Among the meager and scattered Franciscan records is a letter from Fray Francisco Troncoso, dated September 18, 1824, which is of note as containing an estimate of the Seri population at the time: This island [Tiburon] has more than a thousand savage inhabitants, enemies of those of California, and it has frequently occurred that, on balsas of reeds, ... they have crossed over to invade the mission [of Loreto], killing and robbing some of those they found there.[132] [132] Incorporated in Escudero, Noticias Estadisticas de Sonora y Sinaloa; Mexico, 1849, p. 18. The record is of value also as indicating that the Seri traversed the gulf freely, and raided settlements and tribes of the peninsula ruthlessly as those of the mainland. * * * * * The Carrizal episode was followed by a half century of comparative silence concerning the Seri, though various contemporary records and later compilations indicate customary continuance of the Seri wars. Among the more useful compilations is that of Velasco; and among the more important episodes noted by him was the Cimarrones-Migueletes war of 1780.[133] The Cimarrones included the greater part of the Seri of Tiburon and the Tepoka (then estimated at 2,000 of both sexes),[134] together with the “Pimas called _Piatos_, of the pueblos of Cavorca, Tubutama, Oquitoa, etc.”, and supposedly certain other representatives of the Pima and Apache, who had shortly before marauded Magdalena and sacked Saric, killing a dozen persons;[135] the Migueletes were national troops assigned to Sonora under the command of Colonel Domingo Elizondo. The forces met in several bloody battles in Cerro Prieto, at Jupanguaimas, and at Presidio Viejo; and the former, or at any rate the Seri, were once more “annihilated” (“reducidos a nulidad”). Nevertheless, the hydra-headed tribe retained enough vitality in 1807 to induce Governor Alejo Garcia Conde to send an army of a thousand men to Guaymas, en route to Tiburon, to repeat the extirpation—though the expedition came to naught for international reasons. [133] Noticias Estadisticas del Estado de Sonora; Mexico, 1850, p. 124 et seq. [134] Ibid., p. 132. [135] Bancroft, op. cit., vol. II, p. 682. It is incredible that such a confederation of so incongruous elements could ever have been effected; it is incomparably more probable that there was a succession, of outbreaks of the Seri, Piato, and Apache, each stimulated by the removal of soldiers for defense against the other enemies, just as Seri outrages follow Yaqui outbreaks today; but it was undoubtedly a custom of the times (a custom still existing) to connect the several enemies in current thought and speech.