THE LITTLE TWENTY-GUN FRIGATE, Mercurio, from stem to sternpost no more than ninety feet, drifted placidly with the current in the warm sun somewhere southwest of Cuba. The voyagers aboard almost forgot the hell that lay behind—the dark, close quarters sloshing with bilge; the foul, suffocating stench of vomit; cold, worm-infested food; the terrible shuddering; and the wild ceaseless rolling and pitching. Separated from Júpiter, her twin and consort, Mercurio had ridden out the storm and made Havana for repairs. Her overbearing captain, don Florencio Romero, had insisted that she sail on as soon as able, despite the autumnal equinox and the warning of Cuban officials.

Now on October 9, 1763, seventy days out of Cádiz, the Mercurio was becalmed. Passengers lounged on deck. Fray Juan Crisóstomo Gil de Bernabé and the other ten friars aboard prayed for their brethren on Júpiter, not knowing that they were safely ashore on Puerto Rico, where their captain had wisely chosen to wait out the equinox.

That night Mercurio's watches, lulled by the apparent motionlessness of their ship, came to only with the sudden jolt and awful scraping as she ground onto a reef and rolled over on her starboard side. [1]

During the weeks that followed the castaways experienced another kind of hell—exposure, hunger and thirst, and disease on an uninhabited beach. The wreck lay a mile and a half offshore, just what shore no one knew. Captain Romero set some of his crew to collecting the crates and barrels washing up on the beach; others he sent scouting for help. All hands had survived, but now a burning fever descended upon them. According to his brothers, one of the Franciscans, Fray Juan Gil, fought off the disease and selflessly ministered to the sick and dying. There on the beach in cluttered shelters of crates, drift wood, and canvas, he proved his calling. [2]

Later the chronicler of the missionary college at Querétaro would portray Fray Juan Gil as "of handsome and manly countenance, pleasing and melodious voice, gentle yet vigorous disposition, natural and forceful persuasiveness, and a fitting and honest keenness of mind that enhanced these gifts with holy erudition and perfect moderation, permitting him to propound Christian doctrine with solid reasoning and no other end than the glory of God and the well-being of souls." [3] The port authorities of Cádiz had seen the friar in a harder light: "tall, slender, round-faced, swarthy, with heavy black beard, curly hair of the same color, and small eyes." [4]

At age thirty-five the oldest member of the mission of 1763, Father Gil was from Aragón, from the Villa de Alfambra, a cluster of tile-roofed rock houses set against bare red hills a long day's walk north of Teruel. [5] He had moved early in life north over the mountains to the venerable city of Zaragoza, perhaps to live with relatives. [6] There in 1746 at the age of seventeen or eighteen he entered the Franciscan seminary of Nuestra Señora de Jesús. [7]

Predisposed to things of the spirit, and thoroughly convinced of the weakness of the flesh, the lanky lad from Alfambra embraced the life of a religious with his whole being. "I met him when his Reverence was studying theology in the convento where I was a novice," recalled another friar some years later.

Even though he was by then a chorister I found him very humble and most punctual day and night in the routine of the community. . . . I learned that he was very good at plain and harmonic chant, and that he had a superb voice and sang beautifully. . . . [Later] he was esteemed as a fine preacher, fervent in the pulpit and most devoted in the confessional. [8]

Sometime after his ordination Gil had abandoned the comforts of the big-city convento. Seeking a more austere environment and a stricter life of prayer and penance, he set out for one of his order's mountaintop retreats north of Zaragoza. At the outskirts of the Villa de Luna he turned east as pilgrims had for centuries, crossed a weathered Roman bridge, and climbed the lone mountain called Monlora. The view from above was breathtaking. Below on every side stretched the area known locally as the Cinco Villas, a gently rolling, complex patchwork of wheat fields, orchards, and pastures radiating from miniature villages whose buildings blended together except for the churches.

Fray Juan Crisóstomo Gil de Bernabé. Detail from a stylized eighteenth-century portrait. Courtesy Museo Municipal, Querétaro

In the severe, fortress-like stone monastery atop Monlora, the grayrobes of a Franciscan recollect community lived their ordered, meditative lives and cared for one of the countless Spanish statues of the Virgin revealed to shepherd boys during the Christian Reconquista. Here where a crucifix reportedly bled and spoke to a brother, Fray Juan Gil, the missionary-to-be, had prayed, mortified his body, and nurtured his soul. [9]

Late in 1762 word from Mexico intruded. A pair of friars from the missionary college of Querétaro, one of them a former professor of theology at the University of Zaragoza, were traveling from convento to convento recruiting. With letters they reached even Monlora. They told of the scrupulous communal life within the college and of the staggering challenge outside—throngs of believers wallowing in sin, whole heathen nations utterly ignorant of their Redeemer. [10]

Juan Gil begged to go. On January 15, 1763, he strode down the mountain, his travel order for Cádiz tucked in the folds of his habit. [11] Two days south of Zaragoza he picked up another friar bound for the missions. Aside from the bonds of their mutual estate, the two men had little in common. Gil, sophisticated, eloquent, effusive, insisted on witnessing to the beauty of his calling at every convento where they stopped for the night. Instead of taking in the sights of Madrid he devoted himself to spiritual exercises. In contrast, his young, newly ordained companion betrayed at every turn his down-to-earth peasant origin. Plain, taciturn, unrefined, Fray Francisco Garcés preferred the company of simple people. Yet in the missions Gil and Garcés would be neighbors. [12]

The government had granted to the college of Querétaro a mission of twenty-four priests and two lay brothers. As was customary, the royal treasury paid for their recruitment, outfitting, and travel. After several months' wait the group had sailed from Cádiz on August 1, 1763, four priests short of the quota, bound for Veracruz. Father Garcés, eleven other recruits, and the padre colectador, Fray Joseph Antonio Bernad, had passage on the Júpiter. Juan Gil and nine others, shepherded by Bernad's ruddy-faced little assistant, Fray Miguel Ramón Pinilla, rode with the ill-fated Mercurio. [13]

Ten days after the wreck of the Mercurio, the feeble Captain Romero learned their location, a beach called Petempich on the windward shore of Yucatan. At once he and his purser wrote urgent pleas to the officials at the port of Campeche requesting boats, gear, ship's carpenters, caulkers, and divers for the salvage operation, and provisions for the sick, half-starved survivors. The captain then dispatched his second mate in the ship's boat and sat down to wait. [14]

The arrival of Mercurio's launch at Campeche set off a well-rehearsed operation. Within three days five boats made for the scene of the wreck. A lieutenant, a sergeant, and twenty soldiers were dispatched. The governor in Merida alerted coastal villages to send canoes and men. By mid-November the beach resembled a bustling town. The major objective, short of floating the disabled frigate, was getting to shore a thousand containers of the king's quicksilver. [15] Captain Romero and the purser, who both died on the beach, were charged posthumously with smuggling when certain barrels labeled almonds, a cask marked vermicelli, and even the captain's mattress were found to contain cinnamon, playing cards, silks, lace, and ladies' stockings. [16]

The Franciscans along with their distinguished fellow castaway, the prosecuting attorney designate of the Mexican Inquisition; Mercurio's register; the royal mail, including the text of the final treaty with Great Britain; six hundred and sixty barrels of liquor, mostly brandy; and other salvage were put aboard the bilander Don Carlos Tercero and on December 3 safely reached Campeche. [17] Giving thanks to God for their deliverance, the fatigued friars, all of whom survived, consented to preach a home mission to the residents of that tropical port before sailing on to Veracruz. [18] Early in 1764, about the time they finally arrived in Querétaro, billows of smoke rose from the wreck of the Mercurio. Unable to float the broken hull, the salvage team had set her afire to recover the hardware. [19]

The exemplary Fray Juan Gil, spared in the wreck of the Mercurio, tested himself among the faithful for three and a half years. Because of his fervor, his commanding yet humble presence, and his talent for preaching, he was a natural for home missions, those whirlwind spiritual assaults meant to put the fear of God and the love of Christ into the hearts of complacent sinners.

At the request of the presiding bishop a half dozen zealous friars would set out afoot for some predetermined area, not uncommonly hundreds of miles from Querétaro. They might be gone for six months. In town after town, preaching fervorinos on street corners, singing hymns, leading processions, and scourging themselves in public, they implored the loose-living to repent. If their harvest was bountiful, they heard hundreds of confessions. [20]

Contemporary sketch of a Spanish frigate wrecked in 1780 off the coast of Yucatan, near where the Mercurio had run on a reef seventeen years before. Courtesy Museo Naval, Madrid

Grayrobes from the college also ministered to the people of Querétaro, primarily in the confessional, where Gil if present could be found daily. The "simple and artless" Francisco Garcés, still too young to confess women, became "the Children's Padre." [21] When the urgent call to heathen missions was sounded in the summer of 1767, both men volunteered, bided their time with the others for twenty weeks in Tepic, and the following January sailed for Guaymas on different ships.

Juan Gil found himself crammed aboard the Lauretana, an ill-constructed vessel of only fifty-four tons, confiscated from the Jesuits. [22] Buffeted by furious squalls, the little ship rose and fell sickeningly. The friars threw up till their whole bodies ached. Forty days later, in early March, 1768, the Lauretana stood in at the port of Mazatlán, five hundred miles south of Guaymas. Meanwhile, the San Carlos, carrying Father President Mariano Buena y Alcalde, Garcés, and four more friars, had been blown all the way back to San Blas.

Six of the Franciscans, terribly ill from their ordeal, begged the captain of the Lauretana to let them go on by land. He consented. When they were safely ashore, Father Gil admitted to the dark-skinned andaluz Fray Juan Marcelo Díaz, who had shared with him the trials of the Mercurio four years earlier, something that had been troubling him. Not long before they had set out from the college, Gil, it seemed, confessed a poor woman possessed by the Devil. She told him that the Devil had predicted his death. He had escaped on the coast of Yucatan, but in Sonora he must die. [23]

If he could have studied an accurate map, Father Gil would have seen how the river later called the Santa Cruz rose in the mountains east of present day Nogales; how the watershed, like a giant horseshoe open to the south, drained into the grassy San Rafael Valley; and how from there the main stream flowed on south past mission Santa María Soamca, less than ten miles below the present international boundary. At the place known as San Lázaro the stream bent abruptly west and then northwest winding gently through a fertile valley called locally the San Luis. Some people claimed that the land in the San Luis Valley was the richest in all the province, but in 1768 its settlements—San Lázaro, Divisadero, Santa Bárbara, San Luis, Buenavista—stood crumbling and vacant for fear of the Apache.

Meandering on northwest through grassy, largely unchanneled valleys, wetter and more open than today, the river passed mission Guevavi, Calabazas, Tumacácori, and the presidio of Tubac. From Tubac to mission San Xavier del Bac and Tucson it ran nearly due north then took off again north westward over a hundred miles till it joined the Río Gila just southwest of today's Phoenix. Only in a semiarid region would this meager flow be dignified as a river. In some places it stood in malarial ciénagas, or marshes, and in others north of Tubac it sank into its sandy bed and disappeared from sight completely. Yet this was the life line of the northern Pimería, of three missions and a presidio.

Misión los Santos Ángeles San Gabriel y San Rafael de Guevavi was even cruder than he expected. After a year of neglect the shabby brown pueblo looked wholly unprosperous, its mud and adobe-block walls hardly rising above the surrounding mesquite, its indigent Pimas and Pápagos reduced to a few dozen. He would endure as Job the squalor, the heat and mosquitos, the sullen, indifferent neophytes, the disease and dying, and the Apache menace. Always the penitent, Fray Juan Crisóstomo Gil de Bernabé welcomed a heavier cross. His Indians would not understand, but his interpreter would call him a saint. [24]

He arrived in mid-May, driest month of the year, perhaps in the company of Captain Juan Bautista de Anza who had a twenty-day leave from the southern campaign to collect provisions in the missions of Soamca, Guevavi, and San Xavier. [25] Gil, one of the early arrivals, had been provisionally assigned to Guevavi by Governor Pineda. Six weeks later he would have chunky Fray Francisco Roche, fellow castaway from the Mercurio, thirty miles southeast at Soamca and the unsophisticated Fray Francisco Garcés up the road sixty miles north at San Xavier. But for the time being the slender, zealous grayrobe was the only priest in the northern Pimería.

The Upper Santa Cruz Valley. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

The principal village of his first heathen mission, the one where he would live, took up most of the clearing atop a several-acre mesilla just east of the river. Blocks of low, cluttered adobe huts housed the Indians of the pueblo proper. The modest church, oriented roughly north-south, stood at the eastern edge of the eminence, its entrance looking south on the irregular plaza. A Jesuit superior had described it in 1764 as "a very good church" but added that the sanctuary was shored up. In his opinion it could easily be repaired.

Inside, Juan Gil found the church

adorned with two altars and one small side altar with paintings in gilt frames. The sacristy contains three chalices, two little dishes with cruets, a pyx, a ciborium, a censer, and a baptismal shell—all of silver—vestments of all types and colors, as well as other ornaments for the altar and divine services. [26]

Attached to the church and west of it was the one-story convento with all its doors facing inward on a small patio. Here Father Gil had his quarters.

From Guevavi he could see brown hills, not actually as bare as they appeared, nearly all round but pressing in closest from the west. The shallow, northward-flowing river passed through a narrows at Guevavi. Giant old cottonwoods marked its course. Above the pueblo to the south the valley opened up. Here the mission Indians irrigated plots of maize. In some places on the river flats, unhealthfully close to the pueblo, the water stood in cienagas and bred mosquitos. Off to the north, down the broken, chaparral-covered valley cut by a thousand arroyos, he could see the peaks of the Sierra de Santa Rita, a hazy purple in the distance.

To call on his three visitas the friar and his escort rode north downriver. The trail, described nineteen months earlier by a military engineer, kept to the river "whose banks are very grown up with cottonwoods, and the rest of the plain with many mesquites and other bushes." The closest visita, San Cayetano de Calabazas, about five miles from Guevavi, blended into a hillside east of the river and well above it. The view from the site north down the valley was impressive, Calabazas itself singularly unimpressive. The same engineer called it "a small pueblo formerly of Pimas Altos, who all perished in a severe epidemic, and repopulated with Pápagos." [27]

Calabazas did not even have a church. The small adobe, reported "half built" in 1761, stood roofless. There was no cemetery. Early in 1769 when Ignacio Guíojo-muri, native governor of Calabazas, died, Fray Juan Gil would have the body carried south and buried in the church at Guevavi. Not many more than a dozen families lived at Calabazas. [28]

Riding on, the party passed the mouth of Sonoita Creek, trickling into the river from the east, and by the detached and looming mountain called San Cayetano. Ten miles beyond Calabazas the Franciscan caught site of San José de Tumacácori, set back in the mesquite several hundred yards west of the river. Close behind, the dark, rocky Sierra de Tumacácori rose above tan hills forming an imposing backdrop. Here Father Gil was gratified to find both church and cemetery, and more natives than at either Guevavi or Calabazas, surely over a hundred.

Like Calabazas, Tumacácori was an artificial congregation. Fifteen years before, in 1753, a garrison of frontier soldiers had preempted Tubac, only a league north on the same side of the river. They had rounded up all the Indians who had returned to this part of the valley after the uprising of 1751—families they dispossessed at Tubac, others from the pre-revolt east-bank rancheria of Tumacácori, and Pápagos—and settled them here. A Moravian Jesuit consecrated the church in 1757, a plain flat-roofed adobe building roughly sixty by twenty feet. The new pueblo's population had risen and fallen almost with the seasons as Pápagos came and went and as epidemics took their toll. But because the presidio stood so close, the Jesuits had thought of making Tumacácori a cabecera. [29]

Here on May 20, 1768, in a scene that recalled the days of Father Kino, the gray-robed friar lined up and baptized nineteen Pápagos, evidently instructed beforehand. To seven of them he gave the name Isidro or Isidra in honor of the Spanish farmer saint and patron of Madrid whose feast fell earlier in the month; one he called Juan Crisóstomo [30] This was what he had left the mountaintop for, the reason he had crossed an ocean—to redeem spiritually heathen Indians, the more abject the better. But Fray Juan had come too late.

Valley leading to Santa Cruz, Sonora. From Bartlett, Personal Narratives, I

The native population of Pimería Alta was dwindling. One 1768 report put the overall decline for Guevavi and its visitas at over 80 percent, down from a peak during the Jesuit years of three hundred families to only fifty. Where six had lived now only one remained. [31] Transient Pápagos would continue to show up at planting and harvest times to work and fill their bellies in the river pueblos. Some would stay. But, as Father Gil soon learned, few of the heathens wanted to become permanent members of the mission community. In the missions people died, they said.

By commission of the bishop of Durango the Jesuits of Guevavi had served as interim chaplains at Tubac. Since there was hardly ever a regular military chaplain assigned to the post, the duty in effect became permanent. In 1768 Bishop Tamarón passed it on to the friars. That gave Father Gil the chance to preach "home missions even while ministering to the heathen—for a missionary, seemingly the best of both worlds.

There must have been close to five hundred persons at Tubac. Most were gente de razón, a generic term setting people culturally Hispanic but racially mixed apart from both Indians and Spaniards. In addition to the garrison of fifty-one men, including three officers and the interim chaplain, their dependents, servants, and assorted hangers-on, dozens of settlers had clustered around the presidio, many of them refugees from the abandoned ranchos upriver. A census of Tubac settlers compiled a year earlier, in the spring of 1767, showed 34 heads of family, 144 dependents, plus 26 servants and their families, for a total of well over two hundred. [32]

The Sonora frontier officer corps and their families, mostly criollos born in the province, many like Juan Bautista de Anza of Basque lineage, hung together and intermarried. Along with the wealthier ranchers, miners, and merchants they were the frontier elite, the gentry. They owned the land. Anza, for example, owned or came to own frontier properties in the vicinities of Fronteras and Tubac, among them Santa Rosa de Corodéguachi, Sicurisuta, Divisadero, Santa Bárbara, Cíbuta, Sásabe, and Sópori. [33]

Captain at Tubac since 1760, the vigorous thirty-one-year-old Anza had impressed even the peninsulares, those proud Spaniards born in the mother country, like Governor Pineda and Colonel Elizondo. The Marqués de Rub&ieadute;, a member of Charles III's high-ranking military mission to New Spain, had met Anza when he inspected Tubac during the Christmas season of 1766. "Because of his energy, valor, devotion, ability, and notable disinterestedness," Captain Anza was in the opinion of Rubí "a complete officer" deserving of the king's favor.

As a presidial commander Anza followed in the tradition of his father, a peninsular "of singular merits," and his criollo grandfather on his mother's side. Born in the summer of 1736 at the presidio of Fronteras, a hundred miles southeast of Tubac, he was not yet four years old when his father died in an Apache ambush. As he grew he followed the prescribed course for a member of his class. He joined a garrison commanded by a relative, in his case Fronteras under his brother-in-law Gabriel Antonio de Vildósola, serving first as an unpaid teenage cadet and then moving up in rank. By the age of nineteen he had been commissioned lieutenant. An inspiring leader of men, Anza had the grit to engage in hand-to-hand combat. He had campaigned against rebel Pimas and Pápagos, against Seris, but mostly against Apaches. [34]

The royal presidio of San Ignacio de Tubac was meant to keep the peace with Pimas and Pápagos and to defend the province against Apaches. If Father Gil anticipated a real frontier fortress, even a neat military enclosure or rudimentary fortifications, his first view disabused him. Low and totally constructed of adobe, it amounted to no more than a disorderly cluster of buildings with the large U-shaped casa del capitán at the center. The presidial chapel, begun at Anza's personal expense, stood just to the northwest with cemetery in front. Because the crown had invested so little in the physical plant at Tubac, and because he thought so large a concentration of settlers could defend itself, the Marqués de Rubí had recommended that the garrison be moved. [35]

The pueblo of San Ignacio de Sonoita, Fray Juan Gil's third visita, lay half-hidden in the hills separating the parallel valleys of the Santa Cruz and the San Pedro. To get there he either rode east from Tubac or Tumacácori around the far side of San Cayetano Mountain or up Sonoita Creek. In either case he ran the risk of ambush.

Sonoita stood directly in the path of Apaches raiding southwestward into the Santa Cruz Valley and beyond. Some of the Sobáipuris evacuated from the San Pedro Valley in 1762 had been settled here. If the military intended to hold the place, they would have to station a detachment of soldiers at Sonoita, as they had done at San Xavier del Bac. But Father Gil had already heard Anza's excuse. The captain and thirty-five Tubac regulars had been ordered south to fight Seris [36] That left the presidio with fifteen soldiers and a few dozen poor and ill-armed militiamen, hardly enough to guard the horses.

Early in June five Sonoita Indians looked up from work in their fields to see an Apache war party bearing down on them. Instead of running they held their ground and fought a gallant delaying action while the women and children scrambled for the pueblo. Two of the five died. "One was a close friend of the most courageous Indian known in all the Pimería," wrote Governor Pineda,

the other a close friend of the native governor, also a very brave Indian. Because of this I urged them to go out and avenge the killings. Since the Apaches are their worst enemies, all that was necessary to encourage them was to give them a few provisions.

Every day the Apaches extend their raids, because for more than two years it has been impossible to patrol their territory since all the troops of the northern presidios are on the southern front. [37]

Joseph de Urrutia's plan of Tubac in 1766. Courtesy British Museum

Fray Juan Gil soon found out what the viceroy's instructions to the college meant in practical terms. The reformers had made him a guest in his own mission. When Captain Anza, provisioning his troops with wheat, maize, and beef in the missions, negotiated for Guevavi's quota, he did so not with the friar but with Comisario Andrés Grijalva. When he arranged for the pay of Guevavi Indians fighting in the southern campaign, he dealt not with the missionary but with Grijalva. Father Gil was left to record the casualties. [38]

As soon as Father President Buena and the other late arrivals reached their missions, Governor Pineda ordered the comisarios to hand over the churches. Comisario Grijalva came to Guevavi for the formalities. In the presence of Fray Juan Gil, the native governor, and another Indian official, Grijalva proceeded to inventory item by item what the Jesuits had left in the church and sacristy: santos, sacred vessels, vestments, down to the last purificator for cleansing the chalice. Next they moved on to the casa del Padre in the convento. Every cup, pot, and pan, the few books, some tools, the meager furniture—everything usable and unusable was listed. When the comisario had satisfied himself that he had included it all, he asked the missionary to cosign the document. Then he rode on north to do the same for Father Francisco Garcés at San Xavier. [39]

As far as the reformers were concerned, the Franciscan replacements now possessed all they needed to function spiritually as missionaries to the Pimas. How woefully wrong they were became obvious as the summer wore on.

When he had been at Tubutama no more than a couple of weeks, Father President Buena confirmed his superiors' worst predictions. The new liberal way was a disaster. The king's wish that the mission Indians of Sonora not be made to work, that they be free to live and learn with non-Indians, had miscarried. "They live," wrote Buena,

in perpetual idleness, wandering through the backcountry and from one mission to another. Because of this, since we cannot reprimand them, only the ones who feel like it come to catechism, without according us so far even the slightest recognition or more attention than a stranger might get in their pueblo.

Yet the Father President had cautioned Gil, Garcés, and the others to hold their tempers. For no reason were they to come down hard on their charges. Governor Pineda had made that clear. Ever since the 1751 uprising some Pimas, particularly among the so-called Piatos of the western pueblos, had refused to return to the Spanish yoke. Bands of them had joined the Seris in the wild Cerro Prieto country. On the slightest pretext, the governor believed, many more mission Indians would flock to the rebels' camps.

They must not discipline the Indians, said the reformers. But that was not all. To meet mission expenses the government had consented to continue the annual subsidy, which during the last Jesuit years had amounted to 360 pesos per mission. That may have been enough for the wealthy, business-oriented Jesuits, but how, the Father President wanted to know, could a poor Franciscan maintain himself; pay a cook, houseboy, and tortilla maker; provide wine and wax for divine services; improve the mission; and offer the Indians material benefits, all on 360 pesos? After all, he pointed out, the Indians "only submit to and obey someone who gives them something, not someone who only preaches the Gospel."

Governor Pineda, named by Buena the friars' business agent in Sonora, had suggested several ways of easing their economic plight. He would assign each friar some mission land to cultivate and would sell him livestock cheap, or he would immediately advance each of them one hundred pesos against their sínodos. The Father President had refused politely, saying that in such matters he had to have the approval of the college. That seemed the wisest course, since Visitor General José de Gálvez was due in August or September to review the entire situation in Sonora.

Buena begged his superiors to let him know promptly by the weekly mail through Guadalajara what they wanted him to request of the Visitor General. He also asked them to consider two other perplexing problems: the supplying at a reasonable price of "clothing, footwear, chocolate, snuff, and the other things a religious cannot do without," and the crying need for two friars at each of the widely scattered Sonora missions. In the meantime he would ask the missionaries themselves to report directly to the college. [40]

The protest was resounding. Their charges they described as crude, lazy, shameless, irresponsible, ill-disciplined Christians-in-name-only—docile and not beyond help, some added. The physical plants they found miserable, full of bats, and in many cases threatening ruin. To get from one mission village to the next they ran the risk of mutilation and death at the hands of the Apaches. One friar per mission simply could not cope with the many needs of such scattered flocks. The annual stipend, they predicted, would scarcely cover church expenses, let alone maintain a missionary, clothe the Indians, feed the hungry and the sick, and attract the heathen. Supplies if available at all cost a fortune.

But worst of all—they were not even masters in their own missions. So long as they had no material means to awaken their neophytes' interest, and fill their bellies, no authority to mete out discipline; so long as they had to borrow seed from a comisario and stand by while Spaniards took advantage of mission Indians; so long as these conditions prevailed, the missions would remain abysmally wretched. [41]

Despite the glum consensus, only a few wished to disavow their commitment. From Pimería Baja came the loudest cries. At Opodepe thin, small mouthed Fray Antonio Canals was livid. Not only were most of his neophytes half-breeds who refused to obey him, but they and their ancestors had been nominal Christians for a century and a half. By rights they should have been turned over to the secular clergy long ago. Furthermore, Fray Antonio had to spend a great deal of time in the kitchen, to supervise the dish washing, to prevent theft, and "to see that they wash the meat and remove the worms and moths; otherwise all would arrive scrambled on the plate." While the superiors decided what to do with "these curacies," Canals prayed for God's help "to get me out of this Purgatory, not to say Hell." [42] If they stayed in Pimería Baja, some of them feared, they like the Jesuits would be dragged into bitter civil-ecclesiastical clashes. [43] And from Ures pock-marked Esteban de Salazar lamented, "My job here is not apostolic missionary but glorified innkeeper," not misionero but mesonero! [44]

At least in Pimería Alta they were closer to the heathen. Up the road from Guevavi at San Xavier and Tucson, Father Garcés rejoiced that he had no Spaniards in his care. "I am very content," he wrote. "There are plenty of Indians. I like them and they like me." He did like them, and he seemed to understand them. He knew full well that they only tolerated him at first because they knew that he could not force them to work as the Jesuit Fathers had. Yet for their own good, to protect them and provide for their needs, Garcés urged that the missionary's authority be restored. "Already we have seen the harm done in this kingdom," he had written to Governor Pineda, "because these people do not know the submission they owe their king, for even when they do venerate their priests and are subject, they are little short of heathens. If this is lost they will be worse." [45]

At Santa María Soamca, not at all content, Father Roche admitted to his superiors that "speaking for myself I would rather live on chili and tortillas and work in a sweatshop than continue with things as they are now." [46]

Governor Pineda said he wanted to help: if the missionaries would make known to him their needs he would try to supply them, evidently on account from his own store. At Soamca, Roche needed a tablecloth, napkins, and some cups and saucers. At San Xavier, Garcés needed locks and a chest to keep his vestments and sacred vessels free of vermin, another lock for his chocolate, a small box for the oils, some molds for hosts, a large kettle, an awning, a pocket inkwell for the trail, a razor case, and other such items. Reyes wanted beans to plant. [47] To provide themselves with the simple necessities, some of the friars had already bought on credit more than their first year's stipend would cover. Most believed that even five or six hundred pesos annually would not be enough unless they were given recourse to mission produce.

Father Salazar of Ures commented on the buying power of the peso in Sonora. At Pineda's store he had spent 9-1/2 pesos for a half ream of paper suitable for recording baptisms, marriages, and burials at his mission, 2 pesos for two ounces of saffron, 3 pesos for two ounces of cloves, and 4 pesos for two ounces of cinnamon. Half a pound of pepper, a pair of shoes, a pair of stockings, and three varas (a vara measures about 33 inches) of Mexican baize for a skirt to cover a big Indian girl who was running around naked pushed his bill to 29 pesos, which the friar settled by saying twenty-nine Masses for the governor. He also had to buy salt, a tercio at 4 pesos. He refused to pay the 12 pesos Pineda was asking for a beef cow. Instead he bought seven on the hoof at 2-1/2 pesos each. But because the hostiles had stolen all the mission's horses he had no way to round them up, and so he was eating mutton.

An arroba (25.36 pounds) of wax for candles to burn on the altar had cost him 21 pesos 7 reales at the mining town of San Antonio, seventy-five miles southeast of Ures. Wine sold that year at 1-1/2 pesos per cuartillo (.12 gallon). Butter and lard were so scarce that he was doing without. By shopping around he had bought 176 bars of soap for 11 pesos, or sixteen bars for a peso. Pineda was selling only a dozen for the same price. Salazar explained the quantity. Not only did he use soap to keep himself clean in his filthy surroundings, but also to trade to his Indians for eggs on fast days. [48]

The friars wanted to control the missions of Pimería Alta as the Jesuits had, but they could not say so, not in 1768, not while the reformers still claimed credit for emancipating the Indians from Jesuit slavery. So they hedged. They pointed instead to the success of the college's missions in Texas and Coahuila. There the friars, two at each mission, managed the temporalities. There they disciplined their charges and oversaw dealings between Indian and Spaniard. There Indians worked for the missionaries and attended catechism and services. [49] Despite the burden it implied, the Franciscans in Sonora knew that they must have control over their missions' food supply. As one of the Jesuits had put it three decades earlier, "Indians do not come to Christian service when they do not see the maize pot boiling." [50]

Some of the Franciscans compared Pimería Alta to Babylon. No matter how loudly they wailed they knew that things would get no better until God sent them a Cyrus. For a return to the proven way, "for the redemption of our tribulations and wants," they looked to one man, the archreformer José de Gálvez. His coming, Father Buena admitted, "we await like that of the Messiah." [51]

At Guevavi the penitential Fray Juan Gil made do. He hired an interpreter and began teaching the Pimas and Pápagos of his mission pueblos to pray by rote in Spanish. Still, they seemed strangely distant. He never got to know the Indians the way Francisco Garcés did. As their spiritual father Gil felt an abiding compassion for these poor ignorant creatures. But while he was mortifying his flesh to atone for his own shortcomings—he wore a hair shirt and scourged himself—Garcés was sitting cross-legged on the ground, eating Indian cooking and learning Piman.

Garcés wanted no part of "Spaniards": to Gil they were a blessing. He felt at ease at Tubac. Though the several hundred persons in and around the post, soldiers, dependents, and settlers, represented numerous racial mixtures, culturally they were Spaniards. They understood him. For Fray Juan it was back to the revival trail.

"The presidio was becoming a spiritual wasteland," wrote another friar, "but the Father implored so much, preached so much, that even the deepest-rooted vices were wrested out." Father Gil put Mass on a set schedule, and instituted various devotions. [52] Certainly his impassioned preaching was a diversion from the monotonous rounds of a frontier post. The wives and mothers of the community welcomed the friar's influence. The troopers grimaced when he stopped the girls from provocatively splitting their skirts to show their petticoats. [53]

While Fray Juan Gil was combating sins among Spaniards in Tubac that first summer, Garcés accepted an invitation from heathens. With no more baggage than the horse he rode, a little jerky and pinole, and a pot of sugar for the children, the trusting young minister of San Xavier, in his words,

set out August 29, 1768, accompanied by an Indian of my mission and the four sent by the heathens. [In all] I traveled some eighty leagues [about two hundred miles], to the west, north, and southeast, passing through various and large rancherías of the Indians called Pápagos. I also saw the Río Gila at one of its numerous rancherías, at which a large crowd had gathered.

At all the rancherías where I spent the night I celebrated the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. When I arrived at the ranchería I would preach through the Indian interpreter. I would convene the old Indians and the principal men of the ranchería for what they call a circle, which amounts to their discourse around the fire. This would last from nightfall till two. During the course of it I would speak of the divine mysteries; of the king, God save him; of his wars; and so on. For their part they would not hesitate to ask why I had come, what manner of person the king was, how I had crossed the sea, what I was after, if I had come only to see their country. They also would assure me that they had no quarrel with Spaniards or objections to the building of new missions. . . . I liked all the Indians, but especially the Gileños [Gila Pimas].

I baptized four sick children and returned to my mission since there was no assistant minister there to look after it. The Indians of one ranchería would escort me to the next and everywhere they would provide for the interpreter and me from what they had. Such gifts from among such people, and with me so poor, are extremely precious. [54]

From near the Gila Garcés wrote to Father Buena and sent the letter by a Pápago. Although the Father President admitted that had he known what Garcés was up to he would have forbidden the dangerous solo entrada, he now saw it as divinely inspired. At last he had something favorable to report to the college. These heathens had welcomed Garcés. They had begged for baptism. "They were much impressed," Buena exulted,

and filled with admiration at the sight of our habits, sandals, and cord, and the poverty in which the Father traveled, and much more by his courage at having come among them without soldiers or retinue. This they indicated to him, thanking him and demonstrating to him the pleasure his visit had occasioned among them, and always would, if he came without soldiers.

For Francisco Garcés this was only the beginning. The Franciscans had their Kino, and, they were quick to point out, he traveled without soldiers and was prudent with the baptismal shell.

Father Gil learned of his paisano's success with the heathens firsthand, though not under the circumstances he might have wished. Soon after his return Francisco Garcés fell dreadfully ill. Struck speechless for twenty-four hours, then racked by prolonged chills, he lay utterly helpless. Gil had him carried the sixty miles south to Guevavi. There the missionary of San Xavier recovered, and the two friars talked. Meanwhile, death stalked San Xavier. [55]