The Seri Indians. (1898 N 17 / 1895-1896 (pages 1-344*))McGee, W J
History
The Seri Indians. (1898 N 17 / 1895-1896 (pages 1-344*))
McGee, W J
Seri Indians; Seri language; Yuman languages
and the general history dropped into unimportance with the escape
of Andrade’s captives, after temporary quartering on the legally
established landholders and householders of the Mexicanized pueblo.
For a century and a half the name of the pueblo has continually raised
and renewed the assumption that it marks a site of aboriginal Seri
habitation or has played some other leading rôle in Seri history, and
this assumption has shaped opinion past and present; yet its error is
clearly shown by scrutiny of the historical records, as well as by
collateral ethnologic and archeologic evidence.
Here may be said to end, too, the local chronicles of the Seri; for
although the state archives are crowded with charges, petitions,
commissions, reports, and other papers pertaining to the irrepressible
Seri; although these materials have overflowed to Ciudad, Mexico, and
even to Washington, in official documents both numerous and voluminous;
although Dávila in 1894 increased Velasco’s forty Seri wars to fifty;
and although the weightiest events in the internal history of the Seri
have occurred since 1844, little attempt has latterly been made to
reduce the abundant data to print.
The Mexican geographic knowledge of the time was surprisingly vague,
as is shown by the current maps, for example, the Tanner maps which
appeared in several editions: the 1846 edition recalls and evidently
reflects the Humboldt map of the beginning of the century; “R.
Ascencion” is represented as embouching through an estuary about 30°
20', with the “Seris Indians” north of its lower half-length and west
of “Pitic” and “Ft. del Alter”; Ures is located 3 or 4 miles southeast
of this fort, and “Racuach” (the Bacuachito of the present) is 20 miles
farther southeastward. Neither Rio Sonora nor any of its important
branches are indicated, while “Pitic” is placed several times too far
from the coast and from Guaymas, in a featureless expanse of paper;
“Rio Hiaqui” is shown as a branchless and conventional stream of a
single crescentic curvature, embouching in about the right latitude.
The coast of the gulf is distorted, and “Tiburon” is shown as an island
much too large and nearly a degree too far north, separated from the
mainland by a greatly exaggerated strait, with an elongated mesa (“Mt.
del Picu”) skirting the mainland coast—in short, the cartography is
largely traditional if not fanciful.[169]
[169] A Map of the United States of Mexico, as organized and defined
by the several Acts of the Congress of that Republic, constructed from
a great variety of Printed and Manuscript Documents, by H. S. Tanner.
Third edition, 1846. The map in De Mofras (op. cit., atlas) is little
better.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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