TARAHUMARI INDIANS. 
173 
investigating some of their most curious 
habitations and customs, coupled with 
what information I could get from a few 
hardy Mexican pioneers in the fastnesses 
of the great Sierra Madre range, who 
corroborate each other, constitutes the 
basis of my comments. 
Although the Tarahumari tribe of In¬ 
dians are not at all well known—for I 
doubt if many of my readers have ever 
heard of them—they are, nevertheless, a 
very numerous people, and were they in 
the United States or Canada, where sta¬ 
tistics of even the savages are much better 
kept than in Mexico, they would have an 
almost world-wide reputation. On ac¬ 
count of this utter lack of statistics it is 
impossible to state with close approxi¬ 
mation the number of Tarahumari Indi¬ 
ans in this part of the country. So I will 
