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.
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