Authors: Bruce Chatwin
In Patagonia (10 page)
There is a difference of opinion as to whether the expedition, equipped with an enormous hypodermic, actually reached the lake. But the animal's non-existence must have been evident to whoever stood on its bank. And with the plesiosaurus died the hope of finding, in Patagonia, live dinosaurs like those described by Conan Doyle, stranded on their plateau in
The Lost World
.
The Lost World
.
Martin Sheffield died in 1936 in Arroyo Norquinco, a place he believed was his personal Klondike, of gold-fever, starvation, and D.T.s. A wooden cross with the initials M.S. marked the grave, but a souvenir hunter from Buenos Aires stole it. His son, by an Indian woman, lives drunkenly at El Bolsón, believing himself a Texas sheriff by inheritance and wearing his father's star.
From Epuyen, I walked to Cholila, a settlement close to the Chilean frontier.
20
âF
EEL IT,' she said. âFeel the wind coming through.'
EEL IT,' she said. âFeel the wind coming through.'
I put my hand to the wall. The draught blew through the chinks where the mortar had fallen out. The log cabin was the North American kind. In Patagonia they made cabins differently and did not chink them with mortar.
The owner of the cabin was a Chilean Indian woman called Sepúlveda.
âIn winter it's terrible,' she said. âI covered the wall with
materia plastica
but it blew away. The house is rotten, Señor, old and rotten. I would sell it tomorrow. I would have a concrete house which the wind cannot enter.'
materia plastica
but it blew away. The house is rotten, Señor, old and rotten. I would sell it tomorrow. I would have a concrete house which the wind cannot enter.'
Senora Sepúlveda had boarded up the living-room windows when the glass fell out. She had pasted newspapers over the cracks, but you could still see scraps of the old flowered wallpaper. She was a hard-working, covetous woman. She was short and stout and had a bad time with her husband and the rotten cabin.
Señor Sepúlveda was grogged out of his mind, half-sitting, half-lying by the kitchen stove.
âWould you buy the house?' she asked.
âNo,' I said, âbut don't sell it for nothing. There are North American gentlemen who would pay good money to take it away piece by piece.'
âThis table comes from the
Norteamericanos,'
she said, âand the cupboard, and the stove.'
Norteamericanos,'
she said, âand the cupboard, and the stove.'
She knew the cabin had a certain distinction for being North American. âIt must have been a beautiful place once,' she said.
As well as show me round, she was trying to get her eldest daughter off with a young road engineer. He drove a new pick-up and might be good for some cash. He and the girl were in the yard holding hands and laughing at the old nag tied to a willow. Next day, I passed her walking home to Cholila, alone across the pampas, crying.
21
T
HE BUILDER of the cabin was a sandy-haired and rather thick-set American, no longer young in 1902, with tapering fingers and a short roman nose. He had likable easy-going manners and a mischievous grin. He must have felt at home here, the country round Cholila is identical to parts of his home state, Utahâa country of clean air and open spaces; of black mesas and blue mountains; of grey scrub breaking into yellow flowers, a country of bones picked clean by hawks, stripped by the wind, stripping men to the raw.
HE BUILDER of the cabin was a sandy-haired and rather thick-set American, no longer young in 1902, with tapering fingers and a short roman nose. He had likable easy-going manners and a mischievous grin. He must have felt at home here, the country round Cholila is identical to parts of his home state, Utahâa country of clean air and open spaces; of black mesas and blue mountains; of grey scrub breaking into yellow flowers, a country of bones picked clean by hawks, stripped by the wind, stripping men to the raw.
He was alone that first winter. But he liked reading and borrowed books from an English neighbour. Sometimes in Utah he would hole up in the ranch of a retired teacher. He especially liked reading English mediaeval history and the stories of the Scots clans. Writing did not come easily to him, yet he did find time to write this letter to a friend back home:
Cholila., Ten Chubut
Argentine Republic, S.Am.
August 10 1902
Argentine Republic, S.Am.
August 10 1902
Mrs Davies
Ashley, Utah
My Dear Friend,
I suppose you have thought long before that I had forgotten you (or was dead) but my dear friend, I am still alive, and when I think of my Old friends you are always the first to come to mind. It will probably surprise you to hear from me away down in this country but U.S. was too small for me the last two years I was there. I was restless. I wanted to see more of the world. I had seen all of the U.S. that I thought was good. And a few months after I sent Aâover to see you, and get the Photo of the rope jumping ... another of my Uncles died and left $30,000 to our little family of 3 so I took my $10,000 and started to see a little more of the world. I visited the best cities and best parts of South A. till I got here. And this part of the country looked so good that I located, and I think for good, for I like the place better every day. I have 300 cattle, 1500 sheep, and 28 good saddle horses, 2 men to do my work, also a good 4 room house, wearhouse, stable, chicken house and some chickens. The only thing lacking is a cook, for I am still living in Single Cussideness and sometimes I feel very lonely for I am alone all day, and my neighbours don't amount to anything, besides the only language spoken in this country is Spanish, and I don't speak it well enough to converse on the latest scandals so dear to the hearts of all nations, and without which conversations are very stale, but the country is first class. The only industry at present is stockraising (that is in this part) and it can't be beat for that purpose, for I have never seen finer grass country, and lots of it hundreds and hundreds of miles that is unsettled and comparatively unknown, and where I am is good agricultural country, all kinds of small grain and vegetables grow without Irrigation but I am at the foot of the Andes Mountains. And all the land east of here is prairie and deserts, very good for stock, but for farming it would have to be irrigated, but there is plenty of good land along the mountains for all the people that will be here for the next hundred years, for I am a long way from civilization. It is 16 hundred miles to Buenos Aires the Capital of the Argentine, and over 400 miles to the nearest RailRoad or Sea Port but only about 150 miles to the Pacific Coast. To get to Chile we have to cross the mountains which was thought impossible until last summer when it was found that the Chilean Gov. had cut a road almost across so that next summer we will be able to go to Port Mont, Chile in about 4 days, where it used to take 2 months around the old trail. and it will be a great benefit to us for Chile is our Beef market and we can get our cattle there in 1/10th the time and have them fat. Also we can get supplies in Chile for one third what they cost here. The climate here is a great deal milder than Ashley valley. The summers are beautiful, never as warm as there. And grass knee high everywhere and lots of good cold mountain water. but the winters are very wet and disagreeable, for it rains most of the time, but sometimes we have lots of snow, but it don't last long, for it never gets cold enough to freeze much. I have never seen Ice one inch thick ...
The dead Uncle was the Wild Bunch Gang's robbery of the First National Bank at Winnemucca, Nevada, on September 10th 1900. The writer was Robert Leroy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, at that time heading the Pinkerton Agency's list of most wanted criminals. The âlittle family of 3' was a
ménage à trois
consisting of himself, Harry Longabaugh the Sundance Kid, and the beautiful gun-moll Etta Place. Mrs Davies was the mother-in-law of Butch's greatest friend, Elza Lay, who was languishing in the pen.
ménage à trois
consisting of himself, Harry Longabaugh the Sundance Kid, and the beautiful gun-moll Etta Place. Mrs Davies was the mother-in-law of Butch's greatest friend, Elza Lay, who was languishing in the pen.
22
H
E WAS a nice boy, a lively friendly-faced boy, who loved his Mormon family and the cabin in the cottonwoods. Both his parents came out from England as children and trekked the Plains, with Brigham Young's handcart companies, from Iowa City to the Salt Lake. Anne Parker was a nervous and highly strung Scotswoman; her husband, Max, a simple soul, who had a hard time squeezing a living from the homestead and made a little extra in timber haulage.
E WAS a nice boy, a lively friendly-faced boy, who loved his Mormon family and the cabin in the cottonwoods. Both his parents came out from England as children and trekked the Plains, with Brigham Young's handcart companies, from Iowa City to the Salt Lake. Anne Parker was a nervous and highly strung Scotswoman; her husband, Max, a simple soul, who had a hard time squeezing a living from the homestead and made a little extra in timber haulage.
The two-room cabin is still standing at Circleville, Utah. The corrals are there, and the paddock where Robert Leroy rode his first calf. The poplars he planted still line the irrigation ditch between the orchard and the sage. He was the oldest of eleven children, a boy of precise loyalties and a sense of fair play. He chafed under the straitjacket of Mormonism (and smelled corruption there). He dreamed of being a cowboy and, in dime novels, read the ongoing saga of Jessie James.
At eighteen he identified as his natural enemies the cattle companies, the railroads and the banks, and convinced himself that right lay the wrong side of the law. One June morning in 1884, awkwardly and ashamed, he told his mother he was going to work in a mine at Telluride. She gave him her father's blue travelling blanket and a pot of blueberry preserves. He kissed his baby sister, Lula, crying in her cradle, and rode out of their lives. The truth came out when Max Parker returned to the homestead. His son had rustled some cattle with a young outlaw called Mike Cassidy. The law was after them both.
Bob Parker took the name Cassidy and rode into a new life of wide horizons and the scent of horse leather. (Butch was the name of a borrowed gun.) His apprentice years, the 1880s, were years of the Beef Bonanza; of Texas longhorns peppering the range; of cowboys âlivin' the life of a buck nun' (one woman to ten men); of the Cattle Barons who paid miserly wages and dividends of 40 per cent to their shareholders; of champagne breakfasts at the Cheyenne Club and the English dukes who called their cowboys âcow-servants' and whose cowboys called them âdudes'. There were plenty of Englishmen knocking round the West: one cowboy wrote to his Yankee employer: âThat Inglishman yu lef in charge at the other ranch got to fresh and we had to kil the son of a bitch. Nothing much has hapened since yu lef ...'
Then the great white winter of 1886â7 wiped out threequarters of the stock. Greed combined with natural catastrophe to breed a new type, the cowboy-outlaw, men driven by unemployment and blacklisting into criminal hideouts and the rustling game. At Brown's Hole or Hole-in-the-Wall they joined up with professional desperadoes; men like Black Jack Ketchum, or the psychopath Harry Tracy, or Flat-Nose George Curry, or Harvey Logan, the diarist of his own murders.
Butch Cassidy, in those years, was drover, horse-wrangler, mavericker, part-time bank-robber, and leader of men; the sheriffs feared him most for the last of these accomplishments. In 1894 they gave him two years in the Wyoming State Penitentiary for stealing a horse he hadn't stolen, valued at five dollars. The sentence soured him to any further dealing with the law. And, from 1896 to 1901, his Train Robbers' Syndicate, better known as The Wild Bunch, performed the string of perfect hold-ups that kept lawmen, Pinkerton detectives and the railroad in perpetual jitters. The stories of his antics are endless; breathless rides along the Outlaw Trail; shooting glass conductors from telegraph poles; or paying a poor widow's rent by robbing the rent man. The homesteaders loved him. Many were Mormons, outlawed themselves for polygamy. They gave him food, shelter, alibis, and occasionally their daughters. Today, he would be classed as a revolutionary. But he had no sense of political organization.
Butch Cassidy never killed a man. Yet his friends were seasoned killers; their murders drove him to fits of remorse. He hated having to rely on the deadly aim of Harry Longabaugh, the Pennsylvania German with evil blue eyes and a foul temper. He tried to go straight, but there was too much on his Pinkerton card and his pleas for amnesty went unheard. Each new robbery spawned another and added years to his sentence. The costs of operating became unbearable. The story goes that the Wild Bunch frittered their hauls on women and the gaming table, but this is only half true. They had another, far greater expense: horseflesh.
The art of the hold-up depends on a quick getaway and Butch Cassidy's hold-ups depended on relays of fine thoroughbreds. His horse dealer was a man called Cleophas Dowd, the son of Irish immigrants to San Francisco, dedicated to the Jesuit priesthood, and forced as a boy to grovel to altar and confessional. Immediately after his ordination, Dowd startled his parents and the Fathers by riding past on his new racehorse, a brace of six-shooters strapped over his cassock. That night, in Sausalito, he had the pleasureâa pleasure he had long savouredâof giving last rites to the first man he shot. Dowd fled from California and settled at Sheep Creek Canyon, Utah, where he raised horses for outlaws. A Dowd horse was ready for sale when its rider could balance a gun between its ears and fire. The necessary speed he purchased from the Cavendish Stud at Nashville, Tennessee, and relayed the cost to his clients.
Around 1900 law and order settled in on the last American frontier. The lawmen bought their own fine bloodstock, solved the problem of outpacing the outlaws, and organized crime hid in the cities. Posses flushed out Brown's Hole; the Pinkertons put mounted rangers in box cars, and Butch saw his friends die in saloon brawls, picked off by hired gunmen, or disappear behind bars. Some of the gang signed on in the U.S. Armed Forces and exported their talents to Cuba and the Philippines. But for him the choices were a stiff sentenceâor Argentina.
Word was out among the cowboys that the land of the gaucho offered the lawless freedom of Wyoming in the 1870s. The artist-cowboy Will Rogers wrote: âThey wanted North American riders for foremen over the natives. The natives was too slow.' Butch believed he was safe from extradition there, and his last two hold-ups were to raise funds for the journey. After the Winnemucca raid, the five ringleaders, in a mood of high spirits, had their group portrait taken in Fort Worth and sent a copy to the manager. (The photo is still in the office.)
In the fall of 1901 Butch met the Sundance Kid and his girl, Etta Place, in New York. She was young, beautiful and intelligent, and she kept her men to heel. Her Pinkerton card says she was a school teacher in Denver; one rumour has it she was the daughter of an English remittance man called George Capel, hence Place. Under the names of James Ryan and Mr and Mrs Harry A. Place, the âfamily of 3' went to operas and theatres. (The Sundance Kid was a keen Wagnerian.) They bought Etta a gold watch at Tiffany's and sailed for Buenos Aires on S.S.
Soldier Prince.
On landing they stayed at the Hotel Europa, called on the Director of the Land Department, and secured 12,000 acres of rough camp in Chubut.
Soldier Prince.
On landing they stayed at the Hotel Europa, called on the Director of the Land Department, and secured 12,000 acres of rough camp in Chubut.
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