SUMMARY HISTORY 



TLere is some doubt as to who was the first among the Caucasian 

 explorers of the Western Ilemispliere to set eyes on tbe Seri Indians. 

 Nuuo de Guzman, rival of Cortes and invader of Jalisco and Sinaloa, 

 must have appoacbed the southern boundary of Seri territory about 

 1530, though there is no record of contact with these tribesmen. Diego 

 Hurtado de Mendoza, one of Cortes' captains, coasted along southern 

 Sonora in 1532 to a point considerably beyond Rio Yaqui, where he was 

 massacred on his return, and hence left no record of more northerly 

 natives.' Both of these pioneers must accordingly be eliminated from 

 the list of probable discoverers of the Seri. 



In the course of their marvelous transcontinental journey, Alvar 

 Nufiez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions also approached Seriland, 

 and apparently skirted its borders shortly before meeting Captain 

 Diego de Alcaraz, of Guzman's party; this was in April, 153G, accord- 

 ing to Bandelier.' Vaca wrote: "On the coast is no maize: the inhab- 

 itants eat the powder of rush and of straw, and fish that is caught in 

 the sea from rafts, not having canoes. With grass and straw the 

 women cover their nudity. They are a timid and dejected people.'" 

 He added half a dozen ambiguous sentences, of which only a part, 

 apparently, refer to the ''timid and dejected people"; half of these 

 describe a poison used by them " so deadly that if the leaves be bruised 

 and steeped in some neighboring water, the deer and other animals 

 drinking it soon burst". The people were identified as Seri (Ceris) by 

 Buckingham Smith and General Stone,* and the identification may be 

 considered as strongly jirobable, provided the Tepoka be classed with 

 the Seri. 



The next Caucasians to approach Seriland appear to have been the 

 two Spanish monks, Fray Pedro Nadal and Fray Juan de la Asuncion, 

 who, in 1538, sought to retrace Vaca's route, and traveled northward 

 to a river somewhat doubtfully identified as the Gila;^ but the meager 

 accounts of this journey contain no clear reference to the Seri Indians. 



On March 7-19, 1539, the Italian friar Marcos de Niza left San 

 Miguel de Culiacan under instructions from the Viceroy, Don Antonio 



'Theodore H. Hittell, History of Califoruia. 1898, vol. I, pp. 43-44. 



^Contributions to the Hi.story of the Southwestern Portion of the United States (Hemenway South- 

 western Arcbieological Expedition), Papers of the Archaeological Institute of America, American 

 series, v, 1890, p. 44. 



3 Relation of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, translated from the Spanish by EuckiDghara Smith ; New 

 York, 1871, p. 172. 



"Ihid, p. 178. 



^Cf. Bandelier, Magazine of Western History, iv, 1886, p. 660. 



51 



