Finding that threats of future fire did not avail him, the missionary sent to Punta Arenas for Winchesters and men to use them. Thereafter the propagation of sheep and the growth of barbed wire fence, and the slaughter of Indians went on together in right merry fashion, for everybody but the Indians and an occasional white man caught napping.
The sheep business is spreading slowly, as all things are done in Spanish American regions, but it is a sure growth. It will eventually cover all the grass land of the island, in spite of the Onas, just as it spread in Australia in spite of the black fellows, and as cattle spread in Texas in spite of the Comanches.
THE ONA INDIANS.
The Ona tribe is a distinct race inhabiting the prairie region of Tierra del Fuego. The traveller who goes around Tierra del Fuego in the Argentine transports is sure to see several—children and women, as a rule, who have been captured by the soldiers that make occasional forays from two of the three stations that the Argentine Government maintains on the island. One of these two stations is at Paramo, mentioned in the chapter on the gold diggings, and the other is at Thetis Bay on the southeast corner of the island. At both of these stations one may usually find a couple of officers and a soldier or two having their families with them. The Ona children are used as servants in these families, and when the families return to Buenos Ayres they carry the youngsters along with them. I saw a full-grown girl and a half-grown boy, brother and sister, taken there in the steamer I was on.
In the city they get "a sufficiency of food" and a "semi-annual distribution of clothing."
It was the doings of a party of Ona Indians that gave Tierra del Fuego its name. The Onas have always inhabited the part of the island which Magellan first saw, and their habit of signaling one another by means of fires led them to make extraordinary smokes at the marvellous spectacle of the ships of the navigator. Magellan naturally called it the Land of Fire.
It is a curious fact that the Onas have been mentioned very little in the stories of Cape Horn travellers in comparison with what is said of the Yahgans and the other tribe of the region called the Alaculoofs. Nearly all of the early navigators fell in with Alaculoofs, but so far as I remember only Darwin and Fitzroy make special mention of the larger and strange tribe of the prairies of Tierra del Fuego. Cook did see some and he partly describes them, but he did not understand that a part of the clan he saw was, as his illustration seems to prove, of the Yahgan tribe and part of the Ona.
The reason the Onas were overlooked is made plain to the modern traveller. They were a land tribe; they did not make canoes and they had no horses. The Indians with canoes came off to the ships of the explorers. The Onas could not do so. Moreover, the explorers kept to the north shore of the Strait of Magellan, east of the narrows, because of the more sheltered anchorages there, and so they saw the Tehuelches of Patagonia, but missed the Onas.
People who know the results of white visits to aboriginal tribes will congratulate the Onas.
