[237] It seems probable that the Seri were nearer to tribes of southern Baja California than to those of Sonora at the time of the earliest explorations, yet that the distinction was sufficiently strong to warrant the extension of the proposition to these tribes also.
It is especially noteworthy that the Seri have held aloof from that communality of the deserts which has brought so many tribes into union with each other and with their animal and vegetal neighbors through common strife against the common enemies of sun and sand—the communality expressed in the distribution of vital colonies over arid plains, in the toleration and domestication of animals, in the development of agriculture, and eventually in the shaping of a comprehensive solidarity, with the intelligence of the highest organism as the controlling factor.[238] Dwelling on a singularly prolific shore, the Seri never learned the hard lesson of desert solidarity, but looked on the land merely as a place of lodgment or concealment, or as a source of luxuries such as cactus tunas, mesquite beans, and tasty game; they never formed the first idea of planting or cultivating, and their only notion of harvesting and storing against time of need was the intolerably filthy one of nature’s simplest teaching; they apparently never grasped the concept of cooperation with animals, and came to tolerate the parasitical coyote only in that its persistence was greater than their own, and in so far as it was stealthy enough to hide its travail and the suckling of its young against their ravening maws; and they apparently never rose to real recognition of their own kind in alien forms, but set their hands against agricultural and zoocultural humans as peculiarly potent and hence especially obnoxious animals. Naturally their racial intolerance was seed of battle and blood-feud; and they would doubtless have melted away under the general antagonism but for the natural barriers and unlimited food of their restricted domain.
[238] The Beginning of Agriculture, American Anthropologist, vol. VIII, 1895, p. 350. The Beginning of Zooculture, ibid., vol. X, 1897, p. 215.
At present, as for the later and best-known decades of their history, the Seri are absolutely without extratribal affiliations, or even sympathy. When the chronicles of three centuries are scanned in the light of recent knowledge, it seems practically certain that they have been equally isolated since the dawn of Caucasian history in Mexico; and both recent data and the chronicles combine with the principles of demotic development to indicate that the Seri have stood alone from the beginning of their tribal career, and have never foregathered with the neighboring tribes of distinct blood, distinct arts and industries, distinct organization, distinct language, and distinct thought and feeling.