AN INDIAN HOME BETWEEN ROCK PILLAR AND TREE.

In my wanderings through this portion of the Sierra Madres (and right here I might state that on some Mexican maps this portion of the great range is occasionally labeled as the Sierra de Tarahumari, about the only place we ran across the name) I was more fortunate in seeing a large number of them engaged in more nearly all the labors and duties they are known to follow than is usually the case: the civilized Tarahumari, living in rough stone and adobe houses, with brush fences around his cultivated fields; and the most savage of the race, acknowledging none of the Mexican laws or customs, and living in caves in the rocks or under the huge bowlders, or in cliffs high up the almost perpendicular faces of the rock, where they probably tend a few goats and plant their corn on steep slopes, using pointed sticks to make the holes in the ground into which the grains are deposited.

In appearance the Tarahumari savage is, I think, a little above the average height of our own Indians in the Southwest. They are well built, and very muscular, while the skin of the cave and cliff dweller is of the darkest hue of any American native I have ever seen, being almost a mixture of the Guinea negro with the average copper-colored aborigine that we are so accustomed to see in the western parts of the United States. The civilized Tarahumaris are generally noticeably lighter in hue. The Mayos and Yaquis on the west, the Apaches to the north, the Tepehuanes to the south, and the Comanches to the east are lighter in their complexions than the cave- and cliff-dwelling Tarahumaris, although they live in much warmer climates than the latter. There is every opportunity to inspect the skin of the savage Tarahumari, as they wear only a breechclout and a pair of rawhide sandals; and if it be a little chilly—as it always is at evening, at night time, and morning on the elevated plateau land or mountainous regions of Mexico—they may add a serape of mountain goat's wool over their naked shoulders. Their faces generally wear a mild, pleasing expression, and their women are not bad-looking for savages, although the older women break rapidly in appearance after passing thirty to thirty-five years, as nearly as I could judge their ages. The savage branch of the Tarahumaris is of course the more interesting as the most nearly representing our own Indians of fifty to one hundred years ago, or before white men came among them. The civilized are not unlike those we have cultivating the soil in a rude way around the western agencies; although those of Mexico have no governmental aid such as we so often and so lavishly pour into the laps of our copper-colored brethren of the North.

The savage Tarahumari lives generally off all lines of communication, shunning even the mountain mule trails if he can. His abode is a cave in the mountain side or under the curving interior of some huge bowlder on the ground.

The Sierra Madre Mountains, where they live, are extremely picturesque in their rock formation, giving thousands of shapes I have never see elsewhere—battlements, towers, turrets, bastions, buttresses and flying buttresses, great arches and architraves, while everything from a camel to a saddle can be descried in the many projecting forms. It is natural that in such formation—a curious blending of limestone pierced by more recent upheavals of eruptive rock—many caves should be found, and also that the huge, irregular, granitic and gneissoid bowlders, left on the ground by the dissolving away of the softer limestone, should often lie so that their concavities could be taken advantage of by these earth-burrowing savages.

The first cliff dwellers I saw were on the Bacochic River, the first day out on mule-back from Carichic. These cliff dwellers had taken a huge cave in the limestone rock, some seventy-five feet above the water and almost overhanging the picturesque stream. They had walled up its outward face nearly to the top, leaving the latter for ventilation probably, as rain could not beat in over the crest of the butting cliff. It had but one door, closed by an old torn goat hide, through which the inhabitants had to crawl, like the Eskimo into their snow huts or igloos, rather than any other form of entrance I can liken it to. The only person we saw was a "wild man of the woods," who, with a bow and arrows in his hand and the skin of a wild animal around his loins for a breechclout, was skulking along the big bowlders near the foot of the cliff. A dozen determined men inside this cliff dwelling ought to have kept away an army corps not furnished with artillery, although I doubt if the occupants hold these caves on account of their defensive qualities, but rather for their convenience as places of habitation, needing but little work to make them subserve their rude and simple wants. My Mexican guide said they would only fly if we visited them, leaving a little parched corn, a rough metate or stone for grinding it, an unburned olla to hold their water, and some skins, and, perchance, worn-out native blankets for bedding; so I desisted from such a useless trip as getting over to their eyrie to inspect it.

About three months before my first expedition into Mexico, I saw a notice going the rounds of the press that living cliff dwellers had been seen in the San Mateo Mountains of New Mexico, and that as soon as the snow melted a mounted party would be organized to pursue and capture them; but I have heard nothing from it, beyond the little stir created at the time, and which the finding of any living cliff dwellers anywhere would be likely to create. Yet here are people of that description, of whom the world seems to have heard nothing. How many there are of them, as I have already said, it seems hard to tell. We saw at least five to six hundred scattered around in the fastnesses of this grand old mountain chain, and could probably have trebled this if we had been looking for cave and cliff dwellers alone along and off our line of travel. Let us place them at only three thousand in strength, and we would have enough to write a huge book upon, giving as startling developments as one could probably make from the interior of some wholly unknown continent—in fact more curious; for the public is somewhat prepared for such a story by the large number of old deserted cliff dwellings found in Arizona and New Mexico, which have often been assigned to a people older than the ruins of the Toltec or Aztec races. That there is some relation between these old cliff dwellers and the new ones I think more than likely; and I believe that most writers who have seen both, or rather the ruins of the former and much of the life of the latter, as I have, would agree with me in this view.

It is pretty clearly settled that the Apaches are Athabascans, and came from the far north; and it seems not unlikely that they drove southward or exterminated the northern cliff dwellers, leaving only these here as representatives, although numerous beyond belief, of a most curious race generally supposed to be extinct. The Pueblo Indians, of the same locality, by living in larger communities and stronger abodes were better able to resist these Indian Northmen, and consequently some of their towns still exist; but the old cliff dwellers, like the new ones, could in many cases be cut off from water by a persistent and aggressive enemy, such as the Apaches must have been then, when just fresh from their northern excursion. It is still more probable, however, that they drove them southward until the retreating cliff dwellers became so powerful by being massed upon their southern brothers that they could resist further aggression, and therefore give successful battle to their old foe, as we know they have been able to do recently when the Apaches were performing such destructive work in this part of the country.

It is a well-known fact in archæology that a badly defeated people, driven from their country by a superior force of numbers, and occupying a new and less desirable tract, will generally reproduce their habitations, implements of the chase, and all other things which they may be called upon to construct in a much less perfect manner than when in their own country; and I found the cave and cliff dwellings of the wild Tarahumaris in the Sierra Madre Mountains to be in general less perfect than the cliff dwellings far to the north, as those near Flagstaff, Ariz., the cave and cliff dwellings in the Mancos Cañon, and many others I could mention in our own Southwest. Whatever may be the relation between the dead and departed northern cliff dwellers and their southern living representatives, it seems to me that it would well pay some scientist to devote a few years to their thorough study, as Catlin did so well among the Sioux, Cushing with the Zunis, and many others I could mention.

All these Tarahumaris, whether civilized to the extent of agriculture, living in houses, and having the other arts in a crude degree, and embracing Christianity, or whether in the most savage state, naked to the skin except rawhide sandals, and living in caves or cliffs, while still worshiping the sun, and hoping for the return of Montezuma some day, all are to a great extent independent of the Mexican Government, much more than are any of the peaceable Indians of the United States from our own government, unless it be a few almost unknown tribes in the interior of Alaska. If a Tarahumari commits a crime against, or does an injury to, a Mexican or foreigner, the Mexican Government takes notice of it and tries to punish the offender; but between themselves, except in a few cases of flagrant murder, they can conduct all administration of justice, as well as other matters, wholly by officers of their own selection and by their own codes and customs. The very wild ones—the cliff and cave dwellers—know nothing of Mexican affairs, and in fact fly from all white people like so many quails when they approach. The more civilized elect their own chiefs and obey their executive mandates so well, as a general thing, that there is really very little reason for the Mexicans to force their officials upon them, if their only object is a maintenance of peace. Still the half-wild tribes of some parts of the mountains even war against each other without asking the Mexican Government yes or no, and conclude their own treaties as a result of such quarrels on their own basis. I was informed by Mr. Alberto Mendoza, a perfect master of both Spanish and English, and an interpreter at one of the big Sierra Madres silver mines, where there also was employed an excellent Tarahumari interpreter, that such a war as I have described recently broke out and was carried on by two factions in adjoining parts of the mountains. It was a very strange affair, of course, but I doubt if its existence was even known in any other part of Mexico.

METHODS OF WARFARE

Singularly enough, the badge of office of the self-governing tribes is a scepter, if an ornamented stick held in the hand can be called a scepter. These black savages of the sierras obey it more implicitly, however, than if it were a loaded Gatling gun trained on them. Whenever a government official or justice seizes this mace of the Madre Mountains, and holds it aloft, every person in sight is quelled more effectually than if it were a stick of giant powder that would explode if they did not obey. Its name among them, translated, is "God's Justice," and certainly no superstitious people ever obeyed a mandate more readily and completely than do they this mute expression of their own laws, and without which they would often be lawless under the same circumstances.

An almost ludicrous case was told me of a foul murder having been committed by the wild Tarahumaris on the person of a civilized one, the murderers holding possession of the body. It was natural that the civilized faction should want the corpse for burial, and they demanded it, but it was refused. The civilized natives then went to the boundary line of the two factions, hoping to get the chief of the wild savages to assist them. Here they found some four or five hundred of the latter drawn up in battle array, with bows and arrows, to dispute their passage into their own land. The chief was absent and refused to come to the assistance of the others, although demanded in the name of the Mexican law, with corresponding punishment. The civilized natives then conceived the idea of a small body of picked men going in a roundabout way to compel his attendance, which was done, although he still refused to exercise his authority to compel his own band to give up the corpse of the dead Tarahumari. The forcing of the wild chief into the dispute was about to bring on a collision between the two factions, when one of the civilized natives wrenched his scepter from his hand, waved it aloft, and demanded of the wild ones that they cease all hostile demonstrations and bring in the body of the murdered man, all of which they did in the name of "God's Justice."

Nearly all the civilized Tarahumaris are Christianized, while the wild ones living in cliffs and caves are—if they can be called anything—still worshipers of the sun and believers in the return of Montezuma; so this "God's Justice," as represented so effectually by the mace or scepter, cannot mean solely the Christian God or that of the Tarahumaris, for in either case it would have no effect on the other. There can be only one conclusion that I can see, and that is that this badge of authority is as old as the Tarahumaris themselves, or at least antedates the conversion of the civilized ones by the old Jesuits, or the conquering of the country by the Spaniards from Europe. The Mexicans use nothing of the kind except, probably, in their state and federal legislatures, as we do in some of ours, and it is not at all likely that these natives, especially the wild ones, would have borrowed it from so distant and almost never visited a source.

The civilized Tarahumaris have their own elections, patterned after the Mexicans in a crude way, while the wilder ones have their chiefs, but whether they are elected or hereditary I was not able to ascertain; I am inclined to think it is the former.

The wildest known of the Tarahumari cliff and cave dwellers are probably those of the Barranca del Cobre, which can be seen from the Grand Barranca of the Urique, as one skirts its dizzy cliffs, being in fact a spur of the Grand Barranca leading out to the east. There are undoubtedly many other, but unknown, places where these savages dwell, if possible more primitive than those of the Barranca del Cobre. In this cañon the cliff dwellers are often stark naked, except for a pair of guarraches, or rawhide sandals, these protecting the soles of the feet from the flint-like broken rocks of this part of the country, and without which even their tough hides would soon be disabled. Upon the approach of whites they fly to their birdlike houses in the precipitous cliffs like so many timid animals seeking their burrows.

The next nearest grade of these people goes so far as to ornament the person with breechclouts after the latest fashion set by Adam and Eve, the more savage of these again using the skins of wild animals for this purpose, while the better grade manages to secure some dirty clothes from the others to finish out this necessary part of their wardrobe. When it is reflected that the winters are quite severe on the higher parts of these sierras, the snow being some winters two and three feet deep, it is quite easy to conceive what constitutional toughness these fellows must have in their scanty attire.

An Eskimo would long to get back to the Arctic if he were here, so he could sit on an iceberg and get warm.

On the great mountain trails their feats of endurance are almost of a marvelous character. The semi-civilized are often employed as couriers, mail carriers, etc., and in all cases they invariably make from three to five times the distance covered by the whites in the same time, while there is no known domesticated animal that can possibly keep pace with them in the mountains.

It takes six or seven hours of fairly continuous climbing to make, by mule-back, from the mine in a deep gulch to the "cumbra," or crest of the Barranca del Cobre, by a most difficult mountain trail, the ascent made being five thousand to six thousand feet. It takes four hours to descend in the same way. A message was sent from "la cumbra" by a Tarahumari foot runner to a person at the mine and an answer received in an hour and twenty minutes, the same messenger carrying the letter both ways, or making the round trip.

One day a Tarahumari carrier passed us just after we had gone into camp about three o'clock in the afternoon, bound for the same point we expected to reach in three days' hard travel by mule-back. I wanted to send a message by him to this place, and on ascertaining when he would reach it was, as my hearers will easily infer, somewhat astonished to find out that he expected to make it that night, and I was afterward informed that he had done so.

Not a great many years ago the mail from Chihuahua to Batopilas was carried by a courier on his back, who made the distance over the Sierra Madre range, a good 250 miles, and return, or a total of 500 miles, in six days. Here he rested one day and repeated his trip, his contract being for weekly service. Alongside of this the best records ever made in the many six days' "go-as-you-please" contests that are heard of in the great cities of the United States sink into almost contemptible insignificance. I could give a dozen other instances, but these are enough. Of course these runners make many "cut offs" from the established mule trails when their course is along them, and they thus save distance, but making all such allowance their endurance is still phenomenal.

CHAPTER VI.

As our next month was passed on mule-back, and Mexican mule-back at that, I think it would be not at all inappropriate to make a brief dissertation on this kind of brute for the necessary merits and demerits of the journey.

The Mexican mule is a sort of a cross between a mountain goat and a flying squirrel, with the distinct difference that its surplus electricity flows off from the negative pole instead of the positive, as with the goat. It is in its meanderings on the mountain trail that it shines resplendent, but with a luster wholly its own, that can be no more compared with any other than can the flash of the diamond be compared with the fire of the opal. I would like to place it alongside of the American mule for comparison in the "deadly double column" of the newspaper, but the Mexican beast would kick out the intervening rule and "pi" the type before enough was up to form an opinion. On the mountain trail this distinct species of mule was never known to fall, although he has an exasperating and blood-curdling way of stumbling along over it that would raise the hair of a bald-headed man on end. Many a time I have watched the mule I was compelled to ride with a view of discovering his methods of trying to frighten me to death as payment for past injuries. Oftentimes the trail would lead past dizzy heights or cliffs, where one could look sheer down far enough to be dead before he reached the bottom should he fall, and every few feet along the trail of not over a foot in width it would tumble in a foot or so and again take up the original inclination of the mountain, or about that of the leaning tower of Pisa. Here the mule would always be sure to stick one foot over and stumble a little bit, but regain its equilibrium at the next step, having clearly done it intentionally, and for no other purpose than pure maliciousness. One can imagine the cool Alpine zephyr that is wafted up the vertebræ with sufficient force to blow the hair straight up on end. If you have touched the beast within the last three or four days with the whip, or dug into its sides with the spurs when it was absorbed in melancholy reflections, it'll be sure to remember it when you are climbing over the comb of a cliff from two thousand to three thousand feet high, and at the least movement of your feet or twitching of your fingers it will throw its head high in the air, like a hound on the scent, and go stumbling over every pebble and blade of grass on the dangerous way, evidently trying to make you regret that you had ever tried to punish so delicate a creature. At any other time you can turn double somersaults on its back, or act like a raving maniac, and it will not increase its funereal march a foot a day as the result of your actions. Whenever a trail leads exceptionally near a cliff, before it turns on the reverse grade down or up hill, the Mexican mule never fails to go within an inch of the crest and let his leg over with a slight quiver, as he turns around.

All these mountain trails are full of little round, hard stones about the size of marbles, and even larger ones, hidden underneath a carpeting of pine needles. These are liable to make a mule stumble if two feet are on the stones at once, but this is very seldom, although they always go sliding over them on the steeper trails. It is wonderful how these round rocks, hidden under the pine needles on the trail or off it, will throw a human being prostrate if he dismounts a few minutes to take a walk on a slope and stretch his stiffened limbs. Of course the mule, under headway, is liable to walk over him before it can stop or the person pick himself up.

There is another pastime in which the Mexican mule delights, and in which you won't. It likes to deviate enough to go under every low-branched tree on the trail, and so universal is this trait of character that the trail seems to lead from one low tree or vine to another, just as the mule has a mind to make it. The dodging of limbs and branches among the pines, cypresses, and oaks in the high lands was not so bad, but down in the tierra caliente or hot lands, where brambly mesquite and thorny vines were tearing crescents out of your clothes until you looked like a group of Turkish ensigns, it was much more monotonous.

The beast I was compelled to ride had one ear cut off near the head, and looked top-heavy in the extreme. As a mule's ears make up a goodly portion of it, as seen in elevation from the saddle on its back, I was always frightened when he approached a cliff on the unabridged side, and instinctively leaned in to counterpoise the heavy weight that I thought might drag us over the precipice. He was familiarly known by the party as "Old Steamboat," "Old Lumber Yard," and other names indicating these characteristics; but he was large and so was I, and he fell to my lot. When I first saw his abbreviated auricular appendage, as a member of the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Mules," I felt incensed upon hearing that it had been lost by the cut of a whip in the hands of a previous driver; but before we had been acquainted a week I had transferred all my sympathy from the mule to the man, whoever he may have been. On the level ground this mule was slower than the Mexican cook, who took fifteen minutes to wash a spoon; but on a perilous path of half a foot in width, on a dizzy precipice, the way he could box the compass with the lone ear, so as to catch some faint sound at which he could get frightened at this inopportune time, made me wish I could cut off the other ear at about the third cervical vertebra.

About half-past one on the first day out from Carichic we stopped for our lunch in a grove of beautiful pines in the valley of the Pasigochic, on the banks of a little stream of the same name. As I have said, we had ridden about fifteen miles from Carichic and were all very much in need of rest. Just before lunching we passed a number of Tarahumari Indians of the civilized class, working in a small field of about three or four acres. Even in this small space there were a dozen others hard at work. Their dark, swarthy bodies were almost the color of the rich soil in which they toiled, making their white breechclouts and white straw hats, the only things they wore, look curious enough when they moved about like so many unpoetical ghosts, as seen at a distance.

A TARAHUMARI MOUNTAIN HOME.

We were now well into the Sierra Madre range, and although the scenery was so far about the equal of the Alleghanies or Catskills, there was not much level ground for cultivation, and this was eagerly seized by the working natives, not only to raise crops for their own use, but to have some to sell; for from six to seven days' travel to the southwest was the richest silver district in the world, where all kinds of produce brought fabulous prices that would have enriched an American farmer in one season—flour forty cents a pound and other things in proportion. Indeed one of the best distinctions that could be made between the wild and civilized Tarahumaris is the fact that the former knows nothing of money nor makes any attempt to secure it, bartering directly by exchange with the civilized native for those things he wants and does not make; while the latter makes money his medium of exchange, and seems to thoroughly appreciate its value.

The midday lunch for a party of Mexicans moving through the mountains is quite long by comparison with American parties under like circumstances. It was two hours before we got away again. There are probably two reasons for this, one being that the midday is generally warmer with them than with us, although this did not apply to us in the cool, timbered regions of the high sierras; while the second reason is clearly found in the fact that they seldom feed their mules on these mountain trips, and must give them time to graze a fair-sized meal at noon. The Mexican packs and unpacks the mules twice a day, the American but once; for by feeding grain he can keep going until they want to camp, making it much earlier than his Mexican brother, who, starting at three o'clock, has to go until six or seven to make a respectable afternoon's march. By three o'clock the American is generally in camp, having made the same distance and having done half the work. It is doubtful, however, if American mules would do as well here under like circumstances.

After leaving the pretty and picturesque Pasigochic, a high hill is ascended, and late that afternoon we passed the highest point between the morning and evening camps, eighteen hundred feet. On the high hills were seen the beautiful madroña tree, or strawberry tree, with blood-red bark, and bright green and yellow leaves, and covered with white blossoms, so startling a mixture of colors that it would hardly be believed if painted and put on exhibition. They were everywhere, from the merest bush in size to trees twenty and thirty feet in height. In form they are not unlike a spreading apple tree, with strongly contorted and twisted branches. Then there were many oaks of different kinds, the encino robles or everlasting oak, the white oak, and the little black variety. There were a dozen kinds I knew nothing of in my limited vocabulary of forest trees. The pines were beautiful, and in many places forty to fifty merchantable trees to the acre, straight as an arrow, and without a limb for sixty or seventy feet from the ground. In one or two clusters I noticed groups of pines like those an old lumberman once pointed out to me in the forests of Oregon as good mast timber. I have seen the same repeated dozens of times on the slopes of the Sierra Madre range. This dense mass of spar and mast timber, as I shall call it, is nearly always found on the richest soil of the mountain, generally in the narrow little valleys where the silt from the sides is swept down by the rains until the soil is many feet deep.

The great coniferous forest of the northern part of the Sierra Madre range of Mexico is probably one of the largest in the world (it is undoubtedly the largest virgin forest on either continent), and when its resources are opened by well-constructed wagon roads, or, better still, by a railway system, it will undoubtedly prove an enormous source of revenue to the Mexican States of Chihuahua and Sonora, and to no little extent those of Sinaloa and Durango—a source nearly as profitable as their mineral wealth, and this is saying a great deal, for these States comprise the richest silver district in the world.

That evening we camped in the valley of the Guigochic, on another beautiful mountain stream, where a little park of an acre or two gave our mules some sweet alpine grasses, which warranted us in believing that half the morning would not be passed in chasing over the hills to find stray mules, as is so often the case in Mexico when these beasts are turned loose to search for their food. We were all thoroughly tired with our first day's ride on mule-back, but nevertheless turned in to help the cook, as we realized that we wanted something to eat that night. The tent was pitched between two magnificent pines of enormous size, and I slept to the music of the wind in their branches. We left our camp by the light of the camp fire next morning and started over the crest of one of the steepest mountains overlooking our camp. Halfway up the steep trail we passed two graves of stone heaps surmounted by rough wooden crosses. At this spot a man and his wife had been killed by the Apaches a few years ago. These same Apaches had penetrated too far into Tarahumari land, and after a disastrous encounter with the latter were fleeing themselves, when they met the defenseless Mexican and his wife and killed them. This was the farthest point west where a white person had been killed by Apache Indians in this part of Chihuahua. After climbing this hill of 1500 or 1600 feet our trail still led upward, the mountains growing steeper and steeper. When we reached the top of one peak we would immediately begin the zigzag descent, then climb up another and down again. Sometimes the trail wound over a bald, rocky peak, where steps by long years of use had been worn deep in the soft rock; and into these little places the mules would carefully place their feet, there really being no other foothold for them. Again there would be a chain of gigantic stairs leading down some steep mountain side, where one could look hundreds of feet, and see tall trees that from such an elevation resembled small shrubs. The nimble and sure-footed animals would place all four feet together and jump down from one step to another, oftentimes more than their own height, so that one felt sure of being sent flying over the cliff, Again, the trail would be over the loose, rolling stones, and the little animals would fairly slide down these dangerous places. By noon we reached the quaint little civilized pueblo of Tarahumari Indians named Naqueachic, they living in rude log houses instead of caves or cliff dwellings.

At the pueblo of Naqueachic of civilized Tarahumaris I found a curious method of cooking. Over the fire the food was boiling in two different dishes. One contained a substance that looked like a compound of mucilage and brick dust. The mademoiselle in charge would take up a calabash gourd full, holding a pint or two, and, although the gourd was held mouth up all the time, before it was three feet above the pot it was completely emptied, so tenacious and stringy was the substance, like the white of a soft boiled egg. This was repeated every five or ten seconds, evidently to keep it from burning. It is made from the soft, pulpy leaves or stalks of the nopal cactus; and is about as palatable to a white man as gruel and sawdust would be. The other pot contained some mixture of corn, beans, and probably one or two other more savage ingredients, a sort of Sierra Madre succotash.

In one corner of the room—I might say the house, for there was only one room in the house—was a rude loom for weaving blankets, which they make from the wool of their mountain sheep, and which under all the circumstances are quite creditable. The ornamentation is not very great, and yet none of them lack this seemingly necessary part of a blanket. These blankets are usually of a dark brown color, with one or two dark yellow stripes across them at the ends. Being "all wool and a yard wide" they are quite warm, much warmer than some Mexican woolen blankets that I bought at Chihuahua, which seemed better calculated to keep the heat out on the cold nights in the mountains than to keep it in.

The civilized Tarahumaris are quite cleanly for savages, noticeably more so than the lower order of Mexicans, and yet there is plenty of room, great, unswept back counties of it, for improvement in this respect.

After leaving the interesting little village of Naqueachic we at once started over a high range or crest some twenty-nine hundred feet above our level, and from the top could look down in a beautiful valley on one of the most important Tarahumari villages in the Sierra Madres, the town of Sisoguichic. I would have liked to camp here for the night, but as there was no corn for the mules or grass for them to graze on we were compelled to proceed.

OLD TARAHUMARI INDIAN.

CHAPTER VII.

That night our camp was in an immense pine forest on the crest of one of the high peaks, and here we parted with our Mexican friend Don Augustin Becerra, to whom we had already become deeply indebted, and who found it necessary to hasten on to his father's mines at Urique, which we were to make more leisurely.

There is a widely dispersed variety of pitch pine in these mountains, which may be said to be the candles or the lanterns of the natives of the country. The night scenes in the pitch-pine States of the South have long formed themes in prose and poetry, but those States are in the flat-land coasts of our country, with no scenery to give any of the strange, weird effects of a broken land. At one camp I made upon a high potrero, I saw such a scene. It was in a little flat place in the mountain, where the grass was good for the mules, but where the water was far down the precipitous ravine or box cañon that opened out by a gorge to a great barranca as deep and wide as the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. A half-dozen men at a time, all with pitch-pine torches, descended after water, or to drive the mules to and from water. As they cut long slivers of pine, eight to ten feet in length, that blaze for two-thirds to three-fourths their length, the strange effect on the wild scenery, stretching for miles, can be more easily conceived than described. To have put it faithfully on canvas would have made the reputation of any artist, and the equal of which I have never seen. Vereschagin's "My Camp in the Himalayas" seemed almost tame by comparison. The great wide sombreros, glittering with silver—for even the common peons of Mexico have more costly hats than the "Four Hundred" of New York—the bright red foliage of the manzanillas and the madroño trees, rendered doubly lurid by the reflection of the torches, the sharp rocks of the cañon in battlemented and castellated confusion, stretching off to the mighty barranca five thousand to six thousand feet deep, really made up a picture that not one painter in a thousand could have done justice to, and not one could imitate.

On our third day out we crossed a most picturesque stream called the Panascos River. Near the crossing were a number of huge irregular bowlders lying at the foot of a sculptured cliff. Under those that formed cave-like recesses were a number of Tarahumari cave dwellers, looking absolutely comical in their wide-brim straw hats of coarse grass and their primitive breechclouts. Their skins were so dark-colored that had it not been for this white clothing at the two termini it would have been hard to make them out in the dark, deep caverns into which most of them fled upon our approach.

CAVE-DWELLING TARAHUMARIS.

A recently occupied cave of these strange earth-burrowing savages could nearly always be told by the stains of ascending smoke from the highest point of entrance to the cave. If the cave has been abandoned for any length of time the rain soon wipes out this sure sign of habitation. We passed a large number of caves with funnel-shaped smoke stains, leading up from the outside, but the silence of death surrounded them, as if human life had never been within a mile of the place; but I have not the remotest doubt that there were a dozen people inside of each, peeping at us from around the dark corners, having heard our approach and fled in time to keep well out of our sight. Nothing is noisier than a Mexican mule packer, and the mountains are always resounding with his pious shouting to his lazy, plodding animals as he urges them on; so I considered it very lucky indeed that we saw as many of the living cave and cliff dwellers as we actually did, so excessively shy are these poor, timid creatures.

HOME OF CAVE DWELLERS.

One of our Mexican packers tried to buy a sheep of one of the civilized Tarahumaris a little farther on, but he would not part with one for any money, although apparently having plenty to spare. Many of the pueblos of the civilized Tarahumaris are really isolated communities, raising all they need for food from the soil, or wool for clothing, or both from animals of the chase, and consequently seldom buying or selling.

That same day we passed La Sierra de los Ojitos. It is a high, shaggy mountain, covered to the very top with a dense forest of pine, and indicates where the waters divide to the east and west. On its slope that we faced, its rivulets poured their contents into the Gulf of Mexico, while from the opposite slope they go into the Pacific Ocean, or rather its great Mexican arm, the Gulf of California. It is the highest point of the Sierra Madres that we encountered on the trail, and I found it to be 12,500 feet above the level of the sea, with La Sierra de los Ojitos towering some 2000 to 3000 feet higher on our left. I camped that night in a picturesque box cañon, which I named Carillo Cajon after the Governor of the State of Chihuahua, who had done a great deal to help the expedition with all the local authorities in the different parts of the State that I might visit. We camped at the first available point we could find, and even here slept at an inclination of some thirty degrees to the level, the mules grazing nearly overhead above us and occasionally rolling a stone down on us during the night.

This part of the Sierra Madres has a great deal of game in it, but the most essential things to hunt it with would be a good pair of wings, things that unfortunately travelers never have. There are many white-tailed deer in the well-wooded valleys, but a brass band would find them before a Mexican pack train, as it makes much less noise. In fact this is true of nearly all kinds of game that can be frightened off by the lung power of man. There are also many bears here, but we saw none, nor any fresh signs of them. It is said by those who ought to know that there are two kinds of bears in the Sierra Madre range, lying between Chihuahua and Sonora—the common black species, and a huge brown kind that must be, I think, the cinnamon or the grizzly bear, so common farther north. The Tarahumari natives hunt the deer in a very singular manner, but they leave the bears alone, as their weapons, the bows of mora wood, are not strong enough for such an uncertain encounter. The jaguar, or Mexican spotted panther, is known as far north as this, but seems to keep to the warm lands, or tierra caliente, which restricts it to the low plains of Sonora and Sinaloa, just west of here.

The endurance of these savage sons of the sierras in chasing deer is wonderful. They take a small native dog and starve it for three or four days till it has a most ravenous appetite; then they go deer hunting, and put this keen-nosed, hungry animal on the freshest deer trail they can find. It is perfectly needless to add that he follows it with a vim and energy unknown to full stomachs. Fast as a hungry, starved dog is on a trail that promises a good breakfast, he does not keep far ahead of the swift-footed cliff dweller, who is always close enough behind to render any assistance that may be required if the deer is overtaken or a fresher trail is run across. I should say the dog is always liberally rewarded if the hunt is a success.

If night overtakes the pursuers they sleep on the trail, and resume the chase as early next morning as the light will allow. Once on the trail, however, the deer is a doomed animal, although the pursuers have been known to sleep for two or three nights on its course before it was overtaken, especially if the fleeing animal knew in some way that it was pursued long before it was overtaken. Once overhauled, a series of tactics is begun so as to divide the labor of the pursuit between the dog and the man, but to give no corresponding advantage to the deer. Wide detours are forced upon the deer by the swift dog, each recurring one being easier to make, and the pursued animal is brought near the man, who, with loud shouts and demonstrations, heads off the exhausted animal every little while and turns it back on the pursuing dog, until finally in one of the retreats it falls a temporary prey to its canine foe, when the man rushes in and with a knife soon dispatches the game.

Early one morning we could hear wild turkeys calling from one cliff to the other, but as these were over a thousand feet higher and steeper than the leaning-tower of Pisa, I suddenly lost all the wild turkey zeal I had brought along with me for the trip. Then, again, if a commander leaves his pack train just as they are getting away, he will surely find a delay of an hour or two on his hands, for which it would take a dozen turkeys to make amends. There is a plentiful supply of game in the Mexican sierras, however, for any sportsman who wishes to devote his attention directly to that pastime, as shown by the big scores the natives make when they go on a hunting trip.