I propose to devote the greater portion of this chapter to a consideration of the Tarahumari Indians of Central and Southwestern Chihuahua, a tribe of aborigines that I have occasionally seen mentioned in works and articles on Mexico (especially its northern part), but of which I can find no detailed account anywhere in the literature I possess of this region. The fact of my having been in that country for some time, seeing and 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 Indians 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 statistics of even the savages are much better kept than in Mexico, they would have an almost world-wide reputation. On account of this utter lack of statistics it is impossible to state with close approximation the number of Tarahumari Indians in this part of the country. So I will have to rely on the estimates (really broad guesses) of those best informed, giving my readers the benefit of my own researches as a check, although not claiming they will make a very good one, to the wide range of estimates made by others. In a previous chapter I spoke of the number of these Indians, but really am inclined, from all I could learn of them, to estimate their number at twenty thousand or thereabouts. An Indian tribe of twenty thousand people in our own country would be heard of often enough in press and public to become a household word; but the isolation of the Tarahumari Indians from the beaten lines of travel, and the little interest taken in them by local and governmental officials (especially the interest which would make their habitations, habits, and customs known to the world) have thrown a veil over them both dark and mysterious. Some tribes of no greater strength in the interior of Africa are better known to us at home than are these Tarahumaris of the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. They are now seldom seen in the city of Chihuahua, or even on the diligence lines radiating to the many western points which draw their supplies from this town; and it is only when the mule trails to the deeply hidden mountain mines are taken that they are seen at all. Still better, if one cuts loose from these too, he will be yet more likely to find them in all their rugged primitiveness. Those usually seen by the white traveler to these parts are called civilized, and live in log huts, tilling a bit of mountain slope, not unlike the lower classes of Mexico, whom they copy in their departure from established habits. It is no wonder, therefore, that little has been said about them more than to mention occasionally where they once lived in a