Don Pascual estimates that during the dozen years of strife between
his men and the Seri forces about half of the tribe were slain. The
horror of the history of this period may be passed over; it may merely
be noted as a casual fact that one of the two Mexicans accompanying the
1895 expedition was credited with 17 Seri heads. When he pointed out
the site of his last exploit, a mile or two south of Rancho Libertad,
and some incredulity was expressed, he immediately galloped to the
spot and brought back a silent witness in the form of a bleached Seri
skull.[218]
[218] The specimen described by Dr Hrdlička, postea, p. 141.
At the close of the war Don Pascual continued the industrial
development of the plains lying east of the desert border of Seriland,
received new concessions in recognition of his conquest, and developed
the ranches of Santa Ana and Libertad; but the evangelical arm of his
vigorous mission gradually withered. For a dozen years the Seri looked
up to “El Patron” as a quasi ruler, whose approval was requisite for
the ratification of chieftainship, and through him ran a slender thread
of nominal fealty to the state and the republic; yet few parasites
gathered about the rancho. Mashém had gone back to his clan; and
when depredations were committed at Bacuachito or elsewhere and the
criminals were caught, usually through Don Pascual’s instrumentality,
they were sometimes haled to Hermosillo for trial, and Kolusio was
kept there as the official interpreter of charges and evidence and
findings. Sometime during the sixties a few Seri youths were coaxed to
Pueblo Seri for education, but when they were instructed to cut their
hair they slunk dejectedly to their temporary domicile, only to decamp
during the ensuing night; again, in 1870, Kolusio was commissioned
to bring in a few young people and a matron or two of the tribe, and
succeeded in doing so just in time to encounter an epidemic of measles,
from which some died, while the others shook the dust of the pueblo
from their feet forever; and this last straw, added to his alien
residence and his presence at the dreaded trials, broke down the tribal
toleration of Kolusio and made him an outlaw forever.
In the later seventies Don Pascual’s energies began to wane, while the
Seri population was waxing again; and, although the Encinas frontier
was protected, raids began to recur toward Bacuachito, on the ranchos
southwest of Caborca, and sometimes toward Guaymas; and the hostilities
then engendered have never terminated. In the eighties Don Pascual
suffered from cataract, gradually losing his sight, and his rule
relaxed still further; Rancho Libertad was abandoned, and a condition
of armed neutrality supervened at San Francisco de Costa Rica and Santa
Ana; and this condition still persists, save as occasionally modified
by a crude sort of diplomacy on the part of the Seri: when blood-feud
is not burning (and it is usually extinguished by the killing of an
alien on the coast or some remote part of the frontier), and when no
stock have been slaughtered for some months, an aged woman may be
seen skulking about the mesquite clumps in sight of the rancho; if
her presence is tolerated for a day or two, she approaches to beg for
water and food and to receive the cast-off rags hastily forced on her
nakedness by the sensitive señoras; if she deem her welcome not too
chill, she erects a jacal a few hundred yards away, and there she is
usually found, a morning or two later, to be accompanied by a younger
matron with a child or two; and if these are tolerated, the rancheria
may grow to half a dozen jacales and half a hundred persons.[219] The
band may remain a fortnight or even a month; but in case of serious
illness of any of their number, or of threat or punishment for petty
peccadillos, or of an unusual storm, or of a brilliant meteor, or of
any exceptional occurrence about the rancho, the rancheria is commonly
found empty next morning. If the attachés of the rancho are indisposed
to tolerate the first envoy, yet feel kindly rather than rancorous, she
is merely dogged and stoned away like a depredating domestic animal
from another hacienda; if the rancor of past encounters remains, the
mercy accorded her is precisely that shown the predatory coyote or
other feral animal from the fastnesses of the sierras—and the tribe
take warning and doubtless rejoice that their loss is no greater.
[219] A typical single jacal and the entire rancheria gathered at Costa
Rica in 1894 are shown from photographs in plates X and XI.
* * * * *
Any recital of the common history of the peculiarly savage Seri and
the whites necessarily conveys an exaggerated notion of intimacy and
mutual influence, since it emphasizes the few positive interrelations
scattered along the decades of neglected nonrelation; and this is true
of the Encinas régime as of earlier centuries. The great fact is that
throughout their recorded history the Seri have touched civilization
so slightly and so seldom that the effect of each contact was largely
lost before the next supervened; and the unprecedentedly intimate
contact of the Encinas régime, especially during the initial period
of abnormal toleration, serves less to indicate relationship in
characteristics and sympathies than to measure the breadth of the chasm
between the Seri and the Mexican—a chasm not exceeded, and probably
not equaled, elsewhere in America. About the middle fifties, probably
every Seri above infancy and below decrepitude had seen Don Pascual
and some other habitués of the rancho; they yielded to the seductions
of indolent scavengering apparently more numerously than ever before;
they substituted cast-off rags and barter-bought manta (plain cotton
cloth) for the products of their own primitive weaving; they ate
cooked food when it fell in their way; they half-heartedly adopted
metal cutting implements, and sought or stole nails and hoop-iron for
arrowpoints; some of them acquired a smattering of Spanish, and many
of them solicited and sported Spanish names, just as they begged and
flaunted tawdry handkerchiefs and beads; and they generally enjoyed
mildly the ecclesiastical fiestas, and took kindly to the cross as a
symbol of peace and plenty and perhaps of deeper import. Yet even
during this halcyon term no Seri save Kolusio and the Altar outlaw
ever learned to live in a house; none but these and Mashém wore hats
habitually; and, despite the fact that they often witnessed and
sometimes playfully or perforce participated in the processes, no Seri
ever really encompassed the idea of house-building or even of making
adobe. Though surrounded by horses when near the rancho, they never
learned to ride nor to use the animals otherwise than for immediate
slaughter and consumption; though in frequent sight of skilful ropers,
they never fully grasped the idea of the riata, preferring to seize
their prey with hands and teeth; though familiar with the agricultural
operations of the rancho, they never turned a sod nor planted a seed
on their own account; though in frequent sight of cooking, they seldom
began and never finished the process with their own food; though
acquainted with firearms, they continued to regard them as thaumaturgic
devices, and chose the bow and arrow for actual use; though submitting
to apparel on the frontier, they commonly cast away the incumbrances
on returning to their lairs; and no Mexican or other Caucasian ever
saw within their esoteric life—their names remained unrevealed, their
hair remained sacred, their mourning for the dead was unheard save at
a distance, and no alien, even unto today, has ever seen the birth of
their babes, the christening of their children, the burial of their
dead, or the ceremonies of their shrines. The Seri and the whites were,
indeed, mutually tolerant; but, so far as concerns mutual sympathy, the
toleration was almost precisely on a par with that between the ranchero
and the vulture-flock that scavengers his corrals—and when depredation
began the toleration was of a piece with that between householders and
their unwillingly domiciled rodents. It is not too much to say that the
interracial mistrust and hatred of the Western Hemisphere culminates on
the borders of Seriland; though the antipathy is commonly regarded by
the alien tribesmen and the Mexicans as other than racial, since the
Seri are felt to be hardly human—a feeling fully shared by the Seri,
who undoubtedly deem themselves more closely akin to their deified
bestial tutelaries than to the hated humans haunting their borders.
[Illustration: BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY