A Lateral Canyon of Escalante River.
Photograph by J.K. HILLERS, U.S. Colo. Riv. Exp.
The method of the authorities was to establish a military post, called a presidio, at some convenient point, from which protection would be extended to several missions. The soldiers in the field wore a sort of buckskin armour, with a double-visored helmet and a leathern buckler on the left arm. Kino was as often without as with the guardianship of these warriors, and seems to have had very little trouble with the natives. The Apaches, then and always, were the worst of all, In his numerous entradas he explored the region of his labours pretty thoroughly, reaching, in 1698, a hill from which he saw how the gulf ended at the mouth of the Colorado; and the following year he was again down the Gila, which he called Rio de los Apostoles, to the Colorado, now blessed with a fourth name, the Rio de los Martires. “Buena Guia” “del Tizon,” “Esperanza,” and “los Martires,” all in about a century and a half, and still the great Dragon of Waters was not only untamed hut unknown. Kino kept up his endeavours to inaugurate somewhere a religious centre, but without success. The San Dionisio marked on his map at the mouth of the Gila was only the name he gave a Yuma village at that point, and was never anything more. On November 21, 1701, Kino reached a point only one day’s journey above the sea, where he crossed the river on a raft, but he made no attempt to go to the mouth. At last, however, on March 7, 1702, he actually set foot on the barren sands where the waters, gathered from a hundred mountain peaks of the far interior, are hurled against the sea-tide, the first white visitor since Oñate, ninety-eight years before. Visits of Europeans to this region were then counted by centuries and half-centuries, yet on the far Atlantic shore of the continent they were swarming in the cradle of the giant that should ultimately rule from sea to sea, annihilating the desert. But even the desert has its charms. One seems to inhale fresh vitality from its unpeopled immensity. I never could understand why a desert is not generally considered beautiful; the kind, at least, we have in the South-west, with all the cacti, the yucca, and the other flowering plants unfamiliar to European or Eastern eyes, and the lines of coloured cliffs and the deep canyons. There is far more beauty and variety of colour than in the summer meadow-stretches and hills of the Atlantic States. So the good Padre Kino, after all, was perhaps to be congratulated on having those thirty years, interesting years, before the wilds could be made commonplace.
The Moki Town of Wolpi, Arizona.
700 feet above the valley.
Photograph by J.K. HILLERS, U.S. Geol. Survey.
Arizona did not seem to yield kindly to the civilisers; indeed, it was like the Colorado River, repellent and unbreakable. The padres crossed it and recrossed it on the southwestern corner, but they made no impression. After Kino’s death in 1711 there was a lull in the entradas to the Colorado, though Ugarte, coming up along the eastern coast of Lower California, sailed to the mouth of the river in July, 1721. Twenty-four years later (1744) Padre Jacobo Sedelmair went down the Gila from Casa Grande to the great bend, and from there cut across to the Colorado at about the mouth of Bill Williams Fork, but his journey was no more fruitful than those of his predecessors in the last two centuries. It seems extraordinary in these days that men could traverse a country, even so infrequently, during two whole centuries and yet know almost nothing about it. Two years after Sedelmair touched the Colorado, Fernando Consag, looking for mission sites, came up the gulf to its mouth, and when he had sailed away there was another long interval before the river was again visited by Europeans. This time it was over a quarter of a century, but the activity then begun was far greater than ever before, and the two padres who now became the foremost characters in the drama that so slowly moved upon the mighty and diversified stage of the South-west, were quite the equals in tireless energy of the Jesuit Kino. These two padres were Garces and Escalante, more closely associated with the history of the Basin of the Colorado than any one who had gone before. Francisco Garces, as well as Escalante, was of the Franciscan order, and this order, superseding the Jesuit, was making settlements, 1769-70, at San Diego and Monterey, as well as taking a prominent part in those already long established on the Rio Grande. There was no overland connection between the California missions and those of Sonora and the Rio Grande, and the desire to explore routes for such communication was one of the incentives of both Garces and Escalante, in their long entradas. But it seemed to be the habit of those days, either never to seek information as to what had previously been accomplished, or to forget it, for the expedition of Oñate might as well never have been made so far as its effect on succeeding travels was concerned. He had crossed Arizona by the very best route, yet Escalante, 172 years afterward, goes searching for one by way of Utah Lake! Coming from the west, the Moki Towns were ever the objective point, for they were well known and offered a refuge in the midst of the general desolation. Garces had his headquarters at the mission of San Xavier del Bac, or Bac, as it was commonly called, nine miles south of the present town of Tucson. Here Kino had begun a church in 1699, and at a later period another better one was started near by. This was finished in 1797 and to-day stands the finest monument in the South-west of the epoch of the padres. It is a really beautiful specimen of the Mexico-Spanish church architecture of that time. No better testimony could there be of the indefatigable spiritual energy of the padres than this artistic structure standing now amidst a few adobe houses, and once completely abandoned to the elements. Such a building should never be permitted to perish, and it well merits government protection. Its striking contrast to Casa Grande, the massive relic of an unknown time, standing but a few leagues distant, will always render this region of exceptional interest to the artist, the archaeologist, and the general traveller.
Church of San Xavier del Bac, near Tucson.
Drawing by F.S. DELLENBAUGH, after a photograph.
From Bac, under the protection of the presidio of Tubac, some thirty miles farther south, later transferred (1776) to the present Tucson, Garces carried on his work. He made five great entradas from the time of his arrival in June, 1768. The first was in that same year, the second in 1770, but in these he did not reach the Colorado, and we will pass them by. In the third, 1771, he went down the Gila to the Colorado and descended the latter stream along its banks perhaps to the mouth. On the fourth, 1774, he went with Captain Anza to the Colorado and farther on to the mission of San Gabriel in California, near Los Angeles, and in his fifth, and most important one, 1775-76, he again accompanied Captain Anza, who was bound for the present site of San Francisco, there to establish a mission. Padre Font was Anza’s chaplain, and with Garces’s aid later made a map of the country.[[4]] At Yuma Garces left the Anza party, went down to the mouth of the Colorado, and then up along the river to Mohave, and after another trip out to San Gabriel, he started on the most important part of all his journeys, from Mohave to the Moki Towns, the objective point of all entradas eastward from the Colorado. The importance attached at that time to the towns of the Moki probably seems absurd to the reader, but it must not be forgotten that the Moki were cultivators of the soil and always held a store of food-stuffs in reserve. They were also builders of very comfortable houses, as I can testify from personal experience. Thus they assumed a prominence, amidst the desolation of the early centuries, of which the railway in the nineteenth speedily robbed them.