This handful of bandits, assassins, thieves, brutes [inhumanos], infinitely vile and cowardly, on February 28 last, on the Guaymas road, at the place called Huerfano, assassinated 4 unhappy women, including a girl of 9 years, and 7 men who were conducting them in a cart toward that port.
He bitterly denounced the apparent apathy of the state and federal authorities, adding:
When it is read in history fifty years hence that a handful of murderous Ceris, certainly not more than 80 of the tribe able to bear arms, was able to domineer in the midst of their crimes with unexampled audacity on account of the debility of the government and the inhabitants, it will be regarded as a romance or a fable; for it seems impossible that in the nineteenth century such a condition of things could exist to degrade the reason, the morality, and the dignity of civilized man.
Yet a final note, apparently added in press, recorded that—
In consequence of the last incident of the Ceris, the prefect of Guaymas, Don Cayetano Navarro, took the field, returning with 12 women and 16 children prisoners; also 2 striplings and a vieillard. He slew 9 among those who had no leader. This was on Isla Tiburon. The Indians fled thence, and are supposed to be at Tepococ.[221]
These may be considered as characteristic skirmishes attending the Encinas war. Other episodes followed, including the outbreaks of 1879, noted in part by M Pinart. Bacuachito suffered in various locally important events that will never be written: when Don Jesus Omada, a water-guide to the expedition of 1895, was asked about the Seri at Bacuachito, he answered with cumulative vehemence, “They killed my father. They killed my brother! They killed my brother’s wife!! They have killed half my friends!!!” As he spoke he was feverishly baring his breast; displaying a frightful scar over the clavicle, he exclaimed, “There struck a Seri arrow”; then he stripped his arm with a single sweep to reveal a ragged cicatrix extending nearly from shoulder to wrist, and added in a tone tremulous with pent bitterness, “The Seri have teeth!”
In the course of the half century from 1844 onward, the population of Sonora increased materially, and carried more than a proportionate increase in the development of agricultural and mineral resources; and, especially under the beneficent Diaz régime, the state passed from the condition of a remote frontier province into that of a well-governed commonwealth. Naturally this progress carried the Caucasian element, including that of blended blood, farther and farther away from the nonprogressive Seri; and thereby the horror and detestation awakened by the very utterance of the name of the lowly tribe were intensified beyond description or ready understanding. The traditions of arrow poisoning were kept alive, and, doubtless, growing; the recitals of carrion eating were repeated, and possibly—just possibly—magnified beyond the reality; the accounts of offense and defense by nails and teeth (such as that of Jesus Omada) passed from mouth to mouth until—incredible as it may seem—the more timid Sonorenses stood in greater dread of these natural weapons of the Seri than of their brutal clubs and swift-thrown missiles, or even of their poisoned arrows; while traditions of cannibalism came up and received such general credence that the current items of Seri outrages, both in local gossip and in the Mexican and American press, customarily recounted savage butcheries ending with gruesome feastings on the raw or slightly cooked flesh of the victims. The shuddering antipathy felt for the perpetrators of these inhumanities even a thousand miles away increased toward their frontier, as light toward its source; the dread was deepened by the failure of punitive expeditions sent out again and again only to be balked by waterless sand-wastes or wrecking tiderips; and in 1894 and 1895, at least, the horror of the Seri was a daily and nightly incubus on half the citizens of Hermosillo and the tributary pueblos and ranchos, and a thorn in the flesh of the state officials.
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. X
TYPICAL SERI HOUSE ON THE FRONTIER