Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
missionaries in the 17th century certainly upset the shamans and
annoyed the chiefs who had more than one wife (an annoyance for
which many missionary priests met their martyrdom). But the Chaco
hunters also learned to sow crops and domesticate livestock, thereby
providing a more secure diet.
The horse, however, was the single most important European con-
tribution that, once adopted, changed the lives of the Chaco Indians.
The horse made the hunts easier and enabled indigenous groups to
go beyond old territorial limitations. Previously migratory peoples
became veritable vagabonds, and the horse enabled the more aggres-
sive hunting groups to incorporate (even enslave) the marginal groups.
Despite Jesuit exhortations to the contrary, the Abipón of the southern
bank of the Paraguay River took to raiding over long distances. In the
mid-17th century, they allied with another native people to attack the
settlers at Santiago del Estero.
Intertribal rivalries also intensified, and weakened by the ravages
of disease, some smaller hunter cultures disappeared or amalgamated
with the aggressor groups. For example, the Abipón turned on some of
their erstwhile Indian allies, after which these expert horseman looted
the town of Santa Fe in 1751. “The Abipones imitate skillful chess-
players,” noted one missionary. “After committing slaughter in the
southern colonies of the Spaniards, they retire far northwards, afflict
the city of Asunción with murders and rapine, and then hurry back to
the south” (Dobrizhoffer 1822, II:4). To a certain degree, the Abipón
used the horse to stave off tribal extinction, for the diseases that began
to ravage them in the 17th century had reduced their numbers from
5,000 to 2,000 members.
Warfare between settlers and Indians encouraged the continued mil-
itarization of both cultures in the Río de la Plata. Warfare was cruel and
merciless. Nonetheless, coexistence emerged. The settlers remained in
their towns and their lands nearby, and along the great cart trails. The
north and south of this arc of settlements remained the world of the
southern hunters. Where the two cultures meshed, along the frontier
line, one found alternating cycles of trade and warfare. The colonial
period proved to be the Indian summer of the southern hunters. Their
violent resistance was destined to cost these hunting peoples their very
cultural and linguistic existence.
