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Show BARBAROUS RACES. t "Digger" Indians of Lower California-Dream California-Dream of Joy Land- of Promise-Completion Promise-Completion of Canal Presages Prosperity Prosper-ity Cochimic Indians Lowest in the Barbaric Scale Compared With the Eskimos and Leaf Wearers "Dig- , gers" Are Shameless Savage Myth j Jesuit Fathers' Noble Work. j i C" (Special Cor. Intermountain Catholic") J - (Copyrighted.) Although Lower California remains today a an awful example of some tremendous bouleversr-ment bouleversr-ment in the Miocene age. a land of gloom and largely large-ly of abject sterility yet it has many redeeming features fea-tures and there are hopes of redemption for this gruesome peninsula. For example, there have lately late-ly l)cen discovered on the Gulf coast large, very large deposits of sulphur, and north of La Paz, immense im-mense beds of almost pure salt. At and around the Cerabo islands, the pearl fisheries, once so productive produc-tive and valuable, are again becoming promising. In the northern part of the peninsula there i3 much excellent grazing land, calculated at 900.000 acres, where alfalfa, burr and wild clover, and fields of wild oats, four feet long and full of grain .thrive. Along the shores of the Bay of San Marco they are now quarrying from vast beds the finest alabaster in America. At Todos Santos there are large quarries quar-ries of white and variagated marble and in the neighboring mountains great eleposits of copper ore carrying much silver. At Ensenada the Rothschilds control the mines and have erected large smelting works to reduce the ore. A DREAM OF JOY. Lower California has two capitals, Ensenada on the North Pacific coast and La Paz far down on the gulf. The tremendous barriers of mountains j and deserts between the two coasts antl the distance; by water around Cape San Lucas have made tw- ( capitals a necessity. La Paz at the head of a fine, I deep bay of the same name has a population of about 3,000, nearly all Mexicans. It is a town of i one broad, straight street with whitewashed houses f of stone, one story high, tree shaded, verandahed and jalousied. The Tropic of Cancer cuts through the San Jose valley to the south. The town and I the land around it for many miles are a dream of joy. Here the orange groves stretch away for many f miles on every side, bordered with rows of cocoa- j nut palms which respond t the slightest touch of I breeze, and wave their fern shaped crowns. In the I morning, when the sun is rising beyond the giant j mountains, the air of the valley is vibrant with J the songs of mocking birds and California magpies of many hued plumage. Here also, in the alluvion expressions, arborescent ferns with wide spreading leaves tower forty feet in the midst of tropical trees whose branches are festooned with many varieties of orchids and flowering parasites of most brilliant I hues. The completion of the Panama canal will mean much prosperity to the west coast, for a railroad will then be built from Magdalena Bay to San Diego, Southern California, connecting with the Southern Pacific forNew Orleans, Chicago and the east. The west coast will then probably become a gTeat health resort, for the climate is unsur- I passed and chalybate and thermal springs are j everywhere. Some far-seeing Boston capitalists, I anticipating a great future for this section of Low- er California, have purchased the Flores estate, 427 miles long by sixteen wide. The purchase includes harbor rights on Magdalena Bay and is the longest coast line, owned by any one man or firm in the f world. , ! The population of Lower California is about 25,000, principally Mexicans and half-castes. There are 600 or 700 foreigners engaged in mining and ; some Yaqui and Mayo Indians, pearl fishers in tha ! large bay of Pechilinque. THE DIGGER INDIANS. To me the most interesting and pathetically , I attractive members of the human race in North I America are the melancholy remnants of the early tribes of Lower California withering away on the desert lands and mountain ranges.and now almost extinct. In the history of the human race we have ; no record of any tribe, clan or family that had i fallen so low or had approached as near as it wa3 . possible for human beings to the state of offal ani- mal3 as the wretched Cochimis or "Digger Indians" of Lower California. The Cochimis,' unlike any ; other family or tribe of American Indians occupied ! a distinct position of their own, and, indeed, may (Continued on page 5.) 1 BARBAROUS RACES. (Continued from Page 1.) have been a distinct people. Shut off from the main land by the Gulf of Cortez to the east and impassable deserts on the north, they were isolated, it may be ,for thousands of years from all communication commu-nication with other aboriginal tribes, and until the coming of the Spaniards under Otondo they knew nothing of the existence of any other people except ex-cept perhaps the coast tribes of Sonora and Sin-oloa. Sin-oloa. Their language and tribal dialects bore no affinity to those of the northern or southern nations.. na-tions.. It is-doubtful, (indeed, if they were of the same race, for their customs, habits, tribal peculiarities peculiar-ities and characteristics allied them rather to the people of the South Pacific Islands. Sir William Hunter in his chapter on the "Non-Aryan "Non-Aryan Races," describes the Andamans or "dog-faced "dog-faced man-eaters," as a fragment of the human race which had reached the lowest depths of hopeless hope-less degradation. After the Andamans he classed the "Leaf -wearers" of Wissa. Dr. Kane, the Arctic explorer, thought it was not possible for human beings to fall lower in degeneracy than the fugitive , Eskimos, the "Ka-Ivaaks," whom he met at "God send Ledge,"" where his ship was ice-locked and where fifty-seven of his dogs went mad from cold and died. They were foul, verminised and filthy, and when he fed them raw meat and blubber "each slept after eating, his raw chunk lying beside him on the buffalo skin, and, as he awoke, his first act was to eat and the next to sleep again. They did not lie down, but slumbered away in a sitting posture, pos-ture, with the head resting on the breast." These savages were compelled by the intense cold of their northern home to cloth themselves and construct some sort of shelters, and even the Wissa family or "leaf wearers" of Sir William Hunter yielded to an instinct of shame, but the. "Digger Indians" roamed entirely ,naked and built no temporary or permanent shelters. Their vermin infested hair drooped long over their faces and backs; they were tanned, by unnumbered years of sun and wind exposure, to the hue of West Coast negroes, and, worst of all, they were victims of pornographic and sexual indecencies pitiful in their destructive results. A member of Otondo's expedition expedi-tion and colony of 1683, writing of Lower California, Califor-nia, says: "We found the land inhabited by brutish, brut-ish, naked people, sodomitic, drunken and besotted.' The noble savage of Dryden and Cooper is all right in poetry and romance, but the real man, wheu you meet him and know him, is indeed a creature to be pitied, against whom the-element3 have conspired and with whom circumstances have dealt harshly. God deliver us from the man of nature, unrestrained unre-strained by fear of punishment, unchecked by public pub-lic opinion, by law or order, ' untamed by social amenities, uriawed by, the gospel .of the hereafter, t r The nearer we come to the man who ha3 no higher law than his own will, nor knows obedience to a higher authority than himself, the nearer we come to a dangerous animal who eats raw meat, indecently inde-cently exposes himself, loves dirt, hates peace, wallows wal-lows in the filth of unrestrained desire and kills the weaker man he does not like whenever the temptation tempta-tion comes and the opportunity is present. And low as the man can fall, the woman f,alls lower. "Corruptio optimae pessima" the corruption of the best is ever the worst and all nature exposes nothing to the pity and melancholy wonder of man more supremely sad and heartrending than woman reduced to savagery. The Jesuit fathers who established sixteen missions mis-sions in Lower California, beginning in 1GS3, sent to their provincial in Mexico City from time to time, accurate reports of the condition of the tribes and the progress of religion and civilization among them. I will have' occasion in another correspondence correspond-ence to deal with the heroism and self-sacrifice of these saintly men. For the present I confine myself to the letters of these great priests which bear upon up-on the degeneracy and pitiable condition of the Lower California Indians and the appalling degradation degra-dation to which it is possible, under adverse conditions, condi-tions, for human beings to descend. Many of these letters or "Relaciones" are y:t in manuscript and to the average student of missionary history, inaccessible. inac-cessible. The historical value of these "Relaciones" has of course been long understood by scholars, but to the general reader, even to the educated general reader, they were and are somewhat of a myth. At a very early period their value was recognized by that' great traveler and historian Charlevoix, who in 1743 wrote: "There is no other source to which we can resort to learn the progress of religion among the Indians, and to know that tribes of the Apostolic labors of the missionaries they give very edifying accounts." Some day, it is to be hoped, the Mexican government, following the example of the Canadian parliament which in 1853 printed the "Relations of the Jesuits" in Canada, will give to the world in editional form the letters of the Jesuits in Mexico and Lower California. However, from the books compiled from these let- ' ters, such as those of Fathers Venagas, Clavigero and Verre, we obtain a most pathetic and melan- I choly narrative of the woeful state of the tribes before the coming of the fathers. San Ignacio, L. C. |