The Desert Pampas. 3 



settled strip, purely pastoral, and the Indians, with 

 their primitive mode of warfare, were able to keep 

 back the invaders 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 put- 

 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 

 " fight 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 Alhuemapu, 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 

 away the old order, with whatever beauty 

 B 2 



