Tumacacori National Historical Park

Mission to the Pima Indians by Jesuit Father Kino

When the Jesuit Eusebio Kino and his party approached the Pima settlement of Tumacacori in January 1691, they were riding the wave of a century of expansion northward along New Spain’s west coast corridor. The Jesuits had reaped tens of thousands of baptisms and made themselves the most powerful social and economic force in the region. But the tide carried them no further north than the Pimeria Alta, home of the upper Pima Indians.

It was here that Father Kino founded the Jesuit mission San Cayetano de Tumacacori on the east bank of the Santa Cruz River. The next day Mission San Gabriel was founded at Guevavi, 15 miles upriver. After Guevavi was made mission headquarters in 1701, the priest there periodically traveled to preach at Tumacacori and other visitas without resident missionaries.

In 1751 some Pima Indians in the Altar Valley, southwest of Tumacacori, attacked the Spanish settlements there. Fearing retaliation from Spanish soldiers, those at Tumacacori fled to the hills. As a result, a 50-man presidio was founded at Tubac, and the mission at Tumacacori was resettled on the west bank.

The Franciscans

In 1767 King Charles III of Spain, for political reasons, abruptly banished the Jesuits from all his realms. The Franciscans, who took over the missionary effort in Pimeria Alta, inherited the woes that had frustrated the Jesuits: restless neophytes, Apache hostility, disease, encroaching settlers, and lack of government support. The Tubac garrison was transferred to Tucson in 1776, and by 1786 only a hundred Indians remained at Tumacacori. The next year an 80-man Pima company reoccupied Tubac, but as Apache pressure mounted, the nearby missions Calabazas and Guevavi were abandoned.

About 1800 Fray Narciso Gutierrez began building a large church to replace Tumacacori’s modest Jesuit structure, but his mission’s poverty and the Mexican wars for Independence slowed construction. When all Spanish-born residents, including the Franciscans, were forced by a Mexican decree to leave the country in 1828, Tumacacori lost its last resident priest. Scaffolding still clung to the bell tower. The Indians and a few settlers, with the aid of visiting native-born Mexican priests, hung on for another 20 years, but a series of Apache raids and the hard winter of 1848 drove the last residents from Tubac and Tumacacori. The 157-year thread of continuity begun by Father Kino was severed.

Oodham: The River People at the US National Parks

In San Cayetano [Tumacacori] they had prepared us three arbors, one in which to say mass, another in which to sleep, and the third for a kitchen.

So wrote Father Kino of his first encounter with the Pima Indianss at Tumacacori. Kino found them "docile…affable…[and] industrious." Tumacacori and other rancherias in the eastern part of the Pimeria Alta were permanent farming settlements. The Pima, or Oodham as they called themselves, raised corn, beans, and squash in irrigated fields, supplementing their diet with hunting. Dwellings were made of bent saplings covered with brush and earth, forming sturdy, dome-shaped structures. All were within hearing distance of the communal "rain house," from which a crier broadcast information.

Each village had a leader, but government was by consensus, and he depended upon his powers of persuasion. During armed conflict, a war chief took absolute command of the village. The rancherias were politically self-contained, but during war neighboring settlements might form loose alliances against a common enemy. They would also jointly participate in games and religious observances, such as the rain ceremony. These rituals of celebratory songs, masked dancers, and tobacco smoking recreated the harmony of nature at the core of their spiritual life.

The Oodham have long been known for their basketry. Bundled bear grass fibers are bound together in a continuous spiral with strips of yucca leaves, yucca root, and a black bean pod called "devils claw." By the regular variation of the colors, the artisan can weave a number of geometric designs.