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Show 98 BY PATH AND TRAIL. tation, as did the Puritans the wrecks of humanity that occupied the soil of Massachusetts. The Europeans of ( Hondo's time, who attempted, in 1683, to open a settlement on the Peninsula, were aston ished at a condition of savagery lower than they had ever heard of, and their disgust and horror with the land and its people were so great that they abandoned their inten tion of remaining in the country. Powerless from the awful conditions under which they were compelled to support existence, knowing nothing of cultivation of any kind, doomed to imprisonment in a land carrying an anathema of sterility and where large game had become extinct, the tribes of Lower California, among all the barbarous and savage people of America, " trod the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God, the Almighty." The greater part of the peninsula at the time of the coming of the fathers, was in possession of the Cochimis, the Gualcuris and the Pericuis, who occupied the south ern part and some of the adjacent lands. They were a long haired, wild- looking people, scorched into negro blackness, naked and not ashamed. Morals, in the technical sense, they had none, they could not be charged with sin, for they had no knowledge of the law, and therefore they could commit no breach of the law. They bored holes in the ears, lips and nose, inserting in the openings bones, shells or sticks. They bore only names of common gender, which they received while yet in the womb. Without fixed abodes they roamed the country in search of food, supporting life on snakes, roasted grasshoppers and ants, on wild fruit and roots dug from the cacti beds, and because of this rooting habit they were called bythe Spaniards ' ' Cavadores ' ' the Dig- |