The Naturalist in La Plata | Page 2

Europeans. These changes, if taken
merely as evidence of material progress, must be a matter of rejoicing
to those who are satisfied, and more than satisfied, with our system of
civilization, or method of outwitting Nature by the removal of all
checks on the undue increase of our own species. To one who finds a
charm in things as they exist in the unconquered provinces of Nature's
dominions, and who, not being over-anxious to reach the end of his
journey, is content to perform it on horseback, or in a waggon drawn by
bullocks, it is permissible to lament the altered aspect of the earth's
surface, together with the disappearance of numberless noble and
beautiful forms, both of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. For he
cannot find it in his heart to love the forms by which they are replaced;
these are cultivated and domesticated, and have only become useful to
man at the cost of that grace and spirit which freedom and wildness
give. In numbers they are many--twenty-five millions of sheep in this
district, fifty millions in that, a hundred millions in a third--but how
few are the species in place of those destroyed? and when the owner of
many sheep and much wheat desires variety--for he possesses this
instinctive desire, albeit in conflict with and overborne by the perverted
instinct of destruction--what is there left to him, beyond his very own,
except the weeds that spring up in his fields under all skies, ringing him
round with old-world monotonous forms, as tenacious of their
undesired union with him as the rats and cockroaches that inhabit his
house?

We hear most frequently of North America, New Zealand, and
Australia in this connection; but nowhere on the globe has civilization
"written strange defeatures" more markedly than on that great area of
level country called by English writers the pampas, but by the Spanish
more appropriately _La Pampa_--from the Quichua word signifying
open space or country--since it forms in most part one continuous plain,
extending on its eastern border from the river Parana, in latitude 32
degrees, to the Patagonian formation on the river Colorado, and
comprising about two hundred thousand square miles of humid, grassy
country.
This district has been colonized by Europeans since the middle of the
sixteenth century; but down to within a very few years ago immigration
was on too limited a scale to make any very great change; and,
speaking only of the pampean country, the conquered territory was a
long, thinly-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 outpost. In 1879 the Argentine Government determined 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 available 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 witnessed 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 and grace it possessed, it might not seem
inopportune at the present moment to give a rapid sketch, from the field
naturalist's point of view, of the great plain, as it existed before the
agencies introduced by European colonists had done their work, and as
it still exists in its remoter parts.
The humid, grassy, pampean country extends, roughly speaking,
half-way from the Atlantic Ocean and the Plata and Paraná rivers to the
Andes, and passes gradually into the "Monte Formation," or _sterile
pampa_--a sandy, more or less barren district, producing a dry, harsh,
ligneous vegetation, principally thorny bushes and low trees, of which
the chañar (Gurliaca decorticans) is the most common; hence the name
of "Chañar-steppe" used by