Former Bayonet

[Chris Evans]

Originally Posted by Fernando K

Hello

A series of personal interpretations, from the sources or bibliography, which seems to be fundamentally Domenech. Domenech is an Argentine essayist, and his expressions must submit to criticism.

He maintains that the gauchos were "forbidden" after the war of independence. Exactly the gauchos or criollos were the members of the liberating armies and later, of the fratricidal struggles. The facones, caroneros or no, like all type of knife, continued using, in spite of the real cedulas or the republican decrees.

Fernando K

Doemenech's Dagas de Plata is probably the best book on the subject to date, a vast advance on Osornio’s little book, and an invaluable resource for collectors; But it has its limitations on account of what he could fit into a single volume and thus he could only scratch the surface of the history of the flatlands and thus contextualize the weapons that his work deals with.

As I said in my earlier post, a huge problem for the modern student of the subject is that the "word" gaucho dramatically changed meaning in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries and with it the depiction of the attendant equestrian culture of the pampas, which included weaponry. This has resulted in a very misleading presentation of the related subjects by most writers, and one has to have a good grasp of history to be able to disentangle facts from what are often mere romantic eulogies of a bygone era.

Works like Martin Fierro and Facundo Quiroga will broaden one’s understanding as will works in English like Gauchos & The Vanishing Frontier by Slatta, Argentine Caudillo Juan Manuel De Rosas, and Massacre In The Pampas, 1872, both by Lynch.

The challenge for collectors is to understand the men of the pampas in a rapidly changing cultural environment, as that once barely populated wilderness was settled and transformed into the source of the prosperity that characterized the “bella epoca” by way of commercial grazing. And all this occurred in less than a century, commencing around 1810 and ending by around 1890.

Cheers
Chris