Pacheco arrived in 1950 looking for land to cultivate in what was then a remote corner of the Goias interior. The nearest town of any size was Porangatu, 38 kilometers to the north. Pacheco and the first arrivals called their settlement Mutum, after the bird. In 1931 - though this date suggests the name predates Pacheco's 1950 arrival, a common archival confusion - the district status was formalized and the name was elaborated to Mutunopolis, meaning city of the mutum. In 1958 the district was dismembered from Porangatu and promoted to full municipal standing. All of this happened in the decade when Brasilia was being built and the Belem-Brasilia highway was punching north through the cerrado, opening a corridor that would transform this part of Goias - and Mutunopolis, 24 kilometers northwest of the new highway, sat inside that corridor.

The BR-153 runs a few dozen kilometers east of Mutunopolis, a paved highway that links Brasilia to Belem and ties this interior to the broader Brazilian economy. A paved road connects Mutunopolis to the BR-153, and from there to Goiania, 393 kilometers south. This infrastructure matters because Mutunopolis is a cattle town. In 2005 there were 75,500 head of cattle on the municipality's ranches, a large number given that the municipality itself is not very large. Agriculture is modest - rice, corn, manioc, bananas, soybeans, nothing exceeding a thousand hectares in a given year. The land is working pasture more than cropland. In 2007 there were three industrial units listed, 28 retail units, and zero banks. Most of the formal workforce - 156 workers - was in public administration. On 2006 records there were 1,466 people occupied in farm work across 512 farms.

The population of Mutunopolis has been falling since 1980, when it peaked at 5,157. By 2007 it was below 4,000. Between 1996 and 2007 the annual geometric growth rate was negative 0.85 percent - a steady drain. The decline concentrated in the rural areas, though rural people here mostly did not relocate into the town; they left the municipality altogether for Goiania, Brasilia, and the southern cities. In 2007 there were 2,682 urban residents and 1,272 rural residents spread across a municipality with a density of 4.55 people per square kilometer. The town has one hospital with 19 beds, five walk-in clinics, six schools with 1,122 students. One middle school. No higher education. An adult literacy rate of 80.4 percent, below the national average. The infant mortality rate in 2000 was 21.69 per thousand, below the national figure of 35 - one of the few measures where Mutunopolis compares favorably.

The municipality is surrounded by similar places. Porangatu lies north and west - a larger regional center with its own administrative gravity. Santa Tereza de Goias is to the east. Amaralina is to the south. All of them share a similar story: frontier settlements established in the mid-twentieth century, built up on cattle and subsistence agriculture, gradually emptied as younger generations moved toward larger cities. The Serra do Passa-Tres and other low ridges mark the horizon in places. The cerrado vegetation that gives the region its character has been heavily cleared for pasture, but patches of brushland and gallery forest still line the creeks. Somewhere in that remaining cover, the mutum birds that gave the town its name still call, though their population too has thinned.

There is something modest and appealing about a town named for a bird. Most Brazilian municipalities are named for saints, rivers, Portuguese villages, governors, or landowners. A bird implies that the first settlers noticed what was already there - the cerrado ecosystem with its endemic species, the mutum foraging in the underbrush - before they started clearing and converting. The name is a kind of memorial to the country as it was. Pacheco and his fellow settlers did not set out to memorialize the bird; they simply named what they saw. But more than seventy years later, as the rural countryside empties and the pasture edges creep ever deeper into the remaining forest, the name still holds. Mutunopolis. City of a bird that used to be common here. A small place that still carries, in its street signs and on its envelopes, a record of what the land was before it was a municipality.