Here would be the place to mention how an army encamped upon the Pampas finds itself next morning imprisoned and doomed to perish miserably in a forest of giant thistles which has sprung up during the night. There is no doubt that thistles and other weeds are very tall in both South and North America. Fennels are ten to twelve feet high, and even little Chenopodiums (such as in England may reach eighteen inches), become in South America seven to eight feet high, but the tallness of some of the stories is more remarkable even than that of the plants!
Over the Pampas used to roam thousands of guanacos (a creature of the most unlovely type, which resembles both a camel, a mule, a deer, and a horse); here also were Darwin's ostriches (Rhea Darwinii) and other game, which were caught by the lasso and by the peculiar "bolas" of the Indians. They used to surround the herds and then massacre them by hundreds. The "tuco tuco" also, which is a burrowing rodent with habits very like those of the prairie dog, finds plenty of sustenance in the abundant grasses. Upon them subsist pumas, foxes, and other carnivores.
We have said that the Pampas gradually changes from being very fertile on the east to being almost a desert on the west. Here is the place to mention a very interesting, if not romantic, fact. The guanaco does not travel hundreds of miles in order to die in one particular spot as soon as it feels ill, but it does resort especially to certain spots. There the grass is often a bright, fresh green, for it is plentifully manured, and consequently the guanaco helps to encourage the good grasses to occupy a half-desert. On the eastern side of the Pampas great changes are beginning to appear. The owners of the great camps, haciendas or cattle-ranches let off small parts of their land to Italian "colonists." These people grow crops of Indian corn, and when that has been reaped, the valuable Alfalfa or Lucerne is sown down. This forms the most exquisite and valuable pasture, and consequently far more Shorthorn and Durham cattle can be maintained.
There are in South Africa enormous grassy plains, where once springbok and other game used to exist in enormous herds (Wangeman records having seen a herd of antelope four miles long), in spite of lions and other beasts of prey, and in spite also of the Boer, who was as much a horseman as the gaucho or Red Indian. The great buck wagons of South Africa were almost as much the real homes of the Boers as the two-roomed huts which make up his "farms."
The great Steppes of Russia and Siberia are also grasslands. "As seen from a distance hills covered by the Stipa grass resemble sand-hills, but, when nearer at hand, the sand-grey colour changes into a silvery white, and these ever-moving grasses remind one of the waves of the ocean and, in spite of their monotony, leave a pleasant impression."[105]
Tulips, Hyacinths, Veronicas, Periwinkles, Scotch Thistles, Euphorbias, Wormwoods, and other of our common plants or their near cousins, make up most of the flora of the Steppes. Yet there are hundreds of others, for it is a vegetation very rich in species.
If one reads in Gibbon's stately language of the mode of life of the Huns, the Scythians, and those other barbarians who, originating in these huge grasslands, occasionally overflowed and overwhelmed the civilization of declining Rome, the resemblance to Red Indians, Pampas Indians, cowboys, gauchos, and Boers is not a little striking.
Read, for instance, the magnificent account of the great hunting matches of the Tartar princes. "A circle is drawn of many miles in circumference, to encompass the game of an extensive district; and the troops that form the circle regularly advance towards a common centre, where the animals, surrounded on every side, are abandoned to the darts of the hunters." Both the Red Indians of the Prairie and the savages of the Pampas used to surround and destroy the game in exactly the same way.
The unfortunate Chinese princess given over for political advantages to a prince of the Huns, "laments that she had been condemned by her parents to a distant exile, under a barbarian husband, and complains that sour milk was her only drink, raw flesh her only food, a tent her only palace." This describes exactly the ordinary life and home of the Huns. "The Scythians of every age have been celebrated as bold and skilful riders; and constant practice had seated them so firmly on horseback, that they were supposed by strangers to perform the ordinary duties of civil life—to eat, to drink, and even to sleep—without dismounting from their steeds." Red Indians of Pampas and Prairie, cowboy and gaucho, lived exactly in the same way.
In those pages of Gibbon which treat of the Huns, Scythians, and other hordes, one recognizes sometimes the wagon of the Boers; sometimes a migration of the East African Masai; then perhaps it is a weapon that is really the lasso, or a disposition and character exactly paralleled by the Crows and Blackfeet. Even the great grass plains of Australia, where the kangaroo, the wallaby, and the dingo have been replaced by the sheep and the "Waler" horse, one finds, in the shepherd and squatter, traits that remind one of the gaucho or the cowboy.