[Illustration: INTERIOR HOUSE STRUCTURE, TIBURON ISLAND.]
* * * * *
Even during the Encinas régime the Seri came in occasional contact with
aliens on other parts of the frontier: on Hacienda Serna, the somewhat
remoter borderland outpost on the north, the relations between the
landholders and the Seri were analogous to those on the Encinas plains,
though less acute in the ratio of relative distance. Occasionally
small parties of warriors journeyed to Guaymas[220] on balsas or on
foot to barter pelican-skin robes for Caucasian commodities, chiefly
aguardiente and manta; still more rarely similar pilgrimages were
made to the outskirts of Hermosillo; a few marauding raids were made
to the ranches lying near Cieneguilla and Caborca; and a number
of ill-advised prospecting parties, coming by land or water, paid
the penalty of foolhardiness. Writing about 1864, Historian Velasco
recurred to the Seri to say:
[220] The accompanying plate XII is reproduced, from a photograph of
a small group of Seri traders taken near Guaymas, probably during the
eighties. It was kindly furnished by F. A. Ober, who purchased it in
Guaymas.
This handful of bandits, assassins, thieves, brutes
[inhumanos], infinitely vile and cowardly, on February 28 last,
on the Guaymas road, at the place called Huerfano, assassinated
4 unhappy women, including a girl of 9 years, and 7 men who
were conducting them in a cart toward that port.
He bitterly denounced the apparent apathy of the state and federal
authorities, adding:
When it is read in history fifty years hence that a handful
of murderous Ceris, certainly not more than 80 of the tribe
able to bear arms, was able to domineer in the midst of their
crimes with unexampled audacity on account of the debility
of the government and the inhabitants, it will be regarded
as a romance or a fable; for it seems impossible that in the
nineteenth century such a condition of things could exist to
degrade the reason, the morality, and the dignity of civilized
man.