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Sheep Sovereignties: The Colonization of the Falkland Islands/Malvinas, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego, 1830s–1910slocked

Sheep Sovereignties: The Colonization of the Falkland Islands/Malvinas, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego, 1830s–1910slocked

  • Alberto Harambour-RossAlberto Harambour-RossInstituto de Historia, Universidad Austral de Chile

Summary

From the moment the expedition of Magellan gave Patagonia its name, it became a land where European fantasies and fears dwelled. A no man’s land inhabited by giant anthropophagites located at the antipodes of civilization, this steppe swept by icy winds was not transformed into a colonial setting until the 19th century. The territory then became the object of an ongoing territorial dispute between the new states of Argentina and Chile, whose efforts to establish sovereignty as landowners languished until the late 1870s. Nomadic indigenous sovereignties had faced slow Western expansion on the continent; here, they were swiftly replaced by sheep. On the continent, the Tehuelche were displaced; on the island of Tierra del Fuego, the Selknam faced extermination. Sheep sovereignty, fully integrated into imperial networks, was the driving force behind local state building. Just as the British pastoral colonization of the Falkland Islands conditioned any possibility of permanent presence in the South Atlantic, the sheep industry, arriving swiftly in the shape of capital, persons, and animals, allowed for the Argentinization and Chileanization of what was once the frontier of civilization. In this sense, the occupation of the Falklands/Malvinas, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego may be considered successive colonial processes that form part of the same frontier drive as the Empire in capital.

Keywords

Subjects

  • History of Latin America and the Oceanic World
  • Environmental History
  • Colonialism and Imperialism

The Falkland Islands/Malvinas, Patagonia, and the Beginnings of Colonial Projects

For all intents and purposes, Patagonia remained beyond the reach of the empires that colonized America and the nations that succeeded them until the second half of the 19th century. Ever since the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan incorporated the concept of “Patagonia” into European languages in 1521, the distant southern steppes continued to be portrayed as a realm of fascination, mystery, and doom. According to rumors that circulated widely in Europe starting in the mid-16th century, Patagonia was inhabited by naked giants, suspects of cannibalism, who emitted guttural sounds rather than distinguishable words and whose devil worship could be easily surmised.1 The territory was brutal and unknown: a wasteland of bleak regions devastated by ferocious Atlantic gales or storms out of the Antarctic. Terra australis incognita, no man’s land. The sole attempt to establish colonies along the Strait of Magellan in the late 16th century ended with the demise of nearly all of the occupants of the western settlement known thereafter as Port Famine.2 Until the end of the 19th century, the southernmost Hispanic occupation on the Pacific Ocean was Chiloé (1,000 km south of Santiago and more than 1,500 km from the Strait), and on the Atlantic side the town of Carmen de Patagones (900 km from Buenos Aires, 1,700 km from the strait). The “Patagones” (Tehuelche) maintained their independence on the continent, as did the Selknam in Tierra del Fuego and the nomadic Kawashkar and Yámana along the southern and eastern seas.

There was no original population on the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, nor were there any endemic land mammals, and for centuries the docking of ships of diverse origin was sporadic at best. Expeditions alternated under different flags, leaving cattle behind for future stopovers on its isolated, grassy terrain. Not until the late 18th century did an expedition by a Frenchman named Bougainville establish a settlement intended to be permanent, despite opposition from Great Britain and Spain, which claimed possession of the islands under the Viceroyship of Río de La Plata by virtue of the Treaty of Tordesillas. Bougainville finally withdrew from his position after committing to the payment of reparations to Spain.3 Over the next few decades, various private and official expeditions performed different acts of possession in the archipelago. In the 1820s, after gaining independence from Spain, Buenos Aires awarded exploitation rights over the wild cattle inhabiting the islands and titles establishing political and military authority to a businessman who was later evicted by U.S. forces. When the expedition of the HMS Beagle landed in March 1833, having sailed nearly six hundred kilometers from Patagonia, officials found that two British ships had recently completed ceremonies taking formal possession of the islands, leaving behind an officer with nominal, rather than actual, power. According to Darwin, of the local population, “more than half were runaway rebels and murderers” from the continent, most of them gauchos.4

The reports made by Robert FitzRoy, captain of the expedition, were important for defining its colonial future. The captain recommended that the British state establish a line of transportation, making way for the economic colonization of the islands and orienting toward Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. He also proposed the establishment of a penal colony there, as Buenos Aires and Spain had previously attempted to do. The main factor, he insisted, would be maintaining vigilance: “But to whomsoever it may happen to colonize these islands, there can be no doubt that industry will be well rewarded, that health, safety, and a frequent colonization with the mother country, will be as certain as in any other colony.”5

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Figure 1. Southern Patagonia and distances to significant global destinations. Map created by Lorena Mondaca and Alberto Harambour-Ross.

The crucial turning point for the formation of the company that would unite these growing imperial markets with mail and cargo services, as argued by the historian Roland Duncan, was a conference of merchants held at Valparaíso in 1835. At the residence of one of the wealthiest British merchants in the south Pacific, Joshua Waddington, the entrepreneur William Wheelwright presented his proposal before a group that featured both Captain FitzRoy and the strongman of the Chilean government and mercantile leader Diego Portales. At this time, according to Duncan, “Portales assured the entrepreneur that the Chilean government would give immediate attention to granting the required concessions and guarantees for founding the company.”6 Soon after, Chile’s National Congress passed a law granting commercial privileges for a virtual company—through “methods of ‘lackadaisical’ Latin legislation.”7 The decree’s terms were reproduced one year later by Peru and Bolivia. Both countries’ laws included granting the “exclusive privilege” for steam navigation in “our ports or rivers open to the coastal trade” to the company.8

Several later meetings between British businessman of the South American Pacific, summoned by British diplomats, concluded by recommending to Her Majesty’s Government the awarding of privileges to Wheelwright’s project, considering “the expenses incurred . . . in procuring the privileges . . . and the great value of those services and privileges to the success of the enterprise.”9 Not even the war between Chile and the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation, whose unpopularity led to Portales’s execution in 1837, halted the formation of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company. In England, Wheelwright faced some resistance, but got support from key figures such as Admiral Fitzroy, Lord Cochrane, Lord Abinger, and the royal diplomat Peter Campbell Scarlett.10 As the entrepreneur’s biographer states, “persuasion by PSNC directors in commercial and government circles throughout 1839 achieved the desired effect, and a royal charter was awarded” the following year, granting both a subvention and a monopoly.11 In November 1842, the Foreign Office’s official John Bidwell wrote to John Walpole, one of his representatives in Chile, that it would be great to have logistic support at the Strait of Magellan, over which, he explained, Chile had juridical rights that had to be enforced. If not, he argued, “It will not have any right to give any person any kind of privilege.”12

Legal privileges granted in 1840 allowed the first two steamers of William Wheelwright’s Pacific Steam Navigation Company to arrive in Valparaíso and Callao from England, via the strait. They constituted the basis upon which the world’s greatest maritime enterprise was built. Contrary to the claims of traditional Chilean historiography, Chilean occupation was mainly due to the commercial possibilities of Wheelwright’s project and not because of O’Higgins clairvoyant territorial patriotism nor as a reaction against an imagined European occupation.13

The Effective Occupation of Malvinas/Falkland Islands

The naming of officials by Great Britain amid protests from Buenos Aires did not drive the colonization of the islands. Not until the 1850s did this enterprise gain notoriety through the private settlements of the Patagonian Missionary Society and the Falkland Island Company. The former, following successive failures and tragedies in its missionary incursions into southern Patagonia, founded the Missionary Station on Keppel Island in 1854, intending to transfer the Yagan from the Beagle Canal for their reeducation in the precepts of “civilization.” In late 1859, at the station of Wulaia Bay, eight missionaries were murdered by the Yagan. Keppel continued to act as the base from which the missionary colonization of the Beagle Canal would proceed via the foundation of the Ushuaia Station, on another Yagan estancia.14 This first colony south of the Magellan Strait would witness the attempted relocation in 1869 of canoe-building indigenous peoples who worked in exchange for rations, felling lumber to be sold at Port Stanley. The Falkland Islands Company, on the other hand, was key to the British occupation of the islands and held a monopoly on commercial and political activities until—at least—the attempted recovery on the part of Argentina in 1982.

The precarious British presence on the islands began to transform in 1846, when Queen Victoria sold most of the East Falkland/isla Soledad to the Lafone brothers. Probably the wealthiest English merchants in Río de la Plata, they were the suppliers and moneylenders who serviced the armies of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The navigation project from London to the Pacific with stations at Punta del Este and the island known at the time as Lafonia contemplated broad hunting rights for wild cattle and marine mammals across the archipelago. Colonization was delayed until the following decade, as the formidable maritime capacity of a growing empire proved incapable of establishing a significant presence on each new colonial possession—the islands were defined as such in 1843, the same year the Chilean colony was founded on the Strait of Magellan. Soon thereafter, the predation of wild fauna on the Falklands “precipitated a change toward the ovine industry,” which, contrary to the authorities’ intent, was based not on small- to mid-range colonization but rather a system of “absentee landowners and speculative investors.” After lobbying for a Royal Letter to expand his control over the territory and transportation, in 1851 Lafone transformed his economically depressed company into the Royal Falkland Land, Cattle, Seal and Fishery Company, later known as the Falkland Islands Company (FIC).

The company was the actual occupying force on the islands. Sheep and sheepherders transported from Great Britain replaced what few deserters and gauchos had been employed by Lafone, and they expanded the cattle industry: in twenty-five years, surplus capital was accumulated in the form of sheep, given that there were no longer any grazing pastures available. The main settlement consisted “entirely of employees of the Falkland Islands Co.” There were approximately fifty of them, “all Scots.” Around 1880, the colony was occupied by more than three hundred thousand sheep and only fifteen hundred people. Over the course of the following century, the human population would remain stable, employed by the main enterprise and a few lesser ones as well. Managers and prominent estancia ranchers comprised what was baptized a “sheepocracy,” one that controlled political and economic existence on the islands.

The Chilean Colonization of the Strait of Magellan

The historian David Day has proposed the concept of “supplanting societies” in order to explain the strength of a particular kind of colonialism: one that, rather than pursue economic exploitation of “native” labor, seeks to eradicate their presence and install its own dominion over the emptied territory. A paradigmatic case is that of Australia, colonized by Great Britain on the legitimizing principle that the continent island was considered a no man’s land, given the lack of a state or registry of property. Although the concept of res nullius is controversial, in practical terms it defined the policy followed by the empire and by Argentina and Chile with regard to the territories of the nations of Patagonia.15 As in other cases where market-oriented stock farmers deployed extreme violence against hunter-gatherers,16 this violence varied significantly in intensity depending on the possible rate of expansion over continental territory, initially, and that of Tierra del Fuego starting in the mid-1880s.

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Figure 2. Grave of Colonizers’ Cemetery at Josefina Station, Tierra del Fuego. The epitaph reads: “This stone was erected by their fellow employees in memory of Edward Williamson [English] and Emilio Traslaviña [unknown] who were killed by Indians in San Sebastián on January 16, 1896.” The Selknams had been captured in a raid and were sent to the station for deportation when they managed to kill the guards and escape. Beyond the tombstone appears a flock of sheep. The main building is the original shearing shed of the first station of the Sociedad Explotadora. It was used as place of confinement for Selknam people awaiting deportation to Dawson Island, just fifty miles across Inútil Bay.

Photograph courtesy of Alberto Harambour-Ross.

Punta Arenas had replaced in 1848 Fuerte Bulnes (1843) as the only Chilean enclave south of Chiloé, in Tehuelche territory, and it survived as an isolated penal colony until its partial destruction by a mutiny of prisoners and soldiers in 1877. Magallanes (as it was also called) subsisted thanks to state subsidies, the hunting of sea lions, and trade with indigenous peoples. By 1851, it had been devastated as a result of another, even more brutal uprising of inmates and guards known as the Cambiazo Mutiny. After that, the Chilean state attempted to encourage migration from Europe, but it was scant and residual. In the mid-1860s, a somewhat organized attempt was made to settle Chileans for the first time under the promise of land grants and rations. The Armada relocated hundreds of Chilote in 1867, which meant that farmers, not convicts and guards, constituted the majority of a population that barely reached eight hundred people around 1870. These farmers encountered a vast, unproductive steppe and an absent state. Only following the devastation of 1877 did Chile modify its colonization policy and define the area as subject to an intense diplomatic dispute with Argentina over National Territory. By virtue of this, all indigenous lands were legally redefined as state property and transformed into vacant territory. From that point forward, authorities began granting it to foreign cattlemen, fundamentally Europeans.17

In southern Argentina, the same thing happened at almost the same time. In 1879, War Minister Julio Argentino Roca launched the Conquest of the Desert, the name given to the military campaigns implemented by the state to expand its dominion into northern Patagonia, also claimed by Chile. The extermination and deportation of Pampa, Mapuche, and Tehuelche erased the “internal border” and consolidated the Argentinean position but stopped just north of what is now the province of Chubut in 1885, with Roca as president.18 In southern Patagonia, on the other hand, state presence continued to be quite weak. Not until 1879 was the port of Santa Cruz designated a maritime sub-delegation, transformed in 1884 into the capital of a new national territory under the same name. Government attempts to establish “pasture colonies” had not prospered at the port of Santa Cruz, where “three families that account for seventeen inhabitants” lived in 1880.19 The first governor, Carlos Moyano, continued the voyages of exploration that he had been staging since 1876, and in 1883 and 1885 he visited, respectively, Punta Arenas and Malvinas, seeking to attract cattlemen.

By 1881, state presence in southern Patagonia remained as precarious as it was in Malvinas, and territorial control had not yet been established by the cattle companies. Given the failure of their colonial policy, Chile and Argentina expanded into Patagonia and broadened the dogma of free commerce that unified the new countries of the Southern Cone with the United Kingdom, as part of what has been called the British “informal Empire.”20 During his visit to Port Stanley, Governor Dublé transported the sheep purchased by British merchant Henry Reynard and unloaded them in 1877 on an island that he granted in free concession. Reynard, at the time a partner of Elías Braun, would become in 1879 the British vice-consul, ensuring new commercial visits to the islands.21 That first transfer of sheep from Malvinas to Magallanes gave rise to a radical transformation of the landscape and economy of southern Patagonia. After Reynard, “other men soon followed the footsteps of the bold pioneer, for the Falklands were already fully stocked and overflowing with surplus animals.”22 While in 1877 there were five hundred sheep in Magallanes, less than a decade later there were around forty thousand, and in Malvinas they reached six hundred thousand.23 In 1894, Magallanes sustained more sheep than the archipelago; by the early 20th century, their number would reach two million.24

The governor of Santa Cruz, Carlos Moyano, followed in the footsteps of the Chilean Dublé. From Stanley, he offered concessions, purchased livestock, and finished opening up the colonization of Patagonia, up until then confined to the Chilean enclave and scattered settlements flying the Argentinean flag on the Atlantic coast. After the signing in 1881 of the Border Treaty between the two states, officials or former employees of the FIC accelerated the transfer of their excess capital to the continental plains. The company manager was also consul of Chile at the islands, since the voyage of Cublé, and Moyano would later marry the daughter of the British governor.25 This sealed what Martinic called a “natural incorporation into an imperial production scheme,” lending the southern Argentinean and Chilean territories “the character of virtual colonial tributaries” of England.26 Such was the “invasión malvinera,” in the words of Mauricio Braun.27

Occupying Tierra del Fuego

Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I heard say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves . . . [They] leave nothing standing.

— Thomas More, Utopia, Book 1.

To raise sheep, they killed the Indians! They wiped them out and especially throughout the pampas they killed even more, in order to ensure that there would be no Indians, then they put in sheep. Then they were at peace with their sheep, so that they would populate and produce with those sheep, for their gain, for their product. Thus they made their profits. That is why they killed the Indians.

— Federico Echeuline, Selknam survivor

The destruction caused by livestock expansion over farmlands in Scotland and England denounced by Thomas More rematerialized centuries later in Tierra del Fuego, where the introduction of sheep had a far swifter and more violent impact than on the opposite side of the strait.28 On the continent the indigenous peoples, including the Tehuelche, or “Patagones,” were pressed in combat by Roca’s troops to just north of Chubut; farther south, they were gradually displaced toward the mountain range starting in the late 1870s. Until then, they had maintained commercial and political relations with isolated Argentinean and Chilean authorities who sought out indigenous knowledge of the territory and backing in diplomatic disputes. To such a degree that both states granted concessions on their lands, commerce was established, and the Majada, the Tehuelche of the south, and the Aonikenk were dispersed and expelled from their land, dying from the diseases that came from abroad, including alcoholism. In contrast with the decades of coexistence that preceded the Tehuelche ethnocide, in Tierra del Fuego the contact between the Selknam, or Ona, and the Europeans and European Americans was marked by radicalism: it came about very violently, and very quickly.

In February of 1896, an envoy of the governor of Magallanes explained the predicament of the Selknam as follows:

This race, sir, . . . has been stripped as well of all the lands over which they were lords and masters, and the dispossession has been so violent, inhuman, and reckless that the border governments of Tierra del Fuego and the civilized races who were favored by the invasion have not taken the trouble to indicate how they expect more than five thousand innocents who at first did not put up any resistance to live from one day to the next.

In Chile, fields have been enclosed or fenced in with wire; hunting has been made inaccessible or diminished by the traffic of cattle and cattlemen; hunger compels the Indian to embrace the new breeds of animals installed on their lands; the new master or invader instigates a terrible struggle between rifle and bow and arrow in defense of his interests; the Indian is innocent and considers himself to be the rightful owner, compelled to defend his rights, obliged at the same time to preserve his own life and that of his children.29

As Adhikari and others have demonstrated for cases on different continents, market-oriented stock farmers deployed ultra-violence against hunter-gatherers.30 This gradual violence became radical and swift in Tierra del Fuego starting in 1885. As in Patagonia, the occupation of Tierra del Fuego began from the south, with the installation of missions originating in England, first, and Keppel (Malvinas/Falklands) as of 1869, but it advanced starting in 1881 from the north with the gold rush and then far more swiftly with the cattle companies after 1884.31 The “mining pioneers” that “launched the white population,” as Martinic would call them, began a brutal confrontation with the Selknam, mainly to capture women and children.32 As the sociologist Joaquín Bascopé has shown, the principal authorities (estancia managers and police) designated to control the predation that characterized gold fever became new “agents of violence,” “who could hardly be distinguished from private hunters.”33 They disembarked following the establishment of livestock settlements, four of which occupied over half of Tierra del Fuego, assigned to Chile under the agreement with Argentina within seven years.

In 1885, Wehrhahn y Cia., a trade house from Hamburg with a branch in Valparaíso associated with Rudolph Stubenrauch, a German businessman residing in Punta Arenas, disembarked at Gente Grande Bay with Malvina livestock. Afterward, in late 1890, Stubenrauch founded the Tierra del Fuego Sheep Farming Company, formed by Mont E. Wales, Waldron, & Wood, settlers from Malvinas, and José Nogueira of Portugal, who had made his fortune in Magallanes as a sea lion hunter and tamer. This estancia occupied 180,000 hectares. Around fifty kilometers of sea separated the two establishments. A third company in which Waldron, Woods, Wales, and Nogueira participated, was The Philip Bay Sheep Farming Company, also London-based, founded on lands managed by Mauricio Braun, brother-in-law to the Portuguese man who thanks to his political networking in Santiago obtained the greatest concession of them all: over one million hectares. Thanks to British capital, this gave rise to the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, a company that would engulf its neighbors, monopolizing lands, commerce, and transportation while wielding a power similar to that of the FIC in the Falklands.34

The main task of the sheepmen was to organize these new establishments and impose property boundaries on the local population, which resisted the invasion for nearly two decades by slaughtering livestock and destroying barbed wire fences.35 The harshest era of the policy of extermination against the Selknam people, from 1885 to 1897, has been documented by James Radburne, Jimmy, and William Blain.36 The persecution operated in a twofold manner, through murder and capture. Once they had been made prisoners, the Selknam faced deportation to the Salesian missions of Dawson Island in the southern Strait of Magellan and the Río Grande on the Atlantic coast. Their missionary confinement was oriented toward making them sedentary and training them in both the Catholic faith and wage labor, for which they were compelled to provide their services alongside “reduced” Haush or Ona from the south and Yagan and Kaweshkar, the so-called canoe people of Tierra del Fuego. As Clara García-Moro has shown, the “policy of mission concentration,” together with dire poverty and nutritional stress, explains the ease of contagion by new diseases. The graphics assembled by the author for Dawson show that the population was “inevitably condemned to extinction.”37 “Decidedly, there was no other solution,” Mauricio Braun wrote in his memoir: “We sensitive souls stand accused of having contributed to the extinction of the autochthonous aboriginal races; for example, we should have respected their habitat, assuring them dominion over the land; we ought to have created a fiscal reserve, so that they could live out their natural existences. But as regards the latter, fleeting idea, may I remind you of the misfortune of the deadly effect of disease contagion.”38

North of Tierra del Fuego, above all, as the Scotsman Blain would provide ample commentary on, repression was a constant.39 His narration absolves the estancia (owners, managers, and workers) of all crime and therefore presents a perspective according to which justice is inverted, as in the colonial epic popularized by Mateo Martinic: the foreigners are sovereign (they have a right over the lives and deaths of the “natives”) given that states have granted them this land in concession. Thus, the nation of the island has no right to the land it inhabits. It is worthwhile to point out here that in December 1895, Chilean courts ordered the trying of a case in response to “humiliations inflicted on the Indians of Tierra del Fuego,” a trial that was drawn out over nearly a decade and that ended with the absolution of all the accused. These included Blain’s direct bosses, the brothers Ernest and Montgomery Wales, and several of their companions in Springhill, as well as the head managers and employees of other estancias such as Moritz Braun, Alexander Cameron, and Rudolph Stubenrauch. By then what John Spears had predicted in 1894 had already been fulfilled: “The shepherd will drive them into a corner at last by extending his wire fences, and then extermination will come.”40 Or, as Martín Gusinde, a religious anthropologist, would note in 1919: “Today Tierra del Fuego is no longer the fatherland of the Fueguinos, who were feared for so long, but that of meek sheep.”41

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Figure 3. “Flock of Sheep on Tierra del Fuego Island.” Drawing from Theodor Ohlson, Durch Süd-Amerika (Hamburg: Bock, 1894), p. 12.

By then, the nation-states had begun to operate locally through the regulation of commerce, establishing control over the movement of goods and people across their common border by increasing their armed forces. The “Indian problem” ended with the genocide, and from the start of the decade of 1910 the “social issue” had manifested itself with a vengeance. Rural and urban workers built organizations that Luis Emilio Recabarren, the greatest union leader of his era, rated at the time as the most powerful of the Americas.42 Whether it was indeed the most active or not, the multiethnic and multinational Federación Obrera de Magallanes succeeded in regulating wage conditions through intense rural and urban strikes. Both the Chilean and the Argentinean states reacted by attempting to take on roles as mediators at first, but soon enough they chose to back the repressive demands of the powerful landowners’ lobby. From 1918 to 1920 in Magallanes, and from 1921 to early 1923 in Santa Cruz, military forces openly and clandestinely repressed strikers and labor activists, to the point of causing their organizations to disappear for nearly a decade. As a result of the show of military strength, the international boundary began to operate in 1923, for the first time effectively restricting transit between both countries.43 Until then, the only operative borders were the barbed wire fences of the estancias that extended across the border, and the only police forces were those represented by estancia managers, the commissaries appointed by state authorities.44

The Ona extermination, as well as the Tehuelche displacement, were the result of an invasión malvinera that translated into the establishment of ovine sovereignty. Neither the Argentinean nor the Chilean state defined the effective establishment of authority over the Patagonian steppes. The invasion of sheep, sheepmen, and British capital was the actual occupying force in the territory—an effective and efficient sovereignty. The precarious Argentinean and Chilean enclaves, especially the latter, facilitated expansion in order to materially occupy the interior of a territory that up until then had existed only as a metropolitan, diplomatic, and judicial fiction. It was through the estancia, as the fenced-in property of a product for export, that this endeavor was structured, followed by state authority, a monopoly on violence, and economic and border regulations. The estancias, in turn, were built thanks to indigenous land grants that the states defined as their own by virtue of their own jurisprudence.

From the late 19th century, the governors of Magallanes created the rural commissaries, an ad honorem authority to which they appointed estancia managers. Later on, within the context of labor agitation and state repression from 1919 to 1922, the regulation of human and commercial transit across the border between Magallanes and Santa Cruz and the Chilean and Argentinean sections of Tierra del Fuego took shape. This was a result of state action, which built its effective control of the region—or its full sovereignty—by establishing itself over the production nodes that had already been instituted throughout the steppe.

Discussion of the Literature

Traditional historiography on southern Patagonia, including Tierra del Fuego, has emphasized the essential role played by nation-states in driving colonization policies across the territory. From the 1840s, Argentina and Chile disputed the southern territories as part of their respective Hispanic legacies, and this was expressed both through diplomacy and in acts referring to the history of the region’s occupation and the administrative subdivisions of the empire. The polemic regarding Patagonia found in works by authors and politicians such as Juan Bautista Alberdi, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and Bartolomé Mitre in Argentina as well as Diego Barros Arana, and Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna active participants for or against occupation rights over one region or another. This tradition has spawned the creation and teaching of national history under the myth of the loss or theft of Patagonia by the neighboring state in each country. In this regard, Pablo Lacoste has written a major analytical work regarding the image of the Other on a statewide level.45

In the 20th century, different authors reproduced these nationalist theses, albeit while introducing a more regional reading of the history of the austral territories. The Historia de Santa Cruz by José Hilarión Lenzi (c. 1972) and the Historia de la Región Magallánica (1992) by Mateo Martinic express a nationalist regionalism framed by the defense of the historic and demographic particularity of each region with regard to the country to which they belong, while recognizing full rights of sovereignty “from time immemorial,” in the words of the latter.46 Likewise, and in a manner concordant with the geopolitical positions they defend, both authors highlight the historic prominence of the so-called pioneers—mostly European businessmen—as “great figures” of a colonization in which women, indigenous people, and workers have little or no presence. The work of Martinic, despite its racist passages, is probably the most influential with regard to Patagonia, and it has had a major impact on identity policies in Magallanes. It reveals his erudite knowledge in the guise of dozens of articles, books, and reports that allowed him to situate both geographic features and administrative facts with great precision while at the same time refusing to recognize that an indigenous genocide—that is, a planned and systematic extermination—took place. As in the case of Lenzi, and most other historiography, his work tends to construct an “autarchic” interpretation of regional development, centered on national geopolitical delimitations.

In an effort to synthesize these attempts to transcend international boundaries, Pedro Navarro Floria and Susana Bandieri have published books under the title Historia de la Patagonia. These cover different periods and areas of the vast Patagonian region and the Malvinas, although the research of sources on the Chilean side and the islands is less significant. Since the 1990s, studies have proliferated regarding aspects hardly touched on by traditional historiography. A more translational and comparative perspective is offered by “Borderland Sovereignties: Postcolonial Colonialism and State Making in Patagonia. Argentina and Chile, 1840s–1922,” Alberto Harambour’s doctoral thesis. Labor history made a strong appearance after the publication of the three volumes of Los vengadores de la Patagonia trágica, by Osvaldo Bayer, although their impact was postponed by censorship and repression during the military dictatorships in both countries. A re-edition in four volumes under the title La Patagonia rebelde in the 1990s and the film of the same name (1974, rereleased in 1984) permitted the diffusion and discussion of a consistent, well-documented work regarding the Santa Cruz labor movement up until the brutal repression of 1921–1922.47

Since 1990, regional history has been revisited through numerous contributions to a broad variety of topics, indicating an entry into social history. Sociologists such as Ramón Arriagada and Joaquín Bascopé have produced significant texts on regional social history. The first is the author of a well-documented chronicle regarding the labor uprising of Puerto Natales, in 1919, the beginning of the end of an agitated decade of social mobilization.48 Bascopé, on the other hand, has researched the colonization of Tierra del Fuego from a perspective that integrates detailed descriptions with postmodern narratives.49 The journalist Carlos Vega Delgado has produced a vast body of research regarding indigenous, urban, and labor movement history in Magallanes. In addition to the works he has authored, he has published dozens of volumes as the editor of Imprenta Atelí.50 The historian Carolina Odone and the aesthete Margarita Alvarado, together with other authors, have studied in depth issues of indigenous photography and comparative representations in the extreme south. Odone, moreover, has written a thorough doctoral thesis regarding experiences at the Salesian mission of Dawson Island. The missions, above all in the Argentinean section of the territory, have likewise been studied by María Andrea Nicoletti. Alberto Harambour has analyzed in various articles processes of racialization and labor conflict; more recently, he has worked on the Selknam genocide and travel memoirs.51

As for anthropology, notable works include Romina Casali on the Selknam extermination and the missions, and Kenny Low and María Eva Rodríguez on identity and storytelling. The former delves into the conceptualization of masculinity in the rural sector, while the latter concentrates on the much-debated notion of “Tehuelche extinction” and the contemporary reconfiguration of identity.52 An anthropologist with numerous works regarding the period analyzed here is Alfredo Prieto, who has published specialized texts since the 1980s.53

With regard to Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego on the Argentinean side, notable contributions have been made by Pablo Navas regarding sovereignty and the judicial apparatus and by Rosario Guenaga about border history, ideologies, and the labor movement. In 1994, Guenaga published a detailed socioeconomic history of Patagonia. In addition, Ernesto Bohoslavsky was one of the first to study nationalism and class violence. His work El complot patagónico appeared in 2009. An author who passed away far too soon, Elsa Mabel Barbería, published in 1995 the largest study of property formation in Santa Cruz. Hers is an indispensable work regarding the early colonization cycle.54

Primary Sources

A discussion regarding the need to combine different archives in order to approach the social history of the colonization of Patagonia is found in the text “Capturar el viento” by Harambour.55 The major regional depositories can be found in provincial capitals. Located in Punta Arenas, the capital of the Chilean region of Magallanes, is the Archivo Regional de Magallanes in the former Moritz or Mauricio Braun mansion, now a museum. Access is not open; it is therefore recommended that permits be processed in advance. The documentation stored there is very valuable to the study of ovine colonization; there are numerous notebooks containing copies of the original owner’s prolific correspondence, as well as that of certain cattle establishments. Moreover, this city boasts the Instituto de la Patagonia, which forms part of the Universidad de Magallanes and offers a decent specialized library, a photography collection, and business documentation from different periods and of variable access, which ought to be improved by a digitalization initiative that is currently underway. At Río Gallegos, except for the case of the judicial archive, which does not provide regular access to researchers, the hard work of those in charge of the depositories greatly facilitates research. The Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Santa Cruz has an organization that enables researchers to locate and access material quickly and conveniently. Here is found the greater part of the correspondence produced by the governors of the former national territory, which did not become a province until 1955. Also available is the Archivo Municipal, which contains information about that institution as well as a collection of periodicals. In the Argentinean part of Tierra del Fuego, Ushuaia is the city that houses the grand Museo del Fin del Mundo, located in a former penitentiary. This is an archive with documentation related to the history of the settlement-cum-city, fundamentally about penitentiary operations, the guards and prisoners’ movement, and many of their files.

In Buenos Aires and Santiago are found the Archivo General de la Nación and the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), respectively. In the former it is possible to gain access to collections that have not been catalogued in the ministries; therefore, locating correspondence to the southern territories is no easy task; there are too few documents among the vast majority addressed to provinces that are more important, economically and demographically speaking. In the latter are also found the ministerial collections, where cataloguing is more advanced. Moreover, the volume of information available is comparatively broader (Chile occupies a less extensive territory than Argentina, and the economic and demographic weight of Punta Arenas made it a Patagonian metropolis of sorts from 1890 to the late 1920s). Available for consultation at the AHN are ministerial records, censuses, and legislative acts, among other printed sources. Both countries possess a Biblioteca Nacional and Biblioteca del Congreso that extend open access to researchers. In Buenos Aires, it is possible to access fairly exhaustive collections of the national press and legal documents, while Santiago offers more local and provincial press as well as historiographic texts. The Biblioteca del Congreso also houses a great many periodicals and a broad collection of diplomatic and political texts in general. The Biblioteca Nacional, located in the same building as the Archivo, houses the largest collection of metropolitan, regional, and local press as well as rooms for researchers with abundant printed sources.

Beyond South America, London is where the greatest volume of information regarding Patagonia and the Malvinas-Falklands is concentrated. Both the Foreign Office archives and the British Library collections contain sources regarding administration and printed materials that are indispensable in order to better comprehend different dimensions of the colonial process, from the remotest antecedents to the end of the wool cycle. Here, as in other libraries, one may access numerous antique printed sources as well as other material re-edited in recent years, especially travel literature.56 Many of the original editions for these sources have been digitalized and are available on the Internet Archive. Finally, ample unedited material is available on the websites listed in the next section, which contain in addition to texts extensive transcriptions of documentary sources, such as those that refer to the Selknam extermination compiled by authors like Carlos Vega y Nelly and Guillermo Penazzo or to the police on the Argentinean side of Tierra del Fuego by Arnoldo Canclini.57

Further Reading

  • Bandieri, Susana. Historia de la Patagonia. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2005.
  • Barbería, Elsa Mabel. Los dueños de la tierra en la Patagonia Austral, 1880–1920. Río Gallegos, Argentina: Universidad Federal de la Patagonia Austral, 1995.
  • Bascopé, Joaquín. “De la exploración a la explotación: Tres notas sobre la colonización de la Patagonia Austral.” Nuevo Mundo/Mundos Nuevos (2009).
  • Beerbohm, Julius. Wanderings in Patagonia, or Life among the Ostrich-Hunters. London: Chatto & Windus, 1881.
  • Bohoslavsky, Ernesto. El complot patagónico: Nación, conspiracionismo y violencia en el sur de Argentina y Chile (siglos XIX y XX). Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2009.
  • Borrero, José María. La Patagonia Trágica. Asesinatos, piratería y esclavitud. Ushuaia, Argentina: Zagier & Urruty, c. 1928.
  • Braun, Mauricio. Memorias de una vida colmada. Buenos Aires: self-published, 1985.
  • Guenaga, Rosario. Santa Cruz y Magallanes: Historia Socioeconómica de los Territorios de la Patagonia Austral Argentina y Chilena (1843–1925). Mexico City: IPGH, 1994.
  • Harambour, Alberto. “Borderland Sovereignties: Postcolonial Colonialism and State Making in Patagonia (Argentina and Chile, 1840–1925).” PhD Diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2012.
  • Harambour, Alberto. “Capturar el viento: Nómades e inmigrantes en los archivos estatales y empresariales (Patagonia, Argentina y Chile, 1840–1920).” Nuevo Mundo/Mundos Nuevos (2015).
  • Harambour, Alberto. “El ovejero y el bandido: Trayectorias, cruces y genocidio en dos relatos de viaje británicos en Tierra del Fuego (década de 1890).” Anales de Literatura Chilena 16 (2015): 163–182.
  • Marchante, José Luis. Menéndez. Rey de la Patagonia. Santiago: Catalonia, 2014.
  • Martinic, Mateo. La Tierra de los Fuegos. Punta Arenas, Chile: Municipalidad de Porvenir, 1982.
  • Martinic, Mateo. Historia de la Región Magallánica. 4 vols. Punta Arenas, Chile: Universidad de Magallanes, 2006.
  • Melville, Elinor, G. K. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  • Musters, George C. At Home with the Patagonians: A Year’s Wanderings over Untrodden Ground from the Straits of Magellan to the Rio Negro. London: John Murray, 1871.
  • Navarro, Pedro. “La Patagonia en la clasificación del hombre: El desencantamiento de los ‘patagones’ y su aporte a la historia de la Antropología.” Revista Española de Antropología Americana 35 (2005): 169–189.
  • Navarro Floria, Pedro. Historia de la Patagonia. Madrid: Ciudad Argentina, 1999.
  • Nicoletti, María Andrea. Indígenas y misioneros en la Patagonia. Buenos Aires: Continente, 2008.
  • Nouzeilles, Gabriela. “Patagonia as Borderland: Nature, Culture and the Idea of the State.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 8 (1999): 35–48.
  • Penaloza, Fernanda, Jason Wilson, and Claudio Canaparo, eds. Patagonia: Myths and Realities. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010.
  • Viñas, David. Indios, Ejército y Frontera. Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos Editor, 1982.

Notes

  • 1. Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation, trans. and ed. R. A. Skelton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969).

  • 2. Pedro Sarmiento, Viage al Estrecho de Magallanes por el Capitán Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa en los años de 1579 i 1580 y Noticia de la Expedición que después hizo para poblarle (Madrid: Imprenta Real de la Gazeta, 1768).

  • 3. Roberto Laver, The Falklands/Malvinas Case: Breaking the Deadlock in the Anglo-Argentine Sovereignty Dispute (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2001).

  • 4. Charles Darwin, Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, vol. 3 (London: Henry Colburn, 1939), p. 245.

  • 5. Robert Fitzroy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, between the Years 1826 and 1836, Describing Their Examination of the Southern Shores of South America, and the Beagle’s Circumnavigation of the Globe, vol. 2 (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), pp. 227, 262–264.

  • 6. Roland Duncan, “William Wheelright and Early Steam Navigation in the Pacific 1820–1840,” The Americas 32.2 (1975): 268. See also Enrique Bunster, “Los primeros vapores: PSNC,” in Bala en Boca, ed. Enrique Bunster (Santiago: Del Pacífico, 1973), pp. 125–135.

  • 7. Duncan, “William Wheelright,” pp. 269–270.

  • 8. See “Copy of a Decree of the Chilean Government in Favor of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company, Projected by Mr. William Wheelwright,” August 25, 1835, and “Copy of the License of the Gov of the North and South Peruvian States to Mr. William Wheelwright, Granting Him or His Representatives an Exclusive Privilege, for Ten Years, to Navigate the Coasts and Ports Thereof, with Vessels Propelled by Steam or Any Other Mechanical Power,” September 13, 1836, in Copy of a Decree of the Chilian Government in favor of the “Pacific Steam-Navigation-Company”, Lima, 1835.

  • 9. “Report of the Committee appointed, by a Public Meeting of British Merchants and Residents at Lima and Callao, to Inquire into the Expediency and Practicability of Establishing a Periodical Intercourse, between Great Britain and the Western Coast of South America, via Panama,” September 5, 1836, in Documents relating to the Steam Navigation in the Pacific (Lima: Josep Masias, 1836).

  • 10. Ibid.; Frederick Alcock, Trade and Travel in South America (London: George Philip & Son, 1903). pp. 13–14, 370–371.

  • 11. Fifer, J. Valerie, William Wheelwright (1798–1873). Steamship and railroad pioneer. Early yankee enterprise in the development of South America (Newburyport: Historical Society of Old Newbury, 1998), p. 44.

  • 12. Letter of John Bidwell to John Walpole, November 14, 1842, in Patricio Estellé, “Documentos Inéditos Referidos a la Ocupación Chilena del Estrecho de Magallanes,” Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia 5 (1974): 54.

  • 13. This argument is central in Mateo Martinic’s work, the most influential on Patagonian historiography since the publication of his Presencia de Chile en la Patagonia Austral, 1843–1879 (Santiago: Andrés Bello, 1963). It has been widely reproduced in textbooks.

  • 14. See Joaquín Bascopé, “El encantador de yaganes: Entrenamiento de nativos fueguinos en la isla Keppel, 1854–1869,” CLACSO, Área de Promoción de la Investigación, 2016.

  • 15. An excellent and brief bibliographical discussion can be found in “Terra Nullius and the Polar Regions”. In Andrew Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 302–331; and Walter Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

  • 16. Mohamed Adhikari, “‘We are determined to exterminate them’: The Genocidal Impulse behind Commercial Stock Farmer Invasions of Hunter-Gatherer Territories,” in Genocide on Settler Societies: When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Cape Town, South Africa: UCT Press, 2014), 1–31.

  • 17. “A don Carlos Wood se le debe el primer y decisivo impulso en este sentido, cuando llamó a su despacho a los más importantes y más pudientes entre los colonos y los instó para que recorrieran la región circundante, especialmente hacia el norte . . . sin crear problemas entre ellos, porque había tierra de sobra para todos y las poblaran con ovejas. Él les aseguraría la posesión de lo que pudieran abarcar mediante permisos sujetos a un pequeño canon.” See Mauricio Braun, Memorias de una vida colmada (Buenos Aires: self-published, 1985), pp. 54–55. An analysis of ethnic favoritism and the corruption associated with land distribution is in Alberto Harambour, “The State and the Making of the Sovereignty of Capital,” in Borderland Sovereignties: Postcolonial Colonialism and State Making in Patagonia (PhD Diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2012), pp. 121–179.

  • 18. Ver David Viñas, Indios, Ejército y Frontera, 3d ed. (Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos Editor, 2003), especially chapter 1, “Roca y el Ejército argentino en 1879.”

  • 19. Memoria del Ministerio del Interior, 1880, cited in Juan H. Lenzi, Historia de Santa Cruz (Río Gallegos, Argentina: n.p., [c. 1972], p. 407.

  • 20. For a good introduction to the concept of informal British Empire, see Brown (Ed.) Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce, and Capital (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); and Harambour, Borderland Sovereignties … op.Cit., especially chapter 3, “The State and the Making of the Sovereignty of Capital.”

  • 21. See Henry William Reynard and Charles Reynard, A Life of Henry L. Reynard, part 2, Biography by Henry William and Charles Robert Reynard, Sons of Henry Leonard Reynard. Manuscript reproduced by Patlibros.org (.) ([c. 1920].

  • 22. Walter Young, A Merry Banker in the Far East (and South America) (London: John Lane, 1917), p. 189.

  • 23. Alejandro Bertrand, Memoria sobre la Rejión Central de las Tierras Magallánicas presentada al Señor Ministro de Colonización por Alejandro Bertrand, Injeniero Civil (Santiago: Imprenta Nacional, 1886), p. 123.

  • 24. Mateo Martinic, “Patagonia Austral: 1885–1925: Un caso singular y temprano de integración regional autárquica,” in La frontera argentino-chilena como espacio social, comp. S. Bandieri (Neuquén, Argentina: Limay, 2001), p. 483.

  • 25. Mateo Martinic, “Relaciones y comercio entre Magallanes y las islas Falkland (1845–1950),” Magallania 37.2 (2009): p. 14; and S. Cuaniscú, Santa Cruz: Somera historia de su conquista por la civilización; Estado actual; Descripción física; Histórica; Ganadera; Industrial; Comercial y social; Gráficos y estadísticas (Territorio Nacional de Santa Cruz, Argentina: n.p., 2009), p. 37.

  • 26. Mateo Martinic, Historia de la Región Magallánica, 4 vols. (Punta Arenas, Chile: Universidad de Magallanes, 2006), 906.

  • 27. Braun, Memorias, 78–79.

  • 28. The text by More was quoted by Marx in The Capital for explaining “the expropriation and expulsion f the agricultural population” in Great Britain: it was the beginning of what he termed primitive or original accumulation. In colonial areas such as Australia or Patagonia, it intricately relates to settler colonialism’s supplanting of native communities. Echeuline’s testimony appeared in Anne Chapman, Fin de un mundo. Los Selknam de Tierra del Fuego (Santiago: Taller Experimental Cuerpo Pintados, 2002), p. 70.

  • 29. Manuscript by Domingo Canales to Gobernador Señoret, Punta Arenas, February 22, 1896, in Fondo Gobernación de Magallanes-Archivo Histórico Nacional, vol. 8, Agricultura e Industria de Magallanes.

  • 30. Adhikari. “‘We are determined.”

  • 31. A good analysis of the European-American invasion of the Fueguino archipelago is in Joaquín Bascopé, “El oro y la vida salvaje en Tierra del Fuego, 1880–1914,” Magallania 38.2 (2010): 5–26.

  • 32. Mateo Martinic “Panorama de la colonización en Tierra del Fuego entre 1881 y 1900,” Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia 4 (1973): 7.

  • 33. Bascopé, “El oro y la vida,” 10; Joaquín Bascopé, “Salvajismo y moral sexual en Patagonia austral, 1884–1920,” manuscript for a presentation made at Taller Cuerpos sexuados, trabajo y violencia, Universidad Católica del Norte, 2009.

  • 34. Harambour, Borderland Sovereignties, pp. 104–113.

  • 35. The Ona “seem to have been as obtuse in understanding points of law regarding land titles as North American Indians have always been,” as John R. Spears wrote in 1894. According to Spears, this was a typical process of livestock colonization, in which “the sheep business” would end up covering “all the grass land of the island, in spite of the Onas, just as it spread in Australia in spite of the black fellows, and as cattle spread in Texas in spite of the Comanches.” The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), p. 127.

  • 36. Herbert Childs, El Jimmy: Outlaw of Patagonia (London, J. B. Lippincott, 1936), p. 51. An analysis of both memories is in Alberto Harambour, “El ovejero y el bandido: Trayectorias, cruces y genocidio en dos relatos de viaje británicos en Tierra del Fuego (década de 1890),” Anales de Literatura Chilena 24 (2015): 163–182.

  • 37. Clara García-Moro, “Reconstrucción del proceso de Extinción de los Selknam a través de los libros misionales,” Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia 21 (1992): 44–45.

  • 38. The transmission of diseases also appears in Blain’s memoir. Braun, Memorias de una Vida Colmada pp. 136–137.

  • 39. Alberto Harambour, Un viaje a las colonias. La colonización de Malvinas, Patagonia y Tierra del Fuego en las memorias y el diario de un ovejero escocés (1878–1898) (Santiago: DIBAM, forthcoming).

  • 40. Spears, Gold Diggings of Cape Horn, p. 133.

  • 41. Martin Gusinde, “Expedición a la Tierra del Fuego,” Publicaciones del Museo de Etnología y Antropología de Chile 2 (1920): 18.

  • 42. Luis Emilio Recabarren, “La Federación Obrera de Magallanes,” La Aurora (Taltal), June 24, 1916, reprinted in Recabarren: Escritos de Prensa, eds. Ximena Cruzat and Eduardo Devés, vol. 3 (Santiago: Terranova, 1986), pp. 120–122.

  • 43. Carlos Vega, La Masacre en la Federación Obrera de Magallanes: El movimiento Obrero Patagónico-Fueguino hasta 1920 (Punta Arenas, Chile: Atelí, 1995); Alberto Harambour, “El Movimiento Obrero y la Violencia Politica en el Territorio de Magallanes” (bachelor’s thesis, P. Universidad Católica, Santiago, 2000); Harambour, “Racialización desde afuera, etnización hacia adentro: Clase y región en el movimiento obrero de la Patagonia, principios del siglo XX,” in Historias de Racismo y Discriminación en Chile, eds. R. Gaune and M. Lara (Santiago: Uqbar, 2009), pp. 369–394; and Ernesto Bohoslavsky, El complot patagónico: Nación, conspiracionismo y violencia en el sur de Argentina y Chile (siglos XIX y XX) (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2009).

  • 44. Alberto Harambour, “Monopolizar la violencia en una frontera colonial: Policías y militares en Patagonia austral (Argentina y Chile, 1870–1930),” Quinto Sol. Revista de Historia Regional 20.1 (April 2016): 1–27.

  • 45. Pablo Lacoste, La imagen del otro en las relaciones de la Argentina y Chile (1534–2000) (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003); and Rolando Hanglin, “¿Es cierto que Sarmiento quiso entregar la Patagonia a Chile?,” La Nación (Buenos Aires), February 14, 2012.

  • 46. José Hilarión Lenzi, Historia de Santa Cruz (1972); and Martinic, Historia de la Región Magallánica.

  • 47. Pedro Navarro Floria, Historia de la Patagonia (Madrid: Ciudad Argentina, 1999); Susana Bandieri Historia de la Patagonia (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2005); Harambour, “Borderland Sovereignties”; and Osvaldo Bayer, Los vengadores de la Patagonia trágica.

  • 48. Ramón Arriagada, La Rebelión de los Tirapiedras. Puerto Natales 1919 (Punta Arenas: UMAG-Fiordo Azul, 2010).

  • 49. Joaquin Bascopé, “Bajo tuición. Infancia y extinción en la historia de la colonización fueguina”, Corpus 1.1 (2011): 2–20; “Pasajeros del Poder Propietario. La Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego y la Biopolítica Estanciera (1890–1920)”, Magallania 36.2 (2008): 19–44; and “De la exploración a la explotación. Tres notas sobre la colonización de la Patagonia Austral”, Nuevo Mundo. Mundos Nuevos (2009).

  • 50. Carlos Vega, El libro de Oro de Impactos. Antología preparada por Carlos Vega Delgado (Punta Arenas: Fondart-Atelí, 2006); Carlos Vega y Paola Grendi, Vejámenes Inferidos a Indígenas de Tierra del Fuego. Vol.3. Documentos (Punta Arenas: Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena XII Región, 2002); and La Masacre en la Federación Obrera de Magallanes. El movimiento Obrero Patagónico-Fueguino hasta 1920 (Punta Arenas: Atelí, 1995).

  • 51. María Andrea Nicoletti, Indígenas y misioneros en la Patagonia (Buenos Aires: Continente, 2008); Alberto Harambour, “El ovejero y el bandido. Trayectorias, cruces y genocidio en dos relatos de vioaje británicos en Tierra del Fuego (década de 1890)”, Anales de Literatura Chilena 16.24 (2015): 163–182; “Documentos inéditos para la Historia de Magallanes. Memorias de William Blain en Malvinas y Patagonia (c. 1881–1890)”, Magallania 43.2 (2015), 223–249; “Capturar el viento. Nómades e inmigrantes en los archivos estatales y empresariales (Patagonia, Argentina y Chile 1840–1920)”, Nuevo Mundo, Nuevos Mundos (2015);and “Region, nation, state-building. On the configuration of hegemonic identities in Patagonia, Argentina and Chile, 1870s–1920s,” in S. Baumbach (ed.), Regions of Culture—Regions of Identity/Kulturregionen—Identitatsregionen (Trier: GCSC-WVT, 2010), 49–62.

  • 52. Kenny Low, Las penas son de nosotros, las ovejas son ajenas'. Construcción de la masculinidad entre ovejeros de la estancia magallánica (Santiago: Tesis de Licenciatura en Antropología Social, Universidad de Chile, 2001); Mariela Eva Rodríguez, “De cómo murió el chilote Otey': Testimonio de una frontera desangrada en la década del ʻ20”, Revista Austral de Ciencias Sociales (2006), 79–100; “¿Indígenas, obreros rurales o extranjeros? Migraciones chilotas en la literatura de viajes de los años ‘30”, Nuevo Mundo. Mundos Nuevos (2004).

  • 53. Alfredo Prieto, Arquería de Tierra del Fuego (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2011).

  • 54. Pablo Navas, La construcción de soberanía y el control social en la periferia patagónica desde la cárcel de Río Gallegos (1895–1957) (La Plata: Doctoral dissertation, UNLP, 2012); Rosario Guenaga, Santa Cruz y Magallanes: Historia Socioeconómica de los Territorios de la Patagonia Austral Argentina y Chilena (1843–1925) (Mexico City: IPGH, 1994); Bohoslavsky, El complot patagónico; and Elsa Mabel Barbería, Los dueños de la tierra en la Patagonia Austral, 1880–1920 (Río Gallegos, Argentina: Universidad Federal de la Patagonia Austral, 1995).

  • 55. Alberto Harambour, “Capturar el viento: Nómades e inmigrantes en los archivos estatales y empresariales (Patagonia, Argentina y Chile, 1840–1920),” Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos, 2015.

  • 56. Key texts in travel literature are George Musters, At Home with the Patagonians: A Year’s Wanderings over Untrodden Ground from the Straits of Magellan to the Rio Negro (London: John Murray, 1871); Florence Dixie, Across Patagonia (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1880); Julius Beerbohm, Wanderings in Patagonia or Life among the Ostrich-Hunters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1877); Alberto Harambour, Un viaje a las colonias. La colonización de Malvinas, Patagonia y Tierra del Fuego en las memorias y el diario de un ovejero escocés (1878–1898) (Santiago: Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana-DIBAM, 2016); Ramón Lista, Viaje al país de los Tehuelches: Exploraciones en la Patagonia Austral (Buenos Aires: Imp. de Martín Biedma, 1879); Mateo Martinic, ed., Marinos de a caballo: Exploraciones terrestres de la Armada de Chile en la Patagonia austral y la Tierra del Fuego, 1877–1897 (Valparaíso: Universidad de Magallanes—Universidad de Playa Ancha, 2002); Francisco P. Moreno, Viaje a la Patagonia Austral, 1876–1877 (Buenos Aires: Solar/Hachette, 1969); Roberto Payró, La Australia Argentina: Excursión periodística á las costas patagónicas, Tierra del Fuego é Isla de los Estados (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de La Nación, 1898); Hesketh Prichard, Through the Heart of Patagonia (London: William Heinemann, 1902); Robert Barret, A Yankee in Patagonia: Edward Chace, his thirty years there 1898–1928 (Cambridge, U.K.: V. Reffer & Sons, 1931); and Childs, El Jimmy.

  • 57. Carlos Vega and Paola Grendi, Vejámenes Inferidos a Indígenas de Tierra del Fuego, vol. 3, Documentos (Punta Arenas, Chile: CONADI XII Región, 2002); Nelly Iris Penazzo de Penazzo, Wot’n: Documentos del genocidio Ona (Buenos Aires: Arlequín de San Telmo, 1995); and Arnoldo Canclini, Colección documental: El Presidio de Ushuaia, 5 vols. (Ushuaia: Ediciones Monte Oliva, 2009).