MCGEii] THE JESUIT RECORDS CIRCA 1750 77 



with an invocation "for tlie complete reduction of these unhappy sav- 

 ages, now involved in the shadow of death".'- So, also, the talented 

 author of " Rudo Ensayo", writing in 1763, says of the Seri: 



They have always been wild, resisting the law of God, even those who had removed 

 from among- them to Populo, Nacameri, and Angeles, and who constituted the small- 

 est part of the nation. And even these fe-n, in order to have constant eommunica- 

 tion with and give information to their heathen relatives, used to go, as if they 

 eould not aronse suspicion, to spy out in other villages what they wanted to know 

 for their plans, and immediately giving the intelligence they obtained to the runa- 

 way Indians, these would act accordingly and nobody could guess how they acquired 

 the necessary Information. - 



Again, in suuiniarizing the relations with the tribe, this anonymous 

 author naively remarked: 



And at the present day, notwithstanding that iu difl'erent encounters during the 

 oami)aign of November, 1761, and before and since then, more than forty men have 

 been killed by our arms and over seventy women and children have been captured, 

 still they are as fierce as ever and will not lend an ear to any word of reconciliation.^ 



In general, the Jesuit history of the Seri is clear enough with respect 

 to the small extruded fraction, but nearly blind to the normal tribe; 

 there is nothing to indicate clear recognition of Seriland as a heredi- 

 tary habitat and strougliold; yet the records are such as to define the 

 salient episodes in Seri history as seen from a distantly external 

 viewpoint. -Nor can it be forgotten that the erudite evangelists made 

 a deep and indelible impression on the intellectual side of Sonora, and 

 drew the strong historical outline on which their own relations to the 

 civil authorities on the one hand and to the Seri Indians on the other 

 hand are cast by the light of later knowledge. 



The discordance between the civil and military autliorities and the 

 dominant ecclesiastical order of Sonora sounded to Ciudad Mexico, and 

 eventually echoed to Madrid, and was doubtless one of a series of 

 factors which led to the needlessly harsh expulsion of the scholarly 

 Jesuits in 17(i7 — and hence to a hiatus in the history of the province 

 and its tribes. 



Although the padres knew little of the habits and customs of the 

 "wild'' Seri save tlirough hearsay, some of their notes are of ethnologic 

 value: Yilla-Senor located them on the deserts extending from Pitic 

 and Angeles to Tepopa bay, and added: 



They hold and occupy various raiiclierias, and subsist by the chase of deer, bura 

 [mule-deer], rabbits, hares, and other animals, and also on the cattle they are able 

 to steal from the Spaniards, and on fish which they harpoon with darts iu the sea, 

 and on the roots in which the land abounds. < 



Villa-Seiior distinguished the "Tepocas ", whom hecorabiued with the 



' Ibid., p. 211. It is improbable that the Seri had anything to do -with thia particulur butcliery. 

 According to Cones, the latter padre was killed at Sonoita; and he renders the name " Kuen or Kuhen" 

 (On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer; the Diary and Itinerary of Francisco Garc68. etc., 1900, vol. r, p. 88), 



''Op. cit., p.in;i. 



'Op. cit.,j)p. 11)5-196 

 *Theatro Americano, ii. 401. 



