Note 3 — Chapter III · BUENOS AYRES (continued)
Reading edition
One word about M. Onelli's interesting work, À Travers les Andes, an accurate account of his journey in Patagonia. When describing to me the customs of the natives, he was good enough to promise me a few arrowheads collected in the course of his expedition. They reached me the following day with this letter:
"My dear Sir,—After rummaging amongst my drawers, I finally found the arrowheads you wanted. The book which accompanies them, a humble homage to yourself, describes the places in which I found them. If you are good enough to glance at it you will find several photographs of the descendants of the makers of these arrows. The Tchuleches Indians, who to the number of rather more than 2000 live in the southern half of Patagonia, say, when shown one of these arrowheads, which are to be found all over the arid plateau they inhabit, that they were the usual weapon of the Indians of olden times who travelled on foot. We know that they did not know the horse until a hundred and fifty years ago, at most, and, in fact, one may say that the Stone Age represented by these arrowheads only ended in Patagonia a half-century ago. The arrows to be found in Patagonia demonstrate in a contrary manner the influence of civilised industries, since the heads the most clumsily made are the most modern. The Indians lost little by little the art of making them when they learnt to make the shafts of fragments of knife-blades, or of iron obtained from the Christians, and since then they have completely abandoned the work to adopt firearms. In the preparation of guanaco skins, the Indian women, naturally more conservative than the men, still use the old system of scraping the under side of the leather with scrapers made of stone, in every way similar to the tool used by prehistoric man in European lands. Nowadays, having no means of making them, they search in their leisure moments in the ancient dwellings of their forefathers in order to find a flint scraper, which they carefully use and preserve.
"The arrow age still subsists in the north of the Republic among the Indians of the Chaco forests. Their arrows are made of hard wood. On alluvial soils no flint can be found, just as none can be had in the province of Santa Fé, and nearly throughout the whole of the province of Buenos Ayres (a region larger than all France), without a single pebble!—a fact which renders it extremely difficult to keep up good roads across a flat country of crumbling soil without lime. The highway is turned into soft mud by traffic and rain; yet observe the enormous increase of railway lines.
"As for the art of making arrowheads, the Stone Age still reigns among the Onas and Lakaluf, natives of Terra del Fuego; but alas! the art has degenerated. The natives of the seacoast, always on the lookout for a whale, dead or wounded, and for fragments of wrecks of sailing vessels rounding Cape Horn, have discovered that bottle glass is the easiest material to work upon for their arrows, and their poor language is thus enriched with a new word; to express 'glass' they say 'botel,' by the natural quid pro quo of a tongue which in adopting a new word confuses the name of the object with that of the material of which it is made.
"The opaque black arrowhead is of basalt, the most abundant kind of rock in Patagonia, but also the most difficult to use in the manufacture of such small objects. Obsidian—the little black point of flint—is more generally used.
"The twisted forms are moulds of flint of the inside of a tertiary fossil mollusc, the 'turritella,' very common in the strata of the Rio Santa Cruz cliffs, and which Indian women often wear as ornaments. In the hope you will excuse my bad French, since I have had the presumption to write direct to you instead of being translated into good French,
"I am, my dear sir, yours, etc.,
"Clement Onelli."