The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 09, July, 1858

"Who the Devil are you?" shouted he, as he drove right at us. "Two Indians, ha!—somebody said it was one Indian with a moose after him, a man and a moose. Where's Thurlow?—he had the telescope, and asserted there was a man running round the target and a moose after him. I don't see the moose." Zach had dropped the hide and horns from his "recreant limbs," and was seated solemnly upon the snow, in all the majesty of his native dirt.

"By Jove, it's Kennedy!" cried Tankerville, whose artistical eye detected me through my hirsute and fluttering disguise. "What a picturesque object!—I congratulate you, old fellow!—easiest and pleasantest way in the world of making a living!—lose no time about it, but send in your papers at once!—continue assiduously to neglect your person, and you're worth a guinea an hour for the rest of your prime, as a living model on the full pay of the Academies!"

I was soon bewildered by a torrent of inquiries from all sides: as to how I came behind the target,—what success I had had in the woods,—how many miles I had come to-day,—whether I had got the martin-skin I had promised to this one, and the silver fox I undertook to trap for that,—when, suddenly, a diversion was created by a roar from Phillips, who had proceeded to inspect my spoils behind the target, and now stood looking at my portrait-gallery of living celebrities, his great chest heaving with laughter; and before I could satisfy my inquiring friends, the whole crowd had rushed pell-mell to the exhibition.

"Caught, by all that's lovely!" shouted Phillips, repeating my verses at the top of his voice,—

"The bird-song and flowerAnd star from aboveCombine in thy bower;Their union is love!"

"Ritoorala loorala loorala loo, ritoorala loorala loorala loo!" chorused everybody, as he sang the last verse to the vulgar melody of 'Tatter Jack Welch,' knocking the poetry out of my constitution at once and forever, like the ashes out of a pipe. "Hooray for Miss Mac! Who should have thought it, Darby?"—That was my pet name in the regiment.

"How like!—how very like!—That's Warren there, nibbling the turnip. And there's Thurlow,—ha! ha! ha! how good! And that—that—that's me, by Jingo!—he he! he! he!—not so good that, somehow,—neck too long by half a foot. But the Colonel!—only look at his boots!—He must'n't see this, though, by Jove!—Choke the Colonel off, boys!—take him round to the front!—do something!" whispered good-natured Symonds, anxious to keep me clear of the scrape.

But it was too late. The last objects that met my view were the ghastly legs of the Commandant, as he strode through the circle in front of my Art-exhibition. I saw no more. A soldier is but a mortal man. Rushing to the nearest cariole,—it was the Commandant's,—I leaped into it, and, lashing the horse furiously towards the town, never pulled rein until I got up to my long-deserted quarters in the Citadel. There I barricaded myself into my own room, directing my servant to proceed to the target for my scattered property. I had still a month's leave of absence before me, availing myself of which, I started next morning for New York, subsequently obtained an extension of leave, sailed for England, and there negotiating an exchange from a regiment whose facings no longer suited my taste for colors, I soon found myself gazetted into a less objectionable one lying at Corfu.

I have never seen Tankerville's famous picture of my triumphal entry into Quebec.

I.—NOVEMBER

The dead leaves their rich mosaics,Of olive and gold and brown,Had laid on the rain-wet pavements,Through all the embowered town.They were washed by the Autumn tempest,They were trod by hurrying feet,And the maids came out with their besomsAnd swept them into the street,To be crushed and lost forever'Neath the wheels, in the black mire lost,—The Summer's precious darlings,She nurtured at such cost!O words that have fallen from me!O golden thoughts and true!Must I see in the leaves a symbolOf the fate which awaiteth you?

II.—APRIL

Again has come the Spring-time,With the crocus's golden bloom,With the smell of the fresh-turned earth-mould,And the violet's perfume.O gardener! tell me the secretOf thy flowers so rare and sweet!——"I have only enriched my gardenWith the black mire from the street."

THE GAUCHO

What is a Gaucho?

That is precisely what I am going to tell you.

Take my hand, if you please. Shod with the shoes of swiftness, we have annihilated space and time. We are standing in the centre of a boundless plain. Look north and south and east and west: for five hundred miles beyond the limit of your vision, the scarcely undulating level stretches on either hand. Miles, leagues, away from us, the green of the torrid grass is melting into a misty dun; still further miles, and the misty dun has faded to a shadowy blue; more miles, it rounds at last away into the sky. A hundred miles behind us lies the nearest village; two hundred in another direction will bring you to the nearest town. The swiftest horse may gallop for a day and night unswervingly, and still not reach a dwelling-place of man. We are placed in the midst of a vast, unpeopled circle, whose radii measure a thousand miles.

But see! a cloud arises in the South. Swiftly it rolls towards us; behind it there is tumult and alarm. The ground trembles at its approach; the air is shaken by the bellowing that it covers. Quick! let us stand aside! for, as the haze is lifted, we can see the hurrying forms of a thousand cattle, speeding with lowered horns and fiery eyes across the plain. Fortunately, they do not observe our presence; were it otherwise, we should be trampled or gored to death in the twinkling of an eye. Onward they rush; at last the hindmost animals have passed; and see, behind them all there scours a man!

He glances at us, as he rushes by, and determines to give us a specimen of his only art. Shaking his long, wild locks, as he rises in the stirrup and presses his horse to its maddest gallop, he snatches from his saddle-bow the loop of a coil of rope, whirls it in his right hand for an instant, then hurls it, singing through the air, a distance of fifty paces. A jerk and a strain,—a bellow and a convulsive leap,—his lasso is fast around the horns of a bull in the galloping herd. The horseman flashes a murderous knife from his belt, winds himself up to the plunging beast, severs at one swoop the tendon of its hind leg, and buries the point of his weapon in the victim's spinal marrow. It falls dead. The man, my friend, is a Gaucho; and we are standing on the Pampas of the Argentine Republic.

Let us examine this dexterous wielder of the knife and cord. He, Juan de Dios! Come hither, O Centaur of the boundless cattle-plains! We will not ask you to dismount,—for that you never do, we know, except to eat and sleep, or when your horse falls dead, or tumbles into a bizcachero; but we want to have a look at your savage self, and the appurtenances thereunto belonging.

And first, you say, the meaning of his name. The title, Gaucho, is applied to the descendants of the early Spanish colonists, whose homes are on the Pampa, instead of in the town,—to the rich estanciero, or owner of square leagues of cattle, in common with the savage herdsman whom he employs,—to Generals and Dictators, as well as to the most ragged Pampa- Cossack in their pay. Our language is incapable of expressing the idea conveyed by this term; and the Western qualification "backwoodsman" is perhaps the nearest approach to a synonyme that we can attain.

The head of our swarthy friend is covered with a species of Neapolitan cap, (let me confess, in a parenthesis, that my ideas of such head- coverings are derived from the costume of graceful Signor Brignoli in "Masaniello,") which was once, in all probability, of scarlet hue, but now almost rivals in color the jet-black locks which it confines. His face— well, we will pass that over, and, on our return to civilized life, will refer the curious inquirer for a fac-simile to the first best painting of Salvator, there to select at pleasure the most ferocious bandit countenance that he can find. And now the remainder of his person. He wears an open jacket of dirt-crusted serge, covered in front with a gorgeous eruption of plated buttons, and a waistcoat of the same material, adorned with equal profuseness, and showing at the neck a substratum of dubious crimson, supposed to be a flannel shirt. So far, you may say, there is nothing suspicious or very outlandish about his rig; but turpiter desinit formosus superne,—there is something highly remarkable á continuacion. Do you see that blanket which is drawn tightly up, fore and aft, toward his waist, and, there confined by means of a belt which his querida has richly ornamented for him, falls over in uneven folds like an abbreviated kilt? That is the famous chiripá, or Gaucho petticoat, which, like the bracae of the Northern barbarians some nineteen hundred years ago, distinguishes him from the inhabitants of civilized communities. Below the chiripá, his limbs are cased in calzoncillos, stout cotton drawers or pantalets, which terminate in a fringe (you should see the elaborate worsted-work that adorns the hem of his gala-pair) an inch or two above the ankle. His feet are thrust into a pair of botas de potro, or colt's-foot boots, manufactured from the hide of a colt's fore-leg, which he strips off whole, chafes in his hand until it becomes pliable and soft, sews up at the lower extremity,—and puts on, the best riding-boot that the habitable world can show. Add a monstrous spur to each heel of this chaussure, and you will have fully equipped the worthy Juan de Dios for active service.—But stay! his accoutrements! We must not forget that Birmingham-made butcher-knife, which, for a dozen years, has never been for a moment beyond his reach; nor the coiling lasso, and the bolas, or balls of iron, fastened at each end of a thong of hide, which he can hurl a distance of sixty feet, and inextricably entangle around the legs of beast or man; nor the recado, or saddle, his only seat by day, and his pillow when he throws himself upon the ground to sleep under the canopy of heaven. Neither must we omit the mate gourd which dangles at his waist, in readiness to receive its infusion of yerba, or Paraguay tea, which he sucks through that tin tube, called bombilla, and looking for all the world like the broken spout of an oil- can with a couple of pieces of nutmeg-grater soldered on, as strainers, at the lower end; nor the string of sapless charque beef, nor the pouchful of villanous tobacco, nor the paper for manufacturing it into cigarritos, nor the cow's-horn filled with tinder, and the flint and steel attached. Thus mounted, clothed, and equipped, he is ready for a gallop of a thousand leagues.

He is a strange individual, this Gaucho Juan. Born in a hut built of mud and maize-stalks somewhere on the superficies of these limitless plains, he differs little, in the first two years of his existence, from peasant babies all the world over; but so soon as he can walk, he becomes an equestrian. By the time he is four years old there is scarcely a colt in all the Argentine that he will not fearlessly mount; at six, he whirls a miniature lasso around the horns of every goat or ram he meets. In those important years when our American youth are shyly beginning to claim the title of young men, and are spending anxious hours before the mirror in contemplation of the slowly-coming down upon their lip, young Juan (who never saw a dozen printed books, and perhaps has only heard of looking- glasses) is galloping, like a portion of the beast he rides, over a thousand miles of prairie, lassoing cattle, ostriches, and guanacos, fighting single-handed with the jaguar, or lying stiff and stark behind the heels of some plunging colt that he has too carelessly bestrid.

At twenty-one he is in his glory. Then we must look for him in the pulperías, the bar-rooms of the Pampas, whither he repairs on Sundays and fiestas, to get drunk on aguardiente or on Paraguay rum. There you may see him seated, listening open-mouthed to the cantor, or Gaucho troubadour, as he sings the marvellous deeds of some desert hero, persecuted, unfortunately, by the myrmidons of justice for the numerous misfortunes (Anglicé, murders) upon his head,—or narrates in impassioned strain, to the accompaniment of his guitar, the circumstances of one in which he has borne a part himself,—or chants the frightful end of the Gaucho Attila, Quiroga, and the punishment that overtook his murderer, the daring Santos Perez. When the song is over, the cards are dealt. Seated upon a dried bull's-hide, each man with his unsheathed knife placed ostentatiously at his side, the jolly Gauchos commence their game. Suddenly Manuel exclaims, that Pedro or Estanislao or Antonio is playing false. Down fly the cards; up flash the blades; a ring is formed. Manuel, to tell the truth, has accused his friend Pedro only for the sake of a little sport; he has never marked a man yet, and thinks it high time that that honor were attained. So the sparks fly from the flashing blades, and Pedro's nose has got another gash in it, and Manuel is bleeding in a dozen places, but he will not give in just yet. Unfortunate Gaucho! Pedro the next moment slips in a sticky pool of his own blood, and Manuel's knife is buried in his heart! "He is killed! Manuel has had a misfortune!" exclaim the ring; "fly, Manuel, fly!" In another minute, and just as the vigilantes are throwing themselves upon their horses to pursue him, he has galloped out of sight.

Twenty miles from the pulpería he draws rein, dismounts, wipes his bloody knife on the grass, and slices off a collop of charque, which he munches composedly for his supper. Very likely this misfortune will make him a Gaucho malo. The Gaucho malo is an outlaw, at home only in the desert, intangible as the wind, sanguinary, remorseless, swift. His brethren of the estancia pronounce his name occasionally, but in lowered tones, and with a mixture of terror and respect; he is looked up to by them as a sort of higher being. His home is a movable point upon an area of twenty thousand square miles; his horse, the finest steed that he can find upon the Pampas between Buenos Ayres and the Andes, between the Gran Chaco and Cape Horn; his food, the first beef that he captures with his lasso; his dainties, the tongues of cows which he kills, and abandons, when he has stripped them of his favorite titbit, to the birds of prey. Sometimes he dashes into a village, drinks a gourdful of aguardiente with the admiring guests at the pulpería, and spurs away again into obscurity, until at length the increasing number of his desgracias tempts the mounted emissaries of justice to pursue him, in the hope of extra reward. If suddenly beset by seven or eight of these desert police, the Gaucho malo slashes right and left with his redoubted knife,—kills one, maims another, wounds them all. Perhaps he reaches his horse and is off and away amid a shower of harmless balls;—or he is taken; in which case, all that remains, the day after, of the Gaucho malo, is a lump of soulless clay.

Then there is the guide, or vaqueano. This man, as one who knows him well informs us, is a grave and reserved Gaucho, who knows by heart the peculiarities of twenty thousand leagues of mountain, wood, and plain! He is the only map that an Argentinian general takes with him in a campaign; and the vaqueano is never absent from his side. No plan is formed without his concurrence. The army's fate, the success of a battle, the conquest of a province, is entirely dependent upon his integrity and skill; and, strange to say, there is scarcely an instance on record of treachery on the part of a vaqueano. He meets a pathway which crosses the road upon which he is travelling, and he can tell you the exact distance of the remote watering-place to which it leads; if he meet with a thousand similar pathways in a journey of five hundred miles, it will still be the same. He can point out the fords of a hundred rivers; he can guide you in safety through a hundred trackless woods. Stand with him at midnight on the Pampa,—let the track be lost,—no moon or stars; the vaqueano quietly dismounts, examines the foliage of the trees, if any are near, and if there are none, plucks from the ground a handful of roots, chews them, smells and tastes the soil, and tells you that so many hours' travel due north or south will bring you to your destination. Do not doubt him; he is infallible.

A mere vaqueano was General Rivera of Uruguay,—but he knew every tree, every hillock, every dell, in a region extending over more than 70,000 square miles! Without his aid, Brazil would have been powerless in the Banda Oriental; without his aid, the Argentinians would never have triumphed over Brazil. As a smuggler in 1804, as a custom-house officer a few years later, as a patriot, a freebooter, a Brazilian general, an Argentinian commander, as President of Uruguay against Lavalleja, as an outlaw against General Oribe, and finally against Rosas, allied with Oribe, as champion of the Banda Oriental del Uruguay, Rivera had certainly ample opportunities for perfecting himself in that study of which he was the ardent devotee.

Cooper has told us how and by what signs, in years that have forever faded, the Huron tracked his flying foe through the forests of the North; we read of Cuban bloodhounds, and of their frightful baying on the scent of the wretched maroon; we know how the Bedouin follows his tribe over pathless sands;—and yet all these are bunglers, in comparison with the Gaucho rastreador!

In the interior of the Argentine every Gaucho is a trailer or rastreador. On those vast feeding-grounds of a million cattle, whose tracks intersect each other in every direction, the herdsman can distinguish with unerring accuracy the footprints of his own peculiar charge. When an animal is missing from the herd, he throws himself upon his horse, gallops to the spot where he remembers having seen it last, gazes for a moment upon the trampled soil, and then shoots off for miles across the waste. Every now and then he halts, surveys the trail, and again speeds onward in pursuit. At last he reaches the limits of another estancia, and the pasturage of a stranger herd. His eagle eye singles out at a glance the estray; rising in his stirrup, he whirls the lasso for a moment above his head, launches it through the air, and coolly drags the recalcitrant beast away on the homeward trail. He is nothing but a common, comparatively unskilled, rastreador.

The official trailer is of another stamp. Like his kinsman, the vaqueano, he is a personage well convinced of his own importance; grave, reserved, taciturn, whose word is law. Such a one was the famous Calébar, the dreaded thief-taker of the Pampas, the Vidocq of Buenos Ayres. This man during more than forty years exercised his profession in the Republic, and a few years since was living, at an advanced age, not far from Buenos Ayres. There appeared to be concentrated in him the acuteness and keen perceptions of all the brethren of his craft; it was impossible to deceive him; no one whose trail he had once beheld could hope to escape discovery. An adventurous vagabond once entered his house, during his temporary absence on a journey to Buenos Ayres, and purloined his best saddle. When the robbery was discovered, his wife covered the robber's trail with a kneading-trough. Two months later Calébar returned, and was shown the almost obliterated footprint. Months rolled by; the saddle was apparently forgotten; but a year and a half later, as the rastreador was again at Buenos Ayres, a footprint in the street attracted his notice. He followed the trail; passed from street to street and from plaza to plaza, and finally entering a house in the suburbs, laid his hand upon the begrimed and worn-out saddle which had once been his own montura de fiesta!

In 1830, a prisoner, awaiting the death-penalty, effected his escape from jail. Calébar, with a detachment of soldiers, was put upon the scent. Expecting this, and knowing that the gallows lay behind him, the fugitive had adopted every expedient for baffling his pursuers: he had walked long distances upon tiptoe; had scrambled along walls; had walked backwards, crawled, doubled, leaped; but all in vain! Calébar's blood was up; his reputation was at stake; to fail now would be an indelible disgrace. If now and then he found himself at fault, he as often recovered the trail, until the bank of a water-course was reached, to which the flying criminal had taken. The trail was lost; the soldiers would have turned back; but Calébar had no such thought. He patiently followed the course of the acequia for a few rods, and suddenly halting, said to his companions, "Here is the spot at which he left the canal; there is no trail,—not a footprint,—but do you see those drops of water upon the grass?" With this slight clue they were led towards a vineyard. Calébar examined it at every side, and bade the soldiers enter, saying, "He is there!" The men obeyed him, but shortly reported that no living being was within the walls. "He is there!" quietly reiterated Calébar; and, in fact, a second more thorough examination resulted in the capture of the trembling fugitive, who was executed on the following day.—There can be no doubt regarding the literal exactness of this anecdote.

At another time, we are told, a party of political prisoners, incarcerated by General Rosas, had contrived a plan of escape, in which they were to be aided by friends outside. When all was ready, one of the party suddenly exclaimed,—

"But Calébar! you forget him!"

"Calébar!" echoed his friends; "true, it is useless to escape while he can pursue us!"

Nor was any flight attempted until the dreaded trailer had been bribed to fall ill for a few days, when the prisoners succeeded in making good their escape.

He who would learn more of Calébar and his brother-trailers, let him procure a copy of the little work that now lies before us,6 in the shape of a tattered duo-decimo, which has come to us across the Andes and around Cape Horn, from the most secluded corner of the Argentine Confederation. Badly printed and barbarously bound, this "Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga" is nevertheless replete with the evidence of genius, and bears the stamp of a generously-cultivated mind. Its author, indeed, the poet-patriot- philosopher, Don Domingo F. Sarmiento, may be called the Lamartine of South America, whose eventful career may some day invite us to an examination. Suffice it now to say, that he was expelled by Rosas in 1840 from Buenos Ayres, and that he took his way to Chile, with the intention in that hospitable republic of devoting his pen to the service of his oppressed country. At the baths of Zonda he wrote with charcoal, under a delineation of the national arms: On ne tue point les idées! which inscription, having been reported to the Gaucho chieftain, a committee was appointed to decipher and translate it. When the wording of the significant hint was conveyed to Rosas, he exclaimed,—"Well, what does it mean?" The answer was conveyed to him in 1852; and the sentence serves as epigraph to the present life of his associate and victim, Facundo Quiroga.

In this extraordinary character we see the quintessence of that desert- life some types of which we have endeavored to delineate. As one who, rising from the lowest station to heights of uncontrolled power, as a representative of a class of rulers unfortunately too common in the republics that descend from Spain, and as a remarkable instance of brutal force and barbaric stubbornness triumphing over reason, science, education, and, in a word, civilization, he is admirably portrayed by Sr. Sarmiento. Ours be the task to condense into a few pages the story of his life and death.

The Argentine province of La Rioja embraces vast tracts of sandy desert. Destitute of rivers, bare of trees, it is only by means of artificial and scanty irrigation that the peasant can cultivate a narrow strip of land. Inclosed by these arid wastes lies, nevertheless, a fertile region entitled the Plains, which, in despite of its name, is broken by ridges of hills, and supports a luxuriant vegetation with pastures trodden by unnumbered herds. The character of the people is Oriental; their appearance actually recalls, as we are told, that of the ancient dwellers about Jerusalem; their very customs have rather an Arabic than a Spanish tinge.