82 THE SEKI INDIANS [eth.ann.it 



when exhumed six montbs later, attests the dry aud saline soil in this 

 vicinity. jS^one of these conditions exist about Aguaje Parilla at the 

 southeastern base of Sierra Seri. The present absence of living carrizal 

 at Pozo Escalante is of little significance, since the extinction of the 

 plant might easily have been wrought either by the stock of later expe- 

 ditions or by the rise of the salt-water horizon accompanying the local 

 subsidence of the land; certainly dried roots aud much-weathered 

 fragments of cane still remain about the margin of the playa extending 

 southward from the well. 



The episode culminating in the assassination of Fray Crisostomo 

 was characteristic: beset at all points and rankling under the invasion 

 of their range, the Seri sought anew to delude the governor with 

 fair words, using their own reprobates and apostates at Pitic and else- 

 where to point their asseverations; and remembering the facility with 

 which the earlier ecclesiastics were duped into unwitting allies, they 

 made the kindly and loug-suftering friars the immediate object of their 

 petitions. But some of the tribe galled under the lengthy and still 

 lengthening blood feud too deeply to tolerate the alien presence; and 

 one of these, either alone or supported by the alleged accomi)lices or 

 others, tried a typical ruse, suggested less by need than inherited 

 habit; for the friar was helpless in their hands, and might have been 

 slain in his Jacal as easily as in the open. Typically, too, the assassina- 

 tion initiated or deepened factional dissension and further bloodshed. 



The Franciscan records are of even less ethnologic use than those of 

 the Jesuits. Beyond his incidental expressions concerning Seri char- 

 acter and custom in connection with the founding and abandonment of 

 Carrizal, it need only be noted that Arricivita makes hardly a refer- 

 ence to the Tepoka, but habitually combines the " Seris y Piatos " — 

 the latter perhaps representing the "confederate Pima" of "Rildo 

 Eusayo", or the Soba occupying the lower reaches of Rio San Ignacio 

 about that time. 



Among the meager aud scattered Franciscan records is a letter from 

 Fray Francisco Troncoso, dated September IS, 1S24, which is of note 

 as containing an estimate of the Seri population at the time: 



This island [Tiburon] has more th.iu a tbonsanil sav.age inbabitants, enemies of 

 those of California, and it has frequently occurred that, on balsas of reeds, . . . 

 they have crossed over to invade the mission [of Loreto], killing and robbing some 

 of those they found there.' 



The record is of value also as indicating that the Seri traversed the 

 gulf freely, and raided settlements and tribes of the peninsula ruth- 

 lessly 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. 



' Incorporated in Esoudeio, Noticias Estadisticas do Sonora y Sinaloa; Mexico, 1849, p. 18. 



