Page:The Pima Indians.pdf/33

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28
THE PIMA INDIANS
[ETH. ANN. 26

he gave away great quantities of beads, and as the people already valued highly those of their own manufacture it is probable that they readily accepted Kino's statement that magic power resided in the new beads of glass. At any rate, the writer has found very old glass beads on all Piman shrines and has no doubt that some of them were brought by Kino. The first horses, also, to reach Pimería were brought by these expeditions. There is no record of any cattle being brought so far north, though they were generally distributed to the Papago rancherias in Kino's time.

After the death of Kino, in 1711, no Spaniard is known to have reached the Gila or even to have entered Arizona for a period of more than twenty years. In 1731 two missionaries, Father Felipe Segresser and Juan Bautista Grashoffer, took charge of the missions of San Xavier del Bac and San Miguel de Guevavi and became the first permanent Spanish residents of Arizona. In 1736–37 Padre Ignacio Javier Keller, of Suamca, made two trips to the Pima villages on the Gila, where he found "that many of the rancherias of Kino's time had been broken up."[1] Again in 1743 Keller went up to the Pimas and endeavored to penetrate the Apache country to the northward. Communications by means of native messengers indicated a desire on the part of the Hopis to have Jesuit missionaries come to them from Sonora. The point of greatest interest to us is that any communication should have existed at all. Keller failed in his attempt on account of the hostility of the Apaches, and Sedelmair, who tried to make the journey in the following year, was unable to induce the Pimas or Maricopas to accompany him. In 1748 Sedelmair reached the Gila near the mouth of the Salt river and journeyed westward. Of his trip to the Gila in 1750 little is known.

Accounts of these earliest missionaries of course preceded them by means of Papago messengers, who doubtless made clear the distinction between the slave-hunting Spanish adventurers and the Jesuits and Franciscans. Fortunately for the Pimas they were quite beyond the reach of the former and were so remote from the Sonoran settlements that only the most devout and energetic friars ever reached them.

The first military force to be stationed in Arizona was a garrison of 50 men at Tubac, on the Santa Cruz. This presidio was moved to Tucson about 1776, and in 1780 the garrison was increased to 75 men. Even when at Tucson the influence of this small force on the Pimas could not have been very great. Between 1768 and 1776 Padre Francisco Garcés made five trips from San Xavier del Bac to the Pimas and beyond. The fifth entrada was well described in Garcés's Diary (admirably translated and edited by Elliott Coues under the title "On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer"), though he exhibited a pitiful waste


  1. Bancroft, XVII, 362.