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Rested and refreshed, we started at 12:30 for the long fourteen leagues of journey. We passed Pichataro, where the round paddles for Patzcuaro canoes are made, and where the applewood, so prized as material for spear-throwers, is procured. We passed Sabina, where the canoes themselves are hollowed out, miles from their launching place, to which they must be carried over mountains.
With the assistance of the two Padres we were able to secure and deal with our female subjects in less than a day, and were ready to bid adieu to the padrecitos and leave for Tzintzuntzan. All the tourist world that goes to Patzcuaro visits Tzintzuntzan to see the Titian. Padre Ponce was anxious to have us see the famous picture and photograph it.
We were supplied as rapidly as our men could work at the same price we paid our first subject. Mexico has few large lakes, the largest, Chapala, having an area of only 1,685 square kilometers. Patzcuaro is much smaller, but far more picturesque.
Thence, we struck, on horseback, through the Tarascan territory, across to Patzcuaro. On the way, we secured our full series of Tarascan busts, at the Once Pueblos. By rail, we went from Patzcuaro to Dos Rios, to secure our lacking busts of Otomis at Huixquilucan. In the second field expedition, January to March 1899, we worked entirely in the state of Oaxaca.
The German had learned that the parish priest of Tzintzuntzan wore glasses, and we parted agreed to make the trip together. Patzcuaro is summery enough by day, but only the hardy would dress leisurely at dawn. A fog as thick as cheese, more properly a descended cloud, enveloped the place, a daily occurrence which the local authorities would have you think make it unusually healthful.
The hotel only a block from the cathedral and the site of the great teocalli of the Aztecs, to which the German in Patzcuaro had directed me, differed not even in its smells from a Clark-street lodging-house in Chicago. The entire city with its cheap restaurants and sour smelling pulquerias uncountable, looked and sounded like a lower eastside New York turned Spanish in tongue.
The people, however, were not quite sure of our intentions, and Nabor said that when he went to water the horses, a committee of village folk waited upon him, asking whether we were the party of white men who had been skinning live indians over in the Once Pueblos. There were four leagues between us and Cheran, and many more beyond it to Patzcuaro, where we hoped to arrive the next night.
Thence we went to Patzcuaro by rail, and studied the Tarascans in the villages about Lake Patzcuaro, visiting these by canoe-trips. After returning to Mexico, we visited the states of Tlaxcala and Puebla. In and around the City of Tlaxcala, we secured our Tlaxcalan subjects. At Cuauhtlantzinco, we worked upon Aztecs.
The sacristan was looking on with doubt: when he saw us making preparations for the picture, he hurried to us and said it was against all rule for anyone to take a photograph when the cura was not present. We told him our time was short; that we must return to Patzcuaro that day to arrange our farther journey; we showed the governor's order and Padre Ponce's letter, but all in vain.
But the center of the picture, the picture, indeed, for which all the rest served as frame, was Lake Patzcuaro. It is not beautiful, but rather inviting, enticing, mysterious for its many sandy promontories, its tongues of mountains cutting off a farther arm of the lake with the old Tarascan capital, and above all for its islands.
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