The Indian never took to cattle-breeding. His herd never consisted of more than mares and a few sheep. But trade in stolen cattle quickly became the chief occupation of the tribes. It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that the thievish Indian was merely and always a dreaded enemy of the ranches of Carmen. They sometimes had recourse to his services and profited by his misdeeds. After the Revolution, it was the Indians who helped to fill once more the ranches of the Rio Negro, bringing runaway cattle which had remained in the San Jose district. Later, Carmen bought the cattle stolen by the Indians at Buenos Aires. From 1823 to 1826 the number of the cattle sold by the Indians to the colonists on the Rio Negro is estimated at 40,000. Hence the breeders of Carmen had, as regards the Indians, alternate periods of armed conflict and complicity. But Chile was always the great market for stolen cattle. Raids (_malones_) and the crossing of the Cordillera by convoys began in the eighteenth century, and continued throughout the nineteenth, until 1880, when the consolidation of Argentine authority on the eastern side gave a more regular form to the cattle-trade. The convoys came to a halt at Antuco and Chillan from which the Chilean buyers sometimes accompanied the Indian tribes as far as the _tolderias_ on the edge of the Pampa. The trade in stolen cattle made use of all the passes of the Cordillera, from the Planchon pass below 35 deg. S. lat., which Roca had covered in 1877 by the fortress of Alamito, to the source of the Bio Bio. The one most used was the Pichachen or the Antuco pass. On the tableland the cattle-tracks formed a regular network with innumerable strands, spreading over a width of about two hundred miles. The most northern route started east of the Poitague district and, after fording the Salado and the Atuel, and passing the _aguadas_ of Cochico and Ranquilco, entered the Cordillera at the bend of the Rio Grande. Another track ascended the Colorado and then reached the high valley of Neuquen. A third crossed from the Colorado to the Rio Negro, and, above the confluence of the Limay, to the Rio Agrio or the Alumine. The first exact information about the range of the Patagonian Indians is supplied by a group of bold travellers who followed their tracks from 1870 to 1880: Musters, Moreno, Moyano, Ramon Lista, etc. Their discoveries had already outlined the geographical survey of Patagonia when the campaign of 1879-1883 opened it to colonization.