Two thousand sheep and four years: how the halves contract made and broke the Irish

John Murphy of Haysland, near Kilrane in south Wexford, reached the River Plate on 25 June 1844 with £1, according to Edmundo Murray's reconstruction of his life. A song by the teacher Walter McCormack, "The Kilrane Boys", remembers the departure. What happened to Murphy over the next forty years is the clearest record we have of how a shepherd's contract could turn a ditch-digger into a landowner, and of how rarely it did.

The halves contract

The arrangement that drew the Irish to the sheep camps of Buenos Aires province was known as halves, in Spanish medianería, and its man was the medianero. Patrick McKenna's Maynooth thesis gives the fullest account found. A flock-owner with about 2,000 sheep went into partnership with an immigrant, usually for four years. The shepherd bore the labour and the costs of keeping the flock and renting pasture. At the end the owner took back his 2,000 plus an agreed share of the increase, usually half, and his share of the wool money. A well-run flock might reach 10,000, leaving the shepherd 4,000 of his own.

Other writers describe it a little differently. Murray has flocks of 1,500 to 2,000 and says a good shepherd could have his own flock in two or three years. Patrick Speight, as reviewed in the Dublin Review of Books, describes a flock raised four- or five-fold and then split down the middle. No contract text survives in anything the research saw, so the four years and the half share are McKenna's generalisations. He adds that the system was unknown in South America outside Buenos Aires province and has no known origin. One popular account places it in Patagonia; the historians put it on the pampas.

Thirds, then wages

The terms did not stay generous. In McKenna's account, Irish flock-owners came to expect a newcomer to buy his half share. A man who could not became a tercero, a thirds man. At first the tercero got grazing and pens free, but those terms were dropped in the mid-1850s. A tercero could use his share to become a medianero, which doubled the time to the same result. By the late 1850s, with sheep dearer and shepherds more plentiful, many owners simply paid wages, and shepherds left on old contracts saw their share shrink and their terms lengthen. Later arrivals dug ditches and wells for about £30 a year, McKenna says, while Pat Nally has labourers earning up to ten shillings a day.

The contract also explains how the chains from Westmeath and Wexford grew. McKenna describes a shepherd who became sole owner of about 4,000 sheep splitting them into two flocks and hiring new shepherds on the terms he had worked himself, so that one emigrant brought out his brothers, then cousins and neighbours.

From the ditch to the wire

Murphy's road ran through every one of those stages. He first dug boundary ditches near Chascomús for an Argentine family that never paid him; fences did not yet exist. He then spent eleven years sharecropping and renting in Chacabuco. By 1855 he was an estanciero in Rojas and Salto. He bought "La Flor del Uncalito" in Salto, about 1,748 hectares, in 1854, "La Caldera" in Rojas, 4,050 hectares, in 1864, and on 15 March 1883 a large tract in southern Santa Fe from Eduardo Casey. He was reportedly the first in northern Buenos Aires to wire-fence his land. In the drought of 1859 he kept his sheep alive by carrying water in buckets. Late in life he leased land to Italian colonists for maize and wheat as sheep gave way to cattle and grain, and in 1909 his heirs inherited about 40,000 hectares in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe.

What the camp cost everyone else

The fortunes are real but selective. Murray finds that only about 10 per cent of emigrants could buy land, and that most Irish estancieros held 1,700 to 2,500 hectares. McKenna's reading of the sources is darker. The rancho had a single opening covered by a horsehide, an ox skull for a chair and a mutton carcass hung from the gable. Many shepherds came back broken or insane from near-total solitude, often made worse by drink, and a flood, blizzard or drought could wipe out a flock. Raiders killed for provisions and clothes: John Brabazon, a Protestant Westmeath emigrant, recalled his first wife, Honoria, and her sister stabbed to death in their home by a passing gaucho. Brabazon also described Saturday-night brawls at the pulpería between Ballymore and Ballymahon men armed with sharpened sticks, and Murphy's own letter of 20 October 1867 complains of the disorder of Westmeath men.

María Eugenia Cruset's reading of the 1869 census for Saladillo and Monte finds the typical Irish jobs there were sheep peons and ditch-diggers, the men the contract no longer reached. McKenna finds that the 1870s restructuring of the rural economy left surplus Irish labour, and that between the 1869 and 1895 censuses the only Irish groups to shrink were rural labourers and their dependants. By the end of the century, Murray writes, the sheep business was in decline, replaced first by cattle and then by grain. Two thousand sheep and four years had been the best bargain on offer for a decade or so before 1855. For those who came after, it was already a story about other people.