The discordance between the civil and military authorities and the dominant ecclesiastical order of Sonora sounded to Ciudad Mexico, and eventually echoed to Madrid, and was doubtless one of a series of factors which led to the needlessly harsh expulsion of the scholarly Jesuits in 1767—and hence to a hiatus in the history of the province and its tribes.
Although the padres knew little of the habits and customs of the “wild” Seri save through hearsay, some of their notes are of ethnologic value: Villa-Señor located them on the deserts extending from Pitic and Angeles to Tepopa bay, and added:
They hold and occupy various rancherias, and subsist by the chase of deer, bura [mule-deer], rabbits, hares, and other animals, and also on the cattle they are able to steal from the Spaniards, and on fish which they harpoon with darts in the sea, and on the roots in which the land abounds.[120]
Villa-Señor distinguished the “Tepocas”, whom he combined with the “Gueimas” and “Jupangueimas”. Alegre located the Seri on the coast of the gulf from a few leagues north of the mouth of Rio Yaqui to Bahia San Juan de Bautista (Bahia Kino), adding, “with them may be classed the Guaimas, few in number and of the same language”.[121] Writing about the same time, José Gallardo observed: “The distinction is slight between the Seri and Upanguaima, the one and the other having the same idiom” (“Poco es la distincion que hay entre seri y upanguaima, ... y unos y otros casi hablan un mismo idioma”).[122] The author of “Rudo Ensayo” wrote: “The Guaimas speak the same language, with but little difference, as the Seris.”[123] He mistook Cerro Prieto as their principal retreat; mentioned the mountains of Bacoatzi Grande, Las Espuelas, and others as other haunts; noted Tiburon and San Juan Bautista (San Esteban?) islands as less-known shelters, and gave extended attention to “the poison they use for their arrows” as “the most virulent known in these parts”; for “even in cases where the skin only is wounded, the injured part begins to swell, and the swelling extends all over the body to such a size that the flesh bursts and falls to pieces, causing death in twenty-four hours.” To test this poison, the Seri “bandage tightly the thigh or arm of one of their robust young men; then make an incision with a flint and let the blood flow away from the wound. When the blood is some distance from the incision, they apply the point of an arrow to it, steeped in the deadly poison. If at the approach of the point of the arrow the blood begins to boil and recedes, the poison is of the right strength, and the man who lends his blood for the experiment brushes it out with his hand to prevent the poison from being introduced into his veins.” He was unable “to find out with certainty of what deadly materials the deadly poison is composed. Many a thing is spoken of, such as heads of irritated vipers cut at the very moment of biting into a piece of lung; also half putrefied human flesh and other filth with which I am unwilling to provoke the nausea of the reader.” He added the opinion that “the main ingredient is some root.”[124] Padre Joseph Och, who, with other German evangels including padres Mittendorf, Pfefferkorn, and Ruen (or Rohen), was stationed in northwestern Sonora shortly before the eviction of the Jesuits, was one of the recorders of aboriginal traits and features, though his record (like that of most of his confrères) is impoverished by his failure to discriminate tribes; but one of his notes is specific: