Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/505

Charles Dickens] A word or two now about the Papagos.

The Papago country is large in extent, but for the most part a complete desert. It comprises all the country south of the Rio Gila, which lies between the head of the Gulf of California and that extensive Cordillera of which the Sierra Catarina forms the most westerly range, and extends for some fifty to a hundred miles into Sonora. All over this tract, wherever there happens to be a stream, a spring, or a little marsh amongst the barren rock hills which thrust their peaks above the parched and friable ground, or any spot favourably suited for tank irrigation, there you are very likely to find a little colony of Papagos, living in huts similar in all respects to those of the Pimas. I have been through their desolate country, and visited many of their villages, and I feel convinced that the hard struggle they have ever had with nature to support life in such a region, has done much to develop the energy and manliness of character peculiar to the tribe. As a race, they are the finest specimens of man, physically, I have ever seen; on one occasion I met five of them at a ranch, and not one of the party measured less than six feet two inches. If they were not so very dark in complexion, their features would be pleasing, for they have the steady, intelligent eye, and straightforward manners of their more northern brethren, the Pimas. The most interesting point about them, however, is their mode of life. Like the Jaqui Indians of Southern Sonora, they very willingly leave their homes at certain seasons to gain a livelihood elsewhere. They own flocks and herds in considerable quantities, and they keep large droves of horses, or rather ponies. It is probable that a number of their villages, especially those supplied only by artificial tanks, are uninhabitable, from want of water, for a great part of the year, so that they are obliged to migrate, to support themselves and their stock during the droughts; be that as it may, they have become the greatest traders and the most industrious people to be found in the country. When the time for leaving their little patches of cultivated ground around the villages has arrived, some pack their merchandise, consisting chiefly of baskets and pottery similar to those made by the Pimas, on their ponies, and go down to Sonora to trade with the Mexicans, driving their stock with them to pasture in the comparatively fertile valleys to the southward. Others travel immense distances over the great Sonora Desert to the Gulf of California, and particularly to some salt lakes about a hundred miles west of Altar, where they lay in a stock of salt and seashells, and then return to trade with the Indians on the Colorado, or the Pimas on the Gila; or to sell the salt to the Mexicans on the eastern side of their country. Others, who have no merchandise to sell or ponies to trade with, go to the settlements and ranches from Tucson southward, and willingly hire themselves out as field labourers or miners. They work well for the Americans, and receive usually a dollar a day, which is certainly not bad wages. Then when the time for planting comes round, they all return again to their own homes in the desert.

The Pimas resisted sternly all attempts made by the Jesuits or Franciscans to convert them, and are now so diffident on religious subjects, that they will not discuss them, or give any information respecting their belief; the Papagos, however, probably from the close intercourse which they have so long kept up with the Mexicans, are, to all appearance, most devout Roman Catholics. The cathedral of the tribe is the last relic left of the Papago mission of San Xaviere del Bac, and is situated on the Rio de Santa Cruz.

Intercourse with the Mexicans has also much modified their mode of dress, for the men usually wear wide straw sombreros of home manufacture, moccasins, buckskin gaiters, a breech cloth of cotton, and a snow-white cotton blanket thrown gracefully across the chest. The women wear petticoats, and neither sex seems to affect ornaments or paint. The number of villages scattered throughout the land of the Papagos is about nineteen, and the population of the entire tribe probably reaches four thousand, of which three thousand live north of the Mexican boundary line, and perhaps one thousand south of it. So effectively do the warriors protect their homes that the Apaches never have the courage to penetrate far into their country, although they have quite depopulated the Mexican settlements bordering it on the east.

HECTOR BERLIOZ.

of the most singular men who has ever appeared in the world of music and of musical literature has passed away, at the age of sixty-six. This was Hector Berlioz. If he did not even reach the allotted period of three score years and ten, it may have been because his life was somewhat prematurely consumed by emotions, ambitions, and disappointments. They were to be read in every line of a face never to be forgotten by those who can read faces, in every line which came from his pen. The story