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In Arizona 
VII.—The Gila Monster—Pima Indians—Sonora’s 
♦Journey into the Sierra Madres 
By J. W. SCHULTZ 
Author of "My Life as an Indian ” "Life Among the Blackfeet.” "Floating Down the Missouri ” etc. 
T HESE are certainly dreamy days. Old- 
Timer, Sonora and I mostly sit in the 
shade of the remuda and smoke and spin 
yarns. 
The other day I came across a fine large 
Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum ) waddling 
along a dusty trail, noosed it with a piece of 
string and carried it to camp. “You want to 
be careful how you handle them things,’ 
Sonora warned me. “Many a fellow has died 
by bein’ bit by ’em.” 
I asked for particulars; names of the victims; 
dates and places of their untimely demise; dura¬ 
tion and character of their suffering. “Well, I 
myself never seen any one bit by ’em,” he 
answered, “but I’ve heard of ’em plenty. Any 
Mexican will tell you that their bite kills.” 
I used an old wash-tub for a pen for my 
lizards, and that evening when Enders’ chickens 
went to roost, I captured a lean and venerable 
rooster for an experiment I had in view. In the 
morning, grasping the bird by the legs, I thrust 
it time and again, head first against the head 
of the monster, but the latter only shrank back 
and sluggishly attempted to turn tail to the at¬ 
tacks. I goaded it with a stick; even switched it 
with a willow cutting; but nothing I did aroused 
its ire. Finally, I killed the heloderma, made an 
incision in the rooster’s thigh, and inoculated 
it with the well mixed blood, saliva and fluid 
from the former’s mouth, throat and upper and 
lower jaw. 
“I’ll bet that the rooster ’ll be dead in an 
hour!” exclaimed Sonora, who was assisting 
in the experiment. 
“I don’t know about an hour, but I’ll bet 
he’ll be dead before night,” Old-Timer offered. 
Three days have elapsed, and except for a 
slight lameness, the rooster has shown no effect 
of the ordeal. At this moment he is scratching 
around at the head of his harem, and crowing 
as nonchalantly as ever he did. I have con¬ 
cluded that the Gila monster has no poison 
glands; portions of unswallowed food may and 
doubtless do ferment in its mouth at times, and 
thus a person bitten by one may be poisoned. 
Yesterday morning I went down the river a 
couple of miles to a Pima Indian settlement 
called Blackwater, although no black nor any 
other water is t-here, except that of the liquid- 
mud Gila, and it is gray. The Pima homes are 
of three kinds, adobes, box-like structures of 
mud-smeared cactus, and the semi-spherical 
ancient huts called “kis,” made of bent willows 
and thatched with arrow weeds and grass. 
Each family has a small patch of irrigated land 
on which wheat is raised, followed by a crop of 
corn, melons, beans, chili and tobacco. Form¬ 
erly they raised cotton and wove it into cloth, 
but of late years they find it cheaper to buy 
cloth of the traders than to expend their time 
in making it. Wheat, not meat, is their staff of 
life, wherein they differ from the Indians of 
the North. They tend their little patches with 
much care, and are so conservative of ancient 
customs that they will not use modern 
machinery in harvesting it. Down on their 
knees they get and cut it, a handful at a time, 
with knives or small sickles and carry it on 
their backs to a diminutive corral, where it is 
threshed by the feet of their horses or burros. 
There is nothing romantic about the Pima. 
He is not and never was an aggressive fighter, 
nor a hunter, nor a weaver of folk tales at all 
interesting. 
What most impresses me about the Pimas is 
that they are at least nominally Christians, and 
Presbyterians at that, a zealous missionary, the 
Rev. Dr. Cook, having gathered about all the 
tribe into his faith during the thirty-five years 
he has lived with them. Another of their 
peculiarities is that they have never favored in¬ 
ter-marrying with the whites, there being but 
one half-blood in the tribe. Yet they have ever 
been friendly and were of no little assistance 
to our army during the Apache wars. From 
what I can learn of them, I should say that in¬ 
tellectually and physically they are far inferior 
to the Indians of the plains, the Sioux, Crows, 
Cheyennes and Blackfeet, for instance. There 
are, I am told, something like eight thousand 
Pimas—including the Papagos—in Arizona, and 
Sonora tells me that there are probably as many 
more of them in the States of Sonora and Chi¬ 
huahua, Old Mexico. 
Sonora is wroth at the Mexican government. 
On his last trip into the Sierra Madres he 
found what he believes to be a fine gold pros¬ 
pect. but it is in a section of the range where 
only a well armed and wide-awake party can 
hold their own against the Yaquis and the 
equally desperate Mexican bandits who mas¬ 
querade as Indians, and the government strictly 
prohibits the importation of even one’s own 
rifle and ammunition into the country. The 
law regarding this went into effect several years 
ago, and only a few days after he and his 
partners had come north to Bisbee, Arizona, to 
get financial aid in developing their find. 
What Sonora does not know about the north¬ 
ern Sierra Madres of Mexico is scarcely worth 
knowing, I imagine, for he has prowled around 
that part of the range off and on for more than; 
thirty years. 
“Them Sierra Madres are somethin’ tre¬ 
mendous,” said he this afternoon when our 
talk was of mountain ranges, north and south. 
‘They’re high, an’ wide an’ rough, of all kinds 
of formation, an’ you can find - all sorts of 
climate an’ trees an’ plants, an’ birds an’ 
animals in ’em; also some mighty queer people 
—Injuns of course. But the people livin’ in 
’em now ain’t a marker to the people that once 
lived in ’em, God knows how long ago. Talk 
about ruins, why these here along the Gila 
ain’t nigh so big as those of the Casa Grande 
in Chihuahua, an’ while the cliff dwellin’s ol 
Arizona are the highest, an’ maybe the best 
built, still, there’s somethin’ like ’em in caves 
m parts of Mexico, especially along the Piedras 
Verdes River, the which is a stream risin’ ir 
the east slope of the Sierra Madres, about fort} 
or fifty miles southwest of the Casa Grandh 
ruins, an’ emptyin’ into the river of that name 
I went through there in ’74 and ’75, an’ yot 
talk about adventures, I sure had ’em that trip 
“We outfitted in Tucson, four whites an’ ; 
Mexican named Pedro Alvarez, about as bull; 
an’ light-hearted a fellow as I ever met, bu 
rash—terrible rash. Women was his game 
an’ one an’ all they just lost their hearts to hin 
on sight. Did you ever notice a bunch of mule 
when a little horse colt comes along? Whethe 
harnessed or packed, they bolt and follow i 
regardless. Well, that’s the way women wante< 
to do when they sighted this here Pedro. Yee 
he sure was handsome, well built, tall, active 
eyes big an’ brown, long-lashed, an’ soft an’ en 
treatin’, or hard and fiery, just as he please 
to have ’em. An’ such polite an’ nice ways a 
he had, too! makin’ every woman think that sh 
was the queen of ’em all. You see, he wan 
an ordinary Mexican, havin’ been raised by 
white doctor in El Paso, an’ sent to St. Loui 
to school. His guardeen dyin’, an’ dyin’ brokfl 
he took to prospectin’ an’ he sure liked th 
life. 
“As I said, there were four of us whites; 
fellow we called ‘Irish,’ because he was Dutch- 
Snyder by name; another one was an old-time 
named Johnson, an’ then there was ‘No Tall 
Owens, so named by the boys because he wt 
