The Bridges Trail - Paso Bridges: Day 1

January 22, 2009


It was my good fortune to join Jorge Bruzzo of Sendero Indio and Fernando for a 3-day horse trip along the southern portion of the historic Bridges Trail. The Bridges family was the first from Europe to settle in Tierra del Fuego. Thomas Bridges created the Anglican mission in Ushuaia in 1871. In 1886 he was granted 20,000 hectares by the Argentine president Roca to create the first ranch on the island, Estancia Harberton, 85 kms east of Ushuaia, in a protected bay along the Beagle Channel. There they discovered the indigenous Yahgan people, rather small in stature, living along the coastal areas, who hunted sea lion in canoes. The rest of their diet consisted of fish and shellfish and marine birds such as cormorant and penguin. The Ona, a race of larger people who roamed the plains and forests of Tierra del Fuego, hunted the guanaco, a relative of the camel, their main source of food and skins. Both groups had adapted to conditions on the island and lived a nomadic life for the past 7,000 years. Both were living in the area of Harberton when the Bridges family arrived.

As Europeans began coming to Tierra del Fuego in the late 19th century, hunting for gold and creating massive sheep ranches, the Ona people became an obstacle to this expansion. They were hunted and killed, and the word extermination is not too strong to describe their plight. Here is the well-known photo of the Romanian Julio Popper posing proudly with his rifle and a murdered man.


Many Ona found refuge at Harberton, and were protected by the Bridges family as they became farm workers on the estancia. The Harberton lands were not ideal for raising large number of livestock because of the thick forests that were difficult to clear. However the Ona explained that the land further north was open and supported large numbers of guanaco and might provide excellent pasture for sheep.


Lucas Bridges was among the first generation to be born on the island. His friends and fellow ranch workers were the Ona, and he learned to speak that language. Present members of the family tell me that the children all spoke Ona, Yámana, Spanish and English, and that the indigenous people learned to communicate in Spanish and English. Years earlier, Thomas Bridges had created a Yámana-English dictionary that is still available today.


A second estancia, Viamonte, was created near Río Grande, on the Atlantic coast further north. A road over the mountains was built in 1902 by Lucas, with his brothers Despard and Will and the Ona, felling trees along the way, creating a wide passage through the forest. Logs were laid horizontally in the wet turba, the red, spongy peat bog (Sphagnum magellanicum) and across the swamp areas. They took 2,300 sheep, cattle and horses from Harberton to Viamonte. It was later repaired in 1916 by prisoners from Ushuaia. Today the trail is known as Paso Bridges. It was abandoned in the 1960s, and has only recently been rediscovered and made passable.


The trail has been obliterated in the river valleys by the introduction of the beaver in 1946. It is said that four pair were brought to Tierra del Fuego to begin a fur industry. Unfortunately, the climate here is not conducive to good fur production. The pelts are of inferior quality. Meanwhile, those four pair have multiplied into millions, and have spread to neighboring islands in the south and to continental Patagonia in the north. There is no known method of eradication, and they are literally destroying the native forest. The beaver, along with introduced mink, are also destroying the native birds which nest on the ground by eating their eggs. Upland geese populations in the area have been considerably reduced.


As we explored this beaver house, my right leg suddenly broke through and I was up to my thigh in the living room of a castor canadiense. Jorge pulled me free.



Next: Day 2

Much of this information is taken from the book Tierra del Fuego by Rae Natalie Prosser Goodall, facsimile edition published 1979 by Ediciones Shanamaüm.