In consequence of the last incident of the Ceris, the prefect
of Guaymas, Don Cayetano Navarro, took the field, returning
with 12 women and 16 children prisoners; also 2 striplings and
a vieillard. He slew 9 among those who had no leader. This was
on Isla Tiburon. The Indians fled thence, and are supposed to
be at Tepococ.[221]
[221] Boletin de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografia y Estadistica, tomo
XI, 1862, pp. 124-125.
These may be considered as characteristic skirmishes attending the
Encinas war. Other episodes followed, including the outbreaks of 1879,
noted in part by M Pinart. Bacuachito suffered in various locally
important events that will never be written: when Don Jesus Omada,
a water-guide to the expedition of 1895, was asked about the Seri
at Bacuachito, he answered with cumulative vehemence, “They killed
my father. They killed my brother! They killed my brother’s wife!!
They have killed half my friends!!!” As he spoke he was feverishly
baring his breast; displaying a frightful scar over the clavicle, he
exclaimed, “There struck a Seri arrow”; then he stripped his arm with a
single sweep to reveal a ragged cicatrix extending nearly from shoulder
to wrist, and added in a tone tremulous with pent bitterness, “The Seri
have teeth!”
In the course of the half century from 1844 onward, the population of
Sonora increased materially, and carried more than a proportionate
increase in the development of agricultural and mineral resources; and,
especially under the beneficent Diaz régime, the state passed from the
condition of a remote frontier province into that of a well-governed
commonwealth. Naturally this progress carried the Caucasian element,
including that of blended blood, farther and farther away from the
nonprogressive Seri; and thereby the horror and detestation awakened
by the very utterance of the name of the lowly tribe were intensified
beyond description or ready understanding. The traditions of arrow
poisoning were kept alive, and, doubtless, growing; the recitals of
carrion eating were repeated, and possibly—just possibly—magnified
beyond the reality; the accounts of offense and defense by nails
and teeth (such as that of Jesus Omada) passed from mouth to mouth
until—incredible as it may seem—the more timid Sonorenses stood in
greater dread of these natural weapons of the Seri than of their brutal
clubs and swift-thrown missiles, or even of their poisoned arrows;
while traditions of cannibalism came up and received such general
credence that the current items of Seri outrages, both in local gossip
and in the Mexican and American press, customarily recounted savage
butcheries ending with gruesome feastings on the raw or slightly
cooked flesh of the victims. The shuddering antipathy felt for the
perpetrators of these inhumanities even a thousand miles away increased
toward their frontier, as light toward its source; the dread was
deepened by the failure of punitive expeditions sent out again and
again only to be balked by waterless sand-wastes or wrecking tiderips;
and in 1894 and 1895, at least, the horror of the Seri was a daily and
nightly incubus on half the citizens of Hermosillo and the tributary
pueblos and ranchos, and a thorn in the flesh of the state officials.
[Illustration: BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY