Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
These non-Indian captives were rural residents, most of them illiter-
ate Spanish-speaking people of mixed ancestry. Men did not make
pliant captives and were instead put to death. Many accounts testify
that the indigenous peoples incorporated the non-Indians into their
groups as virtual slaves. The women were given as brides to warriors
with whom they brought up a new generation resistant to losing more
frontier territory to the cattle and sheep ranches. Some of the
cautivas
declined to escape and avoided “liberation” because they did not want
to abandon the children to whom they had given birth.
General Roca and the national army resolved the centuries-old
frontier conflict in 1879. Technology contributed to Roca's rapid
success. In his Conquest of the Desert, he armed his soldiers with
imported repeating rifles and used telegraph lines to communicate
orders to five separate military columns. These columns departed
from Buenos Aires, Córdoba, San Luis, and Mendoza in a pincer
movement converging on the Río Negro. The cavalry forces quickly
scattered or exterminated the Tehuelche, Pampas, and Araucanian
villagers. Then Roca closed the southern Andean passes and garri-
soned them with army soldiers. The surviving Indians went to live
under government supervision on special reservations; the liberated
cautivas
reentered Creole society as servants in Spanish-speaking
households.
Once indigenous resistance was broken, land became available for
settlement in the southern Pampas and the entire Patagonia. The rich
and powerful and the politically connected once again claimed the
lion's share of the booty. As much as 21 million acres of frontier land
now passed into the possession of just 381 persons.
The Crucible
While the interior provinces stagnated or moved ahead slowly, the rural
economy of Buenos Aires bounded ahead confidently, absorbing Indian
raids, occasional uprisings, political divisions, and a chronic labor
shortage. Landholdings were large, a fact accounted for by the tradition-
bound production methods of the day, yet landed units became reduced
in size and their ownership diffused. Stimulated by the cattle industry's
need for an expanding rural infrastructure, Pampas society displayed
increasing complexity in its structure. Most country folk worked on
the land as proprietors, renters, or hired hands. Natives, migrants, and
foreigners found opportunities as artisans and in commerce and trans-
portation. Much of the opportunity and diversity of rural society can
