While at Nacori I learned from the inhabitants that at no great distance from their town there were several deposits containing huesos giganteos (giants’ bones), a name given to fossils in this part of the world, where the people imagine that the large bones were originally those of giants.  I had then neither time nor men to make excavations of any importance; but Mr. White, the mineralogist of the expedition, whom I sent to look into the matter, and who devoted a week to the examination of the deposits, reported that one of them, in a valley sixteen miles south of Nacori, was a bed of clay thirty feet thick and about a mile and a half long.  On the edge of this field he discovered a tusk six feet eight inches long and twenty-six inches at its widest circumference, and having almost the curve of a circle.  It was not petrified and had no bone core, but the hole filled in with clay, and its colour was a rich mahogany.  It was undoubtedly the tusk of a mammoth.

From the beginning it had surprised me how very ignorant the people of Sonora were regarding the Sierra Madre.  The most prominent man in Opoto, a town hardly forty miles from the sierra, told me that he did not know how far it was to the sierra, nor was he able to say exactly where it was.  Not even at Nacori, so close to this tremendous mountain range, was there much information to be gotten about it.  What the Mexicans know about that region may be briefly summed up thus:  That it is a vast wilderness of mountains most difficult of approach; that it would take eight days to climb some of the high ridges; that it contains immense pine forests alive with deer, bear, and wonderfully large woodpeckers, able to cut down whole trees; and that in its midst there are still existing numerous remains of a people who vanished long ago, but who once tilled the soil, lived in towns and built monuments, and even bridges over some of its canons.

This general ignorance is mainly due to the fact that until very recently this entire part of the sierra, from the border of the United States south about 250 miles, was under the undisputed control of the wild Apache Indians.  From their mountain strongholds these marauders made raiding expeditions into the adjacent states, west and east, sweeping down upon the farms, plundering the villages, driving off horses and herds of cattle, killing men and carrying off women and children into slavery.  Mines became unworkable; farms had to be deserted; the churches, built by the Spaniards, mouldered into decay.  The raiders had made themselves absolute masters, and so bold were they that at one time a certain month in the year was set apart for their plundering excursions and called “the moon of the Mexicans,” a fact which did not prevent them from robbing at other seasons.  Often troops would follow them far into the mountains, but the “braves” fought so skilfully, and hid so well in the natural fortresses of their native domain, that the pursuit never came to anything, and the Mexicans were completely paralysed with fear.  The dread of the terrible pillagers was so great that even at the time when I first went into the district, the Mexicans did not consider it a crime to shoot an Apache at sight.