The whole area of the territory within this line and the Arroyo del Medio, which separates the province of Buenos Ayres to the northward from that of Santa Fé, comprises about 75,000 square English miles.
The Indians would listen to no terms of accommodation, and fought for their lands; whilst, unfortunately for the people on the frontier, the civil dissensions which broke out at the close of the Brazilian war once more drew off the forces of the government, and exposed them to the inroads of the savages, before the fortifications on the frontier could be completed and sufficiently garrisoned for their defence. The devastation they committed in consequence was frightful; but it was signally avenged in 1832 and 1833 by General Rosas, who, at the head of the largest force that ever entered their territory, marched southward as far as the rivers Colorado and Negro, scoured the whole intervening country, and put thousands of them to death. Many tribes were totally exterminated, and others fled to the Cordillera of Chile, where alone they were safe from the pursuit of the exasperated and victorious soldiers.
That the Buenos Ayreans had ample cause for these hostilities may be judged from the number of Christian slaves whom they succeeded in rescuing from the hands of the savages; upwards of 1500 women and children were retaken by General Rosas' troops, who had all been carried off in some or other of their marauding incursions, their husbands, sons, and brothers having been in most instances barbarously butchered before them. Many of these poor women had been in their hands for years; some taken in infancy could give little or no account to whom they belonged; others had become the wretched mothers of children brought up to follow the brutal mode of life of these barbarians. General Rosas fixed his head-quarters on the river Colorado, midway between Bahia Blanca and the settlement of Carmen on the river Negro. Thence he detached a division of his forces, under General Pacheco, to the south, which established a military position on the Choleechel, now called Isla de Rosas, on the Negro, which river was followed to the junction of the Neuquen. Another detachment marched under the orders of General Ramos along the banks of the Colorado as far as latitude 36° and 10° longitude west of Buenos Ayres, according to his computation, from whence he saw the Cordillera of the Andes and believed he was not more than thirty leagues from Fort Rafael on the Diamante. Unfortunately not the slightest sketch was made of the course of this river, respecting which, therefore, we have no new data beyond a corroboration of the accounts obtained by Cruz, in 1806, of its being a great river, which runs without interruption direct from the Cordillera to the sea.[45] Of the Negro, General Pacheco has been kind enough to send me a sketch, which strikingly confirms the general course of the river as laid down by Mr. Arrowsmith, from Villariño's diary.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] The latitude of the Great Salt Lake was taken from about the centre of the north side of it, where the party were encamped.
In 1786 Don Pablo Zisur, a lieutenant in the Spanish navy, had fixed the north-east angle of the lake in lat. 37° 10´, and 4° 36´ west of the meridian of Luxan (Guardia); according to him the lake of Cabeza del Buey is in lat. 36° 8´, and the Guardia de Luxan in 34° 36´. Azara fixed it in 34° 38´ 36".
[38] In the life of the Carreras, given in the Appendix to Mrs. Graham's account of Chile, there is an account of some of these Indian forays in conjunction with Carrera's troops, particularly of their surprisal of the town of Salto, and the carrying off from thence of 250 women and children, after butchering all the men, in spite of every effort of their unnatural allies to prevent it.
[39] Villariño found the Indians in the Cordillera opposite to Valdivia calling themselves Aucases.
[40] Garcia seems to have believed that the language and origin of this people was different from the other Indians he fell in with. There is no proof, however, adduced of the difference of language, and I suspect they were only a further-removed branch of the Araucanian family, as were the Indians Viedma found at San Julian's in 1782.