Last Cowboys at the End of the World: The Story of the Gauchos of Pategonia - Tapa dura

A study of the traditional cattle-herding culture of the gauchos of South America's Patagonian region describes the dramatic impact of the modern world on their centuries-old way of life, explaining how a road built by the Chilean army a decade ago provided access into a remote, previously inaccessible region. 20,000 first printing.

res up an image as iconic as the word cowboy. But according to historians and anthropologists, their semi-nomadic culture disappeared at the end of the nineteenth century, and no one has seen the gauchos since. Until now.

Twenty-five years ago, the government of Chile began building a road into Chilean Patagonia, one of the least-populated regions in the world. In 1995, when Nick Reding traveled down that still-unfinished road into an unmapped river valley, he found himself in a closed chapter of history: a last, undetected, and unexplored outpost of gauchos so isolated that many of them, some of whom are boys as young as thirteen, still live completely alone with their herds, hours on horseback from the nearest neighbors. In 1998, Nick returned to the valley to witness what happens when time catches up to a people whom history has forgotten.

Reding’s account of the ten months he spent in Middle Cisnes, Patagonia, is a riveting, novelistic exploration of the longing f