The Indians have been ill-treated from the beginning. Darwin relates that, in their eagerness to exterminate the red men, the Argentine troops have pursued them for three days without food. On the frontier they are killed in hundreds; by submitting to the white man they die in thousands. Latin civilization is more terrible to them than war. Sad to state, their only hope is to fight, and this the savage affirms he will do for ever and ever.
Francia, the Dictator of Paraguay, ordered every Indian found—man, woman or child—to be put to death! Lopez, a later ruler, took sport in hunting Indians like deer. We are told that on one occasion he was so successful as to kill forty-eight! The children he captured and sold into slavery at fifteen and twenty dollars each. The white settler considers himself very brave if he kills the savage with a rifle sighted at five hundred yards, while well out of range of the Indians' arrows, and I have known them shot just "for fun"! The Indians retaliate by cutting off the heels of their white captives, or leaving them, in statu naturae, bound with thongs on an anthill; and a more terrible death could not be devised by even the inquisitor, Torquemada, of everlasting execration. The Indian is hard and cruel, indifferent to pain in himself or others. A serpent may sting a comrade, and he takes no notice; but let one find food and there is a general scamper to the spot. The Chaco savage is barbarous in the extreme. The slain enemies are often eaten, and the bones burnt and scattered over their food. The children of enemies are traded off to other tribes for more food.
The Chaco Indian is a born warrior. Sad to say, his only hope is to fight against the Latin paleface.
Most of us have at times been able to detect a peculiar aroma in the negro. The keen-scented savage detects that something in us, and we "smell" to them. Even I, Big Cactus Red Mouth, was not declared free from a subtle odor, although I washed so often that they wondered my skin did not come off. They never wash, and in damp weather the dirt peels from them in cakes. Of course they don't smell!
When a man or woman is, through age, no longer capable of looking after the needs of the body, a shallow grave is dug, the aged one doubled up until the knees are pressed into the hollow cheeks, and the back is broken. This terrible work done, the undesired one is dragged by one leg to the open tomb. Sometimes the face and whole body is so mangled, by being pulled through thorns and over uneven ground, that it is not recognizable, and the nose has at times been actually torn off. While sometimes still alive, the body is covered up with mother earth. Frequently the grave is so shallow that the matted hair may be seen coming out at the top. The burial is generally made near a wood, and, if passible, under the holy wood tree, which, in their judgment, has great influence with evil spirits. Wild beasts, attracted by the odor of the corpse, soon dig up the remains, and before next day it is frequently devoured.
An ordinary burial service may be thus described: A deep cut is first made in the stomach of the departed one. Into this incision a stone, some bone ash, and a bird's claw are introduced. The body is then placed over the grave on two sticks, a muttering incantation is said by the witch doctor, and the sticks are roughly knocked from under the body, so as to permit it to fall in a sitting posture. A bow and arrows, and some food and cooking utensils, are dropped into the grave. All shooting stars, according to the Indian belief, are flying stones; hence the custom of placing a stone in the stomach of the dead. It is supposed to be able to mount heavenward, and, assuming its true character, become the avenging adversary, and destroy the one who caused the death—always a bad witch doctor. The bird's claw scratches out the enemy's heart, and the ashes annihilate the spirit. One of the missionaries in the Lengua tribe stated that he assisted at the burial of a woman where the corpse fell head foremost into the grave, the feet remaining up. Four times the attempt to drop her in right was made, with similar results, and finally the husband deliberately broke his dead wife's neck, and bent the head on to the back; then he broke her limbs across his knee, and so the ghastly burial was at last completed! Truly, "the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty." Let the one whose idea is to "leave the pagan in his innocency" visit these savages, and, if he lives to tell it, his ideas will have undergone a great change. They are lost! and millions have not yet heard of the "Son of Man," who "came to seek and to save that which was lost."
At the death of any member, the toldo in which he lived is burnt, all his possessions are destroyed, and the people go into mourning. The hair of both sexes is cut short or pulled out, and each one has the face blackened with a vegetable dye, which, from experience, I know hardly ever wears off again. As I have said, everything the man owned in life is burnt and the village is deserted; all move right away to get out of the presence of the death-giving spirit. To me the toldo would not only seem abandoned, but the people gone without leaving a trace of their path; but not so to Wolf Rider, my guide. By the position of the half-burnt wood of the fire, he could tell the direction they had taken, and the number gone—although each steps in the other's footprints—whether they were stopping to hunt on the way, and much more he would never tell me. Some of the missionaries have spent ten years in the Chaco, but cannot get the savage to teach them this lesson of signs.
In some tribes the aged ones are just "left to die" sitting under a palm-leaf mat. All the members of the tribe move away and leave them thus. Many are the terrible things my eyes have witnessed, but surely the most pathetic was the sight of an old woman sitting under the mat. I was one day riding alone, but had with me two horses, when I caught sight of the palm-leaf erection and the solitary figure sitting under it. Getting down from my horse, I approached the woman and offered to take her to a place of safety, promising to feed her and permit her to live as long as she chose. Would she come with me? I begged and entreated, but the poor woman would not so much as lift her eyes to mine. The law of her tribe had said she must die, and the laws are to them unalterable. Most reluctantly, I left her to be eaten later on by the wild beasts.
Terrible as this custom is, other tribes kill and eat their aged parents "as a mark of respect." Another tribe will not permit one member to go into the spirit world alone, so they hang another one, in order that there may be two to enter together.
Whereas the Caingwas are a religious people, even attributing their custom of piercing the lip to divine commandment, the Chaco aborigines have no god and no religion. Missionaries in the solitary station I have referred to, after ten years' probing, have been unable to find any approach to worship in their darkened minda. "The miserable wretches who inhabit that vast wilderness are so low in the scale of reasoning beings that one might doubt whether or not they have human souls." [Footnote: Washburn's "History of Paraguay.">[ These "lost sheep" have no word to express God, and have no idols. "The poverty of the Indian dialects of the Chaco is scarcely surpassed by that of the dumb brutes."