Although the Coras here maintain their traditions and customs more completely than in other places, I did not see any of the adults wearing the national dress, buckskin trousers and a very short tunic reaching only below the breast and made of home-woven woollen material dyed with native indigo-blue. Only one of the boys was seen with this costume, and his father was said to have it also. Yet the Coras do not want to be confounded with the “neighbours.” When the principal men submitted to be photographed, I wanted a picture to show their physique, and therefore asked them to take off their shirts, which they refused to do. But when I remarked, “You will then look like neighbours,” the shirts came off like a flash.
The gobernador here was an original and peculiar character. First he wanted me to camp in La Comunidad, to which I objected; but he was bent upon having me as closely under his supervision as possible, and I had to agree to establish my camp only half the distance that I had intended from the village. As soon as my tent had been put up, he came, accompanied by one of his friends. He had a passion for talking, which he indulged in for two hours, interrupting himself about every twenty seconds to spit. His companion wrapped himself in his blanket and began to nod, and whenever the gobernador stopped for expectoration, the other one would utter an assenting “hay” (“yes”). The Cora language is guttural, but quite musical, and when I heard it at a distance it reminded me in its cadence of one of the dialects of central Norway. However, the gobernador’s monologue soon became very tiresome, and finally I made my bed and lay down. After a while they retired, but every evening as long as I stayed in the place, his Honour came to bore me with his talk. I generally took him out to my men, who entertained him as long as they were able to keep awake. He wanted to hear about other countries, about the bears we had met, and the great war, because he thought there must always be war somewhere. When everybody was asleep after midnight, he would retire. He was a widower, and he was the most un-Indian Indian I ever met.
About five miles east of Mesa del Nayarit the descent toward the pueblo of Jesus Maria begins. The valley appears broad and hilly, and the vegetation assumes the aspect of the Hot Country. Specially noticeable were the usual thickets of thorny, dry, and scraggy trees, seen even on the edge of the mesa. They are called guisachi, and in the vernacular of the common man the word has been utilised to designate a sharper. A man who “hooks on,” as, for instance, a tricky lawyer, is called a guisachero. It is the counterpart of the “lawyer palm” among the shrubs of tropical Australia.
Cora Indians from Mesa del Nayarit.
Jesus Maria looks at a distance quite a town, on a little plain above the river-bank. A fine, grand-looking old church, in Moorish style, a large churchyard surrounding it, and the usual big buildings connected with the churches of Spanish times, make all extraordinary impression among the pithaya-covered hills. The rest of the houses look humble enough. I went a little beyond the pueblo to the junction of arroyo Fraile with the river of Jesus Maria. As a violent wind, caused by the cooling off of the hot air of the barranca, blows every afternoon, I did not put up my tent, but had my men build an open shed. The wind lasts until midnight, and the mornings are delightfully calm and cool. The Coras consider this wind beneficial to the growth of the corn, and sacrifice a tamal of ashes, two feet long, to keep it in the valley.
The Cora of the cañon, and probably of the entire Tierra Caliente, is of a milder disposition than his brother of the sierra, but he looks after his own advantage as closely as the rest of them.
The houses of the village are built of stone with thatched roofs, and, having no means of ventilation, become dreadfully overheated. I frequently noticed people lying on the floor in these hovels, suffering from colds. In the summer there is also prevalent in the valley a disease of the eyes which makes them red and swollen. Although the country is malarial, the Indians attain to remarkable longevity, and their women are wonderfully well preserved. All Indian women age very late in life, a trait many of their white sisters might be pardonably envious of.
There are twenty Mexicans living here, counting the children; they are poor, and have no house or lands of their own, but live in the Convento and rent lands from the Indians. The Coras, of course, are all nominally Christians, and the padre from San Juan Peyotan attends to their religious needs. I was told that as recently as forty years ago they had to be driven to church with scourges. Some families still put their dead away in caves difficult of access, closing up the entrance, without interring the bodies, and they still dance mitote, although more or less secretly.
The Indians catch crayfish, and other small fish, with a kind of hand-net of cotton thread, which they hold wide open with their elbows while crawling in the water between the stones. Where the river is deep they will even dive with the net held in this way.