io8 BAHIA BLANCA chap. 



seven hundred Indians together, and that in summer their 

 numbers would be doubled. Ambassadors were to have been 

 sent to the Indians at the small Salinas, near Bahia Blanca, 

 whom I have mentioned that this same cacique had betrayed. 

 The communication, therefore, between the Indians, extends 

 from the Cordillera to the coast of the Atlantic. 



General Rosas's plan is to kill all stragglers, and having 

 driven the remainder to a common point, to attack them in a 

 body, in the summer, with the assistance of the Chilenos. This 

 operation is to be repeated for three successive years. I 

 imagine the summer is chosen as the time for the main attack, 

 because the plains are then without water, and the Indians can 

 only travel in particular directions. The escape of the Indians 

 to the south of the Rio Negro, where in such a vast unknown 

 country they would be safe, is prevented by a treaty with the 

 Tehuelches to this effect ; — that Rosas pays them so much to 

 slaughter every Indian who passes to the south of the river, but 

 if they fail in so doing, they themselves are to be exterminated. 

 The war is waged chiefly against the Indians near the 

 Cordillera ; for many of the tribes on this eastern side are 

 fighting with Rosas. The general, however, like Lord Chester- 

 field, thinking that his friends may in a future day become 

 his enemies, always places them in the front ranks, so that 

 their numbers may be thinned. Since leaving South America 

 we have heard that this war of extermination completely 

 failed. 



Among the captive girls taken in the same engagement, 

 there were two very pretty Spanish ones, who had been carried 

 away by the Indians when young, and could now only speak 

 the Indian tongue. From their account they must have come 

 from Salta, a distance in a straight line of nearly one thousand 

 miles. This gives one a grand idea of the immense territory 

 over which the Indians roam : yet, great as it is, I think there 

 will not, in another half-century, be a wild Indian northward of 

 the Rio Negro. The warfare is too bloody to last ; the 

 Christians killing every Indian, and the Indians doing the same 

 by the Christians. It is melancholy to trace how the Indians 

 have given way before the Spanish invaders. Schirdef says that 

 in 1535, when Buenos Ayres was founded, there were villages 



^- Purchas's Collection of Voyages. I believe the date was really 1537. 



