[113] Captain Fernando Sanchez Salvador, in his official Representaciones to the Crown in 1751, complains that these Indians “are allowed on frivolous pretexts to visit the presidios, and they make use of the privilege to discover weak points and to plan attacks” (Bancroft, op. cit., p. 542). [114] Theatro Americano, segunda parte, p. 401. [115] Ibid., p. 392. [116] History of California, vol. II, p. 190. [117] Ibid., p. 211. It is improbable that the Seri had anything to do with this particular butchery. According to Coues, the latter padre was killed at Sonoita; and he renders the name “Ruen or Ruhen” (On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer; the Diary and Itinerary of Francisco Garcés, etc., 1900, vol. I, p. 88). They have always been wild, resisting the law of God, even those who had removed from among them to Populo, Nacameri, and Angeles, and who constituted the smallest part of the nation. And even these few, in order to have constant communication with and give information to their heathen relatives, used to go, as if they could not arouse suspicion, to spy out in other villages what they wanted to know for their plans, and immediately giving the intelligence they obtained to the runaway Indians, these would act accordingly and nobody could guess how they acquired the necessary information.[118] [118] Op. cit., p. 193. Again, in summarizing the relations with the tribe, this anonymous author naively remarked: And at the present day, notwithstanding that in different encounters during the campaign of November, 1761, and before and since then, more than forty men have been killed by our arms and over seventy women and children have been captured, still they are as fierce as ever and will not lend an ear to any word of reconciliation.[119] [119] Op. cit., pp. 195-196. In general, the Jesuit history of the Seri is clear enough with respect to the small extruded fraction, but nearly blind to the normal tribe; there is nothing to indicate clear recognition of Seriland as a hereditary habitat and stronghold; yet the records are such as to define the salient episodes in Seri history as seen from a distantly external view-point. Nor can it be forgotten that the erudite evangelists made a deep and indelible impression on the intellectual side of Sonora, and drew the strong historical outline on which their own relations to the civil authorities on the one hand and to the Seri Indians on the other hand are cast by the light of later knowledge. The discordance between the civil and military authorities and the dominant ecclesiastical order of Sonora sounded to Ciudad Mexico, and eventually echoed to Madrid, and was doubtless one of a series of factors which led to the needlessly harsh expulsion of the scholarly Jesuits in 1767—and hence to a hiatus in the history of the province and its tribes. * * * * *