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Show GRAN BARRANCA Of THE UREQUI Meza Fam'ly Slaughtered by Yaquis Inspiring Scenery of the Gran Barranca Its Future Prospects Nature Has Wrought Wonders in the Wilderness Figures and Foliage Impossible to Transmit Trans-mit to Wood or Canvas Suggestive Thoughts Pen Picture of the Wonderful Wonder-ful Scenic View El Rosario Mininu Camp. (Special Correspondence Intermountain Catholic.)! (Copyright.) The readers of The Intermountain Catholic wlnj have accompanied me in my travels and researches will remember that with Don Alonzo Espinosa, hU son and daughter, I entered the hunting ground of the Yaquis. As we alvanced, the trail grew ever steeper, ever rougher, ever more confused by the inexplicable windings and protruding elbows that pushed out from the granite walls as if to challenge our advance. How the ancient, angry waters wa-ters must have roared through these narrow passages pas-sages when the torrential rains were abroad on these high peaks and the swollen streams, leaping - , from ledge to level, swelled the rushing flood! ' Above our heads there rose three thousand feet of porphyritic rock, but we had no consciousness of it, no foreboding of danger, no fesar, no chill. i SLAUGHTER OF MEZA FAMILY. We were now in a gorge of the Otates moun- j tains, where a year ago, the Yaquis ambushed and ' I slaughtered the Meza party, leaving their mangled J bodies in this narrow gorge between Ortiz and La ( . Dura. The report of the massacre was brought to '. ! Ortiz by an Indian express runner, who passed through the defile at breaJc of day and identified ' ? the bodies. Senor Pedro Meza, a wealthy mine owner and one 'of the most prominent men in tho district, accompanied by his wife and daughters, I ) Senoritas Carmen, Elvira, Eloisa and Panchetta sixteen, eighteen, twenty and twenty-three years , ; left Guaymas early one morning for La Dura. At r Ortiz they halted for refreshments, where they wert. '. joined by Senor Theobold Hoff, his wife and son, a, ' j young man twenty-three years old. There was ' I apparently no reason for alarm, for the Mexican I troops and the Yaqui warriors were fighting it out eighty miles to the east. When the Indians ambushed them, the men of1 the party charged desperately up the slope to draw, the Yaquis' fire, shouting to the ladies to drive oaj and save themselves. The women refused to abandon aban-don the men, and when a company of Mexican Rurales (mounted police) arrived on the scene.. Pedro Meza, his family and guests were numbered with the dead. j I have already written a brief history of thi extraordinary tribe, and I confine myself now tcv the statement that the Yaquis are no-w and hav. been for the past three hundred years, the boldest, and fiercest warriors within the limits of Mexico, and Central America. WONDERFUL PANORAMA OF SIEHRAS. I passed the night under the friendly roof of Don Alonzo, and early the next morning with my; Mayo guide and companion continued my journey to the Gran Barranca. Far away to the southeast towered the volcanic mount, the Sierra de lo Ojitos, whose shaggy flanks and heaving ridges aro covered with giant pines, and on whose imperial crest the clouds love to rest before they open and distribute impartially their waters between the Atlantic At-lantic and the Pacific, through the Gulfs of Mexico and California. The trail now became steeper and narrower, carrying car-rying us through an inspiring panorama of isolated mounts, huge rocks and colossal bowlders standing here and there in battlemented and castellated confusion. con-fusion. Stretching away to the south and extending extend-ing for hundreds of miles, even to the valley of Oaxca, was the great coniferous or pine forest o the Sierras Madres, the reserves of the paleto deer, the feeding grounds of the peccary or wild hog and the haunts of the mountain bear and the jaguar o Mexican spotted tiger. This great pine range is the laTgest virgin forest in North America, and for unnumbered ages has reposed and still reposes in its awful isolation. In the early Miocene age, when God was preparing pre-paring the earth for the coming of man, this immense im-mense wilderness was the feeding grounds of mighty animals now extinct and, at a later period-of period-of the fierce ancestors of those now roamrna? through the desolation of its solitude. The deca.-r (Continued on Page o.) ) , .... 1 GRAN BARRANCA OF THE UREQUI. (Continued from Page 1.) of forest wealth and the disintegration of its animal ani-mal life eternally going on has superimposed upon the primitive soil a loam of inexhaustible richness Unfortunately there is no water to river its timber, tim-ber, but when the time comes, as come it will, when its produce can be freighted, this forest will be of incalculable commercial value to Mexico and as profitable to the Republic as her enormously rich mines. . . WONDERS OF THE WILDERNESS. The mountains, isolated cones and the face o the land, as we proceeded, began to assume weird and fantastic shapes. Wind and water chiseling, carving and cutting for thousands of years, have produced a panorama of architectural deceptions bewildering to man. These soulless sculptors and carvers, following a mysterious law of origin and J movement, have evolved from the sandstone hill an amazing series of illusions and have cut out and fashioned monumental designs of the most curious and fantastic forms. Here are battlements, towers, tow-ers, cathedrals, buttresses and flying buttresses, Away to our left are giant figures, great arches and architraves, and among heaps of debris from fallen columns there is flourishing the wonderful madrons or strawberry tree, with blood red bark, bright green and yellow leaves, and in season, covered with waxen white blossoms, impossible of imitation on wood or canvas. The wild turkeys are calling from cliff to cliff and the wilderness is yielding food to them. The intense silence weighs upon the soul, the stupendous stupen-dous hills bear to the mind a sensation of awe and sublimity. I looked around me and saw everywhere every-where titanic mountains roughly garbed in hoary vegetation; the vision carried me back to a. formative forma-tive peril before time was, "when the earth was-void was-void and fmpty, and' darkness was upon the face o' the deep i and the Spirit of God moved upon th waters and said let land appear." And now, as we advance, the scenery suddenly becomes .grander and more sublime, surpassing great in itsSawful solitude, its tremendous strength and terrifying size. The spirit of man, in harmonv with the lr-ajesty of his surroundings and tho matchless-splendor of these silent monuments to God's creative power ought to expand and grjw-large, grjw-large, but the soul is dwarfed and dominated Uv the sense of its own littleness in the presence of the infinite creative mind which called from the depths and gave form to this awful materiality and, down through the ages, there comes to him tho portentous call of the Holy Spirit, "Where was thou, O, man, when I laid the foundations of these hills, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?'' A LAND OF SCENIC WONDERS. Late in the afternoon we came out from a dense forest of lofty pines and at once; we stood upon the very edge of the precipice and looked down upon and across the "Gran Barranca." My position vu on a broad rock platform overhanging the great canyon, and from it I looked down a sheer two thousand feet to where the palms and -pines meet and part again. Here was the zone of separation the pine moving up to the "tierra fria," the cold land, and the palm sloping dov.n to its own home the "tierra caliente," the hot land. The melancholy melan-choly murmur of the winds ascending from the sepulcher of the silent river, flowing three thousand thou-sand feet below, but made' 'he sense of loneliness the more oppressive. From the table of the mountain moun-tain that sloped away from me and above me to the waters of the dark-red river below was six thousand feet of almost perpendicular depth. Away to the south Avas the Yale of the Churches, so called frorj. the weird architectural monuments carved and left standing in the wilderness by Ihe erratic and mysterious mys-terious action of the winds intermittently at work for ages. From where I was standing the mining camp of El Rosario appeared as if pitched in an open plain, but it is really on a promontory between two "barrancas" "bar-rancas" or ravines, and beyond it the land is broken and falls away in terraces till it meets the purpi mountains of Sahuaripa. Indeed, the little villago on this tremendous ridge is surrounded by lofty mountains. Looking down and beyond where the graceful palms have placed themselves, just whero an artist wcyild have them in the foreground of his-picture, his-picture, the view is a revelation. Far away is the , long mountain range, gashed with ominous wounds, out of which in season streams flow, where formidable formid-able promontories reach out and peaks and cones of extinct craters tell of elemental wars. To mv right, stretching away for miles, the land is onp vast tumultuous mass of giant bowlders, of stubborn stub-born cacti and volcanic rocks. Many of these erupted rocks still carry tho black marks of the fire from which they escaped in times geologiea linear. li-near. How many thousands of years, we know noi since these porphyritic hills were heaved up and wasted to a dark wine purple or these adamantine ledges burned to a terra cotta orange. Here, scat- tered along or cropping out of the faces of the towering cliffs, are metamorphic rocks and con- glomerates slates, shales, syenites and grit Hon and here and there dust of copper, bririston-and bririston-and silver blown against the granite wal.fc and blackened as if oxidized by tiro. The porphyrin.-hills porphyrin.-hills bear ugly scars upon their sides, cicatricial wounds received in the days when "the deep calli-d to the deep and the earth opened at the voice f the flood gates." Guyamas, June 2:1. 1007. |
