gaucho knives

[Gonzalo G]

Chris, a very precise description. The gaucho was a frontierman, a nomad usually living and sleeping in the open, hunting wild cattle and trading with the indians, form whom he learnt many things, as the use of the boleadoras to chase cows and cimarron horses. Like a mountainman in the USA, but in another geography, la pampa, the great plains with pastures, just like the big plains in Dakota, USA. He was also a bootlegger form Argentina to Chile, a bandit, an occasional cowboy for the landowners and a cavalry soldier in the civil wars and the wars against the colonial powers. However, I want to make some precisions. The real gaucho endured maybe to the middle of the 19th Century, as a nomad and occasional cowbow, bandit and bootlegger. Blades made industrially were imported from Europe, but there was also a local blacksmithing production which made several blades for the market, mainly from used files. Facones were not always made from broken swords or sabers (there are also antique curved facones made in this way), and discarded bayonets, but also with blades made by local blacksmiths, sometimes with fullers, sometimes without them. The gaucho was ultimately finished by the private appropriation of the land, the wire fences surrounding the land and their prosecuting by the government authorities. The gaucho usually carried more than one knife. He carried usually a small criollo or verijero and a facon, or a puñal criollo and a facon. I read the article about the facon here, The part of the buttons must be reworked. Argentineans also uses rounded buttons, but are different from the uruguayans. The description of the buttons can be made with precision to identify their origin without doubts, and there is another type of button, not mentioned, the riograndense button, from the region of Rio Grande (Great River). Faca in portuguese just means "knife", and facon means big knife. As reference, the books are:

Abel Domenech
Dagas de Plata
privately edited by the author
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2005

Mario López Osornio
Esgrima Criolla
Ediciones Nuevo Siglo (Biblioteca de la Cultura Argentina No. 9),
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1995

The last, is in fact a smal manual about knife, rebenque (the leather tool used to incentivate the horse, I don´t remember the name in english in this moment), poncho and chuza (a spear) combat techniques. A very small manual in fact, and difficult to get. But Abel has his own page and you can purchase his books from there:

http://www.domenech.com.ar/

He´s also one of the moderators of the Forum Armas Blancas.

My regards

Gonzalo