The province of Apolobamba is described as extending about eighty leagues northeast-southwest, east of the Cordillera, and west of the Rio Beni. The languages adopted in it were the Leca, spoken by the Lecos Indians at the mission of Aten, and the Maracani, at the mission of Tumupasa, on the Rio Beni. Forty-nine nations are named as belonging to the mission of the Chiquitos, each of whom is stated to have spoken a different language or dialect, though all were instructed in their religious duties in Chiquito. At the mission of Moxos twenty-nine tribes are named as in attendance, but it had not been found possible, such was the difference of their speech, to manage with less than nine languages, to wit, the Moxa, the Baure, the Mure, the Mobima, the Ocorona, the Cayubaba, the Itonama and the Maracani.[482]
Of these tongues I have classed the Leca and Maracani as dialects of the Takana, not from comparison of vocabularies, for I have seen none of either, but from the locations of the tribes speaking them. The Moxa and Baure are dialects of the Arawak stock. The Mura is a branch of the Tupi, spoken by the powerful tribe of the Muras on the Medeira and Amazon, who distinctly recalled in tradition their ancestral home in the west.[483] The Chiquito, the Mobima, the Caniciana (Canichana), the Cayubaba, the Itonama and the Ocorona remain so far irreducible stocks. Vocabularies of the first five have been preserved, but nothing of the Ocorona. It is probably identical with the Rocorona, in which Professor Teza has published some texts.[484] I have not been able to identify it with any other tongue. Hervas unites both with the Herisebocona as a single stock.[485]
2. THE PAMPEAN REGION.
South of the dividing upland which separates the waters of the Amazon from those which find their way to the Rio de la Plata, the continent extends in broad level tracts, watered by numerous navigable streams and rich in game and fish. Its chief physical features are the wooded and rolling Chaco in the north, the treeless and grassy Pampas to the south, and the sterile rocky plains of Patagonia still further toward the region of cold. In the west the chain of the Cordilleras continues to lift its summits to an inaccessible height until they enter Patagonia, when they gradually diminish to a range of hills.
The tribes of all this territory, both east and west of the Andes, belong ethnographically together, and not with the Peruvian stocks. What affinities they present to others to the north are with those of the Amazonian regions.
1. The Gran Chaco and its Stocks. The Guaycurus, Lules, Matacos and Payaguas. The Charruas, Guatos, Calchaquis, etc.
The great streams of the Parana and Paraguay offer a natural boundary between the mountainous country of southern Brazil and the vast plains of the Pampas formation. In their upper course these rivers form extensive marshes, which in the wet season are transformed into lakes on which tangled masses of reeds and brushwood, knitted together by a lush growth of vines, swim in the lazy currents as floating islands. These were the homes of some wild tribes who there found a secure refuge, the principal of whom were the Caracaras, who came from the lower Parana, and were one of the southernmost offshoots of the Tupi family.[486]
For five hundred miles west of the Parana and extending nearly as far from north to south, is a wide, rolling country, well watered, and usually covered with dense forests, called El Gran Chaco.[487] Three noble rivers, the Pilcomayo, the Vermejo and the Salado, intersect it in almost parallel courses from northwest to southeast.
Abounding in fish and game and with a mild climate, the Chaco has always been densely peopled, and even to-day its native population is estimated at over twenty thousand. But the ethnology of these numerous tribes is most obscure. The Jesuit missionaries asserted that they found eight totally different languages on the Rio Vermejo alone,[488] and the names of the tribes run up into the hundreds.