Brief space will suffice here for a resumé of what history tells of them. It was on April 1, 1520, when they first saw "men with faces like the snow." Magellan had happened into St. Julian harbor. They came with wonder to see marvellous vessels that brought him, and it is said that they tell around their camp-fires to this day of the trick by which he succeeded in loading two of their chiefs with chains that he might carry them away forever.
The Tehuelches were afoot, then, but it was not many years before horses from the Spanish settlement at Buenos Ayres had spread to the Strait of Magellan, and so the explorers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found them mounted. They were not a vicious race; on the contrary, they were of kindly deposition, and even playful when well treated, though their experiences with the whites eventually taught them duplicity, theft, and outrage. But their good dispositions did not attract white settlers, because the whole of Patagonia, east of the Andes, was a desert that seemed wholly incapable of supporting a civilized being.
However, the Jesuits came to them bringing the cross in one hand and apple-seeds in the other. The cross did not flourish, but the apple-seeds planted about the lakes in Western Patagonia grew into a great forest, that has produced abundance of fruit and much strong cider ever since.
Later still, at the end of the eighteenth century, Spain attempted to establish colonies at Rio Negro, Port St. Julian, and Port Desire. They did some little trading, but the Indians very properly mistrusted the good faith of the whites, and in 1807 Patagonia was once more abandoned to the natives, save for the one post on the Rio Negro known as Carmen de Patagones. This was maintained partly because of the great salt fields found on the desert near the town. But the terms on which it remained unmolested by the lordly Patagonians were exceedingly humiliating to the Spanish rulers of Buenos Ayres and of the settlement. The whites had to pay an annual tribute of cattle, knife-blades, indigo, cochineal, and other goods as rental for the Indian-owned land they occupied.
We read in the history of the State of New York that in the days before the Revolution, the brave old Mohawks used to send a warrior, now and then, alone among the Hudson River and even the Long Island tribes, entering this or that village, walking in the midst of a group of the head men, and while they cowered in his presence, addressing them as squaws and denouncing them for this and that failure in their duty to the noble tribe he represented. In like manner, even until within twenty-five years of this writing, has a Tehuelche chief from the desert of Patagonia been known to ride alone down the main street of Carmen de Patagones to the plaza. Reining in his horse by the low-peaked stone monument still to be seen there, he would shake the great skin mantle from his brawny shoulders, strike the butt of his spear a ringing blow on the pedestal of the monument to call the whites about him, and then, in disdainful words and with imperious manner, ask why the tribute had been delayed. All of this the whites bore meekly and meanly. They could not fight the Indians successfully, and they were willing to submit to such treatment because of the profit in the trade they carried on with their red masters.
If any one wants fully to appreciate how degrading trade is to the human soul, let him read the stories of white traders among red buyers.
In modern times—rather in the nineteenth century, two efforts to convert the Patagonians to Christianity have been made, one of which is of especial interest to American readers, because undertaken by a citizen of New York at the behest of the American Board of Christian Missionaries of Boston. One Captain Benjamin Morrell had been on a sealing voyage along the Patagonia coast, through the strait and up the Chili coast, and on returning had brought an interesting story about the aborigines. The story was printed in book-form and the missionary society people read the book, and were thereby led to send out a couple of missionaries to look over the region and the people Morrell had described. Mr. Titus Coan, then a student at the Auburn Theological Seminary, and a Mr. Arms of Andover were selected. A sealing schooner took them to the Strait of Magellan, and on November 14, 1833, at the beginning of the warm season there, they landed. That they were kindly received and well treated scarce need be said. They brought a tent and a variety of articles, which were of the greatest value to the Indians, but they were never robbed. On the contrary, they were freely supplied with the best the Indians had. In return the missionaries did some work, such as sharpening knives, making wooden spurs, etc., but, on the whole, the missionaries lived on the charity of the Indians. Their experiences and thoughts have been preserved in a book entitled Adventures in Patagonia, by Titus Coan. They travelled about with a host that for a time was composed of Tehuelches or Patagonians proper, and of Onas who had come over from Tierra del Fuego. They had to live on such food as the country supplied, of course, and to endure the vicissitudes of the climate.
They remained only a few days more than two months, leaving the region in a sealing schooner on January 25, 1834. They had had enough of life with a nomadic race on a stormy desert like Patagonia. Horseflesh was not suited to their stomachs nor tent life to their inclinations. The Indians had told them plainly that no missionary could succeed who would not live Indian fashion, and that settled it. Of course these Patagonians had souls. Mr. Coan was sure those souls were going to be lost—absolutely sure of it, unless, indeed, some one taught them "the way of life." But there were souls elsewhere in the world that needed saving, too—among the South Sea islands, for instance, where snow was unknown, and horseflesh was not esteemed a dainty. It would be much more comfortable to convert wicked South Sea Islanders than Patagonians.
As was said, for 360 years after Magellan's infamous disregard of the rights of man, the Indians of Patagonia in their conflicts with white aggressors held their own. It was a pity in the eyes of a humanitarian that there should have been conflicts, for all were utterly needless, but, on the whole, the Patagonia day was bright.
Then came the setting of the sun. The day of all the Patagonian Indians was ended. The "progress of civilization" demanded the extermination of the desert races. The pressure of Christian owners of cattle and sheep for new pastures demanded that the best of the hunting grounds of the Indians be taken. The frontier of settlements in Argentine had to be extended to the Rio Negro because cattlemen wanted the land, and the cheapest way to make the extension was by war. In these matters the civilized people of the Argentine have been as much like the civilized people of the United States as two bullets from one mould.