[356] The war cry or "loud invocation addressed to Saint James before engaging in battle with the Infidels."—Captain John Stevens's Dictionary.
[357] See Cabeza de Vaca's narrative in the present volume. The place was at or near the present Ures, on the Rio Sonora in Sonora, Mexico.
[358] Whence the name of the present state of Sonora.
[359] Evidently a Seri Indian. The Seri are a wild tribe speaking an independent language and occupying the island of Tiburon and the adjacent Sonora coast of the Gulf of California. They are noted for their stature. For an account of this people, see McGee in Seventeenth Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, pt. 1 (1898).
[360] Believed to be in the present Sonora valley, where it opens out into a broader plain a number of miles above Ures.
[361] This should be September.
[362] It is not without interest to record here the finding, in 1886, in western Kansas, of a sword-blade, greatly corroded, but still bearing sufficient trace of the name "Juan Gallego" to enable its determination, as well as the inscription "No me saques sin razon. No me embaines sin honor." See W. E. Ritchey in Mail and Breeze, Topeka, Kansas, July 26, 1902.
[363] These were evidently the Cocopa, a Yuman tribe, whose descendants still inhabit the lower Rio Colorado, which is the Rio del Tison of this narrative. The Cocopa now number perhaps 800.
[364] It had been supposed that Lower California, the "Isle of the Marquis" (Cortés), was an island, yet notwithstanding its determination as a peninsula it appeared as an island on maps of a much later period.
[365] The rafts, or balsas, referred to, were made by tying together a large number of reeds. The vessel was wide at the middle and pointed at the ends, and was very buoyant.