In connexion with what I have said upon the trade of Buenos Ayres, a brief notice of the origin and extraordinary increase of the vast herds of horses and cattle which at present constitute so large a portion of the riches of Buenos Ayres, may perhaps be not uninteresting to some of my readers.
America is indebted to Europe for these animals, which were unknown to the people of the New World before its discovery by the Spaniards. Of the two it will easily be understood that the horses, which formed so important a feature in the military equipment of the conquerors, were the first introduced. In 1535, the Adelantado Mendoza, who was the first to effect a landing at Buenos Ayres, took seventy with him on board the expedition which accompanied him from Spain, of which perhaps half were lost on the voyage, if we may judge from the small number of cavalry--one author says twelve, another thirty--which he was able to muster in his first battle with the Indians. The few that survived, when his followers were shortly afterwards driven out of that part of the country by the warlike natives, were turned loose into the pampas, where they multiplied exceedingly, and were found in great numbers forty years afterwards by De Garay, when he re-established the Spanish settlement at Buenos Ayres.
It was in that expedition (in 1580) that De Garay carried from Paraguay the first horned cattle ever seen in the pampas. How the stock had previously reached Paraguay is thus told by Dean Funes, the native historian. He says, "In 1555 there arrived at Assumption, from San Francisco, on the coast of Brazil, a few straggling emigrants, amongst whom were two Portuguese gentlemen, brothers, of the name of Goa, having with them a bull and eight cows, the origin of that mighty stock of cattle which now forms the wonder of the provinces of La Plata." The Portuguese servant intrusted with the important charge of these animals in their long over-land journey from the coast, whose name was Gaete, was rewarded for his care of them with one of the cows, a payment thought so much of at the time, that it gave rise to a saying still in use in those parts--"Es mas caro que las vacas de Gaete" ("Dearer than Gaete's cows").