Tarahumara Runners of the West

RUN, run, run! Joggers lope along on city streets or country roads, putting in their daily two miles, five miles, or eight miles. Strenuous. A new exercise. The modern way to health.

Before there were airplanes or cars or pickup trucks, even before there were horses, people ran over the deserts and mountains of Arizona and the American Southwest. It was the old way to health. It was, in fact, the only way to get around in a hurry. Children, as soon as they learned to walk, began training for a lifetime of getting from one place to another on foot. And the strong ones, the swift ones, became track stars.

The Papago Indians of southern Arizona used to run kickball races over courses from 10 to 15 miles long and return. The contestants, usually several on a side, used their feet to toss a wooden ball or pitch-covered stone ball ahead of them as they hurried forward. The Pima Indians, living along the Gila River in central Arizona, ran the same kind of races.

There were relays, too, without the ball. The races could be over a marked course to the finish line or they might end when the sun went down. Sometimes the athletes continued until the last person was left standing. Survival (Left) Home in a cave. "Visiting the people in the cave and looking around at their furnishings reminded us of the close relationship between the people and their surroundings. About 90 percent of the household furnishings were made by Tarahumaras themselves out of materials more or less readily at hand. All that was required to acquire them was human energy; all that was needed to make them was knowledge of tradition and skill...." from the book Tarahumara - Where Night is the Day of the Moon.

(Below) Yumari chanter of the curing ritual. "... chanters are Tarahumaras who have learned the proper chants and rhythms to go along with the curing ceremonies. Their musical instrument is a special gourd rattle; their presence is essential at all native rituals requiring dancing...." from the book Tarahumara - Where Night is the Day of the Moon.

Of the fittest. On occasion a team member died of exhaustion. There is a shrine on the Papago Reservation that is said to mark the spot where a runner dropped dead in his tracks.

Papago and Pima women ran too. Instead of kicking a ball, they used a stick to toss ahead of them: two small sections of cactus rib tied together with a cord.

The runners were barefoot. Men often painted themselves with white clay. Every Papago summer village had a racetrack near it where people could practice, and the betting on races was intense.

In 1902 an observer of Pima Indians wrote, "The custom of using these [kick] balls is rapidly disappearing, as, it is to be regretted, are the other athletic games of the Pimas."

By 1920, according to calendar records kept by Pimas and Papagos, the running stopped. So, too, had it stopped among most other Arizona Indians except where it continued as a game in schools. Horses had come. Trains had come. There were automobiles and paved roads. Diet had changed. Men, women, and children had become overweight.

Runners of the West Tarahumara

by Bernard L. Fontana with photographs by John P. Schaefer

(Right) Waterfalls above the Rio Urique. "Overwhelming. That is perhaps the word that best describes the impact on one's senses on seeing the Sierra Tarahumara for the first time . . . valleys are 7000 and 8000 feet high. Peaks rise above them another 1000 or 2000 feet. Rivers and smaller streams run across meadows and occasionally cut their way past cliffs and spines of volcanic tuff, carving v-shaped wedges into portions of the terrain and providing an example in miniature of the more dramatic barrancas . . . farther south." from the book Tarahumara - Where Night is the Day of the Moon.

Editor's Note: A major Tarahumara culture exhibit opened recently at Arizona State Museum in Tucson, and will continue throughout 1979. The extensive exhibits include a simulated cave dwelling and a lean-to house, dismantled in one of the villages and rebuilt in Tucson. Also included: examples of hand-woven rugs, baskets, storage and cooking pots plus tools, clothing and musical instruments. Visitors also can listen to the taped music of the Tarahumara and watch their dances on slides. Rounding out the show are enlarged photos of their mountain villages. Blankets and dolls and other crafts are on sale in the museum store. The Arizona State Museum is located at Park Avenue and University Blvd. Hours are 9 to 5 Monday through Saturday, and on Sunday the museum is open from 2 to 5.

But in another part of the “Greater Southwest,” running and racing continue unabated. The area is fewer than 300 airline miles from Tucson, Arizona. It is in the 20,000 square miles of the mountains and canyons of the Sierra Tarahumara of southwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. The people who run are the Tarahumara, linguistic and cultural relatives of the Pimas and Papagos. Their name is a corruption of the term they use for themselves, Rarámuri. It means “footrunner.” Of all the Indians who live in what anthropologists call the Southwest Cul-ture Area, Tarahumaras have changed the least over the last 300 years. They are truly a mirror on the past. To see them is to pay a visit to most Arizona tribes about 100 years ago. They are corn farmers, about 50,000 of them, who live in widely scattered settlements and whose houses are separated from one another by the limits of shouting distance. They are also pastoralists who raise sheep and goats for their manure, wool, and hair. Oxen are yoked to wooden plows. They are foragers who supplement their diet of corn, beans, squash, chilis, and a little meat by gathering wild potherbs and by fishing the numerous streams and rivers of their mountain fastness.

They are involved in the cash economy of Mexico only in a minor way, trading or selling their crafts and labor in order to buy clothes, axes and other steel tools, soap, needles, matches, soft drinks, canned lard, and luxuries such as harmonicas and portable radios. In years when crops are bad, money is a greater necessity. Few Tarahumaras are in schools and fewer still are literate. Most speak Spanish as their second language, but Tarahumara remains the everyday language of the home. Tarahumaras are among the greatest endurance runners in the world. Women, girls, men, and boys continue to race just as Arizona Indians did in times gone by. Having heard this, on one of our trips into the Sierra Tarahumara, my friends and I wanted to see for ourselves. We arranged a race between two pairs of girls. One pair, older than the other, lived near a Mexican settlement where their lives were fairly sedentary. The second lived in a remote canyon, connected to the outside world only by narrow and steep trails. The outcome of the race was a foregone conclusion, but we went ahead anyway, offering 100 pesos to each of the winners and 50 pesos to each of the losers. It seemed like a good investment of some $13 or $14. We chose a short course along the river's edge where the girls could run over existing trails. The trails moved up and down, in some places over rocks. Each girl carried a slightly curved stick about three-feet long, and each twogirl team had a small hoop made of beargrass. One of my friends stood about a half-mile from the starting point as the turnaround marker. The race was to be over when the runner completed three circuits, or about three miles. They were too polite to tell us that such a short race is silly. On your marks, get set, go! The girls dashed along using their sticks to throw their hoops ahead of them. They were supposed to take turns lifting the hoop with their sticks and tossing it ahead of them again, but in this race the first team member to reach the hoop picked

it up, even if she was the person who had thrown it. Sometimes they ran for several yards, carrying the hoops on the stick before they threw it again. The "city" girls soon dropped far behind. However, they never stopped and no one showed any signs of lagging on purpose. Once in a while they smiled as they ran past us, but generally their minds were on the business of running. Three girls were barefooted; one wore sandals. All breathed heavily. And why shouldn't they at approximately 7000 feet above sea level and running with all their might?

The contest seemed to be over almost before it began. We didn't clock it, but certainly the time was excellent. The local "country" girls won handily, almost a half-mile ahead of the other team. Within less than a minute after the race had ended, all four runners sat on the grass at the finishing point and smiled shyly as they received their reward money. They were no longer breathing heavily and, in fact, gave no indication that they had just run three miles. A real effort, after all, would have lasted for many miles and for many hours, sometimes all night.

The endurance of Tarahumara runners is legendary, and justifiably so. Late in the last century or early in this one, Alexander R. Shepherd, a mining magnate, had an upright piano shipped from Carichíc, a town high in the mountains of northern Chihuahua, to his home in Batopilas at the bottom of Mexico's Grand Canyon, the Barranca del Cobre. He hired Tarahumaras to do the job. Shepherd's son, Grant, described in later years how such a feat could be accomplished: They get under the poles in a squatting position; at the word "Vamanos!" they straighten up. The piano is off the ground, and the carriers move off with the inward satisfaction of knowing that all they have to do now is carry this great box for 185 miles in 15 or 20 days. There will be at least 24 carriers that makes three sets and they spell each other every 20 or 30 minutes. . . . Each man is paid at the rate of $1 a day. At the end of the journey he takes his "easy money" and trots back home a 180 miles or more in about three days, and he has a happy time for some months on his ill-gotten gains! The men's kickball race and Tarahumaras use a wooden ball just as Pimas and Papagos used to do is run over a "track" likely to include streams, gullies, rocky slopes, fences, meadows, and brush-strewn hillsides. It is normally anywhere from two to twelve miles long. The number of laps depends on whether the race is to last only a few hours or a day and a night or more.

In the 1890s the naturalist Carl Lumholtz clocked a race in which the runners, kicking a ball ahead of them, covered 21 miles in two hours. The lead man ran 290 feet in 19 seconds on the first lap and the next in 24 seconds. Lumholtz also recalled a Tarahumara who took five days to carry a letter from Guazapares to Chihuahua City and return, a trail distance of nearly 600 miles.

In 1926, two Tarahumara men ran from Pachuca in the State of Hidalgo, Mexico, to Mexico City, 65 miles away, in nine hours and thirty-seven minutes. A year later two other racers covered the 89.4 miles between San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in 14 hours and 53 minutes. It was also in 1927 that a Tarahumara named José Torres broke a world's record that had stood since 1882 when he ran the 51 miles between Kansas City and Lawrence, Kansas, in 6:46:41, shaving a little more than an hour off the old time. Purcell Kane, a 17-year-old Apache student from the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona, missed a turn, had to double back, and came in about 20 minutes later to place second ahead of two other Tarahumaras. The Navajo in the contest had to drop out. “The flat-footed, steady jogging of the Tarahumaras,” noted a newspaper reporter, “was a decided contrast to the long, smooth striding of the Arizona Indians.” For good measure, these fifth annual Kansas relays featured two Tarahumara girls who ran the Topeka to Lawrence part of the course, 29 miles. The winner finished in 5:37:45. The endurance of Tarahumaras as runners has made them the objects of modern medical and phys-iological studies. A heart specialist, writing in 1971, said, “Probably not since the days of the ancient Spartans has a people achieved such a high state of physical conditioning.”

We once visited the home of an elderly Tarahumara and discovered he had an enormous earthenware cooking jar in his house. Although it was cracked and a piece was gone from its rim, we wanted to buy this 30to 40gallon container for the Arizona State Museum. The problem, though, was how to get this huge pot, which weighed 65 pounds, from his house at the bottom of a canyon to a mountain top where we had a truck parked. The distance was fully six miles by the shortest possible route over the face of a cliff; seven or eight miles by a longer trail that avoided the cliff. And it was all uphill.

We asked the man, grey-haired and bent over from years of hard work, if he knew anyone who might be willing to take the pot up to the truck for $100 pesos (a little more than $4). Much to our surprise, he said he would be glad to. But he would need a blanket or tar-paulin to carry it. We agreed that the next day he should come by our camp to get a blanket. We paid him in advance and left. When he failed to show up by the next noon, we went back to his house to see what had happened. When we walked inside, he was there but the pot was gone! “Where's the pot?” we wanted to know. “Oh,” he answered, “I took that up there last night.” He had made a 12to 16-mile round trip in the pitch dark over a narrow footpath on a rainy night carrying this heavy and cumbersome jar. Just how we will never know. Moreover, he was as casual about it as if he had merely walked across the street to buy a loaf of bread.

Tarahumara WHERE NIGHT IS THE DAY OF THE MOON

“How could that old man have done it?” I asked. “Maybe,” came the answer, “no one has ever told him he is old.” And another 100 years from now it is likely there will still be young men like this old man, Tarahumaras, independent and resourceful people, Southwestern footrunners par excellence.

This story was excerpted in part from the book Tarahumara — Where Night is the Day of the Moon. The hard cover edition may be purchased at bookstores or ordered directly from the publisher, Northland Press, Box N, Flagstaff, AZ 86002 ($20 plus $1 postage and handling).

"One of the major factors in their (Tarahumaras) cultural survival has been the looseness and flexibility of their social and political system. They have no clans or lineages and they reckon descent and inheritance on both sides of the family. From the family household to the ranch or pueblo to the network of people who customarily drink corn beer together — these are the affective outline of Tarahumara social and political life. Such a community of people, whose economy depends largely on subsistence and barter, demands face-to-face cooperation. So does it allow for the maximum dignity and self-respect of the individual...."

from the book Tarahumara — Where Night is the Day of the Moon.