54 THE SERI INDIANS [eth.ann.17 



few degrees farther northward on the long-mysterious coast below 

 the elusive " Straits of Anian ". 



About the middle of September, 154:0, Captain Melchior Diaz, then 

 in command at Corazones, selected 25 men from the force remain- 

 ing at that point, and set out for the coast on what must have been 

 one of the most remarkable, as it is one of the least-known, expe- 

 ditions in the history of .Spanish exploration ; for he traversed either 

 the streamless coast or the hardly more hospitable interior through 

 one of the most utterly desert regions in North America, from the lower 

 reaches of Itio Sonora to the mouth of the Colorado. The record of 

 this journey is meager, ambiguous, and apparently inconsecutive; it 

 indicates that he encountered the Indian giants seen by Maldonado, 

 but confused them with the Indians of the Lower Colorado. On the 

 return journey Diaz lost his life through an accident, and his party 

 reached Corazones on January 18, 1541, after encountering hostility 

 from Indians not far from that settlement. Word was sent to Coro- 

 uado, then in winter quarters on the Kio Grande, who dispatched Don 

 Pedro de Tovar to the settlement for the purpose of punishing the 

 hostile natives; he, in turn, sent Diego de Alcaraz with a force to seize 

 the "chiefs and lords of a village". This Alcaraz did, but soon 

 liberated his prisoners for a petty exchange. " Finding themselves 

 free, they renewed the war and attacked them, and as they were strong 

 and had poisou, they killed several Spaniards and wounded others so 

 that they died on the way back. . . . They got back to the town, 

 leaving 17 soldiers dead from the poison. They would die in agony 

 from only a small wound, the bodies breaking out with an insupportable 

 pestilential stink."' 



The Coronado expedition had still further experience with (evidently) 

 the same Indians; for as the army approached Corazones on the return 

 a soldier was wounded, and was successfully treated, according to the 

 record, with the juice of the quince. "The poison, however, had left its 

 mark upon him. The skin rotted and fell off until it left the bones and 

 sinews bare, with a horrible smell. The wound was in the wrist, and 

 the poison had reached as far as the shoulder when he was cured. The. 

 skin on all this fell ott"."^ 



There is some question as to the identity of the Indians met by Diaz's 

 men, Alcaraz and his force, and the Coronado army near Corazones; 

 but various indications point toward the Seri. In the first place, the 

 .several Indian settlements mentioned iu the records define what must 

 have been then, as it was two centuries later, the Seri frontier, beyond 

 which lay the "despoblado" of Villa-Seiior, i. e., the immense area 

 hunted and harried by roving bands from Tiburon; so that the Seri 

 must frequently have crossed the paths pursued by the Spanish pio- 

 neers. In the second jdace, the accounts themselves seem to be typical 

 records of contact with Seri Indians, which might be repeated for each 



' Winship, op. cit., p. 502. '' Ibid., p. 538. 



