The Desert Pampas. 3 
settled strip, purely pastoral, and the Indians, with 
their primitive mode of warfare, were able to keep 
back the inva lers from the greater portion of their 
ancestral hunting-grounds. Not twenty years ago 
a ride of two hundred miles, starting from the 
capital city, Buenos Ayres, was enough to place one 
well beyond the furthest south-western frontier out- 
post. In 1879 the Argentine Government deter- 
mined to rid the country of the aborigines, or, at all 
events, to break their hostile and predatory spirit 
once for all; with the result that the entire area of 
the grassy pampas, with a great portion of the 
sterile pampas and Patagonia, has been made avail- 
able to the emigrant. There is no longer anything 
to deter the starvelings of the Old World from 
possessing themselves of this new land of promise, 
flowing, like Australia, with milk and tallow, if not 
with honey; any emasculated migrant from a 
Genoese or Neapolitan slum is now competent to 
“ficht the wilderness” out there, with his eight-— 
shilling fowling-piece and the implements of his 
trade. The barbarians no longer exist to frighten 
his soul with dreadful war cries; they have moved 
away to another more remote and shadowy region, 
called in their own language Alhwemapt, and not 
known to geographers. For the results so long and 
ardently wished for have swiftly followed on General 
Roca’s military expedition; and the changes wit- 
nessed during the last decade on the pampas exceed 
in magnitude those which had been previously 
effected by three centuries of occupation. 
In view of this wave of change now rapidly 
sweeping away the old order, with whatever beauty 
