The record is of value also as indicating that the Seri traversed the gulf freely, and raided settlements and tribes of the peninsula ruthlessly as those of the mainland.
The Carrizal episode was followed by a half century of comparative silence concerning the Seri, though various contemporary records and later compilations indicate customary continuance of the Seri wars. Among the more useful compilations is that of Velasco; and among the more important episodes noted by him was the Cimarrones-Migueletes war of 1780.[133] The Cimarrones included the greater part of the Seri of Tiburon and the Tepoka (then estimated at 2,000 of both sexes),[134] together with the “Pimas called Piatos, of the pueblos of Cavorca, Tubutama, Oquitoa, etc.”, and supposedly certain other representatives of the Pima and Apache, who had shortly before marauded Magdalena and sacked Saric, killing a dozen persons;[135] the Migueletes were national troops assigned to Sonora under the command of Colonel Domingo Elizondo. The forces met in several bloody battles in Cerro Prieto, at Jupanguaimas, and at Presidio Viejo; and the former, or at any rate the Seri, were once more “annihilated” (“reducidos a nulidad”). Nevertheless, the hydra-headed tribe retained enough vitality in 1807 to induce Governor Alejo Garcia Conde to send an army of a thousand men to Guaymas, en route to Tiburon, to repeat the extirpation—though the expedition came to naught for international reasons.
Among the more useful contemporary records is an unpublished manuscript report by Don José Cortez, dated 1799, found in the Force library, translated by Buckingham Smith, and abstracted by Lieutenant A. W. Whipple for the Report of the Pacific Railway Survey. A subsection of this report is devoted to “the Seris, Tiburones, and Tepocas”. It runs:
The Seri Indians live towards the coast of Sonora, on the famous Cerro Prieto, and in its immediate neighborhood. They are cruel and sanguinary, and at one time formed a numerous band, which committed many excesses in that rich province. With their poisoned shafts they took the lives of many thousand inhabitants, and rendered unavailing the expedition that was set on foot against them from Mexico. At this time they are reduced to a small number; have, on many occasions, been successfully encountered by our troops; and are kept within bounds by the vigilance of the three posts (presidios) established for the purpose. None of their customs approach, at all, to those of civilization; and their notions of religion and marriage exist under barbarous forms, such as have before been described in treating of the most savage nations. The Tiburon and Tepoca Indians are a more numerous tribe, and worthy of greater consideration than the Seris, but their bloodthirsty disposition and their customs are the same. They ordinarily live on the island of Tiburon, which is connected with the coast of Sonora by a narrow inundated isthmus, over which they pass by swimming when the tide is up, and when it is down, by wading, as the water then only reaches to the waist, or not so high. They come onto the continent, over which they make their incursions, and, after the commission of robberies, they return to the island; on which account no punishment usually follows their temerity. It is now twenty-three or twenty-four years since the plan was approved by His Majesty, and ordered to be carried out, of destroying them on their island; but, until the present season, no movement has been made to put it into execution. To this end the troops of Sonora are being equipped; a corvette of the department of San Blas aids in the expedition and two or three vessels of troops from the companies stationed at the port of that name on the South sea.[136]
The record is significant as voicing an ill-founded discrimination of the wandering Seri from the inhabitants of Tiburon, as echoing persistent conception of Tiburon as a peninsula, and as summarizing the characteristics of the tribe recognized at the end of the last century.
Meantime population and industries increased, while civil and military development pursued its course; the Presidio of Pitic expanded into a pueblo, and later into the city which gradually adopted the cognomen of General José Maria Gonzalez Hermosillo, a hero of Sonora in the stirring times of 1810-1812; Pueblo Seri became Mexicanized, retaining only a few Seri families in 1811, according to Manuel Cabrera;[137] Guaymas grew into a port of some commercial note; pearl fishing progressed along the coast and prospecting in the interior; despite constant harrying by Seri raids, the rancho of Bacuachito (probably the Bacoachizo of Escudero[138]) became a flourishing pueblo; and plans for ports in the northern gulf were broached and even tested. Moreover, the dawn of the nineteenth century stirred scientific interest in the native tribes, including the obstinate owners of Tiburon—an interest stimulated by Humboldt’s American journeys of 1803.
Combining earlier cartography (originating with Kino) and persistent tradition up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Humboldt mapped “Isla de Tiburon” nearly a degree too far northward, and separated from the mainland by a greatly exaggerated strait. The land portion of the map is strikingly defective, revealing in numerous imaginary mesas the author’s penchant for Mexican plateaus, while “Rio Hiaqui” (“de Yaqui ou de Sonora” in the text) is combined with Rio Sonora and given an intermediate position, and “Rio de la Ascencion” (Rio San Ignacio) is represented as passing through an estuary into the gulf just off the northern end of Tiburon; the “Indiens Seris” being located on a figmentary mesa north of the latter river and due west of Caborca, Pitic (apparently a composite of San Diego de Pitic, or modern Pitiquito, with San Pedro de Pitic, or modern Hermosillo), and Altar.[139] His text corresponds:
On the right bank of Rio de la Asencion live some very bellicose Indians, the Seris, to whom many Mexican savants ascribe an Asiatic origin by reason of the analogy offered by their name with that of the Seri located by the ancient geographers at the base of the Ottorocorras mountains.[140]