BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. VI.
RECENTLY OCCUPIED RANCHERIA, TIBURON ISLAND
TYPICAL HOUSE INTERIOR, TIBURON ISLAND
Traditions of this Franciscan mission still linger about Hermosillo and at Rancho San Francisco de Costa Rica, and they, like Arricivita’s account, indicate that the churchly jacal was planted either hard by Pozo Escalante or at a traditional Ojito Carrizal (Aguaje Parilla, not found in the surveys of 1895), supposed to lie a few miles farther northwestward. All the probabilities point to Pozo Escalante as the site, despite the fact that no cane now grows there; the topographic description applies exactly, while the state of the padre’s remains, when exhumed six months later, attests the dry and saline soil in this vicinity. None of these conditions exist about Aguaje Parilla at the southeastern base of Sierra Seri. The present absence of living carrizal at Pozo Escalante is of little significance, since the extinction of the plant might easily have been wrought either by the stock of later expeditions or by the rise of the salt-water horizon accompanying the local subsidence of the land; certainly dried roots and much-weathered fragments of cane still remain about the margin of the playa extending southward from the well.
The episode culminating in the assassination of Fray Crisóstomo was characteristic: beset at all points and rankling under the invasion of their range, the Seri sought anew to delude the governor with fair words, using their own reprobates and apostates at Pitic and elsewhere to point their asseverations; and remembering the facility with which the earlier ecclesiastics were duped into unwitting allies, they made the kindly and long-suffering friars the immediate object of their petitions. But some of the tribe galled under the lengthy and still lengthening blood-feud too deeply to tolerate the alien presence; and one of these, either alone or supported by the alleged accomplices or others, tried a typical ruse, suggested less by need than inherited habit; for the friar was helpless in their hands, and might have been slain in his jacal as easily as in the open. Typically, too, the assassination initiated or deepened factional dissension and further bloodshed.
The Franciscan records are of even less ethnologic use than those of the Jesuits. Beyond his incidental expressions concerning Seri character and custom in connection with the founding and abandonment of Carrizal, it need only be noted that Arricivita makes hardly a reference to the Tepoka, but habitually combines the “Seris y Piatos”—the latter perhaps representing the “confederate Pima” of “Rudo Ensayo”, or the Soba occupying the lower reaches of Rio San Ignacio about that time.
Among the meager and scattered Franciscan records is a letter from Fray Francisco Troncoso, dated September 18, 1824, which is of note as containing an estimate of the Seri population at the time:
This island [Tiburon] has more than a thousand savage inhabitants, enemies of those of California, and it has frequently occurred that, on balsas of reeds, ... they have crossed over to invade the mission [of Loreto], killing and robbing some of those they found there.[132]