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