Canoe-borne nomads who made the lower Madeira and Purus the colonial "Territory of Fear," striking river craft from ambush and vanishing into the flooded forest before muskets could answer.
Worn down by smallpox, they made peace with the Portuguese by 1786, were then routed by the Munduruku in 1788, and dispersed; their language line survives only in the Pirahã, who still number a few hundred on the Maici.
The atlas holds 2 border frames for Mura —
the shape you scrub through changes in 1714 · 1786.
Moments from the Chronicle
1786The Mura sue for peace Worn down by smallpox and by the rising Munduruku, the once-feared canoe warriors of the Amazon's 'Territory of Fear' end their century-long war with Portugal, accepting settlement between 1784 and 1786 and scattering into mixed riverside villages on the lower Madeira.
An accessible account of the pre-Columbian Americas and the conquest that gutted Amazonian and coastal Brazilian river peoples like the Cocama, Potiguara and Tamoio.
Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian IndiansJohn Hemming · 1987
The defeat and dispersal of Amazonian Indians like the Mura (broad regional context).