TEHUELCHE MATRONS
For the most part the tribes use stone pipes of a very singular coffin-like shape. One Indian, however, possessed a silver pipe, the stem of which had begun life as a bombilla, or silver tube for drinking maté through. Musters mentions frequently seeing the men become insensible after smoking, which would lead to the supposition that they use some drug corresponding in its effects to opium. I never observed a single instance of this sort, although I smoked the camp-fire pipe on many occasions with Tehuelches. In fact, of those I met, two out of three were not smokers at all.
The language of these people is very guttural, and one word is used to signify a number of different things, which proves its elementary and simple character. In most of their camps Spanish is understood more or less, and with even a slight knowledge of this tongue one can get on very well.
Practically the Patagonian is governed by no tribal laws. He does not need their restraint, for, save when drunk, he seldom commits crimes of greater or less magnitude. In politics he is democratic apparently, for though it is true that a cacique is at the head of each camp, his authority seems limited to ordering the plan of the hunt. If any individual objects he can leave the community, an alternative extremely distasteful to so gregarious a people. Quarrels and fights are of very rare occurrence, except when there is drink in the tents. The natural peacefulness of the Indian is certainly commendable, for his muscular development is enormous. He can tear the skin from a guanaco after merely raising enough with his knife to give him a hand-grip.
Once it was a free and a happy life that they lived, with fortunes ruled by the changing of the seasons. In those days, five-and-twenty years ago, they were scattered throughout the country, moving along the Indian trail. Now, in the whole of my long travel through Patagonia, I came upon only three encampments of them, and I have reason to believe I visited nearly every one that exists at the present day. It is probable that I may be their last chronicler; they will be brushed off the face of the earth by the sweeping besom that deals so hardly with aboriginal races, and is known as "civilisation."
The cause of their disappearance is not far to seek. You may dust a savage people with Martinis and increase their manhood, if the punishment be not severe and too prolonged, but as sure as the whisky bottle—the raw, cheap, rot-gut country spirit—is introduced among them, a primitive people is doomed. In all sorts of places in the world I have seen this baleful influence at work.
The Indians, as I knew them, are a kind-hearted, docile and lazy race. In all the dealings I had with them I found them invariably most courteous. Treat them as you desire they should treat you, and not in the odious "poor-devil-of-a-heathen, beast-of-a-savage" sort of style, which obtains with some of our own countrymen abroad, I am sorry to say, and you will receive a grave and quiet consideration, and they will call you buen hombre, a good man.
Progress, the white man's shibboleth, has no meaning for the Patagonian. He is losing ground day by day in the wild onward rush of mankind. Our ideas do not appeal to him. He has neither part nor lot in the feverish desires and ambitions that move us so strongly. As his forefathers were, so is he—content to live and die a human item with a moving home, passing hither and thither upon the waste and open spaces of his native land. He is far too single-minded and too dignified to stoop to a cheap imitation. He does not shout aloud that he is the equal of the white man, as more vulgar races do. It has often struck me that the primitive races of the world might be put under two heads—the men of silence and the men of uproar. Among the men of silence we have the Zulu, the North American Indian, the Tehuelche, and some others. These silent peoples cannot exist, like the negroes, as the camp followers of civilisation. They have not the ya-hoop imitative faculty of the negro race. They are hunters, men of silence and of a great reserve. When they meet with the white man, they do not rush open-mouthed to swallow his customs.