THE WELSH IN PATAGONIA.
A most remarkable colony is that which the Welsh have made in Patagonia.
Rarely, if ever, in the history of the Americas have emigrants from the
old country been surrounded by conditions and circumstances so
discouraging as those to be described in this story of that colony, and
rarely, if ever, has a colonizing project originated as did this the
Welch colony that is now flourishing on the banks of the Chubut River,
750 miles southwest of Buenos Ayres. Although one must really see the
country to appreciate fully what the colonists endured and have
achieved, yet I fancy that some of the facts are of sufficient human
interest to make the story fully worth the telling.
The colony is known by the name of the river on which it is
located--Chubut. It was formed by immigrants who left their homes,
paradoxical as it may seem, because they were patriots. They were all
Welshmen, who, because the laws of Great Britain have compelled the use
of English in Welsh schools since the year 1282, when Prince Llewellyn
fell, determined to found a colony in such an out-of-the-way part of the
world that they could, unmolested, perpetuate the mother tongue of
Wales. The prime mover in this matter was Dr. Michael Jones of Bala
College, and he was assisted by Mr. Lewis Jones, who is now a resident
of the colony.
These gentlemen looked the maps of the world over, and they read the
descriptions of all the unsettled parts which travellers out of the way
had written, the ultimate conclusion being that no habitable country in
the world could offer such complete isolation as the Patagonia region of
the Argentine Republic. There came a time afterward when they began to
doubt whether the land they had chosen was really habitable, but it was
then too late to turn back.
An appeal for a grant of land was made to the Argentine Government, and
that is an appeal that is never made in vain by any colony acting in
good faith to any Latin-American Government. It is true that efforts
were made to dissuade the Welshmen from going to Patagonia, but those
efforts were intended for the good of the colonists. They were asked to
take the fertile lands of the north instead of the desert of the south.
No one but the promoters of the colony believed that any settlement
could exist in the desert, and never did promoters come nearer to losing
heart and yet succeed.
It was on July 28, 1865, that the Welsh pilgrims first landed in the
region they had chosen. At that time the whole of Patagonia, between Rio
Negro and the Strait of Magellan, was in precisely the same condition
that it was when Pedro Sarmiento's colony starved to death in the
strait, when Cavendish discovered Port Desire, and when Darwin explored
a part of the remarkable Santa Cruz River. Nor was that all. War was
incessantly waged between the people of the republic (who were pleased
to call themselves Christians) and the people of the desert plains, who
were called savages by the self-styled Christians. And the savages, as
has been told, had the best of the fights. The whites occupied one
settlement on the Rio Negro, but only by favor of the red men. What
could a handful of Welshmen, unused to plains life and wholly ignorant
of savage warfare, do with such fierce warriors?
The time came, however, when the Welshmen were asking each other, "What
would we have done without the Indians?"
As said, it was in the last week of July, 1865, when the Welshmen first
saw the land where they intended to perpetuate their mother tongue in
its purity. July in Patagonia is the mid-winter month. A sailing ship
took them to the southeast corner of New Gulf, a nearly circular bay in
the coast, seven hundred miles southwest of Buenos Ayres. Here it put
them out on the gravelly beach, gave them some food and water, and then
sailed away. There were 150 souls all told. How utterly alone they were,
and how far away from civilization can be better appreciated when we
remember that in those days no merchant steamers had yet gone down the
coast to pass the Strait of Magellan, and that the only white men living
south of the struggling settlement on the Rio Negro were a disconsolate
gang of convicts, guarded by an equally forlorn squad of soldiers in a
stockade on the strait just mentioned. The Welshmen were separated from
all civilization, even the Argentine kind--a kind to which they were not
accustomed--by the stormy sea on one hand and by hundreds of miles of
desert on the other, a desert that was utterly impassable save by the
Indians, who alone, in those days, knew where the widely-separated
springs of fresh water were to be found.
Nor were their immediate surroundings any more cheerful than a
contemplation of the region that lay between them and the far-away
settlement on the Rio Negro.
They had landed on a pebbly beach near the foot of a low, white alluvial
cliff into which the elements had eaten holes large enough to be called
caves. Beyond the cliffs the arid desert, a mixture of sand and pebbles,
rose in sweeping undulations to a crest perhaps six miles away and four
hundred feet above the sea. They were walled in by desert ridges. There
was not a green thing in sight, but only ragged brown desert brush and
an occasional yellow, dry bunch of grass. There was neither house nor
hut for their reception or shelter, and, worse than all else, there was
neither stream nor pool nor spring of water fit to drink anywhere within
fifty-one miles. That was the kind of a country to which these 150
Welshmen came to plant a colony that should live by agriculture.
The Pilgrims who came to Plymouth Rock because they could not make the
world elsewhere worship according to the dictates of their consciences,
had a tolerably bleak time of it according to the orators on New England
Society days, but if one wants to hear stories of real hardships endured
by pioneers, let him go to Chubut and talk to one of the older Welshmen.
The first thing done was, of necessity, to dig a well for water. They
found water, and the well is still there. A drink from its depths will
carry a Yankee cowboy back to his old haunts on the plains of Southwest
Kansas and No Man's Land, instantly; that is, it will carry his thoughts
there. He will say "gypsum" or "alkali" with something verbally stronger
still, as soon as he gets his mouth empty. Indeed, one need not look
five minutes anywhere around New Gulf to find plenty of gypsum.
Nevertheless, the water would support life after a fashion, and the
Welshmen turned from the well to make shelters of the caves nature had
provided.
From the work of arranging their scanty household goods in the caves
these pioneers went forth, not to sow and plant, but to make a road.
They were in the region where they were to find homes, but the actual
home sites--the farms of 240 acres that were to be theirs--lay fifty-one
miles away over and beyond the crest of the desert amphitheatre within
which they had landed. They had to mark the trail lest they get lost,
clear it of brush and level its irregularities, and then they must needs
transport themselves and their belongings over it to the banks of the
Chubut River.
And all this they did to find at last that, save for a deposit of black
loam in parts of the valley of the stream, they had come to a land as
desolate as the shores of New Gulf. The desert walled them in. The wells
filled with alkali water. The north wind was like a blast from the
furnace in which Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego fell down, and almost
every wind came laden with a brown fog of sand. They had sought
isolation; they had found it with a vengeance.
Nevertheless, these Welshmen--and they were all miners, too, and not
farmers--began work to make homes and farms. They laid out a capital
city, which they named Rawson in honor of the Argentine Cabinet officer
who had interested himself in their behalf. It was a sorry capital then,
but duplicates of it can be found in the Texas Panhandle. It was a town
of dugouts and mud huts. There was no timber for houses. They planted
gardens. They looked the region over. They began to learn how to hunt
the guanaco and the ostrich that roamed over the desert.
And then came the Indians, the huge-framed Tehuelches, to whom the early
explorer of the region had given the name of Big Feet (Patagonians). It
was a notable day in the history of the settlement, but not a day of
bloodshed. The Tehuelches and the Welshmen became friends at once,
partly because the Indians, on learning why the whites had sought the
isolation, comprehended the matter in a way that made them feel a
brotherly regard for the intruders such as they had never felt for any
other whites. The Welshmen had come to find entire freedom in the
desert, and that was something the freeborn son of the desert could
appreciate.
That was an excellent beginning, but only a first victory. There were
many other foes on the desert. There were the panthers, the great, lean,
sly cats that are called also American lions. They swarmed on the
uplands and by night came to the settlement for the blood of horses,
cattle, and sheep. There were locusts in clouds that obscured the sun.
There were wild geese, ducks, and coots from the river--the winged pests
were in legions. It was a waterless region and uninhabitable for man
beyond the valley of the stream, but in the thorny brush of the desert
millions of nature's allies in her warfare against man found breeding
places.
For the first year the colony was to be supplied with provisions by the
Argentine Government. The contract was faithfully kept. The colonists
hoped to raise enough food for their own use after that, but their hopes
failed. The hot winds destroyed the few results of their labors which
birds and beasts had spared. Nevertheless, they held on for another
year, the government supplying their needs, although, meantime, more
colonists had come. Then came another failure of crops. The reader will
say it took a lot of pluck to hold on after that for another year. So it
did. These Welshmen were full of it. Not only for another year, but for
another, and another still--for six weary years those men fought the
gaunt wolf that stood at their doors. Then came prosperity, but with
leaden footsteps.
That the colonists did not perish absolutely of starvation was due first
to the persistent care of the Argentine Government. Uncle Sam was
counted generous when he gave to every immigrant 160 acres of land. The
Argentine Government not only gave these immigrants 240 acres of land
each, on the condition that they improve it somewhat and live there two
years, but it established a commissary department in the colony, and for
nearly ten years gave free of cost all supplies of food and clothing
needed to keep them alive, and as late as 1877, when crops had begun to
flourish well, still extended a generous helping hand. This was done in
spite of the fact that these Welshmen were avowedly clannish. They had
come to establish a Welsh colony, and had obtained permission in advance
not only to preserve their own language, but to govern themselves and to
live free of taxation. Under the terms of the original concession, they
were of value to the Argentine nation only in the fact that they were to
break up and cultivate so much wild land. They could not have been made
to fight for the land of their adoption even against an invading host of
Brazilian monarchists. No government was ever more generous to colonists
than the Argentine.
Goods were sent to Chubut by the ship load. But more than once the ship
went wrong, and the goods were lost. Then came the time of dire distress
when only their good friends the Tehuelches could save them. The
Welshmen were starving on several occasions when the Indians came down
the river and brought succor--guanaco, and ostrich, and panther meat in
abundance, with skins for clothing. As the corn of the Massachusetts
Indians saved the Pilgrim Fathers, so the meat of the Tehuelches saved
the Welshmen. But the Tehuelche Indians have not now to mourn, nor do
the Welshmen now hang their heads in shame at the mention of any King
Philip. White men made war on the Tehuelches and exterminated them, but
no Welshmen, though the colony was then self-supporting, took part in
that hateful enterprise, and when the red remnant were forced at last to
give up the fight, they came down to the Chubut River and surrendered to
the fair-dealing white men, who had called them brothers and meant what
they said. More pitiful still, when one brave old chief, wounded to
death, was breathing his last in Buenos Ayres, he smilingly looked about
him and said:
"I am going to the Welshman's heaven."
As said, for six years, the colonists struggled against failing hopes,
eating only the bitter bread of charity, struggled to maintain
themselves where they could perpetuate their language in its purity. In
1871 came the turn in the tide. A dam was built across the Chubut River
in that year, and an irrigating ditch taken out. Of course they did not
finish the canal in one year. It was a ditch thirty-six feet wide on
top, eighteen on the bottom, and six feet deep, and year by year they
lengthened it out. When the water kissed the warm, dark soil, it was
like the kiss of the maiden on the lips of the grateful beast in the
fairy story. The desert was transformed into a blooming garden.
And here is an interesting fact. For six years the colonists had eaten
no bread, save what was given to them. They would, therefore, get clear
of that evil first of all. They sowed wheat and barley, and they sow
little else to this day. Whatever may happen, the Chubut man will never
again have to ask for bread of anybody.
However, as said, progress was slow. The first ditch was not well
located, and when an unusual drought came the water of the river did not
reach the ditch, and the crop failed in spite of it. Then, too, there
were the wild pests at all times--the locusts and the wild fowl. Even
after eleven years of irrigation--in 1882--there was a failure from the
drought. But that set them to building a greater ditch, of which they
all now make boast.
About five hundred settlers came out in the early years of famine, but
the number dwindled to less than two hundred in 1871. In 1880 the result
of irrigation had swelled the number to eight hundred, and in 1885 there
were double that number. In 1880 the settlers were scattered along the
valley for about twenty-five miles from the mouth of the river, and
there was a sort of a village at each end of the settlement. The houses
were, as a rule, even then mere huts. Wagons, and carts, and horses were
had in sufficient number. In fact, the Government at Buenos Ayres had
provided all of these things. But the abundant harvests of 1880 and 1881
gave a boom to the settlement which the failure of 1882 only checked
temporarily. The colonists went up stream to a valley thirty miles long
beyond a narrow canyon and took up land there. It was there that the head
of the great new ditch was located. They have since gone to a third
still higher. They have, in fact, taken up all the available land for
seventy miles along the river. They have 270 miles of main irrigating
canals. The largest has a cross section measuring 75 x 9 x 36 feet, and
the whole 270 miles cost L180,000. There are 3250 people in the
settlement.
Some of the details of their condition from time to time remind one of
the Yankee frontier settlements. They began their religious life in the
colony with union services, and got on comfortably until they prospered.
Sectarians floated in on the waters of the irrigating ditch, so to
speak, and there was a burst of zeal in building up denominations that
brought a growth in church outfits quite equal to that in the area
planted--rather larger, in fact. Among the 2000 people of 1883 there
were two independent congregations with ordained ministers, who held
regular services in chapels, of which "the walls were baked brick, the
roofs were wooden, with a layer of mud on top, and the wooden benches
had good backs to them," as one of them described the places of worship.
They had also a stone-walled chapel in a third place, and held regular
services in school-houses in other places. The Methodists had a brick
church with an ordained minister, at Rawson, and held services in the
upper valley. The Baptists had a fine chapel at Frondrey, one of the
little villages that sprang up, and an ordained minister for it. In
fact, there were, in all, seven ordained ministers in the colony, and in
1884 the Episcopalians brought out the eighth. Every one of these had
his 240 acres of land, and every one worked his own farm and got rich,
as his neighbors did, raising wheat.
It is a significant fact that up to 1884 the colony did not have a
single physician. It scarcely needed one. Still some one was sure to
break a limb every two or three years, and the colonists were right glad
when, in 1885, a man with a diploma came there and took up the usual
allowance of land.
In 1883 a number of Welsh prospectors came from Australia to Chubut and
went as far back as the Andes. They found several croppings of lignite,
which at first were thought to be good coal, and that made a stir. The
stuff is now used for fuel to some extent in the houses, and it is to be
found that five tons will serve for about two tons of Welsh coal.
Then they found gold and went to work filing claims. The gold, however,
lies only thirty-one leagues from a port on the Chili coast where a
German steamer calls once a month, so that the diggings, which include
placer as well as quartz workings, will hardly benefit Chubut save as a
market for produce may be created. About $50,000 gold has been invested
in the workings. The Yankee traveller is sure to be informed, too, that
"a Texas cowboy named Marshall has a store at the camp, and he says the
diggings beat California."
Then it was observed that the desert plains above the upper parts of the
inhabited valley swarmed with guanacos as the desert plains of New
Mexico once swarmed with antelopes. Droves of from 5000 to 7000 were
seen. It was rightly argued that sheep could live where the guanaco did.
The Chubut colonists are going into the wool business, though slowly,
and this is certain to be the greatest source of wealth to the colonists
in the future. Bunch grass grows on the uplands. It is in scant
quantity, but it is there. Water flows through the valley. The man who
has water can hold all the sheep that can feed on the desert back of his
farm, and that means at least two thousand. Sheep thrive wonderfully in
the pure air and on the dry gravel of Patagonia. Everywhere along the
coast the shepherds boast that every sheep is worth a gold dollar a year
clear profit, besides the increase in the flock. But this statement
should not lead any one to go to Chubut to begin life, because all the
available land in the valley has been taken up.
Meantime, after irrigation brought crops, the subject of transportation
had agitated the colonists. The mouth of the Chubut River had an
impassable bar. Nearly all freight, previous to 1885, was either brought
to New Gulf and carted thence over the old trail to the valley, or else
was brought in tiny sailing vessels which, at the time, when the melting
snow on the head waters made a freshet in the river, could work in over
the bar. The surplus grain had to be shipped out in the same way. There
was a weary and an expensive haul by the one route; by the other, a
tedious and expensive waiting for high water. In 1885, a company was
formed to construct a railway from the valley to New Gulf, and the
Argentine Government granted a charter, and gave a subsidy of 204 square
miles of desert land. I guess the subsidy isn't worth much, for there
seems to be no way to get water on it. They even carry water from the
Chubut valley to supply all employees along the line, now, but a road of
a metre gauge was built, and a very good road it is, considering that
English stock and materials were used.
Building the road involved the making of two new town sites--one on the
gulf and one at the railroad terminus. That in the Chubut valley has
been built up, but half a dozen wood, iron, and mud huts are all that
can be found at Madryn, on the gulf. Still Madryn is an interesting
town. It has a ruler, appointed by the President of the republic. He is
called the Prefect. His district is a sub-prefect, and he is a sort of
an autocratic Mayor. Lieutenants in the navy get all such appointments
in Patagonia.
Madryn also has a Captain of the Port and a squad of sailors to help
preserve the dignity of the Prefect, and the Prefect has an assistant
Prefect, who ranks a little below the Captain of the Port. Outside of
the official group, but on excellent terms with it, is the railroad
group. This includes an agent, who is a well-educated Welshman, and a
telegraph operator, who is the charming daughter of the agent. To rank
with the non-commissioned officer and the Jack tars of the official
group there is a foreman and a gang of railroad trackmen. Then there are
two lighters afloat in the bay for the transfer of freight to and from
the Argentine naval transports, which come down from Buenos Ayres once
in three weeks. These lighters are excellent sea boats, instead of
having the models that lighters in New York have. One is a schooner and
the other is a sloop, and five men man the two.
The railroad has prospered moderately. It has 5000 tons of wheat to
carry from the colony every year, besides some small packages of ostrich
feathers, guanaco skins, and products of Indian workmanship. It carries
in dry goods, groceries, and hardware, and several passengers a month
pass over it each way. A train runs over the road every time a ship
comes to port--say once in three weeks. In fact, the company is going to
extend the line up the valley. The people living seventy miles above
the end of the road want better facilities for shipping their wheat, and
they are going to have them. This branch of the road will very likely
have a train once a week to accommodate local passenger traffic. In case
the gold mines develop half the wealth they are expected to, the
railroad will be carried right away up to the diggings.
Patagonia railroad building is not expensive. All Patagonia between
river valleys is everywhere ballasted with proper gravel for a road-bed,
and is so nearly level that the ties can be laid, as they were laid on
Texas lines years ago, right on the natural surface without turning a
shovelful of dirt. As compared with some Yankee railroads, the only
railroad in Patagonia is no great affair; but when compared with some
others it leaves them out of sight, because it pays dividends as well as
develops the country.
To sum it all up, here was a colony that might well have been called a
failure before the people reached their destination. It was called a
failure by about every impartial observer who visited it during the
first ten years of its existence. Nevertheless, in spite of the drought,
in spite of alkali, in spite of homesickness, in spite of all the myriad
drawbacks to which it was subject, it prospered at the last, and is now
worth millions sterling.
But alas for Dr. Michael Jones of Bala College! Alas for Mr. Lewis
Jones, now of the colony! They planted their hosts in the uttermost
parts of the earth that the shade of Prince Llewellyn might flourish and
his language be spoken in its original purity forever. So the shade did
flourish and the language was spoken for many years, but when prosperity
came there was an influx of other tongues, along with an Argentine
Governor and an official staff. Spanish was the language of the
Argentine, and was necessary for all official business. Under the
Argentine law every child born in the colony was a citizen of the
republic, and it was a republic of which even the descendants of Prince
Llewellyn did not need to be ashamed. The Welsh youngsters, indeed, have
grown up to look with pride to the broad blue and white stripes of the
flag under which they were born. They are children of the desert--and
they love that desert--love it so well that they never lose an
opportunity to speak in its favor; and they speak of it with the soft
vowels of the Castilian, rather than with the consonants of the Welsh.