io8 
BAHIA BLAJVCA 
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. Schirdel 1 says that 
in 1535, when Buenos Ayres was founded, there were villages 
1 Purchas’s Collection of Voyages. I believe the date was really 1537* 
