ARGENTINE GAUCHO
The Gauchos are picturesque both in their lives and in their appearance: a pair of moleskin trousers, long boots, and a handkerchief usually of a red pattern, a slouch hat of black felt, and a gaudy poncho serve them for apparel. The poncho, which is merely a rug with a hole in the middle for the head, makes a comfortable great-coat by day and a blanket by night.
A Gaucho may be sprung from any nation on earth. Even as the shores of Patagonia are washed by the farthest tides of ocean, so the same tides have borne to people her solitude a singular horde of massed nationalities. But it is the man born in the country of whatever stock who becomes the true Gaucho. Infancy finds him in the saddle, and he grows there. Other men can stick on a horse, but the Gaucho can ride. Living as they do, they form a class alone. On horseback they are more than men; on foot, I am half tempted to say, less, for they would rather ride fifty miles than walk two. They are farm-hands, shepherds, horse-breakers, occasionally good working vets, and when they prosper they buy waggons and go into the carrying trade; in fact, they form the foundation of Patagonian life.
The coast settlements are similar to such places all the world over: storekeepers, men who run wine-shops, traders, and the usual sort of folk who form the bulk of dwellers on the edge of civilisation.
In Patagonia it is not difficult to leave civilisation behind you, for between lat. 43° and 50° S. the interior, save for a very few pioneers and small tribes of wandering Tehuelche Indians, is at the present day unpeopled. When the line of the Cordillera is reached, you come to a region absolutely houseless, where no human inhabitant is to be found. Comparatively speaking, but little animal life flourishes under the unnumbered snow peaks, and in the unmeasured spaces of virgin forest, which cover those valleys and in many places cloak the mountains from base to shoulder. Hundreds of square miles of forest-land, gorges, open slopes, and terraced hollows lie lost in the vast embrace of the Patagonian Andes, on which the eye of man has never yet fallen.
HALF-BREED GAUCHO
Our travels took us over a great part of the country. Starting in September 1900, we zigzagged from Trelew by Bahia Camerones, to Lakes Colhué and Musters and along the River Senguerr to Lake Buenos Aires. After spending a time in the neighbourhood of that lake, we followed the Indian trail for some distance, then touching the Southern Chico we reached Santa Cruz on the east coast in January 1901. Leaving most of the expedition there, I returned with two companions by the course of the River Santa Cruz to the Cordillera, where I remained for some months, and in May I once more crossed the continent to Gallegos to take ship for Punta Arenas, the only port in Patagonia where a steamer calls regularly. I left Patagonia in June 1901. I compute that the whole distance covered by the journeyings of the expedition cannot have fallen short of 2000 miles.
Of the zoology of Patagonia little is known. Of the fauna and flora of the Cordillera of the southern central part it is not too much to say that practically nothing is known. Patagonia thus offers one of the most interesting fields in the world to the traveller and naturalist.