María Behety was born in Montevideo in 1848 to French Basque parents. In 1873 she married José Menéndez in Buenos Aires, and a few years later she followed him to Punta Arenas with their two small children, to a frontier town on the Strait.
The colony soon showed her its worst side. In November 1877 the garrison's artillerymen mutinied and the town was at their mercy. As she fled into the woods with her family, a stray bullet hit her leg, which later had to be amputated below the knee.
She stayed anyway. Seven of her nine children were born in Punta Arenas, and the eldest, Josefina, married Mauricio Braun, joining the two richest families in the south. The family's great estancia on Tierra del Fuego, founded in 1897 as Segunda Argentina, came to bear her name: today it is Estancia María Behety, near Río Grande. That wealth, like the whole Menéndez business, was built on land taken from the Selk'nam.
She died of cancer in 1908. The Museo Regional keeps a large portrait of the Menéndez Behety family by Rudolf Vacha, donated by her descendants.
