The tribe was visited recently by an expedition from the Bureau of Ethnology, which has just returned to Washington with some very interesting information.  Prof.  W. J. McGee, who led the party, says:  “It is understood that the Seris are cannibals—­at all events they eat every white man they can slay.  They are cruel and treacherous beyond description.  Toward the white man, their attitude is exactly the same as that of a white man toward a rattlesnake—­they kill him as a matter of course, unless restrained by fear.  Never do they fight in open warfare, but always lie in ambush.  They are copper-colored Ishmaelites.  It is their custom to murder everybody, white, red or Mexican, who ventures to enter the territory they call their own.”

In many respects the Seris are the most interesting tribe of savages in North America.  They are decidedly more primitive in their way than any other Indians, having scarcely any arts worth mentioning.  In fact, they have not yet advanced as far as the stone age.  The only stone implement in common use among them is a rude hammer of that material, which they employ for beating clay to make a fragile and peculiar kind of pottery.  When one of the squaws wishes to make meal of mesquite beans, and she has no utensil for the purpose, she looks about until she finds a rock with an upper surface, conveniently hollow, and on this she places the beans, pounding them with an ordinary stone.

The Seris live on the Island of Tiburon, in the Gulf of California.  They also claim 5,000 square miles of the mainland in Sonora.  Their dwellings are the rudest imaginable.  A chance rock commonly serves for one wall of the habitation; stones are piled up so as to make a small enclosure, and the shell of a single great turtle does for a roof.  The house is always open on one side, and is not intended as a shelter from storms, but chiefly to keep off the sun.  The men and women wear a single garment like a petticoat, made of pelican skin; the children are naked.  Not far from Tiburon, which is about thirty miles long by fifteen miles wide, there is a smaller island where pelicans roost in vast numbers.  The Seris go at night and with sticks knock over as many birds as they require.

These Indians are fond of carrion.  It makes no difference to them whether a horse has died a natural death a week or a month ago, they devour the flesh greedily.  The feet of the animal they boil until those parts are tender enough to bite.  The Seris are among the very dirtiest of savages.  Their habits in all respects are filthy.  They seem to have almost no amusements, though the children play with the very rudest dolls.  Before the whites came they used pieces of shells for cutting instruments.  They are accustomed to killing deer by running and surrounding the animals.  No traditions of sufficient interest to justify recording in print appear to exist among these people.  The most interesting ornament seen on any member of the tribe was a necklace of human hair, adorned with the rattles of rattlesnakes, which abound in the territory infested with these remnants of all that is most objectionable among the aboriginal red men of this continent.