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Show UNWILLING YAQUIS Mexico Aids Her Indians CIUDAD OBREGON, SONORA, MEXICO. A long-range plan to change warring Yaqui Indians into peaceful farmers is patiently being pursued by the Mexican government regardless of widespread wide-spread doubt and skepticism. The Yaqui is not willing to forget for-get his persecutions by Spanish conquerors or Mexican agents. He feels all the land rightfully belongs to him and thinks he has exchanged a blanket for a small , handkerchief in accepting two and , a half square miles of property for , each of his nine pueblos and additional addi-tional farming lands. Mexicans feel too much land has been given the Indians and that the amount of money being spent on them is excessive. i "The Indians are not good farm-I farm-I ers," they say. I In the meantime, the Mexican I government, copying the United States Indian Service plans, is constructing con-structing a huge canal to irrigate the Yaqui land grants in an effort to convert the warriors into farmers. Butchery Has Stopped j No longer do the Yaquis sweep i out of their Bacatete Mountains stronghold to burn trains, butcher passengers and ranchers and ravage rav-age the countryside. Even so, there is constant, If slight, fear of another Yaqui outbreak. out-break. While Southern Pacific of Mexico trains now travel without soldiers, two cavalry posts at Esperanza and Bicam are ready to protect citizens. "There is not a family in this area but has suffered at the hands of the Yaqui," L. M. Byerly, American farm machinery merchant, mer-chant, explains. "This valley today is in exactly the same position Arizona found itself in the 1880's" says Sidney M. Morrison, manager of the Richardson Rich-ardson Construction Co. which opened the valley's vast irrigation system. Our valley has the Yaqui, Arizona had the Apache," he continues. "There is the constant fear not only of another Yaqui outbreak, but of further expropriation of lands under the agrarian system. Farm Training "Some progress is being made among the Yaqui in training them to become able farmers, but it seems slow by American standards." stand-ards." Mexicans themselves feel their government has been wasteful in giving the Yaqui tribe more than 12 million acres of land which extend to the Gulf of California. A large portion of this is irrigable irri-gable and it is through this that the Utah Construction Co. has been building a new canal over 30 kilometers long. Eventually water will be fed into the canal system solely for Yaqui Indian use. But the Yaqui continues to call the Mexican "yori," or enemy. Generally they dislike laws, soldiers, sol-diers, government agents and Americans. They remember the 1903 massacre massa-cre of thousands of Yaqui and the trainloads who were shipped like slaves to work in Yucatan. |