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Show SONORA AND IHE YAQUIS Fertile Valley of Arizpa Depopulated by Ya-quis Ya-quis Ancient Ruins No Records of an Ancient Race Valley of Blood Yaqui Invincible; Wage Guerrilla War; Are Fearlass, Very Fleet Great Foot-Race Foot-Race They Are Inured to Hardship. (Special Cor. Intermountain Catholic.) (Copyrighted.) If there he any ate in the republic of Mexico.; about which it is difficult to obtain accurate or ex- act statistics, it i Sonora. Populated largely by' Indians and miners scattered over the whole stab' and immune to the salutarv influence of law. it is. difficult to take its census or bring its population-under population-under the restraining checks of civilization. Her-, mosillo with its 2".(mm people is numerically and commercially the most important town in Sonora. j It is 110 miles north of Guaymas. The harbor ofj Guaymas is one of the best on the Pacific coast, il. i is four miles long, with an inner and outer bay. ami i will admit ships of the heaviest tonnage, and could I think, Hoat the commerce of America. The Yaqui river, of which I will have occasion to write at another an-other time, enters the Gulf of California, called the Gulf of Cortez by the Mexicans eighteen miles be-: low Guavmas. The Sonora flows through the An'-; zipa valley which is known as the Garden of So-, nora on account of its incomparable fertility. For-' merly it was dominated by the terrible Vaquis, and a few years ago the depopulated villiages and ranches were melancholy reminders of the ruthless vengeance of these ferocious men. The Sonora river valley with its wealth of rich' alluvial land, its facilities for irrigation and adaptation adap-tation to semi-tropical and temperate fruits and cereals' will eventually support a great population. ANCIENT RUINS. j -".-That. th valley and AdjaceuLliiiid.'i. .Wi'J&au-.an-. , - , cient days occupied by a numerous and barbaric not savage race there can be no doubt. Scattered Scat-tered over the face of the country ;.re the remains of a people who have long ago disappeared. Many of the ruins are of great extent, covering whole table lands, and are crumbling away in groups or in single isolation. Unfortunately no documents are known to exist to record whatever from tradition of the ancient people existed when the Spanish missionary fathers first began the civilization of the tribes 400 years ago. When the early Jesuit missionaries were driven our. the archives and evervthing belonging to the missions were destroyed. de-stroyed. It is. however, possible that a search through the libraries of the Jesuit and Franciscan monasteries in France and Spain may . yet reward the historian with some valuable finds. TIIE VALLEY OF BLOOD. From an examination of the. sites of the ruin, scattered here and there in the Sonora valley. I am satisfied that the ancient dwellers were a sedentary and agricultural people; that they were of the same race as the Moki ami suffered the same fate as they, and from the uiispairing hand of the same merciless mer-ciless destroyers the Apaches or Yaquis. Long before be-fore the time of Cortez the evil fame of the unconquerable un-conquerable Yaquis had settled around 'the throne of the .Montezumas. There is a tradition that after af-ter the Spanish chief had stormed the City of Mexico Mex-ico and made a prisoner of, the Aztec ruler, Montezuma Monte-zuma said to him: "You may take possession of all'my empire and subdue all its tribes but. the! Yaqui, never." Today the Sonora valley is wet. with the blood of slaughtered settlers. Formerly they confined their depredations to the Sonora val-. ley and the Yaqui river regions, but the members of the tribe are now scattered over northern and central Sonora. the fighters, however, live in the Racatele mountains and parts of the Sierras. One-half One-half of them are partially civilized and are peace- ful. the other half continue to wage a guerrilla war in lhc mountainous regions. These mountaineers are men of toughened fiber, of great endurance and inured to the extremes of heat, cold and hunger. They have no fear of anything or anybody, except the spirits of evil, which bring disease and calamities calami-ties upon hem, and the "shamans" or medicine men who act as infernal mediators between these demons de-mons and their victims. Their wild, isolated and independent life Inn given to the Yaquis all those characteristic traits of perfect self-reliance, of boldness and impatience ' of restraint .which distinguish them from the Mayos and other sedentary trilx-s of northern Mexico. ' Born in the mountains, they are familiar with the woods and trails. No coyote of the rocks knows his prowling grounds better than a Yaqui the secrets se-crets of the Sierra wilderness. Like the eagle; he. sweens down upon his prey from bis aerie amid the clouds, and. like the eagle, disappears. ARE GREAT RUNNERS. His dorsal and leg muscles are withes of stetl, and with his dog half coyote, half Spanish hound he'll wear down a mountain deer. With the possible pos-sible exception of his neighbor and kinsman, the Tarahumari of the Chihuahua woods he is, perhaps, per-haps, the greatest long distance runner in America. Occasionally. 'friendly contests take .lace between be-tween the noted athletes of the two tribes. Sis years ago n Tarahumari champion challenged one of the greatest long-distance. runners of the Yaquis. , ! In a former contest the Yaqui runner won out. ILi covered 100 Spanish miles, equal to 00 of ours, over hilly and broken ground, in eleven hours and twenty twen-ty minutes. Comparing this performance with those of civilized man in ancient and modern timc ' . (Continued on Page 5.) - ' ' j j S0N0RA ANDTHEYAqms. (Continued from Pago .) the Yaqui, all things considered, u ins the laurel crown. Pliny records that Anystrsjof Sparta and Philonedes, the herald of Ale sandei- the Great, dividing di-viding the distance between them, covered 160 miles in twenty-four hours. Herodot us teU us that Phied-' Phied-' dippides, the pan-Hellenic chi opion, traversed 105 miles over very rocky territ ry and in grueling weather, in less than two day carrying to Sparta the news of the advancing 3 "ersians. He almost attained an apotheosis in rev ard for his performance, perform-ance, showing that, even amoi s the athletic Greeks the feat was deemed an extraf rdinary performance. History also credits Areus v ith winning the Do-lichas Do-lichas of two and a half mil s. in a fraction less than twelve . minutes, at the Olympic games, and straightway starting on a h meward run of sixty miles to be the first to bear t ie joyous news to his j native village. In recent timejs, Rowe.ll of England, in 1882, traveled 150 miles in (twentv-two hours and thirty minutes, and Fitzgerald, in Madison Square Gardens, went, in 1886, on a quarter-mile circular track, ninety miles in twelve hours. Longboat, the Oneida Indian from the Brantford reservation, Canada, won the Boston ' Marathon twenty-five miles in two hours and twenty-four minutes. These modem feats, however, were performed over care-, fully prepared courses and ought not to take rank with the rough mountain and desert races of the. Yaquis and Tarahumaris. ' AN HISTORIC FOOTRACE. The ract of six years ago was run over the same course as the former and was the same distance, that is, ninety miles. Piles of blankets, bridles and saddles, bunches of cows, sheep, goats and burros were bet on the result, and, when the race was over, the Yaqui braves were bankrupt. The night before the event the Indians camped on the starting line, and whqn the sun went down opened the betting. ( An hour before the start, the course was lined on each side with men two miles apart. Precisely at 4 in the morning the racers, wearing bullhide sandals and breech-clothes or, to be more accurate, the G string, toed the mark and were sent away, encouraged encour-aged by the most extraordinary series of hi-yi-yiis, yells, shrieks and guttural shouts ever heard by civilized civ-ilized man. The path carried them over rough ground, along the verge of deep precipices, over ar-royos ar-royos or old river beds, across arid sands. . Every two miles the runners stopped for a half minute rub down and mouth wash of pinola or atole, a corn- meal gruel. Then with a "win for the Yaquis" or ; "the Ilumari women already welcome you," whis- i pered in his ear the runner bounds into the wilderness. wilder-ness. Three o'clock that afternoon the men were , sighted from the finish line running shin to shin, and at 3:15 the Tarahumari crossed the mark amid a chorus of triumphal yelps, retrieving the honors lost in the former contest and making his backer "heap rich." The ninety miles were run by both men in eleven hours and fifteen minutes, and considering con-sidering the nature of the ground it is doubtful if any of our great athletes could cover the distance in the same time. In addition to his fleetness of foot and staying ( powers the Yaqui is a man of infinite, resources. Years of thirst, starvation and exposure have produced pro-duced a human type with the qualities and developed devel-oped instinct of the coyote of the desert. He is the descendant of many generations of warriors and is heir to all, the acquired information of centuries cen-turies of experience of bush, desert and mountain , fighting. There is not a trick of strategy, not a bit of savage tactics in war, not aparticle of knowledge knowl-edge bearing upon attack, engagement and escape with which he is not familiar, for he has been taught them all from infancy and has practiced them from boyhood. He is the last of the Indian fighters and, perhaps, the greatest. The world will never again see a man like him, for the conditions will never again make for his reproduction. With him will disappear the perfection of savage cun-; ning in war and in the hunt, and when he departs, I an unlamented man, but withal a picturesque char- j acter, will disappear from the drama of human life, i will go down into darkness, but not into oblivion, j Chihuahua, May t. 1 |