Tierra del Fuego Southern Argentina

When we’d pulled out of the airport early that first morning, we had traveled west, or maybe north — I couldn’t have told you. The land opened green and went on, and on. The ground seemed increasingly rough, lumpy in a way I didn’t understand, and the wind kept rising — not a gust that comes and goes, but something that simply grew fiercer the farther we went. We stopped to get coffee at a simple place at the side of the road, then drove on. If there’d been a compass on the dash, it might have read, ever more remote.

Marcos talked as we drove, telling us the basics about places we passed. He called them estancias — simply the Spanish word for ranch, I reminded myself. But he also described them as sheep farms, which tripped me up. Only a few months earlier, I’d ridden in New Zealand, where the sheep were everywhere, in every direction, lining the ridges and massing over the fields. But here, looking out at the vast ground and the enormous sky, I saw no sheep. None. No cattle, either. No sign of any livestock at all.

So I wondered: If they’re sheep farms, where are the sheep? And if there aren’t any sheep, then where did they go? And if these are sheep farms without any sheep, what holds these estancias together, with all this vast land surrounding them? Too uncertain to ask even the simplest question — but where are the sheep? — I kept it to myself, and watched through the window.

As it turns out, though, the question wasn’t simple at all.

The First Peoples

Long before sheep ever emerged on this island, more than 10,000 years before the arrival of livestock and fences, Tierra del Fuego’s Isla Grande — separated from the mainland by the Strait of Magellan — was occupied by three distinct peoples who inhabited three ecological contexts. For thousands of years, these peoples of the far south occupied the island, developing cultures precisely adapted to one of the most demanding environments on earth: the wind, the cold, the seasonal rhythms of the waters that outsiders would later name the Beagle and the Strait. They were not marginal inhabitants of a marginal place. They were the long-term custodians of a specific and intricate world.

The smallest group, the Haush, were land-based hunter-gatherers who lived in the subantarctic forest and along the exposed coast of the rugged Mitre Peninsula. The nomadic, canoe-faring Yámana lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering, traveling along the intricate waterways, fjords, and archipelagos south of Isla Grande, extending from what is now known as the Beagle Channel. They kept warm by maintaining small fires on insulated clay hearths inside their bark canoes, a practice that gave rise to the island’s name: in 1520, while passing through the strait that would later be named for him, Ferdinand Magellan — Portuguese, sailing for Spain — saw fires along the coast. According to traditional accounts, Magellan called the place Tierra del Humo, the Land of Smoke. It’s said that back home in Spain, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V — observing that where there was smoke there was certainly fire — promptly renamed the land Tierra del Fuego. Away from the coast, the third group, the Selk’nam, occupied the open grasslands of the interior steppe, subsisting as forager-hunters, hunting guanaco and the small rodent they called apen, and building temporary shelters using hides and poles. Long before the sheep and the fences, before the gauchos and the estancias, the steppe of this ride was home to the Selk’nam.

Magellan’s voyage marked an inflection point — life for the indigenous people before European contact, and everything that came afterwards. For three centuries, though, the afterwards came on slowly — a few passing ships, some seal hunters, an occasional missionary, as the peoples of Isla Grande — perhaps 300 Haush, and maybe 4,000 each for the Yámana and Selk’nam — continued as they always had.