STONE PILLAR ABOUT THREE HUNDRED FEET HIGH,
RESEMBLING CACTUS.
While here I talked with an intelligent American, who had lived for many years in this country, about the Tarahumaris. He told me he had that season attended one of their foot races, a favorite pastime of these people. At this particular contest one of the fleetest and most enduring foot runners in all the great band of the Tarahumaris (or tribe of "foot runners," as we know they are called) was a contestant. That summer he had made one hundred Spanish miles—about ninety of ours—in eleven hours and twenty minutes, in a great foot contest near the Bacochic River, resting but once for half an hour in this terribly long race. The man, Mr. Thomas Ewing by name, told me that he attempted to run this foot runner a vuelta, (which is six miles straight away and return, or twelve miles altogether), Ewing using a horse; and although the white man tried this three times with three different horses, the Tarahumari cave dweller beat him each time. These contests of the Tarahumaris are almost always very long and exciting. They make their bets with stock of some kind, sheep, cattle, or goats, and large numbers of these change hands on the outcome of the races. In a letter to me regarding these races, Mr. Ewing writes of one of the runners:
"I was with him"—the Indian—"when he was running his fifth round. It was about eight o'clock in the morning, and he was running at about eight miles an hour. At that time his competitor was about six miles behind him. I rode beside him for about four miles, when my horse had enough of it. There were a hundred Indians or more to see the race, and they had stations about every two miles on the trail, where they stopped the runners, rubbed them down, and gave them pinola, a parched corn, ground fine and mixed with water. The runners stopped one minute, or about that, at each station for rest. The Indian who won this race, although tired, finished in good shape, and took in about fifty dollars in stock."
These contests in running are said to be one of the amusements of even the wildest of the Tarahumaris, although I doubt whether many white men have witnessed them. Even as early as the days when Grijalva, the discoverer of Mexico, and Cortes, its conquerer, landed on its shores where now is the important port of Vera Cruz, within twenty-four hours after their appearance an Aztec artist had made perfect representations of the fleet, the kind and amount of armament, and correct pictures of the artillery and horses (although he had never seen such things before), and had transmitted them nearly two hundred miles by carrier to the City of Mexico, placing them in the hands of the Aztec Emperor Montezuma. Cortes afterward found that the Aztec, Tlascalan, and other armies of that portion of the country always moved at a run when on the march, thus trebling and quadrupling the military marches of the present day. This was the first intimation to Europeans of the endurance and swift-footedness of the natives of the great Mexican plateau, and a similar characteristic was found to be almost universal among the Indians of the plateau. But it was afterward discovered that the people most prominent in this respect was one in the far north of New Spain, hidden away in the fastnesses of the Sierra Madres, whose very name, as given by other tribes, Tarahumari, meaning foot runners, indicated their special excellence.
THE END.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: