Goods were sent to Chubut by the ship load. But more than once the ship went wrong, and the goods were lost. Then came the time of dire distress when only their good friends the Tehuelches could save them. The Welshmen were starving on several occasions when the Indians came down the river and brought succor—guanaco, and ostrich, and panther meat in abundance, with skins for clothing. As the corn of the Massachusetts Indians saved the Pilgrim Fathers, so the meat of the Tehuelches saved the Welshmen. But the Tehuelche Indians have not now to mourn, nor do the Welshmen now hang their heads in shame at the mention of any King Philip. White men made war on the Tehuelches and exterminated them, but no Welshmen, though the colony was then self-supporting, took part in that hateful enterprise, and when the red remnant were forced at last to give up the fight, they came down to the Chubut River and surrendered to the fair-dealing white men, who had called them brothers and meant what they said. More pitiful still, when one brave old chief, wounded to death, was breathing his last in Buenos Ayres, he smilingly looked about him and said:
"I am going to the Welshman's heaven."
As said, for six years, the colonists struggled against failing hopes, eating only the bitter bread of charity, struggled to maintain themselves where they could perpetuate their language in its purity. In 1871 came the turn in the tide. A dam was built across the Chubut River in that year, and an irrigating ditch taken out. Of course they did not finish the canal in one year. It was a ditch thirty-six feet wide on top, eighteen on the bottom, and six feet deep, and year by year they lengthened it out. When the water kissed the warm, dark soil, it was like the kiss of the maiden on the lips of the grateful beast in the fairy story. The desert was transformed into a blooming garden.
And here is an interesting fact. For six years the colonists had eaten no bread, save what was given to them. They would, therefore, get clear of that evil first of all. They sowed wheat and barley, and they sow little else to this day. Whatever may happen, the Chubut man will never again have to ask for bread of anybody.
However, as said, progress was slow. The first ditch was not well located, and when an unusual drought came the water of the river did not reach the ditch, and the crop failed in spite of it. Then, too, there were the wild pests at all times—the locusts and the wild fowl. Even after eleven years of irrigation—in 1882—there was a failure from the drought. But that set them to building a greater ditch, of which they all now make boast.
About five hundred settlers came out in the early years of famine, but the number dwindled to less than two hundred in 1871. In 1880 the result of irrigation had swelled the number to eight hundred, and in 1885 there were double that number. In 1880 the settlers were scattered along the valley for about twenty-five miles from the mouth of the river, and there was a sort of a village at each end of the settlement. The houses were, as a rule, even then mere huts. Wagons, and carts, and horses were had in sufficient number. In fact, the Government at Buenos Ayres had provided all of these things. But the abundant harvests of 1880 and 1881 gave a boom to the settlement which the failure of 1882 only checked temporarily. The colonists went up stream to a valley thirty miles long beyond a narrow cañon and took up land there. It was there that the head of the great new ditch was located. They have since gone to a third still higher. They have, in fact, taken up all the available land for seventy miles along the river. They have 270 miles of main irrigating canals. The largest has a cross section measuring 75 × 9 × 36 feet, and the whole 270 miles cost £180,000. There are 3250 people in the settlement.
Some of the details of their condition from time to time remind one of the Yankee frontier settlements. They began their religious life in the colony with union services, and got on comfortably until they prospered. Sectarians floated in on the waters of the irrigating ditch, so to speak, and there was a burst of zeal in building up denominations that brought a growth in church outfits quite equal to that in the area planted—rather larger, in fact. Among the 2000 people of 1883 there were two independent congregations with ordained ministers, who held regular services in chapels, of which "the walls were baked brick, the roofs were wooden, with a layer of mud on top, and the wooden benches had good backs to them," as one of them described the places of worship. They had also a stone-walled chapel in a third place, and held regular services in school-houses in other places. The Methodists had a brick church with an ordained minister, at Rawson, and held services in the upper valley. The Baptists had a fine chapel at Frondrey, one of the little villages that sprang up, and an ordained minister for it. In fact, there were, in all, seven ordained ministers in the colony, and in 1884 the Episcopalians brought out the eighth. Every one of these had his 240 acres of land, and every one worked his own farm and got rich, as his neighbors did, raising wheat.
It is a significant fact that up to 1884 the colony did not have a single physician. It scarcely needed one. Still some one was sure to break a limb every two or three years, and the colonists were right glad when, in 1885, a man with a diploma came there and took up the usual allowance of land.