At 15,000 acres, Wentworth was famed for its menagerie, which held 62 species of birds and 27 species of mammals, among them llamas, kangaroos, and even a brown bear. But what apparently most impressed Newton, amid all this exotic display, was the sight of a herd of deer grazing in the estate’s decorative deer park. Surrounded by sweeping vistas, they were held in not by walls or palisades but by a simple fence of thick iron wire — needing no watchman. Newton, a cabañero de ovinos — a sheep-breeder — saw at once what a barrier that needed no wall and no keeper might be worth to a man with a great deal of land and a great many animals. He took quick action, importing 15,000 yards of wrought-iron wire, plus 500 one-inch iron rods. That the wire arrived at all was something: in 1845 the port lay under foreign blockade, and everything that came by sea came hard and dear. Once equipped, he drew lines around his garden, orchard, and two stands of trees — keeping the fruits and vegetables for his family, and away from the sheep.

With that initial import of wrought-iron wire and rods in 1845, Newton solved a true domestic challenge, at a scale sufficient to protect the kitchen gardens within one family’s estancia. Yet wire was heavy, and estancias encompassed far more than their house and gardens. Protecting a crop by keeping sheep out — as Newton did — was one thing. But reorganizing an entire estancia — so as to keep sheep in and keep cattle out — would be something else again.

It took more than a family man to solve that problem; as it would happen, it took Franz (Francisco) Halbach Schmidt — a merchant and industrialist who carried the lofty title of Consul General of the Kingdom of Prussia in Buenos Aires. By the early 1850s, he had purchased an estancia known as Los Remedios, of perhaps 12,000–15,000 hectares, large enough to manage an estimated 30,000 sheep. With an eye towards the export value of fine-wool merino, Halbach set about importing two specialized breeds — German Negretti and French Rambouillet — to improve his flock.

But a fine flock is a fragile thing on open ground: were his merinos to mix with the criollo sheep — the native, unimproved flocks — drifting across the open country, the bloodlines he had paid for would dissolve within a season. The solution to this problem was not the wire — that was the same finger-thick iron Newton had strung a decade earlier — but the world that had shifted around it: with the end of the foreign blockade, the port had reopened, and the wool that had been a trickle became the country’s great export, leaping from roughly 1,600 tons in 1844 to some 8,500 by 1850. Which meant that Halbach — a man with ample capital, ready access to imported wire, and high demand for exported wool — could now do what a family man in a blockaded port had not.

So Halbach prepared to ring the whole of Los Remedios — four wires deep, a ditch thrown up outside them — and make of the open camp a single enclosed reserve. But fencing an entire estancia would take more than wire. Built post by post, stiff strands drawn tight across mile upon mile of open ground, it would require men working hard with their hands, inching their way across the plain.

It was a new kind of work, done by a new kind of worker: alambradores, the wire-men. The job fell, almost from the start, to newcomers — Basques first, then others off the immigrant ships.

For stringing wire was not the gaucho’s work: he was a man on horseback, and this was tarea de a pie — a task done on foot. So, post by post, the open country was closed by other men, brought from other places.

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When I booked an eight-day horseback ride in Tierra del Fuego, I couldn’t have told you much about what was ahead. I knew the dates, I’d done the packing, I was saddle-ready — but I had no real idea about the place we’d be riding through. And I wanted to know more.

My career path’s been an unlikely one: classical ballet, Wall Street, the archives of American history, criminal justice reform. But despite their differences, one thing has held true — I am always certain there is more to see, just beneath the surface.

It’s the same on horseback: whether I’m schooling my dressage horse in a California arena or tölting through Iceland’s highlands, I still want to know more.

I started A Good Seat to speak to a community of like-minded riders — in a sense, I write these guides so I can read them. The first guide is for an eight-day ride in Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of Argentina. From the destruction of a beech forest, to the silence of a valley emptied of its people, to the hardiness of the Criollo, the region’s history is written into the land. That’s the story I tell.

You can buy that guide right now, or subscribe and get it plus every new guide I release — Iceland and Tanzania are next. Whether you’re on horseback or home on your couch, I hope you’ll come along for the ride — it’s a good seat.

— A Good Seat · for curious travelers who ride

In 1925, a Swiss-born Argentine schoolteacher named Aimé Tschiffely set out from Buenos Aires on two Criollo horses — Mancha, a skewbald, and Gato, a buckskin, both reportedly fifteen or sixteen years old — with the intention of riding to New York. Most horsemen of the day considered the plan lunatic: the horses too old, the distances too great, the terrain too various. Sixteen thousand kilometers later, after crossing the Andes twice, traversing the jungles and deserts of Central America, and arriving in Washington in 1928 — just short of his original goal of New York — Tschiffely had demonstrated something no breeding program could manufacture: the Criollo’s capacity for sustained effort in arduous conditions. They were wildly celebrated, even if the breathless reports overstated the claim a bit: Tschiffely depended on boats to bypass parts of the perilous Panamanian jungle, and on a train to ship Gato through Mexico after he went lame. But the accomplishment was clear, nonetheless.

Mancha and Gato belonged to a breed barely three centuries old, but the history of the horse is far older and it passes over the same ground Tschiffely set out to cross. The horse evolved in the Americas roughly four million years ago, spread across the Bering land bridge into Asia and Europe, and then vanished from the Americas entirely at the end of the last Ice Age — for reasons still debated — some mix of climate change and, perhaps, hunting pressure from newly arrived humans. When the Spanish reintroduced the horse in the sixteenth century, they unknowingly returned something ancient to its native place.

The first horses reached the Río de la Plata with Pedro de Mendoza, who founded Buenos Aires in 1536. When the colony collapsed under Indigenous resistance a few years later and the Spaniards fled, a dozen or so horses were left behind. By the time the city was resettled in 1580, the Pampas held feral herds in the thousands. The stock was Iberian — predominantly Andalusian and Barb-derived, compact and hardy — and it was the landscape, more than any human intention, that bred them for hardiness. The open grasslands offered abundant native forage but no shelter or supplemental feed in the harsh seasonal extremes, while the uneven, tussock-broken terrain rewarded sure-footedness and strong hooves. Rather than the most refined or the fastest, the horses that survived were the most efficient, with the capacity to extract maximum energy from minimum forage, to cover enormous distances without metabolic collapse, to regulate body temperature across a wide range, and to read and navigate uneven ground without injury.

It was the Pampas itself that made horses tough enough to carry Tschiffely.

Further south, the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego remained horseless for a time; the dense forests and the geography of the Strait of Magellan prevented natural migration to the main island. It was only in the 1880s that horses arrived there, brought by fortune seekers during the Patagonian gold rush and by European estancieros, who could not hold a range that size without men in the saddle.

By the time of Tschiffely’s ride, the horse had become known as the Criollo, a name that reflected the history of colonial enslavement. It was derived from the word crioulo, meaning a person raised in a colony, not transported to it, which itself derived from the Portuguese verb criar: to breed, to raise. A word first used for enslaved Africans born in the Americas, it was then extended to encompass everything native-born in the colonial world, and then to name this horse.

By Tschiffely’s day, the Criollo was the subject of a fight over its definition. A century of crossing with imported Thoroughbred, coach, and draft stallions had nearly bred the old Pampas horse out of existence. Beginning in 1918, a veterinarian named Emilio Solanet set out to recover the Criollo, buying up purebred stock — including horses held by an Indigenous group in Chubut — to found a studbook; the breeders’ association formed in 1923, and the compact breed standard was not settled until 1934. It was Solanet who provided Mancha and Gato. The ride was a demonstration for his cause — proof that the purebred Criollo was worth preserving.

The recovery did more than preserve a type. Within a generation, the Criollo had become a national symbol — its endurance proven in the Sociedad Rural’s long-distance trials, the breed that fashion had nearly destroyed now claimed as something particularly Argentine.

The point that Tschiffely made when he rode into North America is that Mancha and Gato were not exceptional specimens; they were ordinary representatives of a powerful breed the estancia economy had required — animals whose capacity for sustained effort over distance was not a remarkable achievement but a baseline characteristic. His ride was not a demonstration of what a specially prepared horse could do; instead, it demonstrated what the Pampas had been producing, unaided, for three hundred years.

This essay is Part Three of the Tierra del Fuego Ride Companion — eight days on horseback from Río Grande into the Fuegian Andes, with the history of the ground, its people, and the horse that carries you across it. Read the full guide, or subscribe to A Good Seat and get it now, along with every guide that follows.

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