Local Features
Considered as a tribal habitat, Seriland comprises four subdivisions of measurably distinct character, viz., (1) the broad desert bounding the territory on the east; (2) the mountainous zone of Sierra Seri; (3) Tiburon island and the neighboring islets; and (4) the navigable straits and bays contiguous to island and mainland.
1. So far as its marginal portions are concerned, Desierto Encinas is a typical valley of the Sonoran province, sparsely dotted with vital colonies of the prevailing type and variegated by the exceptionally luxuriant mesquite forests of the Bacuache and Sonora fans; but the interior of the valley is rendered distinct by the fact that it lies near, if not below, the level of the sea.[11] The central feature is Playa Noriega—a film of brackish water for a few days after each considerable semiannual freshet, a sheet of saline mud for a few weeks later, and for the greater part of the year a salt-crusted sherd 20 square miles in area, level as a floor and unimpressionable as a brick pavement. The playa is rimmed by dunes 10 to 40 feet in height, and about these and along the arroyos which occasionally break into it there is some aggregation of salt-enduring shrubs, evidently sustained in part by the semiannual freshet with its meager vapors and fogs. Outside this rim the surface is exceptionally broken; low dunes and irregularly wandering banks of soft and dust fine sand are interspersed with meandering salt flats much like the central playa, ranging from a few feet in width and a few yards in length up to mappable dimensions, as in the lesser playa lying east of the great one; and many of the dustbanks are honeycombed with squirrel burrows. This annulus of broken surface is narrow on the west, soon passing into okatilla scrub and then into the saguesa forests of the eastern base of Sierra Seri; on the east it is miles in breadth, passing gradually into the normal Sonoran plain; on the south it widens still farther, stretching all the way to Arenales de Gil and Pozo Escalante, and merging into the playa-like mud-flats bordering Laguna la Cruz, into which the gulf waters are sometimes forced by southwesterly gales at high spring tides. Throughout this portion of the desert, marine shells are scattered over the playa-like flats or lodged in the adjacent banks, sometimes in great beds; the vegetation is scantier than usual and largely of salt-loving habit; the mud-flats are usually coated with saline and alkaline crusts, while the dunes are soft and fluffy, and expand into broad belts perforated with the tunnels of the surprisingly abundant rodents. Across this plain of bitter sand-dust lie the two hard land routes to Seriland—the supposed Escalante route of 1700, down the fan of Rio Bacuache and thence by Barranca Salina; and the Encinas route, down the northern border of the Rio Sonora fan and thence by Pozo Escalante to the shores of Bahia Kino.[12]
Desierto Encinas is an impossible human habitat in any proper sense; it is merely a broad and hardly passable boundary between habitats. The hardy stock of the frontier ranchos, pasturing partly on the thorny fruit of the cholla, push far out on the plains, and are sometimes watered for short periods, under strong guards of heavily armed vaqueros, at Barranca Salina; yet the greater part of the expanse is trodden only by the Seri. Two or three ruined frames of Seri jacales and a few graves crown the low knoll near Pozo Escalante, and there are one or two house remnants near Barranca Salina; these are notable not only as the easternmost remaining outposts of Seri occupancy, but because they represent the only known instances in all Seriland of the erection of even temporary houses adjacent to water. Distinct paths, trodden deep by bare Seri feet, radiate from both waters toward the Seriland interior, but no traceable trails extend eastward.
The southern limit of Desierto Encinas is marked either by the broad mud-flats opening into Laguna la Cruz or by the coast of the gulf, the coast cutting the lower portions of the plain being accentuated by a sand-bank 30 or 40 feet high, against which the surf thunders in nearly continuous roar, audible halfway or all the way to Pozo Escalante. A Seri trail skirts the crest of this bank, sending occasional branches into the interior. At Punta Antigualla the bank expands and rises into a great mammillated shell-mound nearly 100 feet high, with several of the cusps occupied by more or less ruined jacales; and occasionally occupied houses occur midway thence to the southernmost point of Sierra Seri, and again at the base of the first spur east of Punta Ygnacio. Beyond Punta Antigualla the sweep of the waves is stronger than in Bahia Kino, and the coastal sand-bank is generally higher. Between the rocky buttresses of Punta Ygnacio and the next spur eastward the sand-ridge rises fully 50 feet above mean low tide, and here, as elsewhere, its verge is protected by a fog-fed chaparral thicket with occasional clumps of okatilla and other cacti. Behind the coast barrier lie lagoon-like basins, generally dry and floored with saline silt-beds, though sometimes occupied by briny pools formed through seepage during southwesterly gales; and there are physiographic indications that the northwestward extension of Laguna la Cruz formerly stretched some miles farther than now and lay in the rear of Punta Antigualla in such wise as to form a source of supply of the clam-shells of which the eminence is built.
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. III
SERI FRONTIER
SIERRA SERI FROM ENCINAS DESERT
2. Sierra Seri is a double range, divided mid-length by a broad saddle barely 2,000 feet in height.[13] Like other Sonoran ranges, the nucleal portions are exceedingly rugged and precipitous—at least two of its picachos shoot so boldly that they commonly seem to overhang, and have been called leaning peaks. In large part the precipices rise abruptly from a symmetrical dome molded by sheetflooding, much as the insulated buttes rise from the Bacuache fan in northeastern Seriland; so that the tract lying between Desierto Encinas and El Infiernillo is a composite of exceptionally precipitous and exceptionally smooth mountain slopes. One of the Seri trails radiating from Barranca Salina lies across the mid-sierra saddle; others push into several mountain valleys, and the largest leads to Tinaja Trinchera, at the base of Johnson peak, where there are a few low walls of loose-laid rubble, somewhat like those of the trincheras (entrenched mountains) farther eastward—the only structures of the sort seen in Seriland. Toward the southern end of the range lie various trails, the most conspicuous paralleling the coast, either near the shore or over the steep salients, according to the configuration; while here and there ruinous jacales a few yards from the coast attest sporadic habitation. The eastern shore of Bahia Kunkaak from Punta Ygnacio northward reveals a typical geologic section of the Sonoran province: the transgressing waves have carved in the granitic subterrane a broad shelf lying just below mean low tide and usually stretching several furlongs offshore; this shelf is relieved here and there by remnantal crags of obdurate rocks, cumbered by bowlders and locally sheeted with sand and arkose derived from mechanically disintegrated granite; while the inner margin of the shelf is a sea-cliff, usually 30 to 50 feet high, of which the lower half is commonly granite and the upper half unconsolidated and recent-looking mechanical debris collected by sheetflood erosion. Sometimes the granite of the subterrane is replaced by volcanics; sometimes ancient and firmly cemented talus deposits separate the superficial mantle from the subterrane, as shown in the lower part of plate V; sometimes the line of sheetflood planation passes below tide-level, when the waves beat against the unconsolidated deposits in a deep embayment; sometimes the sharply defined planation surface ends abruptly at the sides of subranges or buttes shooting upward in the abrupt slopes characteristic of the sierra proper; yet this 10-mile stretch of coast is a nearly continuous revelation of the structure of sheetflood-carved plains and of modern marine transgression. The debris of the combined processes forms an abundant and varied assortment of bowlders, cobbles, and pebbles, whence the inhabitants readily derive their simple implements without need for studied forethought or manual cunning.
The long sand-spit terminating in Punta Miguel and the shorter one terminating in Punta Arena are the product of geologically recent wave building, and consist of irregular series of V-bars, backed by lagoon-like basins and enclosing considerable bodies of brine in the central portions; and the bars and basins become successively higher outward, in such wise as to attest the secular subsidence of this coast. Several jacales are located on the higher portion of the southern sand-spit, midway between Punta Granita and Punta Miguel, while footpaths traverse the flat and skirt the coast. Toward the terminal portion of the spit the sand is blown into hummocks, held by clumps of salt-enduring and sand-proof shrubbery; but there are no rancherias here, despite the fact that it is a natural point of embarkation—doubtless because no Seri structure could withstand the sand-drifting gales and storm inundations of this exposed spot. The more protected lagoons behind the outer bars harbor abundant waterfowl, within bowshot of shrub-clumps and dunes well adapted to the concealment of hunters, while the mud-flats open to the tide abound in clams and other edible things. The features of the Punta Miguel sand-spit are repeated with variations along the eastern shore of El Infiernillo; and Seri jacales, evidently designed for temporary occupancy, occur here and there, usually on higher banks above reach of the severer storms.
3. Tiburon island itself is apparently the chosen home of the Seri—a habitat to which the mainland tract is at once a dependency, an alternative refuge, and a circumvallation. Its dominant range, Sierra Kunkaak, mates Sierra Seri in its essential features, though the rocks are for the greater part ordinarily obdurate eruptives rather than exceptionally obdurate granites, as in the mainland sierra; accordingly the range is somewhat lower and broader, while the sheetflood sculpture, with its sharp transition into precipitous cliffs, is somewhat less trenchant. Sierra Menor is a third term in the mountain series, in structure and geomorphy as in altitude; while the interior plain is a homologue of that portion of Desierto Encinas lying north of Playa Noriega—i. e., of its (potentially) free-drained portion. Almost the entire perimeter of Tiburon is suffering marine transgression, and is faced with seacliffs overlooking wave-carved shelves; and in both form and structure the greater part of the coast repeats, with minor variations, the features of the mainland coast from Punta Ygnacio northward. Partly because of the superior magnitude and height of its debris-yielding sierra, partly because of protection from the wave-beat of the open gulf, the eastern shore is skirted with a talus-shape slope, usually two to four miles wide; and while there are unmistakable evidences of sheetflood carving in the higher portions of this plane, the coastal cliff commonly reveals nothing but heterogeneous debris, sometimes rising thirty or forty feet above tide. Somewhat the greater part of the volume of this debris is fine—i. e., sand and silt and nondescript rock-matter; but there is always a considerable element of larger rock-fragments, which gather along the shore in a pavement of bowlders and cobbles (upper figure of plate V). These coarse materials—important factors in aboriginal industry—are harmoniously distributed; more conspicuously on the ground than on the map, the coast is set with salients (of which Punta Narragansett is a type), consisting merely of exceptional accumulations of debris from gorges in the sierra and from shallow arroyos, or pebble washes, traversing the coastwise plain. These salients owe their prominence partly to the relative coarseness, partly to the abundant supply, of fragmental material from the heights; and about their extremities the beach is paved with bowlders, which grade to cobbles or even to pebbles along the reentrant shores on either hand. This distribution of cobbles is one of the conditions governing the placement of Seri rancherias; and in many cases the jacales are located, either singly or in groups, where the coastal salients and reentrants meet, and where there is an abundant supply of cobbles of convenient size and wave-tested hardness.
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. IV.
SIERRA SERI FROM TIBURON ISLAND
PUNTA YGNACIO, TIBURON BAY
The coastwise plain skirting eastern Tiburon has a few wave-built projections analogous to those east of El Infiernillo; the most conspicuous of these are Punta Tormenta, Punta Tortuga, and Punta Perla with its tide-swept extensions, Bajios de Ugarte. All of these are located primarily by sierra-fed arroyos, but all are greatly extended by wave-borne material laid down along lines determined by the prevailing currents of this best-protected portion of the coast. The long outer face of Punta Tormenta, shaped by the storms of Bahia Kunkaak, is strikingly regular and symmetric; its broad extremity and inner face are diversified by subordinate bars and lagoons, evidently tending to connect with the main coast toward Punta Tortuga, and thereby to transform the whole of Rada Ballena into a lagoon. Already the narrow embayment is so shallow that, although a comfortable haven at high tide, it is mostly mud-flat and sand-waste at extreme low tide—a condition which explains the stranding of an 80-foot whale in this treacherous harbor about 1887. The rada is between two and three miles in length. It abounds in marine life of kinds preferring quieter waters: clams are plentiful in its mud-flats, a sponge lines portions of the bottom toward its inner extremity, oysters cluster numerously on bowlders and on the mangrove-like roots and trunks of a large shrub along the outer shore, and various fishes find refuge here from the fierce currents and the hungry sharks and porpoises of the open strait; these and other creatures form food for innumerable waders and other water-fowl that seek shelter in the quiet bay, which is still further protected by salt-enduring shrubbery on the bars of the point and by the shrubby thickets and wave-cast banks and wind-built dunes on the mainland side.
The combination of conditions renders this portion of the Tiburon coast the optimum habitat of the Seri Indians. There are, indeed, no houses or other traces of permanent habitation on Punta Tormenta itself, which is not only swept by gales but must sometimes be inundated by gale-driven waters at high spring tide; but at the inner end of the long sand-spit, and also on the mainland opposite the outer portion of Rada Ballena, there are extensive and well-kept rancherias, capacious enough to accommodate comfortably thirty or forty Seri families, i. e., 150 or 200 persons. Toward its landward end the sand-spit is built largely of pebbles and cobbles, of which thousands of tons are adapted to industrial use; sea-food is practically unlimited and is readily taken; water-fowl literally crowd the protected rada within arrow-shot of natural cover; the outer slope of the bar is admirably suited for landing and embarking balsas in calm weather, while the bay is an ideal harbor for the portable craft, and the shrub-grown shores give unlimited opportunity for concealing them when not in use; the dunes and banks are high enough to protect the low jacales from storm-winds, while the abundant sponges and turtle-shells afford material for thatching and shingling the more exposed walls and roofs; and finally, it is but a favorite distance (about 4 miles) to the permanent fresh water of Tinaja Anita. From this Seri metropolis well-trod trails radiate toward all other parts of the island; the best beaten leads to the tinaja, sending branches into all the neighboring gorges, in which game is sometimes taken; next best-worn is the trail laid across Sierra Kunkaak to strike Arroyo Carrizal mid-length of its permanently wet portion; others pass northward to rancherias at different points on the coast, and still another skirts the coast southward by several smaller rancherias to the considerable jacal collection near Punta Narragansett—this, like other longshore routes, having alternative trails, the evanescent fair-weather one following the beach, while the permanent path threads the thorn-set thickets marking the crest of the sea-cliff or cuts across the longer salients. The Narragansett rancheria is also a center for radiating trails, the best-beaten of these leading toward the fresh waters of Tinaja Anita and Arroyo Carrizal; and even the rancherias half-way thence to Punta Mashém send their most permanent paths over 15 miles of intervening ranges and spall-strewn valleys toward the same waters. According to Mashém’s cautious statements, there is a minor Seri metropolis at the northwestern spur of Sierra Kunkaak, within reach of Pozo Hardy and Arroyo Agua Dulce, and two or three smaller rancherias along the western shore; but these were not reached by the 1895 expedition.
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. V.
WESTERN SHORE OF TIBURON BAY
EASTERN SHORE OF TIBURON BAY
4. The seas washing Seriland are notably troubled by tides and winds. Gaping toward the Pacific, and narrowing and shoaling for the 800 miles of its length (measured from midway between Islas de Tres Marias and Cabo San Lucas), Gulf of California approaches Bay of Fundy, Bristol channel, and Broad sound as a tide accumulator; while the semidiurnal sweep of the waters in the upper half of the gulf is conditioned by the constriction of the basin to a fraction of its average cross-section at the narrows between Isla Tiburon and Punta San Francisquito. Toward the head of the gulf the ordinary spring tides range from 20 to 25 feet, and may be much increased by favoring winds; the debacles culminate there, but the currents culminate off Seriland in the great tide-gate half dammed by the islands of Tiburon, San Esteban, San Lorenzo, and Salsipuedes,[14] with their marine buttresses, and through the breaches of Pasaje Ulloa, Estrecho Alarcon, and Canal de Salsipuedes flow, four times daily, some two or three cubic miles of water in tremendous tidal floods, probably unsurpassed in vigor elsewhere on the globe. Naturally the islands and the adjacent coasts afford extraordinary examples of marine transgression; and while exceptional wave-work is a factor, the transgression is undoubtedly due mainly to the extraordinary tidal currents in this gateway of the gulf. The fierce currents and the frequent storms of the region condition local navigation, and have undoubtedly contributed to the development of the peculiarly light, strong, and serviceable water-craft of the aboriginal navigators among the islands.
El Infiernillo derives its distinctive characteristics largely from the local character of the tides. Bahia Kunkaak is a funnel-shape embayment so placed as to catch half the volume of the incoming tide and to concentrate the flow into a bore hurtling through Boca Infierno and thence throughout the shoaling strait with greatly accelerated velocity; meantime the body of the tidal stream is diverted around Tiburon, and then enfeebled in its northward flow by the expansion of the gulf above the Tiburon-San Francisquito gateway, so that the entire strait is flooded (to the limit fixed by the capacity of Boca Infierno) before the main tide flows into its head past Isla Patos and through Bahia Tepopa; and with this unobstructed inflow the strait is reflooded with a counterbore, whereby the waters are heaped and pounded into an unstable, swirling, churning mass.[15] The flooding is little less than catastrophic in magnitude and suddenness; indeed, the volume of water in the body of the strait between Punta Perla and Boca Infierno is approximately doubled at neap tide and tripled at spring tide twice in each twenty-four hours. Then, as the crest of the main debacle advances into the upper gulf beyond Punta Tepopa, the trough of the ebb is already approaching the Tiburon-San Francisquito constriction; and even before the final flooding of El Infiernillo from the north is completed, the waters of Bahia Kunkaak are receding and a tiderip is tearing through Boca Infierno at a rate sufficient to half empty the reservoir of its accumulated volume before the ebb trough has rounded the island to the head of the strait. Thus the effect of the exceptional tides of the gulf and the peculiar configuration of Seriland is to concentrate and accentuate tidal currents in El Infiernillo, and to convert the channel into a raceway for nearly continuous tide rips. According to Dewey, the spring tides are 10 feet and the neaps 7 feet about the northern end of the strait;[16] in December, 1895, the tides about Punta Blanca and Punta Granita were roughly determined as 13 or 14 feet at spring and 7 or 8 at neap, the range varying considerably with the direction and force of the wind; and the consequent current through Boca Infierno was estimated at 4 to 8 miles per hour, the higher velocity of course coinciding with the spring tide. The change in direction of the current is almost instantaneous—indeed, the run is in opposite directions on opposite sides of the narrow strait when the wind sets obliquely—so that the tidal flow is practically continuous. The currents are of course slacker in the body of the strait, but even here suffice to transport coarse sediments; and it is to this agency that the “shoals and sand spits” noted by Dewey[17] and the maintenance of a deep channel through Boca Infierno are chiefly to be ascribed. The materials of Punta Tormenta and Punta Tortuga attest the transportation of pebbles up to 3 or 4 inches in diameter by the combined work of waves and tidal currents.
Like other mountain-bound water bodies, the portion of the gulf washing Seriland is exceptionally disturbed by winds of given velocity by reason of the high angle of incidence; and moreover the exceptionally prominent local configuration disturbs the atmospheric currents in a manner somewhat analogous to that in which the tidal currents are disturbed; so that the winds are highly variable but generally strong. Under the combined action of tide and wind the waters are normally ruffled; choppy seas freely flecked with whitecaps are rather the rule than the exception,[18] and are replaced less frequently by calms than by steadier billows breaking in continuous surf on sand-beaches (figure 5) and dashing into foam-flecked and rainbow-tinted spray-jets, bathing the rocky cliffs for 50 feet above their bases. Sometimes the wind stills suddenly, when the sea sinks to rhythmic swells, soon extinguished by reaction from the irregular shores and by the interference of tide-currents; but the swell seldom dies away before the gale springs again. The broad valley between Sierras Seri and Kunkaak, bottomed by El Infiernillo, is especially beset by fierce and capricious gales; the general atmospheric drift is disturbed by the leading and lesser sierras, as well as by temperature convection from the gulf, and eddies are developed in such wise as to send air-currents directly or obliquely up or down the valley. These local or sublocal winds are characteristic. Judging from observations covering several weeks, the valley is wind-swept longitudinally for an average of eighteen or twenty hours daily, the winds ranging from strong breezes to gales so stiff as to load the air with sand ashore and spray asea; and even the calms may be broken any minute by sudden gusts and williwaws, passing rapidly as they arrive. Not only waves but wind itself combines with tides to shape the structural features of the valley; nowhere within it do flour-fine sands like those of Desierto Encinas occur, save as a hardly perceptible constituent of the dunes and banks of coarser sand—they have been blown into the sea or beyond the limits of the valley. Throughout the strait so expressively named by its explorers, the capriciousness of the sea culminates, despite the shoalness and the protection from easterly and westerly winds; the storm currents and tide-currents are half the time opposed, raising breakers even when the air is nearly still; eddies and whirls and cross-currents arise constantly, and even at the stillest hours tumultuous waves come and go sporadically, while about the mile-wide boca the choppy sea sometimes takes the form of spire-like jets, spurting 5 or 10 feet high and breaking into aigrettes of glittering spray in most unwaterlike and wholly indescribable fashion. Dewey described the strait as “unsafe for navigation by any except the smallest class of vessels”; it is safe, indeed, only for portable and indestructible craft like the Seri balsas, which may be put off or carried ashore at will by craftsmen willing to wait for wind and tide, and unpossessed of impedimenta of a sort to be injured by wetting. Of such an environment the balsa is a natural product.
Fig. 5—Embarking on Bahia Kunkaak in la lancha Anita.
The adjunct islets of Seriland are miniatures of Tiburon in all essential respects, save that they are without fresh water. The largest is San Esteban, a somewhat complex butte rising sharply from the waters in a nearly continuous sea-cliff recording vigorous work by storms and tides; it is occasionally visited by the Seri, chiefly in search of water-fowl and eggs. The most important of the series in Seri economy and mythology is Isla Tassne, off the mouth of Bahia Kino; it is a rugged butte some 600 feet high, rising in wave-cut cliffs on the sea side and pedimented by low spits and banks of sand toward the lea; the sand-banks are literally flocked with pelicans, while other fowl cover the flatter ledges and crowd the crannies of the pinnacle. Isla Turner is a somewhat smaller and still more rugged butte, bounded on both sides by precipitous cliffs, while Roca Foca is merely a great rock shelving upward from the storm-swept waters off the most exposed angle of Tiburon; in the crannies of the former birds nest abundantly, while the lower ledges of both are haunted by seals. Isla Patos, north of Tiburon, is a breeding-place for different water-fowl, and is especially noted as a refuge for ducks; it, too, is for the most part a rocky butte, with a sandy shelf at the eastern base. Beyond San Esteban lies the similar but smaller Isla San Lorenzo, while Isla Salsipuedes and a few other islets stretch thence northward half way to the southern point of Isla Angel de la Guarda, the second-largest island of the gulf. San Lorenzo and the smaller islets are occasionally visited by the Seri, partly for a mineral pigment used in face-painting, partly in quest of game; and they sometimes push on to the larger island to enjoy its fairly abundant game, including the easily taken iguana, amid the ruins of an ancient culture apparently akin to that of southern Mexico. Even the most frequented islets, Tassne and Patos, can be reached only by crossing miles of open sea; but in their way the Seri are as canny navigators as they are skilful boat-builders—it is their habit to hug the shore in threatening weather, to await wind and tide for hours or days together, to set out on distant journeys only when all conditions favor, and in emergency to seize inspiration from the storm like the vikings of old, and bend supernormal power to the control of their craft.
Summarily, the prevailing features of Seriland may be said to be characterized by extreme development or intensity, many of them being of such sort as to be adequately described only by the aid of strong comparatives or superlatives. Seriland is the most rugged portion of piedmont Sonora, and is bounded by its most forbidding desert; the territory is nearly if not quite, the most arid and inhospitable of the Sonoran province; the diurnal and sporadic temperature-ranges are apparently the widest, and the gales and other storms apparently the severest of the entire province; the flora is among the most meager and least fruitful, and the mountains are among the craggiest of the continent; the tides are among the strongest and the tidal currents among the swiftest of the world; and, as shown by the limited direct observations and by the extraordinary marine transgression, the waters are among the most turbulent known. At the same time, the waters washing Seriland are among the richest of America in sea-food, so that the habitat is one of the easiest known for a simple life depending directly on the product of the sea. It is but natural that these extreme factors of environment should be measurably reflected in pronounced characteristics on the part of the inhabitants.