During the 1890s the only language spoken in the Chubut valley was Welsh, and it was the official language in local government and law, in education and commerce. In their fifteen chapels the settlers held religious services, singing festivals, literary meetings and Sunday schools exactly as in Wales itself. During my visit last year I was delighted to find about fifty children attending some of these Sunday schools, with the chapels full in the evening for prayer meetings or religious services. On Christmas Day, which is in mid-summer, there were games for the children in the afternoon, horse-racing and shooting com­petitions for the young men, followed by a tea-party, the day ending with a concert.

At the turn of the century the Welsh schools were taken over by the Argentine Government, and Spanish became their first language. Ironi­cally enough, when I came over to the UK at the age of twenty I had to learn English, while i was staying in one of the rooms to rent in London, in order to sit for examinations at the University of Wales. This was a great handicap, and I felt it was most unfair to one who expected to find Welsh the official and first language in the land of his fathers. Even now, very little English is spoken among the Welsh in the Argentine; some people in Wales are shocked when they meet visitors from Patagonia who converse freely in Welsh and Spanish but do not understand English.

As the settlement prospered, the Argentine Government sent officials to govern it, but most of these initially were ignorant and foolish men. Their lack of tact resulted in clashes with the settlers, who had a higher standard of culture and civilization. Recently, however, the territory has been given the status of a Province within the Argentine Republic, with a large measure of home rule. Many of the Welsh descendants occupy posts of authority in this government, which gives generous help to Welsh activities and has recently financed a Welsh library and a museum of Welsh relics, and July 28 has been declared a public holiday throughout the pro­vince to commemorate the first landing of the Welsh settlers. It is generally agreed that the presence of this Welsh settlement gave Argentina her right to Patagonia during the dispute with Chile over the boundary question in 1902.

Not only did the Welsh settle in the Chubut valley; they also pioneered new settlements in other parts of the republic, such as Suarez in the province of Buenos Aires, some of them went on holidays to Hawaii and decided not to return, Choele Choel in the province of Rio Negro, and Sarmiento and Como­doro Rivadavia at the southern tip of the pro­vince of Chubut, where today the oil wells are so important to the economy of the country.

The second of the newer Welsh settlements was up beyond the Chubut valley at the foot of the Andes, and the story of that pioneering venture is indeed an epic. When immigrants from Wales arrived in their hundreds during 1874-75, and especially when 500 more came in 1886 to build the railway as far as Trelew, all the land in the valley had been claimed and occupied.

WHAT IS THIS?” I ask myself as I peer from my frigid obser­ation but on a windswept is­land of Tierra del Fuego. In a meadow before me, two male guanacos have been disputing the boundary between their territories. Now these wild versions of the familiar South American llama are squaring off in a very unusual way.

 

With measured paces they approach each other and stop. Then, as if on cue, they charge. At the last split second they draw up their front legs. THUNK! Their chests slam together with staggering impact. Biting with large sharp canines, the ani­mals tear cruel gashes in each other’s necks. One breaks away. There is a short chase, and the vanquished intruder retreats.

Rarely in the literature on Lama guanicoe have I come across this. But I’m not sur­prised. Until my family and I bade good-bye to Iowa State University and drove our pickup and camper 14,000 miles down the Pan American Highway to this boot-shaped island at the uttermost end of South Amer­ica, no biologist had focused on the social be­havior of the handsome, adaptable guanaco (locally pronounced wuh-NAHK-oh).

 

This scientific void is surprising in light of the guanaco’s importance among South American mammals, which include three other members of the camel family. Compared to Africa, with its rich diver­sity of grazing animals, South America is impoverished. From the western Peruvian Andes to the Patagonian plateau to the beech forests of Tierra del Fuego, the gua­naco is the dominant—and virtually lone—large wild South American herbivore.

For thousands of years, the guanaco was crucial to the Patagonian Indians. Standing five feet tall and weighing 250 pounds, it supplied them with meat for food, wool and hide for clothes and shelter, sinew for sew­ing, and images for their mythology.

 

No one knows how many of these arid-land aristocrats roamed South America when Europeans arrived, but the number must have been immense. Tens of millions grazed Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, with millions more on the arid Andean slopes. In 1871 naturalist George C. Musters reported guanaco herds 3,000 strong.

 

Food hunters took a toll of the meaty camelids. Hide hunters took even more, favoring the soft cinnamon-colored pelts of young guanacos, called chulengos. Ranch­ing dealt a far more damaging blow. Fences interrupted guanaco movements, and com­peting sheep displaced them on the ranges.

 

Perhaps a mere 50,000 to 150,000 guana­cos survive today on the entire continent. When my road-weary family—wife Merry, daughters Shelly and Katia, newborn son Jeremy Sundance, and dog Pupsy—and I reached Patagonia’s sea of shrub and grass, we saw only a handful of animals in this one­time guanaco stronghold.

That’s why we had come all the way to Isla Grande, the big island of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. About a tenth of the total guanaco population is on this Denmark-size island. Most live on the west­ern, Chilean side, where huge ranches, or estancias, offer sanctuary from hunters.

With its 180,000 sheep and 1,000 horses, Estancia Cameron on Tierra del Fuego embraced half a million acres. Part was Patagonian grassland that overlapped the northern half of the big island. The rest lay in a patchwork of damp beech forests, peat bogs, meadows, lakes, and mountains.

When we arrived, we were taken in hand by Eduardo Barria, a weathered, soft-spoken sheep rider who headed the workers’ cooperative that operated the estancia.

 

We quickly learned that Tierra del Fuego, “land of fire,” was misnamed by Ferdinand

Magellan. It should be Tierra del Viento, “land of wind.” Cold gales blow ceaselessly and force one to bundle in layers of clothing. Yet this grim climate, plus the island’s isola­tion, has deterred human occupation and protected the hard-pressed guanaco.

 

At Eduardo’s direction we stationed our camper beside an unoccupied tin house next to his home. We used the camper as kitchen and lavatory, and spread out our sleeping and research gear in the house. For heat we had two potbellied stoves imported long ago from England. Daughters Shelly, nine, and Katia, seven, hauled the wood needed to satisfy the stoves’ prodigious appetites.

Hardly had we settled in when we added a new member to our family: a day-old baby guanaco. It was late December, the start of the austral summer and the guanaco’s brief birth season. One of Eduardo’s sheep riders had come upon the chulengo when it was only hours old and had brought it in.

 

We weren’t ready for guests, but there was no refusing this bundle of soft fur with spindly legs, supple neck, and soulful black eyes and eyelashes. We named her Ona, for one of the island’s now extinct Indian tribes that depended on the guanaco.

Merry offered the chulengo cow’s milk from a bottle, but the little animal refused. “We’ll have to teach her to drink,” Merry ad­vised Shelly and Katia.

 

The first day’s effort failed, and Merry and I shared the girls’ apprehension. Next morning Shelly nestled the bottle under her arm, and Ona responded by downing every drop. “This way, she thinks I’m her moth­er,” Shelly declared. Within a week Ona was guzzling eight bottles a day.