I arrived safely in Guadalupe y Calvo, a once flourishing place, but now quite dead, since the mines have ceased to be worked.  There are large Mexican ranches southeast of the town, and whatever Tarahumares live hereabout are servants of the Mexicans and frequently intermarry with the Tepehuanes.

I thus traversed from north to south the country over which the Tarahumares once held sway.  To-day we find this tribe, approximately, between Guadalupe y Calvo and Temosachic; roughly speaking, between the twenty-sixth and twenty-ninth degrees northern latitude.

Civilisation, as brought to the Tarahumare, is not fraught with benefits for him.  It rudely shakes the columns of the temple of his religion.  The Mexican Central Railroad crushes his sacred plants without thought of its anger, which is vented on the poor Tarahumare by sending him bad years and ill-luck.  While the Indians deny themselves the pleasure of smoking tobacco in the daytime for fear of offending the sun with the smoke, the white men’s furnaces and engines belch forth black clouds of smoke day after day, keeping the people out of the sight of Tara Dios, and thus preventing him from guarding them.  In the engine itself they see the Devil with a long tongue and a big beard.

Worse than that, the foot of civilisation destroys his home; for the whites draw the boundary line of his country closer and closer.  The better class of Mexicans keep to themselves, and seldom, if ever, bother about the Indians at their doors, whose mode of living and way of thinking are so different from their own.  The class of whites on the borderland of such civilisation as the Tarahumare comes in contact with is not the kind that will or can improve him, being ignorant and unscrupulous.  The Indian civilised by them is a very unpleasant person to deal with.  He has learned to cheat and to steal, and he no longer carries out his contracts and agreements.  Having learned the value of money, his greed is awakened, and he begins to look out only for his own profit.

The first white men with whom the Indian gets acquainted are the traders who speak his language, and whose sole aim is to enrich themselves at his expense and compel him to deal with them.  If the Indian does not want to sell, the lenguaraz loses his patience, throws a few dollars toward him, takes the ox, and goes off.  Many will go still further.  They force the native to borrow from them, whether he wants the money, the cloth, the mescal, or the use of the horse, or not.  Many Indians would refuse mescal, satisfied with their native stimulants, but see no other way of getting rid of the unwelcome and obtrusive white than by yielding to his demand.  The agreement is made that he must return the so-called loan on a certain date, two or three months hence; the Indian, of course, having no almanac, easily makes a mistake in his calculation, and the date passes.  The dealer has gained his point.  He saddles his horse, looks up the Indian, and makes a great to-do about all the trouble he is put to in collecting the debt, charging not only enormous interest for overtime, but adding exorbitant travelling expenses and fees.  He succeeds by threats and intimidation in getting his damages adjusted in such a way that, in return for the paltry sum he lent the Indian, he now drives off two or three oxen.