Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [52]
I asked for town history at the tourism information office in Sierra de la Ventana, and the woman handed me a thick three-ring binder. “This is all the history,” she said. The folder included “recent histories” of all the nearby towns, city maps, ecological studies, and park histories, even a list of references and a course layout from the city’s first country club. “All the history” didn’t include much about the Indians though. One document mentioned that the fertility of the valleys and protection of the mountains made Sierra de la Ventana an appealing place to shelter from Rosas’s raids, and also one great battle in the extermination war, on the plain near the town of Tornquist, where two hundred Indians were killed. Darwin commented on the battle in his own journal: “The Sierra de la Ventana was formerly a great place of resort for the Indians; three or four years ago there was much fighting there; my guide was present when many men were killed; the women escaped to the saddle back & fought most desperately with big stones; many of them thus saved themselves.”
When I had finished with the binder I returned it to the office and tried to find the town library. In a building next to the school, a middle-aged, slightly roundish woman with short black hair and glasses sat surrounded by translated bestsellers by Dan Brown, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stephen King, and Danielle Steel. We were interrupted every few minutes by schoolchildren in white lab coats needing help finding books.
Sara Bellabarba became animated when I asked about Indians. “It’s very difficult to tell the history of this place because we don’t have it,” she said. “There is very little about the indigenous people here. And about the war, it’s also difficult. I don’t agree with it, because we moved onto their land and they fought back. If someone invaded my house, there would be a battle.”
Darwin wasn’t inspired to act, but he despised the cruelty of the Indian wars. One soldier reported to him the “unquestionable fact, that all the women who appear above twenty years old, are massacred in cold blood.” Darwin, shocked, called such murders inhuman. “He answered me, ‘Why what can be done, they breed so.’” In other conversations, Darwin noticed that everyone believed the war just, “because it is against Barbarians.” He concluded in his journal, “Who would believe in this age in a Christian, civilized country that such atrocities were committed?”
10: SIERRA DE LA VENTANA
Cerro Tres Picos
I had now been several days without tasting anything except meat & drinking mattee. I found this new regimen agreed very well with me, but at the same time felt hard exercise was necessary to make it do so.
—BEAGLE DIARY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1833
SIERRA DE LA VENTANA has roughly one ice cream store for every four hundred residents. Darwin’s primary purpose in visiting this sleepy place—there wasn’t a town or an ice creamery at the time—was to try to climb a nearby mountain. An inveterate hill-hopper, Darwin almost always found joy in climbing. But there was little joy in this expedition. “I do not think Nature ever made a more solitary desolate looking mountain,” he wrote from the approach. “It is very steep, rough & broken. It is so completely destitute of all trees, that we were unable to find even a stick to stretch out the meat for roasting, our fire being made of dry thistle stalks.” The next day he became the first European to explore the highest mountain in the modern-day province of Buenos Aires, the 4,060-foot-tall Cerro Tres Picos.
The mountain shot up over the town from a large private estancia, and in the evening I called the ranch’s tourism coordinator and asked whether I could hike it. “Come early,” she said. “It will take you ten hours. If you don’t leave by nine, you can