Headquartering in El Pitiqui, he commenced active war against the said Seris, but was unable to reduce them, because, being separated and dispersed over their vast territory, they wore out the troops, who only occasionally stumbled on one little rancheria or another. For this reason, and because in many years they could not exterminate them, and desiring to leave the country, they opened negotiations with them, making them small presents and offering them royal protection if they would surrender peacefully. Some of them pretended to do this and assembled at Pitiqui, where they remained with the same bad faith as always, fed at the expense of the royal treasury, when the troops retired, leaving the evil uncured, but merely covered.[111]
In the same year Padre Tomás Ignacio Lizazoin reported, for the information of the viceroy, that the ravages of the Seri and other Indians “had caused the almost total abandonment of Pimeria and Sonora provinces”, and proposed plans for protection which were apparently never carried out.[112]
The aggressive and bloody policy of Parilla, Mendoza, and Cuervo undoubtedly widened the divergence between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, and brought to nought the pacific policy of the latter. Inspired by fervid zeal, the good padres stretched the mantle of charity to its utmost over their converts, bringing into the fold all whom they could coax or coerce, and clinging unto all whom they could subsidize or suppress. Uninformed or misinformed concerning the extent of Seriland and the numbers and real traits of its inhabitants on their native heath, and professionally prone to see the most favorable side of the situation, they imagined themselves making conquest over a cruel and refractory tribe; yet careful review of the records indicates that they deluded themselves, and in some measure distorted history, through overweening notions concerning their progress in evangelizing the Seri. Actually, their converts were the lame and halt and blind left behind in the harder-pressed raids, captives taken in battle by the intrepid Escalante and other soldiers, apostates and outlaws ostracized and driven off by their fellows, spies sent out to find the way for further rapacity,[113] and the general riffraff and offscouring of the tribe, who esteemed parasitism above the hereditary independence of their kin. This condition is attested by later examples; it is also attested by the rapidly growing divergence of the ecclesiastical and civil policies; it is equally attested by at least partial recognition of the situation on the part of several of the padres: Villa-Señor, writing about 1745, parades the mission and two pueblos of the tribe, and says, “All the Ceris Indians are Christians” (“Todos los Indios Ceris, son Cristianos”);[114] yet he adds that “it is rare to find one who does not cling to the idolatry of their paganism”, and elsewhere describes the great “despoblado” extending to the coast as inhabited by pagan Seri and Tepoka Indians (“habitado de los Indios Seris, y Tepoca, Gentiles”).[115] Venegas, writing about 1750, refers to “the Seris and Tepocas, who are either infidels or imperfectly reduced, and tho’ Father Salva Tierra civilized them and the missionaries have baptized many, they still retain such a love for their liberty and customs as all the labours of the missionaries have not been able to obliterate, so that it is impossible to incorporate them with the missions by mildness”;[116] and his last word of them notes their massacre of Padres Tello and Rohen in Caborca, and ends with an invocation “for the complete reduction of these unhappy savages, now involved in the shadow of death”.[117] So, also, the talented author of “Rudo Ensayo”, writing in 1763, says of the Seri:
They have always been wild, resisting the law of God, even those who had removed from among them to Populo, Nacameri, and Angeles, and who constituted the smallest part of the nation. And even these few, in order to have constant communication with and give information to their heathen relatives, used to go, as if they could not arouse suspicion, to spy out in other villages what they wanted to know for their plans, and immediately giving the intelligence they obtained to the runaway Indians, these would act accordingly and nobody could guess how they acquired the necessary information.[118]
Again, in summarizing the relations with the tribe, this anonymous author naively remarked:
And at the present day, notwithstanding that in different encounters during the campaign of November, 1761, and before and since then, more than forty men have been killed by our arms and over seventy women and children have been captured, still they are as fierce as ever and will not lend an ear to any word of reconciliation.[119]
In general, the Jesuit history of the Seri is clear enough with respect to the small extruded fraction, but nearly blind to the normal tribe; there is nothing to indicate clear recognition of Seriland as a hereditary habitat and stronghold; yet the records are such as to define the salient episodes in Seri history as seen from a distantly external view-point. Nor can it be forgotten that the erudite evangelists made a deep and indelible impression on the intellectual side of Sonora, and drew the strong historical outline on which their own relations to the civil authorities on the one hand and to the Seri Indians on the other hand are cast by the light of later knowledge.
The discordance between the civil and military authorities and the dominant ecclesiastical order of Sonora sounded to Ciudad Mexico, and eventually echoed to Madrid, and was doubtless one of a series of factors which led to the needlessly harsh expulsion of the scholarly Jesuits in 1767—and hence to a hiatus in the history of the province and its tribes.