On my return from an excursion southward from Guadalupe y Calvo as far as Mesa de San Rafael, I ascended on January 12, 1895, Cerro de Muinora, probably the highest elevation in northern Mexico. I say probably, because I had no opportunity of measuring Cerro de Candelaria. Approached from the north it looked like a long-stretched mountain, covered with pines, and falling off abruptly toward the west. It is conspicuous in the songs and beliefs of the Tepehuane Indians.
We made a camp about 1,000 feet below the top, among the pines, with snow lying all around us, and in the night a flock of parrots flew screeching past the tents. I was surprised to find the temperature so mild; there was no ice on the water, not even at night. The aneroid showed the height of the top to be 10,266 feet (20.60 in. at a temperature of 40° F., at 5.15 P.M.). I noticed more birds between our camping-place and the top than I had ever seen before in pine forests. Blackbirds, the brown creepers (_certhia_), and red crossbills were seen on the very top.
From Guadalupe y Calvo I continued my journey to the northwest in order to visit the Tepehuanes, about fifteen hundred of whom still exist here in the northernmost outpost of the tribe's former domain. Only seventeen miles north of Guadalupe y Calvo is the Tepehuane village Nabogame (in Tepehuane, Navógeri, "where nopals [navó] grow").
The Tepehuane region includes some fine agricultural land. There are fields there which have been planted for forty and fifty years in succession, as for instance in Mesa de Milpillas; but here, too, the whites have appropriated a considerable portion of the country, though the Tepehuanes are largely in possession of their land, because they are more valiant than the Tarahumares, and can only be deprived of their property through the agency of mescal, for which they have an unfortunate weakness.
The Tepehuanes are less phlegmatic and more impressionable and impulsive than the Tarahumares. One woman laughed so much that she could not be photographed. They are noisy and active, and in the fields they work merrily, chatting and laughing. Even when peons of the Mexicans they are not so abject-looking as the Tarahumares, but retain their proud and independent manners. They behave almost like men of the world in comparison with the unsophisticated Tarahumares. In the eyes of some of the Tepehuane women I noticed a fire as bright as in those of Italians.