PO ee NS Le TO ee 
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The Delta of the Rio Colorado. 15 
Within recent times the Cucopa Indians have been bested in a war 
with the Yumas at the head of the delta, but neither the losses suf- 
fered in this defeat nor traditions of other wars may account for this 
diminishing population. In the losing struggle carried on by this 
dwindling remnant, the deleterious effects of civilization have played 
but small part. Similar decreases of population in fertile river deltas 
are not unknown in other parts of the world. The native of the Colo- 
rado delta is a sturdy, well-built, peace-loving farmer of industrious 
habits by the standards prevailing in the land of the mafiana, but he 
is notably lacking in handicraft or manual expertness of any kind. 
Living in a land cut and intersected in all directions by streams, he 
is neither a skilful boat-builder nor an expert canoeist, while the 
unaccountable tides and bores of the Gulf fill him with dread. The 
river teems with fish easily caught at times, and he lacks this food 
entirely when fishing becomes difficult. The tules swarm with game 
of many kinds, but the Cucopa is not a shrewd hunter. By the custom 
of his tribe all of his most necessary articles of personal use are 
burned or destroyed upon the death of a near relative, in consequence 
of which he does not weave textiles, make pottery, or build houses 
with enthusiasm or enduring effect, and is almost devoid of means of 
artistic expression of the symbols of his history or beliefs, and his 
diminishing numbers seem but an obvious illustration of the non- 
survival of the unfit. 
The struggle for existence in the jungles of the warmer portions 
of the earth is one in which the human animal is often unsuccessful. 
The chief force against which he must contend is the rampant growth 
of vegetation, which impedes his agricultural efforts,and which makes 
all but impossible the breeding and preservation of domestic animals. 
Then in the protection of the jungle, wild animal life, from the most 
minute to the largest, multiplies with such rapidity as to constitute a 
hindrance to profitable effort, if not a formidable menace to health 
and bodily safety. Add to these the yearly summer inundation of the 
lands of the delta and the occasional flood of the winter, and condi- 
tions are created which may be met successfully only by the highly- 
organized methods of civilized society, and not by the intermittent, 
badly-directed individual effort of the aboriginal, who at best but 
holds his own in such a contest. With every pulsation of the summer 
heat the jungle closes a hardly measurable but positive accretion 
about his fields; with the loss of a working member of the family 
circle he handicaps himself to the limit of all he has previously gained, 
and when the creeping flood silently covers the land and drives him 
unprovided to the desert he must repeat the history of his race to 
regain his previous patheste J 
