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Updated: May 11, 2025
It was a long journey, and I was advised not to attempt it without a tropilla, or troop of horses. But when a native tells you that you cannot travel two hundred miles without a dozen horses, he only means that you cannot do the distance in two days; for it is hard for him to believe that one may be satisfied with less than one hundred miles a day.
It is the usual thing for every man in the Banda Oriental to have one mare, called madrina, in his tropilla, or herd of geldings; the madrina always carries a bell attached to her neck, and at night her forefeet are usually hobbled to prevent her wandering far from home; for the horses are always very much attached to her and will not leave her.
A tropilla of pack mules brought up the rear in charge of a thin brown muleteer, sitting his long-eared beast very near the tail, legs thrust far forward, the wide brim of his hat set far back, making a sort of halo for his head.
After listening for a few moments, we concluded that the sound came from the bell of a madrina, and that her forefeet were bound, for the tinkle came in violent jerks, as from an animal laboriously hopping along. Proceeding to the spot, we found a tropilla of eleven or twelve dun-coloured horses feeding near the river.
Very brown and wooden, in goatskin breeches with the hair outside, he sat near the tail of his own smart mule, his great hat turned against the sun, an expression of blissful vacancy on his long face, humming day after day a love-song in a plaintive key, or, without a change of expression, letting out a yell at his small tropilla in front.
There, possibly on one of his own establishments, I shall be in my element and happy, hunting ostriches, eating carne con cuero, possessing a tropilla of twenty cream-coloured horses for my private use, and building up a modest fortune out of hides, horns, tallow, and other native products. After taking a mate from the old fellow, I mounted and galloped out of the village of Molino.
Eventually, when broken, it would go into his private tropilla, and in this way he would always possess three or four times as many saddle-horses as he needed. If you met Gandara every day for a week or two you would see him each time on a different horse, and every one of them would be more or less a surprise to you on account of its colouring. There was something fantastic in this passion.
He was on a journey from Buenos Ayres to a part in our province some sixty or seventy leagues further south, and after asking permission to pass the night at our house, he explained that he had only one horse, as he liked that way of travelling rather than the native way of driving a tropilla before him, going at a furious gallop from dawn to dark, and changing horses every three or four leagues.
Every man as a rule had his tropilla his own half a dozen or a dozen or more saddle-horses, and he would have them all as nearly alike as possible, so that one man had chestnuts, another browns, bays, silver- or iron-greys, duns, fawns, cream-noses, or blacks, or whites, or piebalds.
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