Tom Doak,
Your silence was deafening there for a few minutes. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't clicking refresh about every sixty seconds!
Neil Crafter,
You're not wrong to be asking these types of questions (I know you know that, I just wanted to say it). The burden of proof is on others to build a case for its authenticity. I don't claim to be a MacKenzie expert. My mission was to report on the experience, outline the personalities of the characters involved, and try to place what I was seeing in context both in terms of the golf and in terms of Argentine society and history.
That said, besides the document itself, there are other pieces of pretty solid evidence that place Dr. MacKenzie in the Mar del Plata region during the spring of 1930 and at the Boqueron itself. Some of these are objects in David Edel's possession, others are part of the historical record. To name just one item, the family kept a guest book of visitors to the estancia. They were one of the richest families in Argentina at a time when Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, so they had their share of famous guests--Jorge Luis Borges (which I checked), Henry Cotton, Aubrey Boomer--and MacKenzie is in that book. So it's not just his signature you'd have to forge, but that of a dozen other people, mixed in at random with the Argentine aristocracy of the time, whose John Hancocks would be historically verifiable. If that's indeed what happened, my hat's off to 'em.
I'm going to speculate a bit now, but my sense is that MacKenzie's Argentine experience made an indelible mark somehow. (Luther Koontz, too, for that matter, who I'm not sure ever returned from SA...I'd love to know if he did, if anyone's got any information) I only say this because MacKenzie's writing about the Jockey Club in "Spirit of St. Andrews" is so ecstatic about the project's success, both from the point of view of engineering innovation and strategic merit that he deemed nothing less than Old Course-esque. I don't have the book in front of me, but as Tom Doak points out, MacKenzie was turning a corner in terms of his thinking about bunkering around this time, saying something about the Jockey along the lines of (horrible paraphrase alert): "the course was great the way it was, but to throw the guys a little something extra I decided to add a few bunkers here and there."
El Boqueron was, as Wayne points out, designed as an estate course--in the vein of a Pocantico Hills, not an Ellerston--so from a maintenance standpoint it does make sense. The brief was clearly not to design a Royal Melbourne, or even a Golf Club of Uruguay.
Thanks for the interest, look forward to hearing other thoughts.
td