Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/54

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44
BARBAROUS MEXICO

that had been brought to him and that were dangling from the end of a cane. This picture was even published in derision of the exploits of Governor Ysabal in the newspaper El Imparcial, of Mexico City."

In 1898 the government troops were armed for the first time with the improved Mauser rifle, and in that year they met and wiped out an army of Yaquis at Mazacoba, the killed numbering more than 1,000. This ended warfare on anything like an equal footing. There were no more large battles; the Yaqui warriors were merely hunted. Thousands of the Indians surrendered. Their leaders were executed, and they and their families were granted a new territory to the north, to which they journeyed as to a promised land. But it proved to be a barren desert, entirely waterless and one of the most uninhabitable spots in all America. Hence the peaceful Yaquis moved to other sections of the state, some of them becoming wage-workers in the mines, others finding employment on the railroads, and still others becoming peons on the farms. Then and there this portion of the Yaqui nation lost its identity and became merged with the peoples about it. But it is these Yaquis, the peaceful ones, who are sought out and deported to Yucatan.

A few Yaquis, perhaps four or five thousand, refused to give up the battle for their lands. The found inaccessible peaks and established a stronghold high up in the Bacetete mountains, which border upon their former home. Here flow never-ceasing springs of cold water. Here, on the almost perpendicular cliffs, they built their little homes, planted their corn, raised their families and sang, sometimes, of the fertile valleys which once were theirs. The army of several thousand soldiers still hunted them. The soldiers could not reach those moun-