Sometime about the beginning of the eighteenth century the Spanish settlements pushed down Rio Sonora beyond the confluence of the Opodepe to the last water gap, made conspicuous by a marble butte in its throat and by the fact that here the sometimes subterranean flow always rose to the surface in a permanent stream of pure and cool water. Here, according to Padre Dominguez, “it was attempted to locate the Presidio of Cinaloa against the rapacity of the Zeris, Tepocas, and Pimas; and here General Idobro, of Cinaloa, wished to found a pueblo of Tiburon Indians, brought for the purpose [probably from Populo and Angeles] that they might be kept in subjection, but most of them returned to their island and attempted to make attacks from their hiding places.”[99] Nevertheless, the padre found 29 married persons, 14 single, and 99 children of these “races” at the rancho. At the time of his visit the place was known as Rancho del Pitquin; later it became the Pueblo of Pitic, or Pitiqui, or Pitiquin, or San Pedro de Pitic,[100] and long afterward the city of Hermosillo, while the beautiful marble butte was christened Cerro de la Campana.
By 1742 the settlements were so far extended as to warrant the establishment of a royal fort in the water-gap at Pitic;[101] and the ecclesiastics kept pace with the military movement by founding the mission of San Pedro de la Conquista,[102] or “Pueblo de San Pedro de la Conquista de Seris”[103] (now abbreviated to “Pueblo Seris”, or merely “Seris”); both fort and mission being designed primarily for better protection of the settlements against Seri sorties. These outposts brought the missionaries and their soldier supporters a day’s journey nearer Seriland, i. e., to within some 27 leagues (71 miles), or two days’ journey, from Bahia Kino and the desert boundary of the Seri stronghold; and although neither fort nor mission was continuously maintained, the event marked a practically permanent advance on the “despoblado” previously despoiled and desolated by the wandering Seri.
Even before this date friction between missionaries and laymen had grown out of the ecclesiastical charity for a people whose repeated atrocities placed them outside the pale of sympathy on the part of the industrial settlers; and this friction was felt especially about the new presidio. In 1749 Colonel Diego Ortiz Parilla became governor of Sonora, and began a rigorous rule over civilians, soldiers, ecclesiastics, and Indians; and when the 80 families (classed as Seri, but mainly of Tepoka and other tribes) domiciled at Populo were dissatisfied with his transfers of land and people, he promptly met their protests by arresting them and transporting the greater part of them, including all the women and children, to various places, “some even in Guatemala and other very distant parts of America.”[104] Naturally this was resented, not only by the Seri messmates at the missions, but to some extent by their kinsmen over the plains and along the coast, with whom sporadic communication was maintained—chiefly through spies, but partly by occasional escapes of the practically imprisoned proselytes and the less frequent but more numerous captures of new converts; and the Seri raids became more extended and vindictive, reaching northward to Caborca, northeastward to Santa Ana and Cucurpe, and eastward into the fertile valley of Rio Opodepe at several points. Deeply incensed in his turn, Parilla undertook a war of extermination—a war interesting not merely as an episode in Seri history, but still more as a type of the Seri wars of two centuries. Organizing a force of 500 men, and bringing canoes from Rio Yaqui, he planned an expedition to Tiburon, to cover two months—and returned with 28 prisoners, “all women and children and not a single Seri man”; though he reported killing 10 or 12 warriors in action (according to other accounts the slain comprised only 3 or 4 oldsters). These women and children were domiciled at the pueblo of the Conquest of the Seri, which in current thought thenceforth became the pueblo of the Seri, and gradually passed into lore and later into history as the home of the tribe rather than the mere penitentiary which it was in fact. The padres waxed satirical over this quixotic conquest: Alegre recounts that—
The good governor returned so vainglorious over his expedition that it was even said he would punish anyone intimating that there was a Seri left in the world, and proclaimed through all America and Europe that he had extirpated by the roots that infamous race.... The truth is that the force, on reaching Tiburon, ascertained that the enemy had retreated to the mountains; that none of the 75 Spaniards who accompanied the governor could be induced, either by entreaties or threats, to ascend in search of the Seri; but that some of the Pima allies undertook to beleaguer the mountains, these, with one or another of the officers, being the only ones that saw the face of the enemy, and even these on two occasions only. From the first sally they returned reporting that they had killed 3 of the Seri, and their empty word was accepted; the second time they were so fortunate as to discover a village of women and children, whom they took prisoners, and returned declaring that the men had been left dead on the field. This famous conquest, which the manuscript drawn up by the commander of the expedition did not hesitate to compare with those of Alexander and Cæsar, who were as nothing beside the governor of Sonora, intoxicated much more the allied chief of the Pima, who had taken the leading part in the final victory.[105]
Eventually the vanity of this chief (Luis, or “Luys de Saric”) led to a revolt on the part of the Pima tribe with the massacre of Padres Tello and Rohen at Caborca.
Ortega was still more sarcastic in his fuller record of the expedition.
The skepticism of the padres as to the completeness of Parilla’s extermination was well grounded, as was attested by the continuation of Seri sorties with undiminished frequency and by the persistence of hippophagy at the expense of the stockmen as already noted; moreover, in the absence of records of maritime operations, in view of the impracticability of transporting so large a force as that of Parilla on balsas, and in the light of a still common application of the name Tiburon to Sierra Seri and its environs as well as to the island, it would seem to be an open question whether the much-lauded expedition ever attained the insular stronghold, or even reached the seashore. However this may be, the expedition was the first of a long series sent out to exterminate one of the hardiest and acutest of tribes, wonted to one of the hardest and aridest of habitats; and, save in the subsequent advertising, all have yielded results more or less similar.
Another curtailment of the range of the Seri dates from the refounding of the mission of “San José de Guaimas”[106] (on the site of the present Guaymas) in 1751, and the establishment of a “rancho called Opan Guaimas” some distance up the coast about the same time; the site of the mission being that of a sanctuary located by Kino in 1701, and revisited by Salvatierra and Ugarte, though never continuously maintained. True, the padre and the ranchero suffered from the Seri, who displaced the former, killed eight of his converts, burned the church, and scattered the hundred families of the pueblo, afterward keeping the Spaniards at a distance for ten years;[107] yet the settlers only returned with new vigor, and gradually gained the strength requisite for holding the town. Naturally the belligerency of the Seri in this vicinity impressed the state authorities with the desirability of further “extermination”; and when in 1756 a band of the Seri, after a hypocritical suit for peace, entrenched themselves among the all but inaccessible rocks and barrancas of Cerro Prieto (a ragged sierra midway between Pitic and San José de Guaimas, which for this reason came to be regarded—erroneously—as the headquarters of the tribe), Don Juan Antonio de Mendoza, then governor of Sonora, sent out a strong body of soldiery to dislodge or destroy them; but after 200 of the soldiers were ambushed and 24 of them wounded, the expedition returned to the capital, San Miguel de Horcasitas. Stung by this defeat, Mendoza reorganized his force and led the way in person to Cerro Prieto, where one of the four parties into which the force was divided wrought such execution that, in the following May, there were seen the bodies of enemies “dead and eaten by animals, dead and partly buried in the earth, dead lying in caves, and dead in the water-pockets of the sierra”.[108] In this battle Mendoza himself was ambushed and attacked by three Seri archers, escaping only by the mediation of his saint (“por medio de mi santo”); but during the ensuing night he carried out the ingenious ruse of beating drums in different parts of the canyon, which reechoed from the rocky heights with such terrifying effect that the enemy fled, leaving him in victorious possession of the field.
Again in 1760, when a band of the Seri (supposed to be temporarily combined with the Pima) took refuge in Cerro Prieto, Governor Mendoza attacked them with over 100 men; but a band of 19 Seri successfully held this force at bay for several hours, until their chief (called El Becerro) fell wounded and dying, yet retaining sufficient vitality to rise, as the Spaniards approached, and transfix Mendoza with an arrow—when the two leaders died together.[109] Mendoza was succeeded by Governor José Tienda de Cuervo, who, in 1761, led a force of 420 men to Cerro Prieto, where a still bloodier battle was fought, the Seri losing 49 killed and 63 captured, besides 322 horses; though the greater part of their force escaped to the island of San Juan Bautista (San Esteban?).[110]
In 1763 Don Juan de Pineda succeeded to the governorship, and obtained the cooperation of a force of national troops under Colonel Domingo Elizondo: