Word: chaco
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...37th year in Paraguay's remote Chaco, Texas-born George Lohman was slowing up a bit. His doctors had warned him about his heart and blood pressure, and had told him to stop riding. Last week, 59-year-old Ranchero Lohman was bossing his 960,000-acre cattle empire, Red Wells, from a veranda rocker...
...There was nobody out here but me and the Indians," Lohman says. He rode hard and long, took personal charge of branding and altering calves, and every couple of years made the ten-day bullock-cart trip to Concepcion for supplies. He lived through the Chaco war (though the Bolivians bombed his ranch house) and Paraguay's innumerable revolutions...
More important, he won the trust and loyalty of some 350 Lengua Indians. He fed, clothed and protected them, in return got their cheap and sometimes skillful labor. With some 40 Paraguayan Gauchos Lohman and the Indians wrangled horses, fenced the Chaco's deadly brackish swamps, found sweet water for the cattle, and did their best to keep rustlers away. By last year, Lohman was selling 20,000 steers a year at $15 a head...
Jaguar in a Cage. Despite his cattle wealth, Lohman lives like a frontiersman. His ranch house is surrounded by a palm-log stockade, has no running water, no plumbing. Screening for the bedrooms is his one concession to comfort in the mosquito-infested Chaco...
...idea. Last week, caudillo-like, he was holding court at Red Wells-now promising a young Indian more corn for his squaw, now buying 30 cattle from a small rancher so that the man could pay for his wedding. "I think my place is right here in the Chaco," he said. "That's where I belong...