The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and PatagoniaSpears, John Randolph
History
The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia
Spears, John Randolph
Patagonia (Argentina and Chile) -- Description and travel
The one vice--rather the root of all evil--among the Tehuelches is the
love of liquor. Robes, weapons, horses, daughters, and wives will all be
exchanged for rum, and there are traders crossing the desert every day
of the year seeking out their camps to sell the stuff to them. Then,
too, there are apple orchards on Lake Nehuel-Huapi. In the season great
festivals are held at the orchards. Then the apples are made into cider
in skin-lined pits, and the fermented stuff is consumed in vast
quantities. The Tehuelche, when drunk, becomes quarrelsome, and murders
are then common, although the squaws hide all weapons before a festival
begins.
The weapons of the Tehuelche are like those of the gaucho--lassoes,
bolas, and knives. They also make bows and arrows, spears and what the
gauchos call "the lost bola." The lost bola is simply a stone of
convenient weight at the end of a three-foot cord. It is intended for
battles only, and is called lost bola because when thrown it is not
usually recovered again. The effective range of this lost bola is
ordinarily 100 yards, and in some hands twice that. Iron bolas are the
favorites, because being smaller for the weight they have a longer
range, and because, too, they are more easily seen and recovered after a
cast across the dull-colored desert than pebbles are. The Tehuelches
carry guns and pistols to some extent, but chiefly for use against the
spirits.
Because of his use of the bola the Tehuelche is, in a sense, a sportsman
as distinguished from a pot hunter. The game has a running chance for
life. However, the usual way of capturing game is for the men to draw a
circle about a bunch of guanacos when pumas and ostriches are often
enclosed and killed. When on the march the women with the pack train
serve as a part of the enclosing circle.
The tent of the Tehuelche is a large affair. It is what would be called
in this country a shelter tent, or a lean-to open in front. It is of
rounded exterior, like the fourth part of an orange. It has a frame of
forks and ridgepoles, and is covered with guanaco skins. Other skins
serve to divide the interior of the tent into rooms. Whole families and
their guests go to bed in a single room in the out-of-the-way parts of
the United States, such as the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia,
but the Tehuelches are modest enough to divide their sleeping places so
that parents and children, boys and girls, and guests are separated by
curtains of horsehide. For beds they have cushions made of coarse
blankets stuffed with guanaco wool, and they know the comfort of
pillows, which are made of soft skins stuffed with guanaco hair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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