Contents
Foreword
Preface
Jesuit Foundations
Gray Robes for Black 1767-68
The Archreformer Backs Down 1768-72
Tumacácori or Troy? 1772-74
The Course of Empire 1774-76
The Promise and Default of the Provincias Internas 1776-81
The Challenge of a Reforming Bishop 1781-95
A Quarrel Among Friars 1795-1808
"Corruption Has Come Among Us" 1808-20
A Trampled Guarantee 1820-28
Hanging On 1828-56
Epilogue
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
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![Hanging On](images/chap11.gif)
The few properties that were left have disappeared;
the houses and churches are deteriorating because there is no one to
care for them or to repair them. The day will come when, even if there
are friars to serve, they will have to begin the conquest all over
again.
Fray José María Pérez Llera,
Apuntes
The people of the presidio of Tubac and of the pueblo
of Tumacácori have removed to the presidio of Tucson as a
consequence of the murders committed by the barbarians during the month
of December last.
El Sonorense,
February 21, 1849
CONCURRENT EVENTS
1828 | Andrew Jackson unseats John Q.
Adams for the American presidency. |
1830 | U.S. Congress passes
legislation providing for the removal of Indian tribes to lands west of
the Mississippi. |
1831-36 | Charles Darwin, naturalist
aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, studies the flora and fauna of South
America. |
1834 | By the Indian Intercourse Act
the U.S. government to prevent unauthorized settlement on Indian
lands. |
1835 | Samuel Colt patents his
revolving pistol in England, the following year in America. |
1836 | Sam Houston inaugurated as
first president of the independent Republic of Texas. |
1837 | Eighteen-year-old Victoria
ascends the English throne.
Mexico lets its first railroad concession. |
1839 | Charles Goodyear vulcanizes
rubber. |
1841 | The capture of ill-starred
Texan Santa Fe expedition is hailed by New Mexico Gov. Manuel Armijo as
a "great victory over the Texas invaders."
In Mexican California John A. Sutter buys the livestock and goods as the
Russians pull out of Fort Ross. |
1845 | Texas admitted as a state by
the U.S. |
1846 | The Smithsonian Institution
founded. |
1846-47 | The Donner party suffers the
horrors of winter at Truckee Lake. |
1847 | Gen. Zachary Taylor, in spite
of himself, defeats the Mexicans at Buenavista.
Brigham Young lays out Salt Lake City. |
1848 | Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
issue the Communist Manifesto.
U.S. troops storm the Taos, N.M., pueblo church to crush local
resistance. |
1850 | U.S. census records a
population of 23,191,000. |
1851 | The Great Exhibition in London
marks the culmination of British industrial leadership. |
1852 | Louis Napoleon is proclaimed
Emperor Napoleon III. |
1853 | Santa Anna rules Mexico with
all the trappings of absolute dictator. |
1854 | Pope Pius IX promulgates the
dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the first since the Council of
Trent.
The Office of Surveyor General for the Territory of New Mexico is
established to deal with Spanish and Mexican land grants.
The Light Brigade charges "into the mouth of hell" at Balaclava in the
Crimea. |
1855 | Mexico has fifteen miles of
railroad. |
1856 | The bloody Kansas "civil war"
rages. |
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS after the others had departed, the
lonely twenty-seven-year-old Fray José María Pérez
Llera stayed at Ures feeling sorry for himself.
The thought of being a religious all alone in a
pueblo with no one to console me in my afflictions and advise me in my
doubts, subject even to dying without the sacraments, so horrified me
from the time I entered the order that had it not been for my vow of
obedience I would sooner have given up my life than ask to go to the
missions. Feeling as I did when a companion was only ten or twelve
leagues away, it was not easy for me with the distances tripled to
resign myself to staying on in that state of forsakenness.
By mid-July, the worst time of year to travel because
of the summer rains, he had got hold of himself. To fulfill his
superior's parting commission Father Pérez Llera intended to
visit the missions and get back to Ures as quickly as he could. At San
Ignacio a revelation struck him, changing his fear to confidence. "God
Our Lord would not forsake me so long as I dedicated myself to the good
of these poor souls." In a few days Fray Rafael Díaz joined him,
having secured a permit to remain in Mexico. Now there were two of
them.
From the perspective of San Ignacio the missions and
settlements of Pimería Alta divided naturally into two sectors:
those to the west and those to the north. Pérez Llera took San
Ignacio and the westTubutama, Oquitoa, and Caborca, with all their
visitas. Sáric, abandoned in 1827 because of the Apaches, he left
off the list. Díaz took the northCocóspera,
Tumacácori, and his old mission of San Xavier del Bac, plus the
presidios of Santa Cruz, Tubac, and Tucson. Never again would the
missions be fully manned. The day of the resident missionary-protector
had passed. Yet inertia, the disarray of their opponents, and the
presence of the last few grayrobes kept the missions alive, if barely,
long beyond their time. [1]
Father Díaz was none too certain about his new
status as a naturalized Mexican, even though he had resided in the
country for at least a decade. Born October 24, 1794, in the wine-making
center of Jerez de la Frontera just north of Cádiz, he may have
emigrated to New Spain with his family during the prolonged French
troubles. He had entered the order in the province of Michoacán
two days before his twenty-fourth birthday. In 1820 he transferred to
the college of Querétaro and four years later found himself
assigned to its farthest mission, San Xavier del Bac. From 1824 until
the expulsion in 1828 Rafael Díaz had done double duty as
missionary at Bac and as interim chaplain of the Tucson garrison. Now
late in the summer of 1828 he decided for his own good to return to
Tucson until the frenzied prejudice against Spaniards subsided. "As a
result," reflected Pérez Llera, "I was again alone, with almost
all the pueblos." [2]
The circling vultures moved in to pick the missions'
bones almost immediately, to hear Father Pérez Llera tell it.
Reports of graft and mismanagement, by or in spite of the hastily chosen
mission overseers, piled up on the governor's desk. As a result Vice
Governor José María Almada charged the repentant alcalde
of Altar, Santiago Redondo, and one don Fernando Grande to visit the
missions and report fully on the state of their economic affairs.
Debtors and creditors were clamoring.
The vice governor ordered don Manuel Escalante y
Arvizu, jefe político of the department of Arizpe, to confiscate
the more than three thousand pesos "collected by don Ignacio
Elías and other individuals by order of the expelled Spanish
religious." Fray Rafael Díaz tried to compile a list of persons
who owed debts to the missions. Don Leonardo Escalante of Bacoachi
claimed that Tumacácori owed him three hundred head of cattle.
Fray Ramón Liberós had given a colt to the commandant at
Tucson, presumably Pedro Villaescusa: it and fourteen purchased
she-asses had been reclaimed. The officer demanded justice. [3]
To straighten out accounts, take inventory, and
assess the mission's future, don Fernando Grande came to
Tumacácori late in the summer of 1828. Ramón Pamplona,
despite "his lack of instruction in accounts and the management of these
affairs," had done a creditable job. He had paid off some of the 1,115
pesos in debts resulting from church construction. The various creditors
who had received payment, including the Ortiz brothers Tomás and
Ignacio, owners of the Arivaca and La Canoa grants, were obliged to
submit an accounting to the state government: any payment not approved
they had to return.
At the time of his rude separation from
Tumacácori, Father Liberós had given
giftstechnically not his to giveto some of the Indians who
had served him well: a mare, a horse, a cow, or clothing. The total
value, Fernando Grande estimated, cannot have exceeded a hundred or a
hundred and fifty pesos. To avoid stirring up resentment among the
recipients, Grande decided to write off these gifts. Besides, "being
Indians and poor" all had eaten, sold, or traded the animals for things
they needed more.
The mission's assets from supply contracts made by
Father Liberós with the presidios of Tubac, Tucson, and Santa
Cruz amounted to 1,516 pesos, plus an additional three hundred pesos'
worth of wheat for Tubac. At this time a fanega of wheat and a cow on
the range were on a parity, each worth three pesos. Two of
Tumacácori's four wheat fields were leased to don Ignacio Ortiz
at the rate of one fourth the yield. Like everything else, this was now
subject to government approval.
In his report Grande praised the way the Indian
Ramón Pamplona had administered Tumacácori. But, according
to Grande, Pamplona refused to remain in office "even though I tried
hard to persuade him . . . offering to assign him a salary." Don
Tomás Ortiz stepped forward. He would oversee mission
temporalities for forty pesos per month, the equivalent of a hundred and
sixty cattle a year. In the presence of Grande and the alcalde of Tubac,
Ortiz signed the inventories making himself accountable. His business
concluded, Fernando Grande rode south to Cocóspera where he
deposed Nicolás Martínez, the Indian left in charge there
by Father Francisco Solano García.
It was no secret that Grande wanted to be general
administrator of mission temporalities for all Pimería Alta.
After he had inspected Tumacácori, Cocóspera, and San
Ignacio, he made three observations to the government: (1) The missions
must be preserved as economic entities in order to civilize and educate
the Indians to the new order. (2) If the missions, which the Indians
understand to be theirs, are suppressed, these long-loyal peoples, full
of resentment, will rock the frontier with violent upheavals. (3) The
state will benefit to the greatest degree by establishing a general
mission administration, imposing annually a sum to be paid into the
treasury, and permitting the missions to supply presidios and settlers
as in the past. He did not mean to laud the ex-missionaries' economic
regimethey had their own propagandistsonly to stress the
reality of the situation. [4]
Father Pérez Llera resented it when General
Administrator Grande moved in with him at San Ignacio. The friar soon
found himself reduced to a single room in the convento and driven half
crazy by the children's ruckus. He was dependent on the administrator
for meat, flour, and practically every thing else, though he did manage
to win control of the missions' kitchen gardens. It galled him that
Grande was drawing a one-hundred-peso-a-month salary plus expenses, and
that the administrator's chosen subordinates enjoyed proportionate
salaries. The disgruntled Franciscan put up with the arrangement for
several months, "until I saw that everything was being exhausted at a
rapid rate and that the Indians would be more responsive to us if we
were in charge of everything and could protect them from the injustices
being done them by the settlers." He petitioned the government to turn
the temporalities back over to him, Díaz, and the other friars
they hoped would soon join them. [5]
At Tumacácori something went wrong. Jefe
Político Manuel Escalante y Arvizu admonished don Tomás
Ortiz to share with him whatever bright ideas he had regarding the
mission. He also told the Tumacácori administrator to remedy
certain inequities immediately. For whatever reason, Ortiz was replaced
in 1829 by a Grande appointee, Buenaventura López.
During November and December that year the volatile
Escalante y Arvizu visited the missions for himself. He was shocked. He
listened to the Indians complaints and saw their deplorable condition.
Under the friars the Indians had at least benefited from the sweat of
their brows: they had been fed, clothed, and housed. Now they benefited
not at all. As a result, noted the jefe, they were leaving the missions
and wandering about, trading oppression for the freedom of
vagabonds.
Escalante y Arvizu supported Father Pérez
Llera one hundred percent. There were now four missionaries in the
Pimería: Pérez Llera, named Father President by the
college, at San Ignacio; Rafael Díaz residing currently at
Cocóspera and ministering to Tumacácori, San Xavier, and
the presidios of Santa Cruz, Tubac, and Tucson; Juan Maldonado who had
returned to Pimería Alta after an absence and was serving Oquitoa
and Tubutama; and Faustino González, "a very ill Spaniard," at
Caborca.
"American-born religious," Escalante y Arvizu
asserted, "are no less capable than Spaniards: the latter, with hand out
and with less interest in our happiness, had in their charge the
management of the economic affairs of these missions; why should not the
former?" If not returned to the friars immediately, everything the
missions owned would end up in the hands of others. The Apaches would
finish off the livestock. And likely the Pimas would rebel. [6]
A creature of the oppressive Gaxiola-Paredes
administration, Fernando Grande fell shortly after it did. The proposal
of Father Pérez Llera and Jefe Político Escalante y Arvizu
found favor with the new government, and on January 22, 1830, the
mission properties reverted to the friars' care. That spring Grande and
Pérez Llera made the rounds together effecting the transfer of
what was left at each mission. On May 4 the Mexican Father President
signed a receipt for Tumacácori 'with its books and accounts."
Grande's appointee Buenaventura López had been sharing local
administration with Ramón Pamplona. Tumacácori, at
latitude 31°47' and longitude 33°42' west of the meridian of
Washington (not far off the actual lat. 31°34' and long. 111°3'
west of Greenwich), wrote Grande in his final report, "has some Indian
families, though their number is not great, and some settlers supported
by the temporalities as day-laborers because of the shortage of hands."
[7]
The temporalities Pérez Llera signed for at
Tumacácori in 1830 reflected a drastic decline in what
Liberós had left two years before. Whether greedy settlers or
Apaches were more to blame was difficult to assess. Many of the
mission's estimated four hundred remaining cattle ran wild because the
people of Calabazas who herded them had been chased from their homes by
Apaches. The mission still claimed some eight hundred head of sheep. The
few horses had all gone wild. Much of the wheat-growing land was
unplanted because of the Apache peril and a lack of demand. The church
the friar described as "good, new, and well enough supplied," and the
convento "likewise." [8]
During the nine months Fernando Grande functioned as
general administrator, the insecure Franciscans did not dare indict him
for the rape of the missions. Besides, no one had enough to pay them
back anyway. But once Grande had departed, Pérez Llera unburdened
himself to the governor.
The temporalities and household furnishings had
suffered a thorough sacking, because of the ineptitude of those in
charge, because of the excessive salaries, because of the absolute
abandonment that left all the industries paralyzed, and finally because
they, taking their pay by their own hand, undervalued everything of
worth either through sale or appropriation to themselves. [9]
In his reminiscences the friar told what had happened
at San Ignacio. When Grande arrived there had been six hundred pesos in
cash, plus crops and livestock. When Grande left "I received not a
half-real of it, but instead debts and eleven cattle that were so old
and skinny no one wanted them. And because there had been takers not
even the wooden chairs in the quarters had escaped."
The moral wreckage, according to the Father
President, was even worse than the physical. Mission Indians had been
abused and corrupted. They had got used to license and vice. Some had
run away, back to their heathen relations. Venal officials encouraged
the dissipation. Such, wrote Pérez Llera, "is the sickness of our
Babylon." He begged for the governor's support. [10]
Evidently Grande did have something to hide. When don
Leonardo Escalante, provisional governor of separated Sonora, reported
in August, 1831, to the minister of justice and ecclesiastical affairs
in Mexico City, he explained that the documents setting forth the state
of the missions during their civil administration had been carried off
to Durango. His appeals had brought not even a reply. The governor
admitted a staggering debt owed to the missions by individuals,
presidios, and the government. He was confident that they would not lose
any more under the direction of Father President Pérez Llera,
"whose honesty and integrity are well known to the entire state," except
to the barbarous Apaches. He closed with an appeal for priests and a
prophecy of hope.
In sum let me conclude by assuring Your Excellency
that the temporalities of Pimería Alta, well organized and
legitimately administered by priests, as has been said, within five or
six years at most will be capable of providing from their growth the
stipends of their missionaries, schools, and repair of the churches,
with a sizable surplus for the other public charities. [11]
The Father President himself would not have gone so
far. But he did share some of Governor Escalante's hope for better
times. He had ridden to Pitic, since 1828 called Hermosillo. In
audiences with the governor and with members of the state legislature
his suggestions for reform of the missions had been well received. At
his urging they had passed a law setting the clock back in the missions
to before the expulsion of 1828. Henceforth the Indians of the missions
were subject to their missionaries, just as before. Henceforth heathens
were forbidden to wander around corrupting and being corrupted in the
established settlements. But it would take more than a law. [12]
The prospects for Sonora did seem brighter in 1831.
The federal congress had approved the division of the Estado de
Occidente into the two separate states of Sinaloa and Sonora. With that
disruptive issue resolved and a constitution of their own, the leaders
of Sonora could presumably get on with developing the potential of their
state. On May 1, 1832, don Manuel Escalante y Arvizu, ex-jefe
político of Arizpe, took office as the first constitutionally
elected governor and proceeded to the feat of serving a full four-year
term. Arizpe, because of foreboding pressure brought to bear by the
military under Comandante Simón Elías González, won
the honor as state capital.
But not all was well. Open fights between political
factions, barrack revolts in support of the latest national uprising of
Santa Anna, appeals to the Indian tribes by all sides, a fresh outbreak
among the Yaquis, and the resultant lawlessness, confusion, and poverty
made the statement of ex-governor Leonardo Escalante a travesty.
Even without hostile Apaches there would have been
little hope of a renaissance in Pimería Alta. With the Apaches,
there was none. Even though the energetic, thrill-seeking Governor
Escalante y Arvizu, who spent much of his term dashing from one crisis
to the next, campaigned against them as far as the Río Gila and
the Sierra de Mogollón, the Apaches continued to come and go
almost at will. The tide of their depredations was again in full flow:
it would not turn for a generation, until well after the abandonment of
Tumacácori by the last Indians. [13]
Even as Father Ramón Liberós had made
his final hurried arrangements at Tumacácori in mid-April, 1828,
an Apache war party attacked and massacred seven settlers at the placers
just to the west "in the sierrita" between the rancho of Arivaca and the
presidio of Tubac. [14] No one was safe on
the roads or in the fields without an armed escort. They learned to live
with the peril.
In December, 1829, Buenaventura López had told
Fernando Grande what it was like at Tumacácori. Early the morning
of the seventh an Indian reported that he had noticed a commotion and
heard yelling as he passed the place called Agua Fría, six miles
south of Tumacácori. Near there the mission's horses had been
grazing. All who could assembled and went to investigate. Soldiers,
settlers, and Apaches mansos from Tubac followed. The horses were gone
and no one could find vaquero Leonardo Ochoa.
While one party searched for the missing Ochoa
another pursued the herd south over the mesas, recovering all but a
dozen or so animals. Around four that afternoon Ignacio Orosco came in
with a grisly trophy and a grislier story. He had found two corpses on
the mesa opposite Agua Fría. The fresh scalp he had taken from
one of them the tame Apaches identified as that of Nagayé,
capitancillo and feared warrior. Ochoa had managed to cut the ties
Nagayé had bound him with and had stabbed the Apache to death
with a hunting knife. He would have got away had the other hostiles not
surprised him just then. So thoroughly had they mutilated Ochoa's body
that it could not be brought in to Tumacácori for burial.
Nagayé the tame Apaches "hung on a stake, as they say."
Because of the signs of hostiles all round,
López ordered a corral built inside the mission. On moonlit
nights the horses would be driven in to protect them from the marauders.
In closing he told how a settler on his way from San Ignacio had run
into two Apaches. "If he had not been on a good animal he too would have
perished at their hands." [15]
In less than a month, on January 5, 1830, Apaches
attacked the mission vaqueros at Calabazas. Just then the detail
carrying the monthly mail from the presidio of Tucson rode up. Together
soldiers and vaqueros fought off the hostiles and retreated with the
horse herd to Tumacácori. Denied a single horse, the Apaches
returned to Calabazas where "they set afire its buildings and chapel,
carrying off all of the sacred vessels and vestments from the latter."
[16] Though they continued to run stock in
the area, no one felt safe anymore at Calabazas.
But for the presidio of Tubac, the declining mission
of Tumacácori would surely not have survived. More than five
hundred persons still lived in and around Tubac. A census of settlers,
apparently compiled in the 1830s, showed 201 adults and 105 children,
not counting members of the garrison or their dependents.
Second-generation tubaquense don Atanasio Otero and his family led off
the list, followed by several other families whose heads deserved to be
addressed as don and doña: José Sosa, Tomás Ortiz,
Pedro Quijada, and doña Reyes Peña, widow of don
Agustín Ortiz. Though people still called the Tubac garrison the
Compañía de Pimas it probably by now included more
mixed-breeds than Pimas. Carried on the rolls at headquarters in the
late 1820s with three officers and eighty-one men, they rarely mustered
at full strength. [17] For a time in 1832
in fact it seemed as though Tubac would be abandoned.
The military had been using every means available to
wage a defensive war against the Apaches: forced levies of Indian
auxiliaries, confiscation of animals and stores, volunteer companies of
settlers, appeals to patriotism, semi-private treaties with willing
Apache bands. They had divided the embattled frontier into two sections,
the first composed of the companies of Fronteras, Bavispe, and Bacoachi;
and the second of Santa Cruz, Tubac, and Tucson. Still the enemy ran
wild.
In May, 1832, all the officials of nine "patriotic
pueblos"Cucurpe, Tuape, San Ignacio, Magdalena, Ímuris,
Cocóspera, Tumacácori, San Xavier del Bac, and
Tucsongathered as guests of Fray Rafael Díaz at
Cocóspera to form a third section, La Sección
Patriótica. First they elected don Ignacio Elías to
preside over the meeting, then named don Joaquín Vicente
Elías chief of the organization and drew up articles. Father
Díaz signed the pact "for himself and for Francisco Carros,
'Lieutenant General of the Pima Nation.'" They would march for Tucson
the next day to rendezvous for a campaign. They would kill some Apaches.
[18]
At four in the afternoon on May 23 the irregular
column marched into Tubac. There Jefe Joaquín Elías
saluted Lieutenant Antonio Comadurán of Tucson, commander of the
Second Section, who had just that morning attacked the enemy in the
Sierra de Santa Rita. Because of spent horses Comadurán had given
up the chase. Elías volunteered. Commanding fifty horsemen and as
many on foot he departed at once and for several long days kept on the
trail. When it became obvious that the Apaches were in full flight, he
returned to Tucson for the rendezvous.
There a note from Commandant General José
María Elías González called into question certain
of the Sección Patriótica's basic articles. It was too
late. They had resolved to act. At the head of some two hundred motley
volunteers, Elías set out again, this time destined for
combat.
Operating fifty miles or so northeast of Tucson on
June 4, 1832, the Secció Patriótica trapped a large
gathering of Apaches, mostly runaways from the peace camps at Tucson and
Santa Cruz, come together to celebrate an alliance with Capitancillo
Chiquito and twenty-five of his braves. After a four-hour battle in the
Cajón de Arivaipa the jubilant Mexicans claimed a count of
seventy one braves killed, thirteen children taken captive, and 216
horses and mules seized. Elías let those who caught them keep the
Apache children. The branded animals he returned to their owners, the
rest he distributed among his men, except for the three mules he gave to
the widow of Roque Somosa, the only Mexican killed. Twelve suffered
wounds. Reporting his triumph to the commandant general, Jefe
Elías begged him to forgive the Sección Patriótic a
for going ahead. If they had done wrong, it was all because of his
ignorance of military procedure. [19]
|
Fronteras, Sonora. From Bartlett,
Personal Narrative, I
|
News of the signal victory of Joaquín Vicente
Elías and his irregulars evoked mixed responses. Many feared
bloody Apache retaliation. "Now we'll have them in our homes," wrote San
Ignacio's justice of the peace, imploring Governor Escalante y Arvizu to
send twenty-five muskets and ammunition. The governor dispatched word of
the triumph, "in a nutshell for time does not permit more," to his
counterpart in Chihuahua where it was published. Sonora's governor said
he had taken what measures he could to head off retaliation by the
barbarians: he suggested that the governor of Chihuahua do the same. [20]
Officers of the regular military, who had of late
fired more rounds at one another than at the enemy, understandably
resented the success of a bunch of farmers and breeds. Something else
worried Antonio Comadurán:
During the attack on the enemy Apaches mounted in the
Cajón de Arivaipa by the Third Section of Patriots, according to
what their commander don Joaquín Elías reported to me, the
thirty-six Pimas who accompanied him did not join in the battle but
appeared very indifferent. All their lives these Indians have been
accustomed when victories were won by our forces to celebrate them with
many acts of public rejoicing like singing, dancing, etc. But this time
it was the opposite: even when they reached their pueblos they and their
families burst into general wailing, demonstrating their deep regret at
the triumph of our forces.
He feared an alliance with the enemy. [21]
One officer and politician, don Ignacio
Zúñiga, native of Tucson and son of its former captain
José de Zúñiga, delighted in the Elías
victory. In his Rápida ojeada, published in 1835, he
wrote:
If one runs his eye over the several conspicuous
victories gained against the enemy, he will see that all were won by
citizens, driven by the necessity of defending themselves or by the
passion of avenging an outrage. A religious of the cross [i.e., a
Queretaran friar, Rafael Díaz] assembled the citizens of San
Ignacio and Santa Cruz with the Pápagos of Cocóspera and
Tumacácori, and in a few days entered the territory of the enemy
and succeeded in inflicting on him an exemplary punishment.
He cited other victories by the citizens of Tucson
and by the Gila Pimas. For the regular frontier military
Zúñiga had nothing but scorn. [22]
Now and again over the next quarter-century there
would be occasional Mexican victories like Elías' to relieve the
dreary reports of Apache depredation and killing. More typical of life
in Hispanic Arizona during the 1830s and 1840s was the gnawing fear and
the pressure of constant guerrilla warfare. Just six days after the
patriots' triumph, Tubac Justice of the Peace Trinidad Irigoyen lamented
the condition to which they had to return.
Tubac that summer was as usual virtually unmanned.
The garrison had been called to duty in the south where a series of
barracks revolts had further split Sonora's military. The settlers were
terrified and many had fled. Told to requisition ten men from
Ímuris, Tubac commandant José María Villaescusa,
younger brother of Pedro, got a note in reply saying that no one in
Ímuris had a horse or weapons. "I am being left alone," he
complained, "with the three retired soldiers and one aide, and with the
soldiers' families." The rest of the settlers, who had remained only to
look after their wheat, were on the verge of abandoning their homes. As
evidence of his plight Villaescusa sent the letter of Trinidad Irigoyen
on to headquarters. "Today," Irigoyen had written,
I convened twelve citizens, the only ones who have
stayed, exhorting them to put aside their fears and defend their homes.
Where do they want to go? What they tell me is that they are not
staying. If they do not leave, their families are going to leave them
for wherever seems best. You must contemplate the presidio without
soldiers and without settlers. [23]
Within a month a ragtag militia company of
twenty-four "cívicos auxiliares" from Oposura, recruited
for short-term service at Tucson, arrived instead at Tubac with their
sergeant Juli&aacut;en Zubía. Comadurán figured that
depopulated Tubac needed them more than Tucson.
|
Tubac and the Santa Rita Mountains.
From Sonora Silver Mining Company, Report
|
Seven deserted almost immediately. The rest of these
poor, unpaid, demoralized men, still at Tubac in October, wanted more
than anything else to go home. "These people," wrote Zubía, "are
unfit to render any service active or passive because of the nakedness
they suffer." [24] Headquarters recognized
the need to restore a regular garrison to Tubac and to relieve the
unfortunate reserves. In 1833, with the Yaquis and the insurgents more
or less under control to the south, the soldiers returned and with them
some of the settlers.
A year later, on the fourth of July 1834, Juan
Bautista Elías, Tubac's justice of the peace, pleaded with the
governor. Things were as bad as ever. Worse. A note to Tubac commandant
Salvador Moraga, written in Tucson the day before, warned of an
impending Apache onslaught. According to a woman captive, who had just
escaped from the Sierra de Chiricahua on a fast horse, the barbarians'
immediate target was Tubac. If they came, said Elías, it would
take them only a few hours to utterly destroy the place.
Your Excellency knows very well its location, the
disarray of its buildings scattered among stands of trees and barrancas,
without a wall, and worse, the fact that the winter rains drew the water
in the river [channel] a long way away. If the enemy avails himself of
this alone, we its inhabitants will perish.
There was not a single piece of artillery at Tubac.
The few settlers were poorly armed. The garrison, if the paymaster got
back in time, could hardly muster ten or a dozen men. Unlike Tucson or
Santa Cruzwith their walls, artillery, hundreds of settlers, and
regular forces of troopsisolated, defenseless Tubac lay at the
Apaches' mercy. As poor men, the settlers of Tubac had to go out
themselves every day to work their fields and tend their animals. In
doing so they took their lives, and those of their families, in their
hands.
Elías begged the governor to intercede with
the commandant general. They had asked before. If additional troops were
not assigned to Tubac, the settlers were again resolved to evacuate the
place, "even though the little we possess is lost." Life was dearer. [25]
Fray Rafael Díaz had had it with
Pimería Alta. He wanted a transfer to New Mexico. When that
failed, he resigned himself. Obviously he could not be everywhere at
once. He chose to reside at Cocóspera and ride the circuit down
the river from the presidio of Santa Cruz to the presidio of Tucson, a
hundred mile stretch along which any clump of mesquite trees or any
arroyo might conceal an ambush. Whenever he was well and could get an
escort, coming and going, he stopped at Tumacácori.
Because the lands belonged to them, and because it
was home, some Indian families hung on at the mission despite drought,
famine, and Apaches. Father Díaz had described their plight to
the vice governor on November 1, 1832. The drought of that year, the
friar averred, was "so complete that we have not raised a grain from a
single seed." Most of the Indians had no stores to fall back on, so they
sought jobs away from the pueblo, at which they earned only two reales a
daybarely enough to feed themselveswhile their families "are
subject to perish without the least help."
Starvation was only one problem. "There is more,"
Díaz lamented. The defense of Cocóspera and
Tumacácori sorely perplexed the Franciscan. The presidial forces
of Santa Cruz and Tucson had ignored their urgent calls for help. Three
Apaches alone had stolen seven bunches of horses from Tumacácori.
"Help was requested but it was refused us." When Apaches murdered two
women and two little girls and abducted three other girls only half a
league from Cocóspera, a plea to the commander at Santa Cruz had
brought not even the courtesy of a reply.
"Is it possible," the friar asked, "that they will
order us to dismember the slim force we depend on so that our people
must look after the garrison of Tubac?" He prayed God that the
government would not order what the two pueblos could not possibly obey.
To discourage the plan, he appended lists of the twenty-nine males of
Cocóspera and the eighteen at Tumacácori.
Pueblo of Tumacácori.
Javier Ignacio Sánchez (juez económico)
José Ignacio Trejo (alguacil)
Valerio Zamora (mador)
Pedro Hipólito (fiscal)
Crisanto Higuera old
Antonio Zúñiga deaf
Joaquín Ríos able-bodied
Andrés Higuera able-bodied
Francisco Garcés able-bodied
Cristóbal Ríos able-bodied
Tomás Ríos able-bodied
Miguel Velarde able-bodied
José Javier heathen catecumen
Nicolás González able-bodied
Lorenzo Zapata able-bodied
Juan Antonio Zúñiga able-bodied
Ignacio Pamplona able-bodied
Cañuto Pamplona able-bodied
"These reasons," the missionary concluded, "and the
impotence to which we are reduced seem to us sufficient to exempt us
from a burden that is intolerable to us. Nevertheless, if Your
Excellency does not consider them sufficient, let us know whatever your
superior pleasure is and we shall give it our serious consideration."
[26]
To oversee what mission temporalities were left at
Tumacácori, Father Díaz commissioned don José Sosa
of Tubac. Sosa's father, the long-deceased Ensign José
María Sosa, had served at the presidios of Tubac and Tucson. When
young José had asked for the hand of Gregoria Luz
Núñez back in 1811 he had to obtain a dispensation from
the bishop: he had known his intended's sister carnally before he
proposed. [27] Twenty years later don
José and doña Gregoria presided over a large family at
Tubac. But to the Indians of Tumacácori, Sosa was a no-good
white. In 1833 they accused him of embezzlement and of "other offenses
no less serious" and carried their complaints to the governor.
Because Tumacácori was subject to its neighbor
in civil matters the governor's office charged the Tubac authorities
newly elected in January, 1834, to hear testimony regarding the bad or
good conduct of don José Sosa. Justice of the Peace Juan Bautista
Elías complied. As scribe he named José Grijalva and as
corroborating witnesses Pablo Contreras and Nicolás Herreros, son
and heir to León Herreros. He called six witnesses, none of them
Indians. Only two knew how to sign. Their testimony, though not
conclusive in the matter of José Sosa, did expose the strained
relations between the Indians of Tumacácori and local
settlers.
The first witness, José Antonio Figueroa,
resident at Tumacácori, appeared before Elías on Friday,
January 24, 1834. Forty-four years old, illiterate, listed on the Tubac
census with his wife and three children, Figueroa said he did not know
whether Sosa's conduct had been bad or good. Asked if Sosa had
misappropriated anything belonging to the mission, or if because of him
some of the Indians had fled to the villages of the heathens, he again
claimed ignorance. He did know that certain Tumacácori Indians
had disappeared from the pueblo, but he had no idea why. Four of them
had broken out of the Tubac jail where they were being held for
indictment in the murder of a soldier. When one of the suspects had dug
up the body from where they had buried it, Figueroa and two soldiers
took custody of it and returned it to Tubac. Had Sosa or any member of
his family insulted or harmed the mission Indians? That Figueroa did not
know either.
The same day Elías called Tiburcio Campa,
married and the father of five. In his opinion don José Sosa was
an honest man. "Of the six Indians whom the agents of the accused had
charged," said Campa, the four who killed the soldier had fled jail. He
mentioned two others who left Tumacácori, for what reason he did
not know. The question of abuse of the Indians by Sosa he answered
indirectly. A compadre of his, one Guadalupe Canelo, had related an
incident at the rancho of Calabazas involving Sosa and Ignacio Pamplona,
son of Ramón. The mission administrator had evidently given the
Indian a severe tongue-lashing. Pamplona had said not a word in reply,
just took the reins of his mule and returned to Tumacácori. That
was all Campa could say. He signed his name.
To get to the bottom of the incident at Calabazas,
Judge Elías summoned Guadalupe Canelo, thirty-five years old and
illiterate. He had been present. Pamplona had arrived at Calabazas to
brand some animals belonging to the mission. Sosa did not give him a
chance. The Indian suffered the administrator's abuse without a word and
went back to Tumacácori. As for the six Indians who fled, Canelo
thought Father Díaz' report would clarify the matter.
Thirty-four-year-old Julián Osorio, a resident
of Tumacácori, began by affirming the honesty of the accused,
then proceeded to cast aspersions. Sosa had at pasture a flock of a
hundred sheep, most of them marked with his brand but vented with the
mission's. The witness did not know how Sosa had come by them, unless he
had taken them as payment for his work. He had heard Sosa say to don
Esteban Velos, who had the wool weaving concession at Tumacácori,
that with what was wasted at the convento through carelessness alone a
man could support himself. When asked if Sosa abused the Indians, Osorio
responded "that the Indians themselves had told him so." And he believed
it, especially after Sosa mentioned his quarrel with Pamplona. In
closing Osorio told how a delegation of Indians had called on don
Ignacio Ortiz and noticed in his house a trunk belonging to the mission.
Don Ignacio explained that Sosa had sent it. When Ortiz asked if they
wished to take it, they had demurred. With that, Osorio made his mark
and stepped down.
The fifth witness, don Esteban Velos, age fifty-five,
denied categorically as a Catholic Christian the conversation alleged by
Osorio. Literate, thirty-three-year-old don Ignacio Ortiz, sixth and
final witness, did not deny the presence of the trunk. The Indians had
suspected that his brother don Tomás had removed it from
Tumacácori during his term as administrator. But don Ignacio
disabused them, explaining that his compadre Sosa had merely left it
with him for safekeeping. That concluded the testimony, which Justice of
the Peace Elías duly submitted to Arizpe. The verdict, if any, is
missing. [28]
A couple of years later Sosa appeared before Justice
of the Peace Atanasio Otero to press his right to more water: the
mission fields and diversions upriver were taking it all. He petitioned
Otero or persons designated by him to come look at his wheat field. On
investigation deputy Pablo Contreras noted that Tumacácori's
wheat needed irrigation more than Sosa's. "It was from laziness not a
lack of water that there were dry places that had not tasted a drop
since planting." When a flash flood, unusual in May, washed down the
river, there was suddenly an abundance of water. After the mission's
wheat and that of an individual Indian had been irrigated, Sosa would
get his share. [29]
Conditions in the moribund missions of Pimería
Alta did not improve. Settlers opposed Father President Pérez
Llera at every turn. First they put some Indians of Caborca up to asking
the governor for full citizenship, distribution of mission lands, and an
end to the friars' paternalistic rule. The governor, fearing an uprising
if he denied them, consented, in vague terms, thereby overturning the
law Pérez Llera had secured in 1831 and confusing the status of
Indians and friars alike. Everyone could see the weakness of the
government and how little laws mattered. When the Father President
despaired of ever receiving the traditional mission subsidy and tried to
collect from every settler on mission lands a minimal annual tribute of
one fanega of wheat or a calf, even a peso and a half or twoa
system used previously at San Xavier and Sáricthey almost
threw him out. "Already considering themselves owners of the lands, even
this trifle seemed to them intolerable."
In 1832 the four FranciscansPérez Llera,
Díaz, Maldonado, and Faustino Gonzálezhad met at
Magdalena to discuss strategy and to dedicate the church that
Pérez Llera had built. Obviously they had to have help. If they
recruited a few more friars perhaps they could then set up a school to
train youths to assist them. In hopes, Pérez Llera built three
additional rooms at Magdalena and asked for government aid. Then in 1833
he had made the long journey to Querétaro to enlist more
missionaries.
He found few of his brethren inclined, qualified, and
healthy enough. Only two, Fray Ángel de la Concepción
Arroyo and Fray Antonio González, returned with him. At San
Ignacio he had an answer from the government: the treasury was bare. So
he assigned the two new arrivals, evidently Arroyo to Caborca and
Antonio González to San Xavier, and busied himself with church
building at Ímuris and Santa Ana. "But while I was trying to
build, the government was doing nothing but tearing down. With the
change of systems and regimes, decrees were issued one after another,
sometimes contradictory, and without repealing the conflicting sections
of earlier ones."
The Father President was torn, "sick of being a
sorrowful spectator of turmoil I could do nothing about." He wanted to
get out. He had served his decade in the missions, he had suffered more
abuse than he thought he could stand, and he knew now that neither the
government of Sonora nor his own college could help. Yet how could he
abandon these wretched souls? He would make one last effort.
Leaving sealed instructions for old Faustino
González to take over as president, Pérez Llera sneaked
away from San Ignacio one day in January, 1837. A strong, conservative,
pro-Church faction had come to power in Mexico City. By the new
constitution of 1836 this regime sought to save Mexico from federalism
by an abrupt return to centralism. It decreed an end to the chaotic,
nearly autonomous state governments and substituted a system of
departments whose governors were appointed from Mexico City. Father
Pérez Llera would carry an appeal to the president of Mexico.
After only a few days' rest at the college, which he
reached in June, 1837, Pérez Llera rode on to the capital.
President Anastasio Bustamante granted him an audience, as much to learn
what the friar had to say about politics in the Department of Sonora as
to hear him out on frontier missions. Father Pérez proposed to
the president that a board of experienced missionaries be named to
advise the government on means of preserving and advancing the missions.
While in Mexico City the Franciscan also called on the bishop-elect of
Sonora, Doctor Lázaro de la Garza y Ballesteros. He wanted to
brief the prelate on missionary matters and make certain
recommendations. Soon after Pérez Llera returned to
Querétaro, bad news reached him from Sonora. [30]
Two days after Christmas, 1837, Comandante Militar
José Urrea, son of don Mariano and native of Tucson, who began
his military career at Tubac in 1809, had pronounced against the central
government and called for a return to federalism. A week later the wily
criollo lawyer appointed by President Bustamante governor of the
Department, don Manuel María Gándara, cast his lot with
Urrea and the revolt. When centralist forces did not disperse promptly,
Gándara switched sides again. Henceforth for a generation the
factions of the opportunist Gándara and his opponents would keep
Sonora embroiled in brutal, internecine civil wars. In the fighting
would die all hope for the missions. [31]
In 1836, just before the furtive departure of Father
President Pérez Llera, the missionary roster apparently looked
like this:
Pérez Llera
Rafael Díaz
Antonio González
Juan Maldonado
Faustino González
Ángel Arroyo
|
San Ignacio
Cocóspera
San Xavier
Oquitoa
Pitiquito
Caborca
|
Within five years only two were left.
Juan Maldonado soon took his leave of the Altar
Valley to rejoin the Jalisco province, laboring on in central Sonora
until they buried him there in the church at Opodepe June 13, 1852. To
replace him, Antonio González transferred down to Oquitoa late in
1837, presumably from San Xavier-Tucson. That same year Rafael
Díaz had moved southwest from Cocóspera to San Ignacio to
fill in for Pérez Llera, who never returned to the frontier.
From 1837 until his death in 1841, Father Díaz
was pastor to the entire northern Pimería, from the mission of
San Ignacio to the presidio of Tucson, which meant that the poor remnant
of Pimas and Pápagos at Tumacácori rarely saw a priest.
[32]
Time was running out for the Queretaran friars. In
1839, the year before he died, the venerable Fray Faustino
González, Father President and comisario prefecto of missions,
wrote one last plea to the government, to Governor Gándara. Much
of what he said, Father President Mariano Buena y Alcalde had said
seventy years before.
Because of the circumstances of these unsettled
times, wrote González, the remaining mission Indians wallowed in
misery, vice, and ignorance of God, utterly insubordinate to their
ministers. Mission property existed in name only, in "hopeless disorder,
for everything pertaining to the fields and lands is up for grabs to
all." Thus the economic base of the missionaries' spiritual ministry had
crumbled. Father Pérez Llera had struggled for years to restore
traditional administration in the missions. He had carried his cause to
Mexico City. Just when it appeared that the national government would
set everything right, the Urrea revolt threw the pueblos into worse
confusion.
The Father President had a plan for the times. The
college obviously could no longer cope with the situation in most of
Pimería Alta. Of the four missionaries in the field, he himself
because of illness and age counted for naught, and two of the others
begged for licenses to return to Querétaro. The Indians, since
1812 denied the benefit of the true and apostolic way in the missions,
had dispersed.
"In these past ten years that they have lived
unrestrained," González asserted, "many have died because they
left that more ordered life, others are now married to gente de
razón, while still others are drifting about or in the employ of
gente de razón." Even the Pápagos who had been
congregating in the western missions, since the discovery in the
mid-1830s of gold placers near Quitovac and elsewhere in the
Papaguería, were now mixed with gente de razón. Given
these conditions, there was no hope of turning back the clock.
Instead, Father President González wanted to
hand over to the bishop all the missions but San Xavier del Bac. He had
already figured out how to arrange the parishes: (1) Caborca and the
placers; (2) Altar and all the settlements upriver to Tubutama; and (3)
the San Ignacio district and Coóspera, with an assistant for
Santa Cruz, Tumacácori, and Tubac. He would also name competent
and trustworthy citizens as sort of economic overseers of the Indians,
one at Caborca and one at Altar.
Freed of this tremendous burden the remaining
Queretarans could go back to propagating the faith. With a friar at San
Xavier, "I believe," González ventured, "that Father Guardian
José María [Pérez Llera] will come with another
zealous Father and found a mission on the Gila." Even the fierce Apache
and the Yuma of the Colorado might then be induced to come in and settle
down to the civilized life. [33]
It was the friars' last offer.
Meanwhile, five hundred miles south, Bishop
Lázaro de la Garza had settled into the episcopal palace in
Culiacán. He was a rigid prelate and, in Father Pérez
Llera's opinion, not sufficiently informed about the missions or distant
Pimería Alta. When someone reported to him that Queretaran
missionary Antonio González had allegedly abused the privilege of
administering confirmation, the bishop forthwith retracted "the
faculties of dispensing impediments to marriage, of administering the
sacrament of confirmation, and all the faculties of missionaries,
reserving them only to the Father President." [34] That precipitated a crisis and gave the
college an excuse to get out of the missions.
The long-suffering Faustino González died at
Pitiquito in 1840. At the college Father Pérez Llera, elected
guardian by his few remaining brothers, wrote a four-page eulogy in the
death register. He recounted how González had been sent to the
missions in 1805, how he had finished the grand church and convento at
Caborca, how the people of Cieneguilla had refused to let him be
expelled in 1828. He praised Fray Faustino's heroic deeds, the
remarkable fruits of his ministry, his chastity, and his exemplary and
utter poverty. Padre Faustino had used the same saddle for thirty years.
[35]
|
Bishop Lázaro de la Garza.
From Villa, Bodas de Plata
|
Pérez Llera named Fray Rafael Díaz,
senior man in the field, the new Father President, a hollow honor at
this stage. In a wobbly hand Díaz announced his appointment to
Antonio González at Oquitoa and to Ángel Arroyo at
Caborca, and at the same time informed them that the bishop had stripped
them of their faculties.
But Father Díaz, the last Spaniard, had taken
to his bed. Not yet forty-seven, he died in the summer of 1841.
Temporarily González and Arroyo put themselves under obedience to
Fray Antonio Flores of the Jalisco province, resident at Opodepe, sixty
miles south of San Ignacio. González moved over from Oquitoa to
live at San Ignacio, and Arroyo left Caborca for the Altar Valley. Now
they were only two: Arroyo for the western Pimería,
González for the north. [36]
A native of Salamanca in the state of Guanajuato,
Fray Antonio González had put on the Franciscan habit at the
college in February, 1823, just after Santa Anna pronounced against
Emperor Agustín de Iturbide. In the late summer or early fall of
1841 he rode down the Santa Cruz Valley with his escort taking
possession at each settlement by formal inventory. He called
Tumacácori not San José, its patron for nearly ninety
years, but rather La Purísima Concepción, from an image of
the Virgin over the main altar. For all that it mattered, Antonio
González was now missionary of Tumacácori in absentia and
trustee of its lands. [37]
In November, 1841, before the surveyor began
measuring the so-called Los Nogales de Elías grant, south and
west of Tumacácori, he notified Father González. The friar
delegated don Marcelo Bonillas to act in the matter and make certain
that the new grant did not encroach on the mission's. Bonillas in turn
summoned the native governor, Ignacio Pamplona, to point out to the
survey crew the landmarks of the mission estancia. Later don Francisco
González of Ímuris, one of the Los Nogales grantees, asked
Pamplona to loan him the Tumacácori land documents so he could
"learn the boundaries." That was the last the Indians ever saw of them.
[38]
Bishop Lázaro did not want the missions of
Pimería Alta, at least not just yet. He had explained to Father
Guardian Pérez Llera why he had taken back the missionaries'
faculties: it was a matter of maintaining the purity of the sacraments.
He did not want the missionaries to leave. In fact he had told the
government that the diocese could not possibly take over the missions
immediately. The bishop had not a priest to spare. He begged the Father
Guardian to keep his friars in the field for four to six years more. By
then the bishop would have ordained some graduates of the seminary he
had founded in Culiacan. Then, he told the Franciscan, "I shall grant
you, if it pleases God, the favor you desire." [39]
Father Pérez Llera would have none of it. He
had made up his mind. At this point he did not want the dying missions
either. The recommendations he had made in 1837 had been ignored and his
dire predictions realizedthe missions were ruined. Though he
deeply regretted giving up Pimería Alta at a time when the
diocese was suffering a shortage of secular priests, the college had no
alternative.
The Father Guardian feared for the pitifully
undermanned college. Reduced to a mere handful of friars, a target for
suppression by the anti-clerical element, the college could no longer
hope to maintain a missionary field. Since there was now no chance of
sending compañeros to the last two missionaries, Pérez
Llera intended to consolidate the community at the college. "I can do
nothing," he wrote to the bishop late in December 1841, "but proceed
with my decision that they be recalled." [40]
Sometime in mid-1842 González and Arroyo left
Pimería Alta. After seventy-five years, the missionary college of
La Santa Cruz de Querétaro had terminated its ministry to the
Pimas and Pápagos.
The two friars did not retreat to Querétaro
immediately. They reported to Jaliscan Fray Antonio Flores at Opodepe.
Behind them, the settlers on the Río Magdalena, some of whom had
taken every advantage of the missionaries in their recent troubles,
cried out for the grayrobes to come back. The justice of the peace of
Magdalena, speaking for at least four other justices, begged Flores to
let González return. He bewailed
the deplorable situation in which all the faithful
Catholics of these missions have been left, destitute of the spiritual
comforts, with no one to administer baptism to their newborn children or
the other indispensable sacraments; exposed as well to depravity of
morals, impiety, and even to the utter abandonment of our Sacrosanct
Religion. May Your Reverence be moved by such sad and doleful evils, by
the orphaning of our Holy Temples, by the desertion of so many of the
faithful. . . . [41]
Fray Antonio González did come back to San
Ignacio, a son not of the college of Querétaro but of the Jalisco
province. Now his assignment was even more hopeless. During 1843 he rode
not only the northern circuit but the Altar Valley as well. So vast was
his territory that he appealed to the bishop to relax the required
announcement of the marriage banns at Mass on three successive feast
days: most of the Pimería was now without Mass. Their fear of
roaming Apaches and their poverty made it impossible for the people to
get to San Ignacio.
On his occasional visits to the scattered sheep of
his flock Padre Antonio had to marry, baptize, sign the burial entries
since the last time, and move on. Because of hostile Indians and bandits
the friar always took an escort, as many men as he could muster.
Whenever he could he joined columns of soldiers. On February 7, 1843, he
reined up at Tubac en route from Tucson with Captain Antonio
Comadurán, a corporal and eight soldiers, four Apache
auxiliaries, and the four settlers serving as his personal bodyguard.
The entire party departed the following day. [42]
Little had changed at Tubac. Monthly reports from the
garrison amounted to routine composites of woe. On November 1, 1842, the
one-hundred-man infantry company had mustered sixty-six soldiers and one
corporal short, "for lack of men in this district." Of the thirty-three
on the rolls only three were available for immediate duty. The rest were
accounted for as follows:
Prisoner of the Apaches: one (Santos Bonillas, since November 23,
1840)
On detached duty at Cucurpe or Rayón: one captain of Indians
(don José Rosario), two sergeants, one drummer, three corporals,
and fifteen soldiers
On detached duty in an Apache campaign: one
Sick: three
On barracks duty: one
Unfit for service: two
The garrison had not a single pack mule.
|
Montly post returns, Tubac, November
1843. Courtesy the Bancroft Library
|
Few officers put in for duty at Tubac. Since the
retirement of Lieutenant Salvador Moraga on May 1, 1841, the office of
post commander had remained vacant. Lieutenant Roque Ibarra of the Pitic
garrison, off on an Apache campaign, commanded ad interim. The position
of Ensign Manuel Alarcón, a casualty on February 1, 1838, had
still not been filled. Sergeant Jerónimo Errán of Tucson,
breveted to ensign, filled in and acted as paymaster. The reports
routinely described the presidial barracks as "the property of the
Nation, healthful, and deteriorating for want of resources to repair
them." The only thing that saved Tubac was the presence outside the
presidio of an encampment of Apaches de paz49 men, 53 women, and
67 childrenunder Capitancillo Francisco Coyotero. [43]
At Tumacácori the physical plant was
crumbling. On April 3, 1843, the Tubac justice of the peace filed a
report on the sad state of the neighboring mission. He had been ordered
to describe in detail any former Jesuit properties, their current
status, and the revenue they produced. With Santa Anna ruling as
dictator in Mexico City, there was talk, incredible as it must have
seemed, of bringing back the Jesuits to restore the frontier.
The Society of Jesus had operated no estates in
conjunction with Tumacácori, the Tubac official assured his
superiors. The buildings of the mission convento, which he dated 1821,
were in 1843 "for the most part fallen down and the rest threatening
ruin." Only the church held up. The mission's two former communal
fields, immediately south of the pueblo and half a league away across
the river, since 1828 had lain "unfenced and abandoned, full of mesquite
and other bushes." Because of a shortage of water in the river, the few
Indians who remained irrigated only their own small fields. Calabazas,
Guevavi, and Sonoita were in ruins with neither buildings nor anything
else of value: only a few stray cattle roamed the hills. The subprefect
of San Ignacio transmitted the justice's report to the proper
authorities in Guaymas. [44]
|
Ruins of the Mission of
Tumacácori. From Southern Pacific Railroad, Survey of a
Route
|
No one knew what would happen on the Sonora frontier
in the early 1840s, but most everyone predicted disaster. There seemed
to be no way of containing the Apaches. The frontier military could not
even wage an effective defensive war. Constantly undermanned, short of
everything from lances to saddles, torn by allegiance to one faction or
another in the Sonoran civil wars, the presidial garrisons barely
survived. The gandaristas appealed to the Indian tribes to fight
on their side, which threatened to turn the internal conflict into a
race war. Captain Comadurán feared that the aroused
Pápagos would attack Tucson. [45]
After decades of thrusts, passionately parried by the
friars, secularization finally overcame the missions of Pimería
Alta, not by any scheme of the reformers, not by the orderly process set
forth in the Spanish Laws of the Indies, not by the Mexican decree of
April 16, 1834, which was waived on the Sonora frontier, but by default.
The Queretarans, protested Bishop Lázaro de la Garza, simply
abandoned them, "against my will and without conveying to me the pueblos
they were serving." [46]
After 1843 the signature of Fray Antonio
González, the last of the Franciscans, ceased to appear in the
mission registers. In the spring of 1844 don Francisco Javier
Vázquez, venerable parish priest at Cieneguilla, compiled for the
bishop a brief report on the churches of Pimería Alta. He had
visited, reclaimed the priest's quarters, and appointed sacristans in
the ex-mission pueblos of the west and those of San Ignacio and
Cocóspera. He had ventured no farther north into the territory
"occupied by the carnivorous Apaches, sacrilegious murders of Father
Andrés [?] and other Fathers." He had heard of "a pueblito called
Tumacácori," but he seemed to confuse it with San Xavier. [47]
Others too had heard of Tumacácori. They
wanted its virtually unpeopled lands for speculation. The Apaches had
chased away all but a poor remnant of ignorant Indians who no longer
even had possession of their title papers. No missionary would intercede
in their behalf. On April 18, 1844, without the Indians' knowledge, the
entire Tumacácori grantfundo legal, estancia, and other
landswas sold at public auction in Guaymas for five hundred
pesos.
The lone bidder, don Francisco Alejandro Aguilar,
just happened to be the brother-in-law and agent of Manuel María
Gándara. Based on article 73 of the law of April 17, 1837, and on
the decree of February 10, 1842, unclaimed mission lands, whose value
did not exceed five hundred pesos, could be sold to help out the
impoverished public treasury. The Tumacácori lands had been
declared abandoned and valued at five hundred pesos. [48] No matter that Ignacio Pamplona and a few
of his kin still lived there. The new owner was in no hurry to evict
them. Soon enough the Apaches would take care of that.
Once or twice a year between 1844 and 1848 the parish
priest from San Ignacio, Bachiller don Trinidad García Rojas,
heavily escorted, rode circuit down the Santa Cruz Valley. In the
massive church at Tumacácori, beset now at ground level by an
army of thirsty mesquite, he celebrated baptisms and marriages for the
impoverished Indian remnant. The record of these services, which he
entered in the books at San Ignacio, gave the lie to the
Aguilar-Gándara claim that the mission was despoblado. No
matter. No one consulted Padre García. [49]
At Tubac Sergeant Jerónimo Errán,
breveted to ensign, took command of the pathetic garrison. He evidently
was a son of don Nicolás de la Errán, who had originally
moved the Pima infantry company to Tubac in 1787. Although don
Jerónimo labored under the most adverse conditions in his first
command, no one doubted his personal bravery.
Errán happened to be at Tucson in early
September, 1844, when Apache scouts reported the fresh tracks of hostile
Apaches nearby. Within three hours Comandante Antonio Comadurán
swung into the saddle at the head of seventy mensoldiers,
settlers, Apaches de paz, and Pimas. Ensign Errán, with the
commandant's permission, rode with them. The column skirmished with the
enemy and alerted the countryside. Comadurán, in his report,
praised "the determination and valor" of Errán, who "grabbing a
brave by the hair, freed an Apache manso and killed [the former] with
lance thrusts." [50]
While their countrymen in Ures, Guaymas, Horcasitas,
Hermosillo, and Arizpe denounced and shot at one another, the frontier
commanders struggled to maintain some kind of war against hostile
Apaches. Late in November, 1845, Comadurán led a force of 155,
including a sergeant, a corporal, and twenty-one infantrymen from Tubac,
to the Gila. After one sharp engagement with the enemy, in which the
Mexicans killed six braves and wounded three, he had to order a retreat
because of the uselessness of the cavalry's horses.
The hostiles had been killing off the skinny,
broken-down, presidial horses. Despite his precautions, Comadurán
predicted that few would survive. From tracks along the Gila the Tucson
commander concluded that the whole Apacheria was gathering closeby, in
the sierras of La Arivaipa, Cerro del Mescal, Pinal, and Agua Caliente.
He feared the result, "especially with us reduced to the purely
defensive, without being able to pursue them on their incursions, for
want of horses." Writing to his superior, friend, and relative
José María Elías González, Comadurán
spoke for the entire forsaken population of the valley. "I shall be
infinitely glad when you are able to pacify the revolution and turn your
view toward the frontier." [51]
Sonora's treasury was bare. Frontier commanders found
themselves without funds to ration their troops. Who could blame hungry
men for rioting or deserting? At Tucson, Comadurán called the
settlers together and wrung from them a pledge of one hundred fanegas of
wheat. They scarcely had more. He appealed to his superiors to deliver
the money, two pesos per fanega, at Tucson on time. If not, the people
would sell at a better price to merchants from the placers in the
Papagueria.
No funds arrived. Yet Comadurán had to pay for
the garrison's twice-a month wheat ration somehow. He called on don
Teodoro Ramírez, local administrator of the government tobacco
monopoly. "To prevent disorders" don Teodoro agreed. With money from the
monopoly and with cigarettes he paid for eighty-eight fanegas, enough
for distribution on December 15, 1845, and January 1, 1846. He was
willing, Comadurán reported to his superior, to purchase the
remaining twelve fanegas with cigarettes. [52]
Ever since New Year's Eve of 1826 when the first
three American trappers showed up in Tucson, stray citizens of the
United States had been trespassing in Hispanic Arizona. They trapped and
traded with the Indians on the Gila, or followed the Gila route back and
forth to California. By the mid-1830s they were making Mexican officials
nervous.
Testifying in Arizpe, Teodoro Ramírez of
Tucson had described a fortified settlement built by americanos on the
Gila. The first reports had come from Pinal Apaches in July, 1836. To
verify it the commandant at Tucson had sent a couple of Apaches de paz.
They returned in early August. They claimed to have counted some forty
Americans "tending a field of maize." "The casa fortificada was a
redoubt where they had positioned a cannon they had brought with them."
While the Apaches watched, the foreigners had packed up and left. The
following November they had returned, harvested their crop, and
disappeared. [53]
Mexican officials suspected Americans, men like the
infamous James Kirker, of trafficking with Apaches in arms and
ammunition. Evidently in 1836 Governor Manuel Escalante y Arvizu had
made a deal with one John Johnson, an American who operated on the
fringe of the Santa Fe trade in Oposura, to betray the Apache leader
Juan José and his band for a price. In the Sierra de las Animas
in April, 1836, Johnson invited the unsuspecting Apaches to a feast and
blasted them with a concealed cannon full of iron fragments. [54]
A few Americans settled down in Pimería Alta.
A Señor Money had come to Oquitoa and married a local girl in
1837. During the 1840s his anti-Catholic attitude and his propagation of
"the false doctrines of the Protestant philosophers" made him unwelcome.
He left for California in 1849. [55] Other
Americans, adventurers and cutthroats, the likes of "Captain" John Joel
Glanton, turned a handsome profit harvesting Apaches' scalps, not always
from Apache heads, for the bounty offered by Sonora.
In 1846 the Protestants' armies invaded Mexico. The
United States had declared war. New Mexico yielded meekly. General
Stephen Watts Kearny and his Army of the West rode on down the Gila in
November bound for California, passing only three days north of Tucson.
The battalion of Mormon infantry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Philip
St. George Cooke, marched farther south to open a wagon road west. They
meant to see Tucson.
|
Route of Major Graham's command,
October21 and 22,1848, by Lieutenant Couts. From Dobyns, Journal
of Couts
|
In an effort to avoid unnecessary hostilities, and
because he was outnumbered, Commandant Comadurán sent an appeal
to Cooke asking that the Americans detour around Tucson. Cooke refused,
and on December 17, 1846, the Mormons entered the presidio unopposed.
Comadurán, the garrison, and most of the people had withdrawn a
safe distance. Before moving on, Cooke wrote a letter to Governor
Gándara. Sonora's destiny lay with the United States. Such a
union, he claimed, "is necessary effectually to subdue these Parthian
Apaches." [56]
The Yankees, most Mexicans believed, were intent on
enlisting rather than subduing the bloody Apaches. In April, 1847, don
Francisco Javier Vázques, enduring priest of Cieneguilla, told
how dangerous travel was because of these American-incited bands of
predators. "They are wont to appear in a group of two to five hundred,
outfitted and armed with rifles that we know are supplied by the Anglos
who have definitely been seen among the Apaches." [57]
The presidials were no match. In May of the following
year at a water-hole called Las Mesteñas, Apaches cut down
fifteen Tucson soldiers. It was two months before their bodies were
brought in for burial. Their widows petitioned the commandant general
for relief. [58]
Late in October, 1848, months after the United States
and Mexico had agreed on terms of peace, a column of U.S. Army dragoons
commanded by the usually drunk Major Lawrence P. Graham rode down the
river from Santa Cruz to Tucson en route to California. Lt. Cave J.
Couts, an observant and proper gentleman, noted his impressions.
We have been marching down the Santa Cruz, since
leaving the town by same name, over a good route, and fine little
valley, passing several deserted as well as inhabited ranches. The gold
mines, near or at Goibaba [Guevavi], are worked at present by some
twenty men, and said to be immensely wealthy. These miners
Mexicans work for $8 per month and their rations. The Apaches are so
numerous and severe, however, that the work only goes on at intervals,
never over two weeks at a time. As we approached the place yesterday
they all broke from the mines for the little Rancho like scared wolves,
taking us for Apaches; thought their day had come at last. The owner, or
man now working it, fearing that we might stop and take a chance, was
very particular to let us know that the mine was sterile, and hardly
paid the workmen: at the same time he had a chunk of pure
gold, which came from it, weighing 2-1/2 oz. and wished to get
silver for it $14.00 to the oz. [59]
Evidently their day did come the following year,
1849. They broke and never returned. For a decade and a half no one of
record worked these old mines. Then in July of 1864 W. Claude Jones, H.
M. C. Ward, and Manuel Gándara filed notice in the First Judical
District, Territory of Arizona, that they had "reopened the old Gold
Mines of Huevavi... lying in the mountains one half a mile more or less
south of the ancient mission." They desired to run arrastras and to work
"both the old shafts of the Yaqui Mine and the Huevavi Mine to which end
they pray that the same may be registered and denounced to their use and
benefit in accordance with the Ordinances de Minería in force in
Arizona as said mine has been wholly abandoned since the year 1849."
Only days before, Gándara had conveyed the Guevavi lands to
attorney Jones as his fee for pressing the Mexican's claim to
Tumacácori and Calabazas. On August I, 1864, Jones bid alone
for
the old shaft of the abandoned gold mine formerly
worked by the Jesuit and San Franciscan Fathers known as the "Padres
Mine". . . situated to the southwest of the mines of the ancient mission
of Huevavi in the side of the mountain ridge in front of a mesquite tree
near an old forge to the left of the main ravine leading from the Santa
Cruz river opposite to and south of the ruins of the mission church,
within one mile thereof more or less. [60]
|
An arrastra. From Browne,
Adventures.
|
As the U.S. dragoons proceeded up the valley that
October of 1848 Lieutenant Couts studied the countryside. Feed for the
horses was scarce. The maize the battalion had bought at Santa Cruz
saved the day. A month earlier, Couts reckoned, the grazing would have
been good as far as Guevavi, but frost had destroyed it. "From Goibabi
to Tucson it is never good, being mesquite growth and chapparal
[sic]." He commented on the pumpkins "of a most elegant quality
and size" and the not-so-good melons, on the river's sandy bottom, and
its disappearance near Tubac.
The churches in this valley are remarkable. At
Tumacácori is a very large and fine church standing in the midst
of a few common conical Indian huts, made of bushes, thatched with
grass, huts of most common and primitive kind.. . . This church is now
taken care of by the Indians, Pimas, most of whom are off attending a
jubilee, or fair, on the other side of the mountain.
No Priest has been in attendance for many years,
though all its images, pictures, figures &c remain unmolested, and
in good keeping. No Mexicans live with them at all.
At Tubac, where a recent census had the population at
248, Lieutenant Couts enjoyed a harangue by an Apache "general."
Tubac itself might be called an Indian village for
there are two or more Apaches to one Mexican. Their huts are built of
straw and grass around the edge of the town, and are regarded by the
Mexicans as Mexicansperfectly friendlysame as
Tumacacori the village just north [south] of it. We met here today the
General in Chief of all the Apaches. He is on his way to the
Capitol Uris [Ures] to see the Governor who sent for him. He left
Tuisson [Tucson] at 8 this morning and was here by 2 P.M. He called all
the Apaches up this evening, mounted the wall which surrounds the town
and made a glorious speech. He might easily have been heard a mile. His
object was to caution his people against stealing from the
Americans, or interfering with them in any way, that they were the
mighty people, and he would punish any one severely who did not obey
what he told them. He is a tall and large man, some six feet two inches,
dressed just as a slick-shin, broadbrim straw hat, Chinese shoes
[moccasins with recurved toes], leather leggings, and a blanket around
the shoulders, a la Mex. Fine and good looking face. I gave him a piece
of tobacco for which he thanked me very much (by signs). [61]
Two months later, in December, 1848, Apaches of a
different persuasion devastated Tubac. They plundered and burned and
killed, intent on making good earlier boasts. This time they were after
more than livestock. And they would be back. The stunned survivors,
convinced that they could not hold out and scared for their families,
packed what they could, formed up a ragged refugee train, and headed
north to Tucson.
The Indians at Tumacácori no more than
twenty-five or thirty, took down the santos from their niches in the
church, bundled up vestments and sacred vessels, and followed the
retreating settlers down the road to San Xavier. To add to their
suffering that winter, it was colder than any of them could remember and
snow blew across the desert. Come spring they hoped to return.
To the south a delegate rose in the state legislature
and proposed that an urgent appeal be addressed to the national,
government setting forth "the condition of the state because of the
depredations of the barbarous Apache" and imploring "the most energetic
and forceful measures to put a prompt end to so many outrages." In
support of his motion the delegate read from recent dispatches sent by
the military commandant to the minister of war "telling of the low
morale of the troops of his command, of the depopulation suffered by the
presidio of Tubac and other pueblos of the state because of the latter's
present lack of resources." [62]
By the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo,
everythingincluding Apachesnorth of the Gila now belonged to
the United States. Article XI bound the new owners to control Indian
raids into Mexican territory, an utterly impossible provision. If
anything, the raiding intensified. In April, 1849, the same month the
United States appointed a subagent for the Gila tribes, the legislature
of Sonora considered a plea by the residents of the Santa Cruz Valley
for protection. The deputies, displaying all the confidence of the
treaty makers, authorized the prompt dispatch of fifty muskets with
ammunition "so that the citizens of Santa Cruz, Tubac [abandoned], and
Tucson might arm themselves proportionately and see to their defense
against the enemy Apaches." [63]
At the same time thousands of sonorenses left
for the gold fields of California, "not so much," said one official, "in
hopes of bettering their lot, but in search of the security they lack
here." [64] As each potential defender
abandoned his jacal or rancho the Apache peril grew in proportion. By
February, 1849, the towns of the western Pimería were reduced to
families of women. The deplorable desolation of Cieneguilla, along with
"the frequent incursions of the carnivorous Apaches," convinced old
Father Francisco Javier Vázques in May that he should move over
to Altar. Unfortunately he did not move fast enough. [65]
Others preyed on the desolation. Early Sunday
morning, June 3, a hell-bent party of American transients, estimated at
forty, burst into sleeping Cieneguilla. Dragging the elderly Padre
Vázquez from his home, they put a rope around his neck, led him
about like a dog, and nearly killed him. They locked up the rest of the
people and proceeded to sack the all-but-deserted town. When they rode
off they abducted the priest's sister. [66]
Tens of thousands of forty-niners traveled Cooke's
wagon road across Mexican territory to California, reinforcing the idea
that this strip of northern Chihuahua and Sonora must become the
property of the United States and the route of a transcontinental
railroad. Instead of bearing north along the San Pedro as Cooke had,
party after party chose to ride on to Santa Cruz for provisions, then
north down the deserted Santa Cruz Valley to Tucson and the Gila beyond.
[67]
Some of the argonauts ate peaches in the orchard at
Tumacácori, some carved their initials in the picturesque,
crumbling church, some sketched it or wrote about it. H. M. T. Powell,
who both sketched and described the deserted mission as it looked in
October, 1849, was sure that in its heyday "the monks or priests had
every accommodation to make life comfortable, as they usually contrive
to do." A couple of months later another traveler commented on the
melancholy desolation of the place. By then the church roof had fallen
in.
|
Tumacácori. H. M. T. Powell's
sketch, 1849. Courtesy the Bancroft Library
|
Tubac, wrote Powell, "is a mere pile of tumble-down
adobe houses. The church has no roof.. . . It was not worth the trouble
of sketching. We found some old military papers in one of the houses. I
took 2 or 3 of them and put them into my portfolio as a 'souvenir'" [68]
On February 6, 1850, when Antonio Comadurán
and nine other citizens of Tucson put their signatures to a petition for
a priest, they had not even seen one for a year. For more than a decade
there had been no resident clergy man in the Santa Cruz Valley. So
dangerous were the roads that the Padre from San Ignacio needed an
escort of twenty-five or thirty men to visit them.
Bachiller Lorenzo Vázquez of Altar, acting for
Vicar Forane Francisco Javier Vázquez, had made a visitation of
the valley in January, 1849, just after the refugees had left
Tumacácori and Tubac. At Tucson and San Xavier the people had
lined up for baptisms, confirmations, confessions, and marriages. [69]
In their petition the Tucsonans described the doleful
consequences of having no Padre. It was especially bad for the
Indians:
The pueblo of San Xavier del Bac, of catechized
Indians, is composed of more than fifty families. Because they have no
pastor to propagate the Faith they live practically as heathens. Because
it is a cabecera close to the tribes of the west and the Gila who
annually come in to this pueblo, many desire the water of baptism. And
because it has no priest they are not being catechized. Even the natives
of this pueblo and its visita of Tucson have gone back to heathenism.
This is the result of their having no shepherd of the flock of
Jesús Christ.
The prefect of San Ignacio endorsed the petition and
passed it on to Governor José de Aguilar, who also recommended
favorable action, forwarding the document to Bishop Garza in
Culiacán. [70]
The bishop was still bitter. He had not forgiven the
Franciscans of the Querétaro college for abandoning
Pimería Alta. The province of Jalisco had denied his request for
friars. The few remaining Jaliscans were dying off. "Thus it is that
almost overnight innumerable pueblos have fallen to me that previously
were not the burden of the diocese." Although he recognized the plight
of orphaned Tucson and San Xavier he had no priests to send. He
counseled patience. The few ministers in the field would simply have to
continue riding the circuit as circumstances permitted. [71]
At the college of Querétaro they had just
buried Fray José María Pérez Llera, "a victim of
his ardent zeal." More than any other individual he had fought to
maintain the missions of Pimería Alta after the expulsion of the
Spaniards. But in the end he had lost. Reluctantly, he had withdrawn the
last two Queretarans in 1842, against the bishop's will. Pérez
had ended his days a missionary in the Sierra Gorda northeast of
Querétaro. The eulogist at the college remembered particularly
his years in Pimería Alta, where he had labored "with such great
success that I do not hesitate to call him the Apostle of Sonora." [72]
In the summer of 1850 when the Commission to Arrange
Parishes in Sonora reported back to Bishop Garza, they recommended five
for Pimería Alta: San Ignacio, Santa Cruz, Tucson, Altar, and
Caborca. Santa Cruz was to include Cocóspera and
Tumacácori, described as pueblos with convento, kitchen garden,
and mission lands; the haciendas of San Lázaro, Santa
Bárbara, Buenavista, San Pedro, Ciénega de Heredia, and
Babocómari; the rancho of Cuitaca; the mine of Candelaria; and
the tumbled-down presidio of Tubac. The commission estimated the
distance from seat of the parish to farthest point at twenty leagues,
more than fifty miles; the total population at 1,500 souls. The parish
of Tucson, with about a thousand persons, would take in the pueblo of
San Agustín de Tucson and the pueblo of San Xavier del Bac "with
convento, kitchen garden, extensive lands, and a magnificent church."
But still the bishop had no priests. [73]
No one wanted to admit that the Sonora mission
frontier had died. There was talk of inviting the Franciscan missionary
colleges of San Fernando de México or Zacatecas to take up the
work left undone by the Queretarans. As late as the spring of 1851
Governor José de Aguilar proclaimed that friars of the Zacatecas
college were standing by not only to reoccupy the missions of
Pimería Alta but also to found new ones in the Papaguería,
on the Gila, and on the Colorado. "These settlements," Aguilar claimed,
"would attract many colonists and provide security to that border." [74]
Fray Francisco Garcés had said the same thing
eighty years before, and Father Kino eighty years before him.
It was no secret that the United States wanted all or
a great part of Pimería Alta, the territory traversed by Cooke's
wagon road. To retain it Mexico grasped at straws. Sonora conceded to a
single combine of mining and land speculators, the so-called
Compañía Restauradora de las Minas de Arizona, all vacant
lands and mines in the state from the thirtieth parallel north to the
Gila, an area of 60,000 square miles! Although the national government
declared this giant giveaway unconstitutional, it and dozens of other
schemes to colonize and develop the region under the Mexican aegis
attracted an international potpourri of adventurers and
filibustersFrenchmen, Germans, Swiss, Americansmany on the
rebound from California. [75]
On paper Mexico dotted her vulnerable northern
borderlands with military colonies. [76] By
1851 Tucson and Santa Cruz wore the designation but had little else to
show. In May a lone Franciscan, one Fray Bernardino Pacheco, received
from the vicar forane of Hermosillo his appointment as chaplain of the
military colony at Santa Cruz. In addition to soldiers he was empowered
to minister to the civilians of Cocóspera, Tumacácori,
Tubac, San Xavier del Bac, and Tucson. [77]
But even nature conspired against the colonizers. The same month a
ghastly plague of cholera, "the black vomit," raced through Sonora,
killing in four weeks in the parish of Altar alone 1,116 persons. [78]
That summer Lieutenant Colonel José
María Flores, commandant general of Sonora, personally led the
forces of the military colonies and the National Guardapparently
the same old presidials and settlers under new namesto the Gila
where they saw action against both Apaches and Americans. Flores yielded
command to General Miguel Blanco de Estrada, whom United States Boundary
Commissioner John Russell Bartlett met at Tucson in July, 1852. Although
Bartlett could comment then on the depopulation of the valley between
Santa Cruz and Tucson, eight or ten months later both Tubac and
Calabazas revived. Plans were already afoot.
|
Fort Yuma. From Southern Pacific
Railroad, Survey of a Route.
|
At his hacienda of Topahue in December, 1852the
same month the sixty-five-foot stern-wheeler Uncle Sam steamed up
the Colorado River to Fort YumaManuel María Gándara
entered into a contract with a group of European expatriates. For a
half-interest in "the land called 'Calabazas' situated in the State of
Sonora near Tubac" Messrs. Payeken, Hundhausen & Co. agreed to set
up and manage a large-scale sheep operation. Gándara further
bound himself to stock the land in March and April, 1853, with 5,000
sheep, 1,000 goats, and various other animals at prices stipulated in
the contract. Gándara was risking his capital, the managers their
lives. [79]
Descending Sonoita Creek in April, 1853, surveyor
Andrew B. Gray and party reached the fortified hacienda of Calabazas
just in time to witness a bloody battle. Sixty mounted presidial lancers
and forty Apaches de paz, under Antonio Comadurán and
Hilarión García of Tucson, charged into an estimated two
hundred Apache hostiles. "The carnage," Peter R. Brady recalled, "was
awful." The Mexicans won, as the mutilated enemy head and a string of
Apache ears soon testified. Brady at first mistook the ears for dried
apples. [80]
Under the direction of foreman Friedrich Hulsemann
and another German, evidently Karl Hundhausen, laborers had converted
the old visita and mission rancho of Calabazas into an extensive walled
hacienda. Renovated and partitioned, the ex-Franciscan church became the
ranch house. There the two foreigners presided over "their numerous
retinue of Mexicans, Pima Indians, and 'tame' Apaches," shared with
notable visitors a bottle of mescal, and "kept an awful old 'bachelor
hall'." [81]
|
Calabazas. From Southern Pacific
Railroad, Survey of a Route
|
By June of 1853 settlers and soldiers of a military
colony had reoccupied Tubac. Some of the refugees of 1848 came home.
Evidently there were disputes between them and new colonists over lands.
About harvest time the commanders of the military colonies at Fronteras,
Bavispe, Santa Cruz, Tucson, and Tubac received orders, citing the
presidial reglamento of 1772, to restore at once any land taken from old
residents of the presidios. They, not the newcomers, were entitled to
the harvests. [82]
The Apaches too took up where they had left off.
Early in the morning June 11 a shaken servant of Tucson citizen don
José María Martínez showed up in Tubac out of
breath. Apaches had attacked the party at La Canoa ten miles north and
had captured his master. At once Corporal Dolores Rodriguez with eight
men rode in pursuit. Soon he was back. The hostiles had attacked him at
nearby Las Vigitas where they had just killed two postriders from
Tubutama.
The ten men sent to warn the settlers in the fields
across the river failed to stop the enemy from taking one captive and
killing four yoke of oxen. At Las Magueycitos, the same marauding band
hit two postriders from Tubac and killed José Ignacio Galindo who
happened to be with them. A combined column, leaving Tubac itself all
but undefended, caught up at Las Cuchillas de Santa Rita and somehow
freed José María Martínez.
Carlos Cota, who reported these events to the
commandant general, asked for a case of ammunition for the colony's
two-pounder fieldpiece. The twenty shot provided initially were
inferior. The usable ones had already been fired. Cota also requested
ten or twenty muskets and a hundred flints. In response, he was
admonished not to disperse his forces: his first duty was to protect the
colony itself. [83]
The next month Tubac had a new commanding officer,
Andrés B. Zenteno, and an Apache peace camp. Capitancillos
Francisco Nichuy and Francisco Coyotero arrived July 16 with thirty-six
men, fifty women, and thirty-two children. Because it was too late to
plant and because the colony now had only two yoke of oxen and no tools
to spare, Zenteno doled out rations of wheat to the tame Apaches. He
sent two mules and an escort to Arizpe to pick up thirty-eight muskets,
ammunition, and cartridge boxes for them.
Headquarters made it clear that the Apaches were to
use these weapons only in the service of the colony, and only after they
had earned the Tubac commander's confidence. "You are responsible," his
superior reminded him, "for the theft or waste of any of this."
Furthermore, Zenteno must show the Apaches where they should plant. The
government could not be expected to go on supporting them forever. After
all, the reason for settling them at Tubac was to provide them with "a
secure home" and to teach them about authority. [84]
Zenteno wanted to take the offensive, to lead an
eight- or ten-day expedition against the hostiles. Because he had only
twenty-five troops at Tubac he asked Tucson officials for
assistancefifteen soldiers, twenty-five civilians, and twenty-five
Pimas. They refused. Everyone was busy in his fields. The Pápagos
of San Xavier had all left for their farming rancherías to the
west or were gathering wild fruits. No one could be spared. Besides,
provisions were short.
The Tubac commander could not believe it. Fine
cooperation. Fuming, he wrote immediately to the governor. The officials
of Tucson should be punished. A few days later Zenteno wrote again. Six
Apaches on good horses had ridden down on don Ignacio Iberri, traveling
from Santa Cruz, and murdered him four hundred varas from Tubac's wall.
In September a circular went out to the officials of the five military
colonies. In the future they would not deny mutual assistance requested
by presidial commanders. "It seems most strange to His Excellency that
frivolous pretexts are resorted to." [85]
By November Captain Andrés Zenteno of Tubac
was in a position to dictate. Named commander of the sector from Santa
Cruz to Tucson, he now outranked his uncooperative neighbors. As chief
of the line he received from headquarters a set of specific
instructions.
First he must determine the force available to
repulse "any party of adventurers that appears." He must keep in close
touch with the Pápagos of San Xavier and with the Gila
Pimaswhom Mexican officials were now calling Pápagos
toosending a couple of scouts to Quitovac and a couple to the
Gila. The Gileño general Culo Azul (Blue Butt) and the captain of
San Xavier deserved thanks for the last campaign. While confirming that
they might keep all the animals taken from the enemy, Zenteno should let
them know that he expected the assistance of mounted men in the event of
a threat.
To protect Gándara's sheep operation at
Calabazas, Captain Zenteno was to detach six men "in order that in an
emergency they might round up the stock and put it out of danger." Above
all he must marshal the entire line in defense of Mexican territory. If
some place proved indefensible he should fall back but not lose sight of
the enemy. He was to be constantly on the alert. "At Tubac, as the
central point, you are to maintain a sufficient force without abandoning
the other points." [86] The Yankees were
threatening another war.
This time the diplomats settled it. By treaty
concluded in December, 1853, the United States would gain for a price
the Mesilla Valley and southern Arizona below the Gila, as well as
repeal of Article XI of the 1848 treaty, the provision making the United
States responsible for Indian raids across into Mexico. While
ratification dragged in Washington and Lieutenant John G. Parke surveyed
a railroad route through Tucson, Captain Zenteno strove to keep his
sector fed.
In response to urgent pleas from Santa Cruz, Zenteno
readied a supply train in January, 1854. He begged and borrowed mules
from "the Germans of Tumacácori" and pack sacks from "the
señores of Calabazas." He ordered a wagon loaded. Corporal
Dolores Rodríguez headed up the escort and they started out.
As the slow-moving caravan approached the deserted
rancho of San Lázaro Apaches rode wildly into it. Soldiers
Martín Santos and Ramón Grijalva died, Petronilo Miranda
disappeared. The attackers cut loose the oxen and drove off all the
mules, both pack and saddle, leaving the corporal and several survivors
afoot. Zenteno implored the government to provide oxen and wagons to
haul provisions and head off "the hideous hunger that awaits us." As for
any dereliction of duty on his part, he would willingly face a
court-martial. [87]
Six months later, when the United States Senate
ratified the Gadsden Treaty, Hispanic Arizona became technically a part
of Doña Ana County, New Mexico Territory. In practice the change
of sovereignty did not occur till 1856. In the meantime American
entrepreneurs, men like Charles D. Poston and Herman Ehrenberg, scouted
out good lands and potentially rich mines. Poston and Ehrenberg liked
what they saw in the middle Santa Cruz Valley around Tubac, so much that
they hastened East to drum up capital and organize the Sonora Exploring
and Mining Company.
Travelers through the valley in 1854 and 1855 were
invariably impressed by the poverty of the few scared inhabitants who
hung on in the teeth of Apache assaults. Most could see the potential of
the country. All that was needed was the United States Army. "Tubac
itself," said one traveler,
deserves no special notice. The place was once a
military post of Mexico, but long since lost its importance for military
purposes. It has few white residents and the population is composed
almost entirely of half-civilized Apaches. The bottom land near Tubac is
wide, fertile and rich in wood. We noticed here that the tillage is very
carelessly managed because the Apaches not infrequently break through
the garden walls and spear down the poor Indians at their work. [88]
Early in 1855 a delegation of
"Pápagos"evidently Gila Pimasarrived in Santa Cruz to
see Ayudante Inspector Bernabé Gómez. They came in the
name of General Antonio [Culo?] Azul and the rest of the tribe. They
wanted to know what was to happen to them if their territory became part
of the United States. For an answer Gómez wrote to General
Domingo Ramírez de Arellano, governor and commandant general of
Sonora. The general could not say. Nothing could be determined until the
new boundary was surveyed. Whatever the outcome, he wanted them to know
that he greatly appreciated their service to the Mexican nation. [89]
Boundary Commissioners Major William H. Emory and don
José Salazar Ilarregui ran the new international line across the
Santa Cruz Valley in June, 1855, some dozen miles upriver from
Calabazas, leaving the entire Gándara sheep ranch and the
Tumacácori-Calabazas grant in the United States. To the west the
line bisected the Papaguería. Like it or not, the Gila Pimas
found themselves wholly within the United States.
The Mexican presence in southern Arizona was fading.
The military colony at Tubac had dispersed. Federico Hulsemann and
associates remained at Calabazas and Tumacácori, virtually alone,
desperately trying to survive till December, 1858, when by terms of the
contract with Gándara they could claim their half of the
hacienda. When the Tucson garrison mustered for review September 1,
1855, only thirteen of forty-nine men were present. Captain
Hilarió García, Lieutenant Manuel Romero, and a number of
the others had not yet returned from escorting the Boundary Commission.
In their absence Ensign Joaquín Comadurán, son of the
former captain, acted as post commander. [90]
Much to the dismay of Tucson residents, Captain
García ordered the last detachment of Mexican troops out of town
in early March, 1856, months before their United States Army
replacements showed up. The same year Solomon Warner arrived from Yuma
with a mule train of goods for a general store. Charles D. Poston
returned to Tubac to set up field headquarters for his company where he
soon presided amiably as patrón over more people than had
ever gathered there before. [91]
Over what was once the towers of the barracks of the
Mexican troops, now floats a banner bearing the arms of peace, a hammer
and pick, the insignia of the company; and in the rooms beneath, which
once echoed to the tread of the successful Apache fighter, are now sold
the calicoes and cotton goods of Lowell, and all manner of Yankee
notions. [92]
In November four companies of U.S. Army dragoons rode
through on their way south to pitch "Camp Moore" near Calabazas.
Hispanic Arizona had passed.
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The prefect of Magdalena. From
Browne, Adventures
|
The Indians of Tumacácori, refugees at San
Xavier del Bac since 1848, had not given up hope of going home. They
kept the church furnishings from their mission, carefully inventoried in
May, 1855, by Ensign Joaquín Comadurán, separate from
those of San Xavier. Juez celador José María
Martinez of Tucson had the key. [93]
They hoped to get back their lands. They knew that
the title papers stolen from them had found their way into don Manuel
María Gándara's hands. His German associates were hanging
on for dear life in the knowledge that "the title to the land is founded
on very complete papers, and will undoubtedly be confirmed by the United
States Government." But Gándara evidently double-crossed them.
When Federico Hulsemann, driving the hacienda's stock south to save it
from Apache predators, reached the San Ignacio district Prefect
José Elías, a Gándara man, confiscated it. Not long
after, one "Fred Huselman" turned up in Tubac as postmaster. [94]
As a last resort nineteen Indians of
Tumacácori through the governor of San Xavier del Bac appealed to
Prefect Elías, whose father-in-law had stolen the title papers in
the first place. They begged Elías to reclaim the
Tumacácori documents from Gándara. It was no use. They had
lost out. For them the missionrecognized as theirs for a century
and a halfhad died in the Apache onslaught of December, 1848. As
far as the Americans who now encroached on mission lands were concerned,
they like their relatives at San Xavier were nothing but "ignorant
Indians." [95]
They did not forget. Three decades into the twentieth
century a Pápago woman at San Xavier, blind and "very old,"
recalled.
Tumacacori belongs to us, too. It happened this way.
The Apaches drove our kin folks from that mission. These wild people
were going to burn the statue of St. Cajetano. The flames had already
commenced to consume the image, when a shower extinguished the fire.
This statue and many others were brought here by the women, who carried
them in their Kiahats (burden baskets). The statue of Maria Santisima,
however, was brought tied on a horse. I missed seeing the cavalcade
arrive at the old mission, but I did hear the ringing of the mission
bells as they reached this place. One of the statues, the one of the
Blessed Virgin with child, was taken to Tucson. [96]
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