As relations among missionary brothers in Pimería Alta festered, Father President Iturralde sought comfort in Psalm 133: "Behold, how goodly and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" In 1797, in the wake of Bringas' house cleaning, at least half the friars were unhappy with their assignments or their companeros. The tempestuous Florencio Ibáñez was back at Sáric, newly embroiled in disputes with the Father at Caborca and with Iturralde at Tubutama. Narciso Gutiérrez still resented his removal from Tumacácori and his surveillance by Iturralde. That Easter season Ibáñez ad Gutiérrez had performed their annual spiritual exercises together at Sáric and had emerged allies. Iturralde braced himself.

During the months that followed, as notes, gossip, charge, and counter-charge flew back and forth among the mission conventos of Pimería Alta, the fight had become obscene. The Father President, convinced that Gutiérrez and his "confidant, counselor, and confessor" Ibáñez were out to blacken his name and have him removed from the missions, had fought dirt with dirt. When Ibáñez pointed out that the children of Iturralde's cook were suspiciously light skinned, Iturralde countered that the wife of Ibáñez' mayordomo, who had easier access to that friar than his cook had to him, was mother to a similarly fair brood. Furthermore, far fewer improprieties took place in the Tubutama kitchen than among the unsavory bunch of syphilitic boys who hung around Sáric's.

On his visitation in September and October, the Father President had sought to pour oil on the troubled waters, at least to reestablish community with the other friars. When he approached his quarters in Tubutama after this five-week absence he could scarcely believe his eyes. There in the anteroom, with the door wide open, lay his compañero Father Narciso "stretched out ... like a Pápago indecently unveiled to the thighs." He made no effort to welcome his superior. He just lay there. Iturralde entered, said good morning, and asked what ailed him. A fever, he had a fever, grunted Gutiérrez. "I told him, 'It is no good here Your Reverence, especially in that position. Pray go to your room and go to bed.'" Without another word Gutiérrez obeyed. "What seemed strange to me," Iturralde wrote later on, "was that he was happier without my company, but afterwards I learned why." [36]

Gutiérrez had written to the college, "not out of spite," he claimed, "or for any other such reason, but obliged by my confessors." The principal charge against Iturralde concerned the woman Gertrudis, who while entitled "cook" had "grown fat at the mission's cost." To the scandal of the rest of the people she had amassed large herds of stock, allegedly because of the Father President's patronage. Rumors had spread all over the Pimería. The mayordomo of San Xavier carried them to Tubac. The friars had become the subject of dirty jokes. [37]

Early in December, Iturralde answered his accusers in a twenty-page letter to the Father Guardian, enclosing as exhibits more than thirty documents. He charged Ibáñez and Gutiérrez with numerous unbrotherly acts and indiscretions and characterized them as insubordinate gossipmongers. Ibáñez, on whom the Father President vented more of his wrath, was so unstable that when things went against him he frequently talked of hanging himself from a mesquite tree. [38]

The college upheld the Father President. When Ibáñez, claiming cruel persecution by Iturralde, begged for the second time to return to Querétaro, the superiors granted his request. After sixteen years in Pimería Alta, he left Sáric in the company of a merchant on August 12, 1798, to all appearances ignominiously finished as a missionary. Yet three years later he landed at the port of Monterey in Alta California, age sixty, ready to renew his career. He had quit the Querétaro college and rejoined San Fernando. For seventeen more years Florencio Ibáñez lived the life of a missionary. Finally he died at Soledad, November 26, 1818, at the age of seventy-eight. In California he is remembered as a musician and the author of nativity plays. [39]

Fray Narciso Gutiérrez had evidently made his peace with Iturralde post haste. In January, 1798, just a month after the president's sordid report to the college, Gutiérrez was back at Tumacácori. Ángel Alonso de Prado, whose self-righteous rigidity suited him more for the college than the missions, had departed or was preparing to, causing the Father President to lament the loss of a healthy friar. Back at the college Prado would be elected Father Guardian three times before his death on December 28, 1824. [40] As for Gutiérrez, who shared Tumacácori with Mariano Bordoy during 1798 and 1799, he had come home to stay.

The presence of Father Visitor Diego Bringas in the missions of Pimería Alta had stirred up a nest of hornets in habits. After three years of unfraternal strife Father President Iturralde, who suffered physically from a bladder disorder "and many other parasitic pests," [41] had managed to impose order if not harmony, the letter of Psalm 133 if not its spirit.

During the last five years of the eighteenth century the Queretaran friars pleaded on all levels, local, provincial, and national, for missionary expansion, and were frustrated consistently. Wars in Europe and threats to the Spanish empire in America reduced the question of salvation for the Pápago Indians to low priority. But the friars conceded nothing.

With the visitation of Pimería Alta and his reconnaissance of the Río Gila behind him, Father Bringas had got his notes together, conferred at length with Father Barbastro, and in mid-March of 1796 resumed talks with Commandant General Nava at Chihuahua. In the matter of the Pápago Indians the friar described the success of Fray Juan Bautista Llorens in attracting heathen Pápagos to settle in the pueblos of mission San Xavier. He cited an order of Nava himself to Captain Zúñiga granting the Pápagos of the ranchería of Aquituni certain privileges if they would join the mission visita at Tucson. Early in 1796, suffering from the drought, they had come in with Lieutenant Mariano de Urrea, 134 of them. Fifty-one had been baptized.

But there had been trouble. The Hispanic community, soldiers and settlers from the presidio of Tucson across the river, had diverted what water there was to their fields, leaving the Indians hardly a trickle. They had let their thirsty stock trample and browse Indian fields. Bringas appealed to the commandant general to enforce the land and water regulations for presidio and pueblo and recompense the injured parties; to provide the newly arrived heathens with oxen and tools; to reimburse Father Llorens for the food and clothing he had given them; and to authorize a second sínodo for San Xavier. On the recommendation of his legal adviser, Asesor Pedro Galindo Navarro, the commandant general turned down the friar flatly. [42]

The Pápagos of Aquituni meanwhile fled back to the desert, "perhaps," observed Father President Iturralde, "because of the perverse counsel of the old Christians." Father Llorens went after them and persuaded them to return. But when Captain Zúñiga reported the affair to Nava, the commandant general decreed that no more heathens be added to mission San Xavier del Bac, a shocking and unchristian measure in the eyes of the missionaries.

Father Bringas had all but promised the Gila Pimas the benefit of missions. Despite all his evidence of their desire for baptism, their industry, and their loyalty, he could wring no commitment from Commandant General Nava. It was incredible, lamented Father Iturralde, that in a hundred years the Spanish frontier had not expanded one step toward the Gila. The Gileños were more than willing, friars were available—only the government stood in the way. [43]

Everything Bringas proposed Nava and Galindo Navarro quashed. Back in Querétaro after a year in the field, the friar presented himself before the guardian and discretory empty-handed. There was nothing left but a direct appeal to the king. "Without a commandant general who is zealous for the honor of God and king," proclaimed the semi-retired Father Barbastro from Aconchi, "neither the missionaries nor the bishop can accomplish a thing." [44]

Bringas argued the college's case in a long, heavily documented representation to the crown finally submitted in 1797. The Queretaran archivist labeled the file copy "Report to the king concerning the missions of Pimería Alta, new foundations, the perverse measures of the [General] Command, the ill-founded peace with the Apaches, and many other important matters." If His Majesty would but approve the several proposals contained therein, three important benefits would result: 1) the spiritual well-being of non-Indians along the entire west coast from Jalisco to the presidio of Tucson, 2) continued propagation of the Faith in the eight Indian missions of Pimería Alta, and 3) the conversion of more than 25,000 heathens.

To prove that the Pimería Alta missions had not gone stale, that they deserved continued royal support as conversiones vivas, Bringas appended lists of nearly a thousand heathens, of a dozen different tribes, baptized in these missions since 1768. He reiterated the settling of the Pápagos of Aquituni at Tucson and the Gila Pimas' exuberant desire for missions.

Carefully demonstrating how royal expenditures might be kept to a minimum, he proposed the founding of six new missions, two each for the Pápagos, Gila Pimas, and Cocomaricopas; two new Indian presidios; and Queretaran hospices at Sinaloa and Pitic, the first to support far-ranging home missions, the second for Indian missions. Again he asked for two missionaries permission and more friars from Spain, resurrecting all the arguments of the 1770s. And finally the friar pleaded for the love of God that Pimería Alta be detached from the Provincias Internas, like Alta California, and restored to the viceroy's rule. [45]

While Bringas' report to the king was held up in the mails by a British naval blockade, the king approved Commandant General Nava's "measures for good government," including civilian management of mission economics. Nava sent a copy of the cedula to Father President Iturralde in November, 1797, with instructions for converting the missions into "doctrinas." The Queretaran friars would be relegated to a spiritual ministry only and supported by Indian tribute. All this they had heard before. [46]

"The good government they propose," Iturralde wrote to the college, experience has shown clearly is that under which churches crumble, the communal properties are exhausted, and the Indians are oppressed without relief." Bringas had written pages and pages to the king, citing laws and precedents, to show why the pueblos of the active Pimería Alta frontier must remain traditional missions, subject in everything to their missionaries. He had detailed the ruin of the Yaqui and Mayo pueblos under the doctrina system and predicted the same fate for Pimería Alta if Nava's orders were allowed to stand. [47]

More bad news almost made the Father President laugh. Now Intendant-Governor Alejo García Conde was demanding that the Queretaran friars pay the tithe on mission produce. In response Iturralde wrote to Barbastro and asked the dean of the missionaries to go over to Arizpe and reason with the intendant-governor. The missions of Pimería Alta had always been exempt from paying the tithe. [48]

Although the friars went about their ministry in Pimería Alta as they had for the past thirty years, the shadow of the general command hung over them like a heavy desert thunderhead. Much of the blame they laid to Asesor Pedro Galindo Navarro. They never had forgiven him for designing Croix's bastard Yuma settlements eighteen years before. This official, in Iturralde's words, "is not only anti-friar but also Antichrist since he opposes new missions contrary to what the king has ordered in the laws of the Indies. As long as he remains, we can hope for nothing favorable." [49]

By November, 1798, Iturralde had all but given up hope. "In these provinces things are so critical with regard to the faith that it appears headed for nothing short of total subversion." [50]

He was wrong. Together he and Barbastro brought Intendant-Governor García Conde, "a good man and of good intentions," around to their way of thinking on the tithe. Commandant General Nava, more concerned with matters of defense, did not press his proposal to make the missions of Pimería Alta into doctrinas. But neither did he offer the friars the least support for expansion of their missions to the Gila.

At Tumacácori, Narciso Gutiérrez had resolved to build a proper church. In his favor he would have the Apache "peace," such as it was, and a decade of relative prosperity; against him Napoleon in Europe and unrest in New Spain.

He lost Mariano Bordoy in 1799. Evidently the brown-eyed mallorquin was not as tough as he thought he was. In January, Father President Iturralde had seconded Bordoy's request for retirement to the college. He did not leave Tumacácori until after the summer, and then he did not retire. Somewhat restored, he decided to stay on in Sonora. Between 1802 and 1805 he served as compañero at Aconchi, where the grand old man Barbastro had died on June 22, 1800. By 1806 Bordoy was back in Pimería Alta, assisting at Tubutama. When finally he did return to the college his health was broken. Until his death on October 6, 1819, at the age of fifty-four, he did what he could around the college, playing the organ and hearing confessions. [51]

Narciso Gutiérrez had no illusions about the Apache peace. What kind of a peace was it, Father Visitor Bringas had asked, that allowed a partially conquered enemy to retain his freedom of movement, his weapons, his Christian captives, his thieving ways, and his polygamy, all the while feeding his belly at government expense?

The Apaches mansos, the tame ones, who lined up outside the walls at Tucson and several other presidios to claim their weekly rations of maize, meat, tobacco, and sweets, had become another source of friction between the Queretaran friars and the commandant general. Only half-hearted measures had been taken for their spiritual welfare. Their pagan vices had been tolerated and malevolent Christians had bequeathed some of their own—an integral part of the Bernardo de Gálvez policy—gambling, dancing, swearing, concubinage, and the like. When the friars suggested subjecting these Apaches to a mission-like environment, Pedro de Nava had ignored them. [52] At best the Apache peace was a relative thing, at worst a sham. When it suited their purposes to raid and kill, some of them still did, as at Tumacácori one hot Friday, June 5, 1801.

Three men died. They had been tending the flocks: Juan Antonio Crespo, forty to fifty years old, a Pima raised at Caborca, husband of María Gertrudis Brixio listed variously as a Yaqui or an Ópata, and father of three young children; José María Pajarito, twenty; and Félix Hurtado, fifteen. Their bodies lay outside the wall. The people inside knew it but they could do nothing. How many Apaches there were no one dared say. This was no hit-and-run raid for stock. The Apaches were still out there, waiting, hoping to draw the people into the open. They stayed all night and were there next morning. Finally, Saturday afternoon all the settlers and Pima troops from Tubac who could be rounded up during the two days arrived to relieve the mission. The Apaches withdrew. Only then could the bodies be brought in for burial and the damage assessed. The attackers had wantonly slaughtered "more than 1360 sheep." [53]

After two fatiguing three-year terms as Father President, the unwell Francisco Iturralde resigned in 1801. He finished out the year at Tubutama then quit Pimería Alta, a twenty-five-year veteran. The college chose Iturralde's steady, non-controversial neighbor at Oquitoa, Fray Francisco Moyano, to succeed him as presidente. The well-built Moyano, with black hair, dark brown eyes, and a mole high up on his left cheek, had come to Sonora in 1783 in the train of Bishop Antonio de los Reyes. After the custody folded he affiliated himself with the college of Querétaro and stayed on in Pimería Alta. He spoke Piman well. In the tradition of Barbastro and Iturralde, Moyano would serve as Father President as long as he was able, over sixteen years. [54] Toward the end he would suffer even more grievous dissent than they had.

About the time Iturralde handed the papers and the headaches of the presidency to Moyano, Bishop Rouset again asked for headcounts in the missions. At Tumacácori Narciso Gutiérrez complied on December 9, 1801, enrolling each person and noting his ethnic or tribal designation, his age, and his marital status. Heading the list was Juan Legarra, a thirty-three-year-old Pápago evidently picked as governor after the death of Luis Arriola in May, 1799. Since the census by Mariano Bordoy five years earlier, the mission's total population had increased by only five persons, from 102 to 107. But the composition had changed. The ratio of non-Indians to Indians was ascending; at the end of 1801 it stood at better than one to four.

On the 1801 census Gutiérrez typed some of the Indians earlier designated Pimas as Pápagos and vice versa. Like Bordoy, he assigned the father's tribal affiliation to the children, except in the case of Pápago couples, whose children he made Pimas. He split the 1801 census somewhat differently, listing sixty-eight mission Indians, largely Pimas and Pápagos, and thirty-nine peones y agregados. The distinction, it appears, stemmed from who was and who was not entitled by membership in the community to a share of the mission's common produce. The peones, or laborers, half a dozen gente de razón families, who seemed to have replaced the Yaquis of five years earlier, were paid, likely in goods and produce rather than cash. The agregados, a few Yuma converts recently settled at Tumacácori, apparently got their keep as potential members of the mission commune. [55]

When he drew up his first state-of-the-missions report in May, 1803, Father President Moyano could point to half a dozen new, brick and mortar churches built under Franciscan supervision. Most of the others had been repaired and renovated. Only two churches in all Pimería Alta did he judge substandard, those of Caborca and Tumacácori. At Caborca, Fray Andrés Sánchez was about to begin construction. At Tumacácori a church was in Moyano's words "currently being built anew." Father Narciso had already begun.

Like Sánchez of Caborca, Gutiérrez took the magnificent Velderrain Llorens structure at San Xavier del Bac, built at a cost of over 30,000 pesos, as his model and his goal. Unfortunate for him, circumstances would impose a whole series of retrenchments. Perhaps he was too optimistic. He staked out the foundations some fifty feet behind the narrow little Jesuit church. The new church would be oriented north-south, and it would have the adjoining convento to the east, as at San Xavier. It would measure some one hundred feet long outside, nearly twice the length of the old church. In 1802 Father Narciso had brought in additional laborers and craftsmen. Moyano's figures for that year credit Tumacácori with a population increase of 70 percent over 1801—76 Indians and 102 "Spaniards and persons of other castes." [56]

The problem for Gutiérrez now became one of economics: how to sustain a long-term construction project with no more resources than his poor pueblo could muster. He could try to raise surplus wheat, but that depended on the weather. The mission did have livestock, more than ever before. But prices had fallen off sharply. Cattle that sold just five years earlier for ten pesos a head, now brought only three and a half. The intendant-governor of the province, don Alejo García Conde, feared the price might soon drop to a peso. [57] As Father Moyano pointed out, the only industry in the missions, aside from pottery and basketry, was the weaving of blankets and sarapes from the wool of mission sheep. But unfortunately, Tumacácori's flocks had been nearly wiped out in the Apache raid of June, 1801. Because these raiders often came by way of the mission's deserted visita of Sonoita, Moyano, probably at Gutiérrez' suggestion, urged reoccupation of the site and a strong enough guard to hold it. [58] But that came to nothing.

None of the friars was saddened by the news late in 1802 that Commandant General Pedro de Nava had finally stepped down. In their eyes his successor, Brigadier Nemesio Salcedo y Salcedo, could be no worse. Though he showed more interest in the missions of the Sierra Madre, closer to his capital of Chihuahua, when the time came Salcedo would support the Queretarans' bid for more religious from Spain.

Fortunately, too, the first years of Salcedo's command coincided with an economic resurgence in Sonora. Mining picked up. The new commandant reported an October, 1803, strike at Noriega, not far from Altar. New placers came into production at Cieneguilla, and despite drastic fluctuations caused by too much or too little rain, epidemics, and the searing heat, the motley population had risen to 5,000 by early 1806. The intendant-governor, García Conde, talked of opening new ports along the Sonora coast. Already some merchants had begun exporting grain and hides and tallow in small schooners and sloops. [59]

In the middle Santa Cruz Valley the new prosperity was evident but limited. Stock wearing the Tumacácori brand grazed the hills for twenty miles along the river, from south of Guevavi. Travelers on the valley road noticed the massive foundations of Father Narciso's church, great river boulders set in mud mortar. At Tubac senior Ensign Manuel de León, who had taken provisional command of the garrison on the death of Lieutenant Nicolas de la Errán, estimated the presidio's cattle herd at a thousand head in the summer of 1804. Down the road forty-five miles north at Tucson, Captain José de Zúñiga reported 4,000 cattle, from which the Apaches mansos were being fed, 2,600 sheep, and 1,200 horses. As industries he included cotton growing and weaving and a lime deposit being worked north of the presidio. Hides from Tucson were being sold as far south as Arizpe. [60]

Still, Tumacácori was poor. Once Fray Andrés Sánchez began building at Caborca, Father Narciso could not keep up. His project lagged. When the Father President made out his second state-of-the-missions report in February, 1805, he described Tumacácori's old church as "very deteriorated and narrow." Construction of a new one had begun, but he mentioned no progress since the last report. In contrast, at Caborca Father Sánchez had the walls up and already had begun the barrel-vault roof. Tumacácori's total population—82 Indians and 82 Spaniards and other castes—was down and Caborca's up from two years before. Interestingly, Tumacácori had lost twenty Spaniards and persons of other castes while Caborca had gained thirty, an indication of how the two jobs were going.

The Apaches were partly to blame. Father Moyano explained:

All of the missions are exposed to the assaults of the Indios bárbaros from north and east, but those suffering the greatest and most frequent peril and damage are San Xavier del Bac, Tumacácori, Cocóspera, and San Ignacio. Every month from October to April they are subjected to robberies of cattle and horses. During April last year they killed four of the peaceful Apaches and carried away captive three others of those who live in the pueblo of Tucson.

Then in the middle of December when the minister of Cocóspera and interim chaplain of the presidio of Santa Cruz, Fray Joaquín Goitia, was spending the night in the old pueblo of Calabazas the Apaches attacked him, fighting until nearly morning while the two soldiers he had brought as an escort defended him. With their help he managed to escape alive, though the horses were killed leaving them afoot in that deserted stretch.

La Purisima Concepción de Nuestra Señora de Caborca. (William Dinwiddie photo, 1894; McGee expedition) Courtesy Smithsonian Institution

These and other outrages kept the missions of the north and east poorer than the others, retarding the growth of their herds and the activities of their people. A garrisoned settlement on the Gila would help, thought Moyano. That would have pleased Francisco Garcés. [61]

For five years Father Narciso had managed pretty much on his own doing double duty as missionary and chaplain. [62] Between 1804 and 1807 Father President Moyano sent him in rapid succession three eager but luckless compañeros. Tall, thin-faced, with black hair and blue eyes, Fray Manuel Fernández Saravia was from Pola de Lena, some twenty miles south of Oviedo in Asturias. He had sailed with the smaller first wave of the 1789 mission aboard the frigate San Juan Nepomuceno. At the college he was literally struck dumb. As his superior had noted in late 1795, Fernández Saravia was "unable to practice the ministry because he is totally without a voice." Evidently he had recovered enough to set out for the missions in 1802. He had been working at Caborca with Father Sánchez. On February 19, 1804, the forty-one-year-old Fray Manuel baptized a newborn child at Tumacácori. But he did not last. Soon after mid-June, 1804, he transferred to Sáric where he died of a seizure on November 11, unable to receive viaticum. [63]

Whether on business or sick leave, Gutiérrez was away from his mission during the winter of 1804-1805, between November and the following May. A devout but sickly thirty-four-year-old Mexican, who had been with Llorens at San Xavier since the summer of 1802, rode down to Tumacácori to fill in. Fray Joseph Ignacio Ramírez de Arellano, from an old family of Puebla de los Ángeles, had been invested with the Franciscan habit only six years before, on December 11, 1798, at the college. He had been a grammar and philosophy teacher at the Colegio Carolino in Puebla before that. A mature adult, he really wanted to be a Franciscan. Writing home to his mother, he described his investiture as "a ceremony which would have caused a rock to melt. By the embrace of all the fathers, I became a brother of them all. Just think what that means, to be a brother of so many. I look forward to being a servant to them."

From San Xavier, Ramírez had continued writing to his mother and to a brother, Joaquin Carlos. He told of the variety of fruit in the mission garden, his heat rash, the frightful storms and winter cold, and the medicinal qualities of the jojoba. He told of the friars' frustrations. "The neglect on the part of the government, if not the calculated disregard, to work for any advance here, stupifies us." Father President Moyano had gone to Arizpe to plead with Intendant-Governor García Conde. The Gila Pimas still begged for Fathers and baptism. Ramírez had probably worried his mother with his exaggerated account of the savage Apaches. "They go about the whole area robbing and killing to get what they can," he had written. "They have nothing else to do or nothing else to think of, nor are the many presidios located here for that reason only, of any avail to restrain them." [64]

Apparently at Tumacácori Ramírez was too busy to write. When Gutiérrez returned in May his haggard replacement was battling what may have been an epidemic. In a space of ten days he had buried seven persons, four of them small children. A week later Father Narciso interred a thirty-year-old Pápago he said died of "the green vomits." Ramírez rode back to San Xavier. The next letters his mother received came from Father Llorens. On September 6, the very day Father President Moyano wrote the college asking that Ramírez be recalled because of "his habitual illness," Father Joseph Ignacio was seized by a fever. It kept mounting, and on September 26, 1805, he died, attended by what the friars interpreted as a sign from Heaven.

That night as the body lay in the cavernous church illuminated by flickering candles, those who kept the vigil noticed that the dead friar's face and tonsure glistened. They were moist. He was sweating. A healthy color had replaced the grayness of death, and "a most sweet and delightful odor" seemed to come from the body. Yet he was plainly dead.

Father Llorens conferred with the two other religious who planned to assist at the funeral next day, apparently Gutiérrez and Fray Pedro de Arriquibar, since 1795 chaplain at Tucson. They would not bury the body as long as the miraculous phenomenon persisted, for "without doubt God wants to manifest by this means the glory His servant is enjoying." Word had spread to the presidio of Tucson and people flocked out to the mission. Hours later the sweating and the odor ceased. Only then did his brethren lay Father Joseph Ignacio to rest. [65]

His third compañero in two years joined Gutiérrez late in 1805. Another Mexican, from the Franciscan province of Yucatan, Gregorio Ruiz had affiliated himself with the college on December 20, 1800, and had evidently come to the frontier with the now deceased Fernández Saravia and Ramírez. He stayed longer than the others had, through 1806 and most of 1807. He would serve later at San Xavier and die there on January 25, 1817. Gutiérrez in fact would be called from Tumacácori to attend him, but would reach his side too late, only to learn that "his death had been violent." Meanwhile a Pima died at Tumacácori without the sacraments because of Father Narciso's absence. [66]

With some misgivings, Narciso Gutiérrez had watched the new settlers arriving in the valley. Tumacácori's herds, despite sporadic Apache raids, had been increasing "daily." The friar foresaw trouble over land. The poor squatters did not bother him, so long as they recognized that the land belonged to the mission—it was the ambitious potential ranchero who might file a claim on allegedly vacant lands or lands with imperfect title. The legal process was known as the denuncia. [67] Any day it could be used against the mission, particularly to the south where, if one chose to ignore mission livestock, Calabazas and Guevavi had been "abandoned" far longer than the three full and consecutive years stipulated by law. Worse, the mission possessed no legal instrument whatever setting forth its title or its boundaries. With all this in mind, Father Narciso summoned Governor Juan Legarra and the other justicias late in 1806 and suggested to them that they petition for a formal regrant of mission lands.

The mission may never have held a specific, all-inclusive title to its lands. As an Indian community it was entitled by statute to all the land its people used. Because the mission existed on a semi-arid and hostile frontier, competition requiring formal adjudication between Indian and non-Indian had been less intense than in some areas. When he compiled his 1793 report on the missions of New Spain, the Conde de Revillagigedo could find no evidence that the Jesuits of harsh Baja California had ever felt the need to define legally the boundaries between their missions. In Sonora, according to Revillagigedo, the blackrobes had "augmented their [mission] properties with grants of land, which they registered and took possession of with royal titles, for the purpose of establishing stock ranches." [68]

The Jesuits had indeed bought additional land south of Guevavi. There had been papers. Then too, back when Juan de Pineda was governor of Sonora (1763-1770), it had been agreed that whatever mission land the presidio of Tubac occupied to the north, the mission could make up to the south. All this, Gutiérrez told them, must be made legal and binding.

Governor Juan Legarra, a Pápago in his late thirties, headed the delegation to Arizpe. Four more of Tumacácori's principales accompanied him: Felipe Mendoza, a Pima, about fifty-three; José Domingo Arriola, Pima, twenty-seven; Ramón Pamplona, the son of a Pápago father and a Yaqui mother but listed by Gutiérrez as a Pima, twenty; and Javier Ignacio Medina, Pima, not quite fifteen and recently married to one of Pamplona's cousins. [69] Presumably Father Narciso, leaving the mission in the charge of Gregorio Ruiz, went with them. In the capital he arranged for an attorney, don Ignacio Díaz del Carpio, to draw up and duly present to the intendant-governor the Indians' plea.

Naming the five principales as representatives of the entire community, Díaz del Carpio proceeded to the reason for their petition. "Inasmuch as the original instruments relative to its former allotment of lands have all been lost, the terms under which it was made at that time are entirely unknown and as a consequence its legitimate and true holdings and boundaries are also unknown." They asked for a fundo legal, a standard township of four leagues, measured in the directions that afforded them the best agricultural lands, and an estancia, or stock range, to include the old cabecera of Guevavi, where Legarra claimed to have been born, as well as the mouth of Potrero Creek. They implored the intendant-governor to do the king's will, always favorable toward "his loyal vassals the poor Indians, especially those like us who find ourselves in abject misery and in a country beset by barbarous enemies."

On December 17, 1806, Intendant-Governor García Conde responded favorably to the Tumacácori Indians' petition. He ordered the acting commandant and civil magistrate of Tubac, don Manuel de León, to survey the appropriate lands. As soon as León had three or four days he could devote to the commission without neglecting his military duties, he was to measure for said Indians "one league in each direction, or the four wherever it best suits them, of the best and most useful lands adjoining their pueblo, without prejudice to third parties." León should also measure an estancia of at most two sitios de ganado mayor, cattle ranges of one league each. [70]

These were not square but linear leagues, measured from a central point outward in the four directions. The total length of the four measurements added up to the number of leagues allotted. If a pueblo did indeed take for its fundo legal one linear league in each direction, which in the arid north was rare, the area came to four square leagues. More often a pueblo took more in the direction that best served it, three and a half along a river for example, and the remainder on each side. While the total area was far less, the pueblo gained more of the watered river bottom.

Tumacácori's six leagues, if squared, would have amounted to more than forty square miles, or 26,029.2 acres, most of them of little use. But instead when the four linear leagues for the fundo and the two for the estancia were laid out on the ground by Ensign León, the mission would claim only a fraction of that area, only about 6,770 acres.

One thing bothered Father Narciso, the extreme southern reach of the mission, twenty miles away in the fertile San Luis Valley. He knew that the Jesuits had bought land in that direction with mission funds. He wanted to make certain that the Tumacácori grant included all of these purchase lands, in addition to fundo and estancia.

On December 23, 1806, the friar drew up another petition, from the Indians of Tumacácori to Tubac Commandant León, the appointed surveyor. In it Juan Legarra, representing the entire community, begged that sworn testimony be taken from old residents of the area to establish: 1) that the mission's southern boundary beyond Guevavi extended as far as "the rancho of the Romeros," the old Buenavista ranch; 2) that the boundary markers still existed beyond the place known as La Yerbabuena, where there was an old corral belonging to the mission, and in the direction of the Potrero at the far end of the ciénaga grande; and 3) that the documents concerning these mission purchases, once in the possession of the civil magistrate of that jurisdiction, had been lost. The Indians had not pressed their claim to these lands arlier because they did not need them. Now, with increasing herds, they did. [71]

Admitting the petition, León called the first witness on Christmas Eve. Juan Nepomuceno Apodaca, a settler of the presidio of Santa Cruz, seventy years old, illiterate, and an heir to the Buenavista ranch, testified that the boundary markers separating Tumacácori's lands and those of the ranch did indeed still exist beyond La Yerbabuena. In the direction of the Potrero he swore the mission's markers were placed above the ciénaga grande, and to the east in the cajón de Sonoita on a very flat mesa. Asked where he had obtained this information, Apodaca said he had observed mission roundups and had talked to the former missionaries (the Jesuits) and to now-deceased magistrate Manuel Fernández de la Carrera. The latter had told him that if anyone was in doubt about land ownership in the area, either the mission's or those of other claimants, the Romeros, the rancho of Santa Barbara, or anyone else, to come to his house where he had the documents. But when he left he took the documents with him. [72]

León heard the next witness on January 7, 1807. He was Sergeant Juan Bautista Romero of the Tucson garrison, currently stationed at Tubac as paymaster. Son of the deceased don Nicolás Romero, who owned the Buenavista ranch, he told how as a child his father had taken him out and taught him where their property bounded the mission's. The rest of Romero's testimony corroborated Apodaca's.

A third and final witness, eighty-year-old, illiterate Pedro Baes of Tucson, testified on January 9. He had grown up on the Buenavista ranch. He added a few details. Though the mission's landmarks beyond La Yerbabuena still existed, they were fallen down. Traces of the mission's corral, where the Romeros used to come at roundup time to cut out their stock, could still be seen on the boundaries of La Yerbabuena." Baes had raised the boy Eugenio, who had since served as a corporal at Tucson. The lad had used the land titles to practice his reading. Baes added that mission land extended in the direction of the Potrero as far as "El Pajarito" above the ciénaga grande. [73] The proceedings came to three folios, which Commandant León turned over to the Indians. With that matter out of the way, he could get on with the survey of fundo and estancia.

The party gathered at Tumacácori on Monday, January 13. León, attended by his two corroborating witnesses Toribio de Otero and Juan Nepomuceno González, formally announced to Governor Juan Legarra and the other Tumacácori Indians present that he would proceed immediately. They assented. Then as a matter of course León asked any adjoining landowners to step forward. Informed by several long-time Tubac residents that there were none in any direction, save the presidio one league north, he moved on to the naming and swearing in of his survey crew.

Lorenzo Berdugo, thirty-eight, listed with his family in the 1801 Tumacácori census among mission gente de razón but now living in Tubac, Ensign León named tallyman (contador). José Miguel Sotomayor and Juan Esteban Romero, both of Tubac, would serve as chainmen (medidores); with León Osorio of Tubac and Ramón Ríos, thirty-three-year-old gente de razón resident of the mission, as recorders (apuntadores). All swore to perform their duties "well, faithfully, and legally, without deceit, fraud, or malice." Only Sotomayor could sign.

Next day in the early morning cold they began their task in the mission cemetery. Ensign León had asked the Indians to designate the center point from which to begin measuring the fundo legal. Because former Governor Pineda had ruled that they could make up in the south what they were short to the north, they pointed to the cross in the cemetery.

With everyone looking on, Leon asked tallyman Berdugo to measure with a legal vara stick (33 inches) fifty varas on a "well twisted and waxed sisal cord," which the commandant had brought along for the purpose. With a wooden handle at each end this would serve as the "chain," fifty varas, or one-hundredth of a league in length. They would chain from the center in all four directions, forming in effect a great irregular cross. They would not bother to run out and mark the corners of the claim. Positioning himself at the cemetery cross with his compass, León sighted north down the valley. Then with his entire entourage, plus five armed men as an escort, the ensign began the survey.

The two chainmen on horseback rode one behind the other with the chain strung out between them. When a recorder marked the position of the lead chainman and the tallyman increased his count, the chain was moved up till the rear chainman reached the recorder. Others helped straighten the chain. The second recorder and the tallyman had by then moved ahead to mark and record the next chain. Fifty chains, or half a league, they measured north down the valley, pulling up at "the eminence (divisadero) between the trail to the river flat and two very thick cottonwoods that stand outside the river bed." Because they had reached at that point—in the present-day village of Carmen—the southern boundary of the presidio, León ordered a cairn made, and the party rode back to the cemetery.

Now by the same process they measured 332 chains south up the valley, working with the dark, craggy Sierra de Tumacácori on their right and tan, hump-shouldered San Cayetano to the left. That brought them to "the upper side, adjoining the cañada near the place called Calabazas," south of the confluence of Sonoita Creek and the river, which was really stretching it. Placing another pile of rocks there, they rode back again to Tumacácori.

The Tumacácori grant, 1807. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

Because they had marked off a total of 382 chains on the north-south axis, there remained only 18 for the east-west line. They chained seven east, this time not from the cross in the cemetery but from the riverbed, ending at the foot of a hill in the midst of a heavy growth of mesquite. Again from the riverbed they rode off eleven west passing by the cemetery and up onto the flat ridge—behind the present Tumacácori Bar—to a spot called El Mesquite Seco. To everyone's satisfaction that completed the fundo legal, a long thin strip less than half a mile wide but stretching along the life-giving river for more than ten miles.

They still had a two-league, or 200-cord, estancia to measure. León asked his crew if they wished to call it a day. They said no. Since they were all together they wanted to go on till dusk. So the ensign ordered Juan Legarra to consult with his Indians and say where the center for the estancia should be set. Because they wanted it to include the mouth of Potrero Creek in the north and Guevavi in the south, León chose a spot on the river plain a couple of miles south of the cairn thrown up to mark the southern extension of the fundo. The crew then chained eighty back to precisely that spot, making fundo and estancia contiguous. There was still light so they returned to the center and measured south another long fifty-five chains to "beyond the pueblo or old mission of Guevavi on the mesa sloping down to the river flat that leads to the dry ford (el Vado Seco)." The alleged purchase land continued south up the valley another couple of leagues. It had been a long day. Evidently they camped that night at deserted Guevavi.

Wednesday morning Ensign León sighted from the center cairn on the river plain east by his compass. The crew started out. Twenty-seven chains put them at the base of a hill León called the Cerro de San Cayetano beyond which the terrain broke into a series of rugged escarpments. This was not the Sierra de San Cayetano, which lay to the north. Here the Indians requested that the commandant give them the remaining thirty-eight chains in the west toward the Potrero. He consented and leaving a cairn at the foot of the cerro the party went back to the center. Their line to the west terminated "on the slope of the highest hill that looks down on the Potrero." The survey was finished. León, his two witnesses, and tallyman Sotomayor, representing the crew and the interested parties, each signed. [74]

That afternoon León ordered the original of the proceedings transmitted through the interested parties to Intendant-Governor García Conde at Arizpe. On Friday, January 17, the ensign turned over the original on nine folios to Juan Legarra and the Indians of Tumacácori. León had thus fulfilled his commission. It was now up to don Ignacio Díaz del Carpio in the capital to submit the survey record and to enter a second petition concerning the additional purchase lands based on the testimony taken at Tubac. To get the matter on the agenda took time.

The government admitted the new petition of the Tumacácori Indians on March 16, 1807. The intendant-governor decreed pro forma that it and the accompanying testimony be appended to the Tumacácori file and the lot passed on to Licenciado don Alonso Tresierra y Cano, teniente letrado asesor del gobierno, for the required legal opinion. Two weeks later Tresierra responded. Either he confused Calabazas with Guevavi, or subsequent claimants, whose interest centered on Calabazas, later altered the documents. In his summary, the intendant-governor's legal counsel stated that the Indians of Tumacácori had laid claim to the lands of the deserted pueblo of Calabazas, as shown by the testimony taken at Tubac. Not once had the witnesses at Tubac mentioned Calabazas.

Whether or not he erred, Licenciado Tresierra agreed that the Indians should have all the land they claimed, fundo, estancia, and purchases, "in as much as the cattle and horse herds of Tumacácori are increasing daily thanks to the efforts of the Indians and the guidance and direction of their present minister, the Reverend Father fray Narciso Gutiérrez." Tresierra suggested only one condition: that should Calabazas ever be resettled (as it was during the 1840s after Tumacácori lands had been illegally declared "vacant"), its lands must be restored. The file was returned to García Conde. On March 31, he decreed that a title be issued.

Whereupon, by virtue of the authority conferred by Article 81 of the Royal Ordinance of Intendants of New Spain, and in accordance with the instructions embodied in the royal cedula of October 15, 1754, and in the Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, Book IV, title 12, law 9, Brigadier don Alejo García Conde, intendant-governor of Sonora and Sinaloa, sole judge in the measurement, sale, adjustment (composición), and distribution of lands, conferred the grant. It was subject to two standard conditions and one particular condition.

First, anyone who had better claim might present it "in due time and form." Second, the grantees must keep the lands "cultivated, protected, and peopled," for if they should lie totally abandoned for three full and consecutive years, they would be subject through the process of denuncia to whomever might ask for them. The commandant and civil judge of Tubac was to insure that the Indians of Tumacácori enjoyed quiet and peaceable possession. To demonstrate "for all time" their boundaries the Indians must erect "solid landmarks of rough stone and mortar of appropriate height and thickness." The condition unique to this grant stated that whenever Calabazas was resettled its fundo legal and estancia should be restored by the Indians of Tumacácori.

García Conde had the grant, dated at Arizpe April 2, 1807, entered in the proper register and the original delivered to the Indians. [75] Thanks to the prodding of Father Narciso they now had a paper to show for all time their rightful ownership of mission lands. They had moved none too quickly. Five years later, in 1812, Agustín Ortiz, a resident of Tubac, filed successfully by denuncia on two sitios de ganado mayor southwest of Tumacácori in the place known as Arivaca, once a visita of Jesuit Guevavi. [76] The Tumacácori grant, as adjudicated early in 1807, contained some 6,770 acres plus the purchase lands. The satisfied Father Narciso and his wards could not have dreamed that later in the same century non-Indian claimants, basing their case on fundo and estancia alone, would bid before the United States Supreme Court for a grant of more than 73,000 acres. [77]

Early in 1808, while Fray Narciso Gutiérrez worked to insure full and proper protection of Tumacácori lands under Spanish law, the legions of Napoleon occupied Spain. Not three years later a terrifying race war erupted in New Spain. Though the fighting never reached Hispanic Arizona, economic stagnation did. The missionaries' annual stipend stopped coming. Most of the Tubac garrison left for detached duty in the south. Uncertainty reigned.

Father Gutiérrez, by now one of los viejos, the old guard in the missions, could scarcely believe the scandals of los nuevos, the "liberated" new friars who arrived from Spain between 1811 and 1813. Physical attacks on the person of the Father President, kept women, drunken fandangos—all by Queretaran friars—devastated morale. Then, too, the reformers reached out with the Spanish constitution of 1812, once again to free the mission Indian from oppression. At the same time the headstrong superiors of the college sought to intimidate a harried commandant general, and failed. They wanted new missions for the Pápagos and Gila Pimas and a missionary hospice in Sonora. They might as well have been baying at the moon.

Though the gaping foundation of the church he never built mocked him until his dying day, Narciso Gutiérrez did not have to look far for an excuse.