In the Punta Arenas of the 1870s and 1880s, the whole town knew Papón. He was an Aónikenk (Tehuelche) chief, by most accounts a son of the cacique Casimiro Biguá, and around 1874 he succeeded him as leader of the families who moved between the Strait and the Santa Cruz River.
Casimiro had backed Argentina; Papón turned to Chile. Governor Diego Dublé Almeyda gave him the title "Subdelegate of Patagonia", with 50 pesos a year and three months' rations for five relatives, and in return Papón told the governor who was moving across the steppe. In 1875 Dublé reported that the Aónikenk no longer had any dealings with the Argentine government, which suited Chile while the border was still in dispute.
The historian Mateo Martinic writes that Papón, like so many of his people, fell into the alcohol the traders brought, and died poor and practically abandoned. A story printed in El Magallanes in 1929 says the last thing he owned was a boleadora, a hunting weapon of weighted cords, which he sold for three pesos and which turned out to be solid gold.
