EPUMER, the last ranquel indian CHIEF
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The great Painé's fourth son conceived in a Christian captive's belly, was born Epungner (two Foxes) for the year 1830, in the Mamuelmapú, (the country of the mountain) the land than his grandparents, Ranquil's pehuenches (common people: Ranqueles), conquered at the end of the century XVIII, evicting from there another men of American blood. From there his love and his effort to defend those mountains and that pampa, his forefathers's habitat for over a century. A desert endowed by the nature of inexhaustible freshwater lagoons: impenetrable forests that were preserving from all foreign intrusion themselves: Grasslands where was pasturing ranges and deer, birds of all spade and enriched for Spanish involuntarily with a foreign fauna cows and horses multiplied by the hundreds - in American ostrich between them -. We called him to make the diction easy, simply Epumer. Some add the last name that their Mariano brother embrace, that is: Roses. Epumer grew drinking the freedom of the Pampas. Soon he stand out for his courage and value. In the April 13, 1870, the coronel writer Lucio V.Mansilla, visit him at his Leuvuco's awnings. He met with "a man seemingly as of forty years, bass, fat, quite white and pink, snub-nosed, of thick lips and protruding, luxurious cheekbones in dressing, that having Christian blood in the veins, that he have died to several indiums with his own hands, seems that he is generous and loose, tame being good of the head, that not estandolo glues one of his stabs to the but painted. He took a great large knife with pod of silver gone across by the front, and Guayaquil looked after me below the wing of a rich sombrer of straw, adorned with a broad incarnate tape, painted of white flowers". Mansilla goes on: "Epumer's awning a quarter of Rose-Colored league of the one belonging to Mariano was far away. Live well and with luxury; Everybody gets to his house and is well received. He waited for me toward while. The awning had just been swept and watered; Everything was in order. Epumer seated in a tall hide seat of ram and blankets. Confront there was other but lifted, that the destined was me. Epumer himself levant, he shake hands, he hug, he told me than that it was my house, he made somebody seat me and after he took a seat you took a seat the. The conversation he hover around massage the habits of the indiums, asking me for apologies to be able to not give me, in razo of his poverty, like me you merited it. A well-educated, modest and obliging Christian would not have the warm reception donely better ... He do not have more than a woman, rare thing between the indiums, and he want her very much...". (1) ... In October 1878, the Argentine Government decided the occupation of the pampa to the Rio Negro (Black River), ordered for an Act of Congress. The flying columns were thrown at the Mamuelmapú's heart. Precisely join of those commissions, headed for the captain Ambrosio Carripilum, of the friendly indiums highlighted in New Sarmiento, and loose of another principal in command of the coronel Eduardo Racedo, early morning of the September 18, 1878, they fell on Leuvuco's abandoned tolderias, catching out the general headman than himself they give up prisoner without putting up a fight. Epumer found himself there taken apart, accompanied of three boys and eight women, raiseeing the harvest of wheat and barley that Christians had him shown to sow. With Epumer's prison, leaving the Nation ranquel without driver neither star that can guide them, so they followed their own luck that was "the fatal way to slavery". Notes: ( 1 ) L.V. Mansilla, A visit to the Ranquel Indians. Chapter 26. |
de "Una excursion a los Indios Ranqueles". L.V. Mansilla
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