  Cinches for pack horses, bags, saddlebags etc.

  In winter, dogs; none in summer.71

  40

  For the first twenty years of its existence, Y Wladfa existed in a happy sort of power vacuum. The settlers were nominally subject to Argentine authority, but the government in Buenos Aires was too distant to interfere. The Welsh provided their own administration, set up their own systems of education and justice, and largely ran their own lives. They had known from the outset that there could not be actual independence: the agreement had been for a settlement within Argentina, not an autonomous colony. But they must have felt pretty autonomous. Then Y Wladfa became, in some ways, a victim of its own success: the small community proved that there was a living to be made in Patagonia from trade and agriculture. The Argentine government was mindful of the fact that the Patagonian territories were similarly coveted and claimed by the neighbouring state of Chile; and that Tehuelche, Pampas Indians and Mapuche by and large didn’t feel much allegiance to either state, having lived on the land long before either Argentina or Chile existed. The success of the Welsh settlement prompted the Argentine government to take a hand. In 1884 – when the ‘Desert Campaign’ was almost over and the plains had been declared clear of Indians – Argentina put Patagonia firmly on its own map, by creating the five provinces that make up the territory to this day. From north to south, they are: Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego. Provincial governors and judges were appointed by the government in Buenos Aires.

  The Welsh of Y Wladfa weren’t overjoyed by this development. They’d become quite used to being their own masters. Indeed, one Argentine official referred to them, unfondly, as ‘those people who are accustomed to doing as they please’.72 A compromise of sorts was reached when Luis Jorge Fontana, an Argentinian, became governor of the newly created province of Chubut, and in return, Lewis Jones was given the title of Commissioner of the colony.

  The so grandly named new Province of Chubut at this time had a total population not exceeding 1600, all of whom were living in and around the two villages of Rawson and Gaiman on the eastern edge of the region. That is to say, a white population of 1600. There were still not inconsiderable numbers of Mapuche (several hundred, at least) and isolated groups of Pampas Indians and Tehuelche in the western half of the territory, but they would be removed if the authorities could do it; and so did not count, and were not counted.

  Patagonia had yet to be properly mapped, although clearly the military must have had maps of some sort in order to find its way around. The federal government in Buenos Aires was desirous that the new governors should explore and settle their new territories, especially the Andean region, where the soil was richest (Moreno’s ‘new Switzerland’) and there beckoned the possibility of finding gold. It promised an area of fifty leagues (around 175 square miles) of free land to be set aside for settlers in the Andes.

  This was well received by the Welsh, who had used up all the arable land in the Chubut valley. There must also have been those who found the idea of living somewhere remote and far away from the government attractive; and others who had caught the pioneering bug and were attracted by the thought of settling ‘virgin’ lands.

  (Almost all travellers in nineteenth-century Patagonia, even the best of them, exclaim at some point in their writings how thrilled they are to be standing in some spot where no person has stood before them. What they invariably mean is, of course, no white person. Thus indigenous people are rendered simultaneously invisible and not-quite-human.)

  Fontana, the new governor, would have liked to explore his new province but couldn’t because, frankly, he didn’t have the means. Apparently the government in Buenos Aires had contented itself with creating the provinces and their administration without providing sufficient funding.

  John Murray Thomas was probably keener to go west than any other inhabitant of Y Wladfa. After all, he’d already been out there. Fontana didn’t have the money to go? No problem. Thomas sent a hat round Rawson and Gaiman, and within the space of months had raised the very considerable sum of 6000 pesos from individual contributions.

  In October 1885, the expedition set off. It was made up of some thirty men (most of them Welsh, also a handful of Argentines, a couple of Germans and one U.S. citizen), and duly headed by Luis Jorge Fontana, with John Murray Thomas as his right-hand man. The horsemen were not only equipped with vittles but also carried a sabre and a rifle with a hundred shots each.73 Were these for hunting? Or did the Welsh expect trouble? But they weren’t just the Welsh any more, they were officially part of Argentina now, riding under the leadership of an Argentine governor, at a time when the state-run war on the Indians was still going on. Two years had passed since an Argentine general had marched a group of captured Tehuelche
through the Chubut valley74, since the deaths of the three young Welshmen, the ‘martyrs’. Much more than previously, this part of Patagonia had become frontier territory. So they carried sabres and rifles. Today, the expedition is known under the martial name Rifleros de Fontana, Fontana’s Riflemen.

  41

  TO BE PERFECTLY HONEST, I’m not all that interested in the Rifleros. Not even in John Murray Thomas, although many of his diary entries make intriguing and diverting reading in between the rather dry geological and scientific observations. Somebody in Gaiman suggests that I go and visit John Murray Thomas’ elderly granddaughter who edited and published the diary, but I am not keen.

  I used to be in love with the image of a hermetically sealed, little piece of Wales in big, foreign Patagonia. But now I want to look beyond the frontiers of Y Wladfa into the rest of Patagonia. Do I really want to talk to Señora Olivia de Mulhall, who will doubtless tell me yet more tales about the heroic doings of the early Welsh settlers? But in the end the seductive whisper of ‘Why not?’ wins.

  Olivia de Mulhall lives, not in Gaiman, but in the big city, in Trelew. It is the biggest city in Chubut today, with a population of around 120,000.

  Her house stands in an old residential area on the edge of the city. The streets are pleasantly tree-lined, the pavements cool with the speckled shade of rustling leaves. Tree roots have pushed up and cracked paving stones in many places. It’s quiet, and the air, even here in the city, carries the faint taste of the dust of the desert. There are small shops, greengrocers, bakeries, butchers. The occasional garage promotes its services by means of the word Gomería (tyre repair shop) stencilled in white on a large black tyre propped up by the side of the road. Advertising slogans are painted directly on garden or house walls. One of them catches my eye: all rendered in blue and white (the colours of the Argentine flag) on a windowless house wall are a large bottle of mineral water and the words, Soda Malvinas – Bien Argentina! Malvinas soda water – very Argentinian! Malvinas, of course, is the Spanish name for the Falklands.