The Seri, with their affines, the Tepoka, Salinero, Guayma, and Upanguayma, were included by Bancroft in his arbitrarily defined “Northern Mexican family”.[195] The accompanying map (which is highly inaccurate) located the “Salineros” on the gulf coast, considerably north of the common embouchure of “R. de Horcasitas” and “Rio de Sonora”; while the “Seris” were more conspicuously represented about the broad estuary into which the rivers embouch, and the “Tepocas” were located still farther southward on both Tiburon and the mainland, the island being placed too far southward and the river much too far northward.[196] Numerous data relating to the Seri were incorporated in his text; all were second-hand, though many were taken from unique or rare manuscripts. The coastwise natives of Sonora were said to “live on pulverized rush and straw, with fish caught at sea or in artificial enclosures”; mention was made of the allegation that “the Salineros sometimes eat their own excrement”; anthropophagy was noted, but as pertaining rather to the interior than to the coastwise tribes;[197] and prominence was given to the Seri arrow poison, of which an early author wrote:
[197] The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. III (The Native Races, vol. III, 1882, p. 576.)
The poison with which they envenom the points of their arrows is the most active that has ever been known here.... It has not been possible to ascertain with certainty the deadly materials of which this pestilential compound is brewed. Many things are alleged, e. g., that it is made from the heads of vipers, irritated and decapitated at the moment of striking their teeth into a piece of lung or of half putrefied human flesh.
Reference was made also to the “magot” (probably the yerba mala of the modern Mexicans) as a source of arrow poison.[198] The girls’ puberty feast was said to be kept up for several days among the Seri and Tepoka, and the former were said to “superstitiously celebrate the new moon, and bow reverentially to the rising and setting sun”, and also to “employ charms in their medical practice”.[199] Finally, the constituent tribes were discriminated in a manner recalling the persistent assumption that the parasite-converts at the missions fairly represented the Seri: