FIG. 174.—Kamanakar Kipa;
young Yahgan Fuegian girl;
height, 1 m. 40; ceph. ind., 79.7.
(Phot. Cape Horn Scient. Mission.)
This plain is occupied by various tribes who have nothing in common but the nomadic and pastoral mode of life determined by the environment since the introduction of the horse. Of the ancient peoples who occupied these regions as well as Uruguay at the time of the conquest, there remain but the débris, or descendants hybridised to the furthest extent possible.
The Charruas and their congeners the Minuanes and the Yaros, who fought so valiantly during the centuries of the Spanish domination, at first with their clubs and bows, then, becoming horsemen, with “bolas” and the lasso, were exterminated only in 1832. The four last representatives of the race were exhibited as curiosities in Paris in 1830. The Charruas had a very dark-coloured skin and were of somewhat high stature (1 m. 68), like their neighbours on the other side of the Rio de la Plata, the Chanases, and especially the Querandis, whose bands were decimated at the end of the sixteenth century, after their last attack on Buenos Ayres.[676]
Their hybrid descendants, called Talhuets, were still fairly numerous in 1860 between Buenos Ayres and Rio Negro. The Abipones to the west of the Paraguay, so well described by Dobrizhoffer,[677] were destroyed at the end of the eighteenth century, partly through conflicts with their congeners the Mocovis, of whom there are no survivors.
All these tribes probably belonged to the Guaycuru linguistic family, established by L. Quevedo, whose most numerous representatives are now the Tobas of southern Choco to the north of Pilcomayo, and the Matacos who wander about between the latter river and the Vermejo.[678] We must further add to this group the Caduves or Caduvei of the Brazilian bank of the Paraguay, between 20° and 23° S. lat., a hundred or so of unhybridised individuals, all that remain of the ancient Mbaya people, and the Payaguas, an ancient warlike and plundering tribe thought to have disappeared, but of which there remain between two and three score representatives in the immediate neighbourhood of Assumption, peaceful basket-makers, potters, or fishers.[679]
The Lenguas of the ancient authors (a term used by them to describe very different tribes), who lived side by side with the Tobas, and of whom there remain but a few individuals, seem to form, with the Guanes of southern Chaco, the Sanapanas, the Angaites, and other tribes between the Salado and the Yababeri (tributaries on the left of the Paraguay), a separate linguistic family, which Boggiani proposes to call Ennema. Their neighbours, the Samucos or Chamococos of the Bolivian Chaco also constitute a special linguistic group, but their manners and customs approximate to those of the southern Arawaks.[680]
The Guatos of the marshes which extend from the Paraguay to the Sao Laurenço also speak a special language. They are excellent boatmen, who fish with their great bows and bone-pointed arrows. They are also renowned as hunters of jaguars.[681]
Most of the Guaycurus and their neighbours seem to be of high stature and to have a brownish-yellow skin; but almost nothing is known either as to the shape of their head or their other somatic characters.
To the south of the Choco, between the Rio Salado de Santa Fe and the Rio Chubut, in the Pampas and the north of the Patagonian table-land, the primitive population which spoke the Guaycuru language in the north and the Patagonian language in the south, has disappeared. It has been absorbed or modified by the invasions of the Araucans coming from the west, and by the encroachments of the Europeans coming from the east. The interminglings have given birth to new tribes like the Puelches, sprung from the Patagonians and the Araucans (p. [551]), with a strain of Guaycuru blood, and the Gauchos, Guaycuru-European hybrids. The invasion of the Europeans increasing, the Puelches and the Araucans (Pehuenches, Rankels, Huilitches) have been pushed back farther and farther to the south. After the war of extermination waged by General Roca in 1881, the “Pampeans” migrated in a mass to the south of the Rio Negro, where they absorbed a portion of the Patagonians, driving away the remainder to the south of the Rio Santa Cruz.[682]
Cramped between this river and the Strait of Magellan, the Patagonians or Tehuelches, who call themselves by the name of Tsoon-ké, are now reduced to 2000 individuals. Those dwelling far from the coasts, as well as the Onas of Tierra del Fuego (the only Patagonian tribe that does not possess horses), have perhaps better preserved the characteristics of the Patagonian race. They are very tall (from 1 m. 73 to 1 m. 83 according to different authors), very brachycephalic (average ceph. ind. on the living sub., 85), have an elongated face, thinnish nose, eyes slightly oblique, projecting cheek-bones.[683]