[99] “Diario del Padre Dominguez en Sonora y Sinaloa, 1731; manuscript in archives of the Bureau of American Ethnology.
[100] This place on Rio Sonora is not to be confounded with the Rancho (afterward Pueblo) of Pitiqui or San Diego de Pitiqui (The Geographical and Historical Dictionary of America, and the West Indies * * * of Colonel Don Antonio de Alcedo, by G. A. Thompson, London, 1814, vol. IV, p. 153), or Pitic chiquito (Bol. Soc. Mex. Geog. y Est., vol. VIII, 1860, p. 454), or Pitiquin, now the town of Pitiquito on Rio San Ignacio.
By 1742 the settlements were so far extended as to warrant the establishment of a royal fort in the water-gap at Pitic;[101] and the ecclesiastics kept pace with the military movement by founding the mission of San Pedro de la Conquista,[102] or “Pueblo de San Pedro de la Conquista de Seris”[103] (now abbreviated to “Pueblo Seris”, or merely “Seris”); both fort and mission being designed primarily for better protection of the settlements against Seri sorties. These outposts brought the missionaries and their soldier supporters a day’s journey nearer Seriland, i. e., to within some 27 leagues (71 miles), or two days’ journey, from Bahia Kino and the desert boundary of the Seri stronghold; and although neither fort nor mission was continuously maintained, the event marked a practically permanent advance on the “despoblado” previously despoiled and desolated by the wandering Seri.
[101] Alegre, Historia de la Compañia de Jesus, tomo III, p. 288; Villa-Señor, Theatro Americano, segunda parte, p. 392; Rudo Ensayo, p. 193.
[102] Bancroft, op. cit., vol. I, p. 528.
[103] Reise-Erinnerungen und Abenteuer aus der neuen Welt, von C. A. Pajeken, Bremen, 1861, p. 97.
Even before this date friction between missionaries and laymen had grown out of the ecclesiastical charity for a people whose repeated atrocities placed them outside the pale of sympathy on the part of the industrial settlers; and this friction was felt especially about the new presidio. In 1749 Colonel Diego Ortiz Parilla became governor of Sonora, and began a rigorous rule over civilians, soldiers, ecclesiastics, and Indians; and when the 80 families (classed as Seri, but mainly of Tepoka and other tribes) domiciled at Populo were dissatisfied with his transfers of land and people, he promptly met their protests by arresting them and transporting the greater part of them, including all the women and children, to various places, “some even in Guatemala and other very distant parts of America.”[104] Naturally this was resented, not only by the Seri messmates at the missions, but to some extent by their kinsmen over the plains and along the coast, with whom sporadic communication was maintained—chiefly through spies, but partly by occasional escapes of the practically imprisoned proselytes and the less frequent but more numerous captures of new converts; and the Seri raids became more extended and vindictive, reaching northward to Caborca, northeastward to Santa Ana and Cucurpe, and eastward into the fertile valley of Rio Opodepe at several points. Deeply incensed in his turn, Parilla undertook a war of extermination—a war interesting not merely as an episode in Seri history, but still more as a type of the Seri wars of two centuries. Organizing a force of 500 men, and bringing canoes from Rio Yaqui, he planned an expedition to Tiburon, to cover two months—and returned with 28 prisoners, “all women and children and not a single Seri man”; though he reported killing 10 or 12 warriors in action (according to other accounts the slain comprised only 3 or 4 oldsters). These women and children were domiciled at the pueblo of the Conquest of the Seri, which in current thought thenceforth became the pueblo of the Seri, and gradually passed into lore and later into history as the home of the tribe rather than the mere penitentiary which it was in fact. The padres waxed satirical over this quixotic conquest: Alegre recounts that—