The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia

by John Randolph Spears

They had landed on a pebbly beach near the foot of a low, white alluvial cliff into which the elements had eaten holes large enough to be called caves. Beyond the cliffs the arid desert, a mixture of sand and pebbles, rose in sweeping undulations to a crest perhaps six miles away and four hundred feet above the sea. They were walled in by desert ridges. There was not a green thing in sight, but only ragged brown desert brush and an occasional yellow, dry bunch of grass. There was neither house nor hut for their reception or shelter, and, worse than all else, there was neither stream nor pool nor spring of water fit to drink anywhere within fifty-one miles. That was the kind of a country to which these 150 Welshmen came to plant a colony that should live by agriculture.

The Pilgrims who came to Plymouth Rock because they could not make the world elsewhere worship according to the dictates of their consciences, had a tolerably bleak time of it according to the orators on New England Society days, but if one wants to hear stories of real hardships endured by pioneers, let him go to Chubut and talk to one of the older Welshmen.

The first thing done was, of necessity, to dig a well for water. They found water, and the well is still there. A drink from its depths will carry a Yankee cowboy back to his old haunts on the plains of Southwest Kansas and No Man's Land, instantly; that is, it will carry his thoughts there. He will say "gypsum" or "alkali" with something verbally stronger still, as soon as he gets his mouth empty. Indeed, one need not look five minutes anywhere around New Gulf to find plenty of gypsum. Nevertheless, the water would support life after a fashion, and the Welshmen turned from the well to make shelters of the caves nature had provided.

From the work of arranging their scanty household goods in the caves these pioneers went forth, not to sow and plant, but to make a road. They were in the region where they were to find homes, but the actual home sites—the farms of 240 acres that were to be theirs—lay fifty-one miles away over and beyond the crest of the desert amphitheatre within which they had landed. They had to mark the trail lest they get lost, clear it of brush and level its irregularities, and then they must needs transport themselves and their belongings over it to the banks of the Chubut River.

And all this they did to find at last that, save for a deposit of black loam in parts of the valley of the stream, they had come to a land as desolate as the shores of New Gulf. The desert walled them in. The wells filled with alkali water. The north wind was like a blast from the furnace in which Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego fell down, and almost every wind came laden with a brown fog of sand. They had sought isolation; they had found it with a vengeance.

Nevertheless, these Welshmen—and they were all miners, too, and not farmers—began work to make homes and farms. They laid out a capital city, which they named Rawson in honor of the Argentine Cabinet officer who had interested himself in their behalf. It was a sorry capital then, but duplicates of it can be found in the Texas Panhandle. It was a town of dugouts and mud huts. There was no timber for houses. They planted gardens. They looked the region over. They began to learn how to hunt the guanaco and the ostrich that roamed over the desert.

And then came the Indians, the huge-framed Tehuelches, to whom the early explorer of the region had given the name of Big Feet (Patagonians). It was a notable day in the history of the settlement, but not a day of bloodshed. The Tehuelches and the Welshmen became friends at once, partly because the Indians, on learning why the whites had sought the isolation, comprehended the matter in a way that made them feel a brotherly regard for the intruders such as they had never felt for any other whites. The Welshmen had come to find entire freedom in the desert, and that was something the freeborn son of the desert could appreciate.

That was an excellent beginning, but only a first victory. There were many other foes on the desert. There were the panthers, the great, lean, sly cats that are called also American lions. They swarmed on the uplands and by night came to the settlement for the blood of horses, cattle, and sheep. There were locusts in clouds that obscured the sun. There were wild geese, ducks, and coots from the river—the winged pests were in legions. It was a waterless region and uninhabitable for man beyond the valley of the stream, but in the thorny brush of the desert millions of nature's allies in her warfare against man found breeding places.

For the first year the colony was to be supplied with provisions by the Argentine Government. The contract was faithfully kept. The colonists hoped to raise enough food for their own use after that, but their hopes failed. The hot winds destroyed the few results of their labors which birds and beasts had spared. Nevertheless, they held on for another year, the government supplying their needs, although, meantime, more colonists had come. Then came another failure of crops. The reader will say it took a lot of pluck to hold on after that for another year. So it did. These Welshmen were full of it. Not only for another year, but for another, and another still—for six weary years those men fought the gaunt wolf that stood at their doors. Then came prosperity, but with leaden footsteps.

That the colonists did not perish absolutely of starvation was due first to the persistent care of the Argentine Government. Uncle Sam was counted generous when he gave to every immigrant 160 acres of land. The Argentine Government not only gave these immigrants 240 acres of land each, on the condition that they improve it somewhat and live there two years, but it established a commissary department in the colony, and for nearly ten years gave free of cost all supplies of food and clothing needed to keep them alive, and as late as 1877, when crops had begun to flourish well, still extended a generous helping hand. This was done in spite of the fact that these Welshmen were avowedly clannish. They had come to establish a Welsh colony, and had obtained permission in advance not only to preserve their own language, but to govern themselves and to live free of taxation. Under the terms of the original concession, they were of value to the Argentine nation only in the fact that they were to break up and cultivate so much wild land. They could not have been made to fight for the land of their adoption even against an invading host of Brazilian monarchists. No government was ever more generous to colonists than the Argentine.