TUMACACORI

On U. S. Highway 89, a scant 19 miles north of the Mexican boundary, lies one of America's most historic landmarks, the mission church of San José de Tumacacori. At this picturesque spot in the fertile Santa Cruz Valley, while some of our own forbears in New England were still having witches, Christianity was being ushered into what is now southern Arizona by the indomitable Jesuit priests. Here, on the edge of one of the most hostile Indian frontiers of this hemisphere, came the paradox, a century later, of an Indian-built edifice to the strange new God of the White Man. This church was constructed of the earth itself, and its walls have endured the ravages of time and vandalism to see the flags of three nations wave over the land.To picture the true significance of Tumacacori's founding, let us pull aside the curtain of time for a minute. We find Spain in the late 17th Century as a great colonial power, claiming territory far north of the present Mexico. In defense of her far-flung empire she dotted her frontiers with presidios, garrisons for the soldiers who maintained dominance over adjacent territory and kept the Spanish flag flying as a warning to possible aggressor nations.

It is axiomatic that if you were to spread a sand pile over a large enough area you eventually would reach the point where therewere only scattered grains lying on the surface. Spain had so spread her available military manpower that the physical capacity of small groups of soldiers to hold territory against insurgents or interlopers would have been inadequate without a great deal of support from the natives.

It is a lasting tribute to the intelligence of Spain's colonial policy that she was able, in many critical situations, to hold sway through the loyalty she had gained from the converted Indians. This success was based on the integal Spanish policy of sending the apostles of her dominant religious faith, Catholicism, into new areas shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers. In the vicinity of Indian villages and towns, the soldiers established presidios. At the same time, the missionary priests began the job of converting the Indians and building missions.

Spain's three-fold attitude of converting, civilizing, and utilizing the Indians paid off in big dividends. She encouraged soldiers and others to fraternize and intermarry with them, in order to absorb them into Spanish culture. Friendship thus engendered produced loyalty among many tribes, and reduced the size of military forces necessary for control. The desire of the Church to save souls dovetailed perfectly with the more mundane desires of the State.

One of the most famous names in an illustrious roster of North American missionary priests was that of the great Jesuit, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino. He was the brilliant combination of priest, diplomat, cattleman and explorer whose zeal effected the construction of a chain of mission churches in Sonora, Mexico, in the later years of the 17th Century. Here his conversion of the friendly and industrious Pima Indians established them as loyal allies of the church and crown, and as a powerful buffer state between populated regions to the south and the very hostile Apaches who ranged north and northeast.

In response to the pleas of a visiting delegation of Pima-speaking Indians from the village of Tumacacori, Kino's field of endeavor was extended into what is now southern Arizona. It was in the year 1691 that Kino and a companion, Father Salvatierra, first held Mass at this spot, under a brush shelter the Indians had built for that express purpose.

With this visit, Tumacacori was established as a visita, or visiting place for the priests, and as such it remained through the remainder of the Jesuit period, which terminated with their expulsion from New Spain by regal decree in 1767. Kino and other Jesuits who came after him effected many conversions in the Santa Cruz Valley, introduced livestock to the Indians, and brought them newcrops and improved methods of farming.

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

It remained for the Franciscan priests, who in 1768 took up the interrupted work of the Jesuits in Pimeria Alta (Land of the Upper Pimas, in Sonora and southern Arizona), to finally build the present church of San José de Tumacacori and establish resident priests here. Unfortunately, many pages of Tumac-acori's history are missing, and so we do not know the exact year of the founding of this church. It is believed to have been started between 1783 and 1800. It was not the first religious edifice to be built here, but nobody knows for certain the location of the original chapel site, or of the small church which succeeded it. The present building was never completed, although it was used as a church for several years, and with its adjoining cemetery and mortuary chapel, the large court to the east, and the extensive orchard adjoining the latter, it constituted a very respectable mission plant. The dedication was probably in 1822, in which year two priests who had been buried in the older church were taken up and buried in the new one.

There is no doubt that the Franciscans, in addition to their religious work with the Tumacacori people, acted as civil administrators for them, and taught them all the essentials of life as Mission, and therefore Christian, Indians, including the Spanish language, music, and instruction in the building trades, and in the crafts such as leather and metal work and others which would naturally lend themselves to the region and materials available. Scarcely was the new church ready for use when Mexico, in 1821, won her independence from Spain. This action was followed shortly by terminating government financial aid to the missions, and the expulsion of priests who were not natives of Mexico. With the shortage of native trained priests, some of the smaller frontier missions were soon abandoned, the last resident priest leaving Tumacacori in 1827.

The Indians of Tumacacori village remained in the vicinity of their abandoned church until an Apache raid on the nearby presidio of Tubac, in 1848, forced them for safety to leave their ancestral homes and flee northwestward to join their kinsmen at San Xavier Mission. San José de Tumacacori was left at the mercy of the elements, the Apaches, the vandals and treasure hunters. The Gadsden Purchase, in 1853, brought all of the present Arizona south of the Gila River into the possession of the United States The remaining years of the century saw a kaleidoscopic series of ebbs and flows of population, as miners, adventurers, soldiers, ranchers, and finally farmers, struggled through intermittent Apache wars to establish permanent foothold in this region.

In 1908 a 10-acre tract of land was set aside as a national monument, to protect the ruined Tumacacori Mission and its adjoining grounds and structures. The National Park Service was established in 1916, and the early 1920's saw considerable repair work done on the church. Since 1929 a resident custodian has been in charge.

Today the visitor arrives by modern oiled highway. He looks over the exhibits in one of the finest small historical museums in the Southwest, and loafs in the beautiful replica of an old style Spanish mission garden. Upon payment of a 30c guide fee he accompanies the custodian or ranger guide on a 30 to 50 minute walking trip through the church and grounds. These scheduled trips start daily at 9:15, with the last one at 5:00.

The church, constructed in massive style of sundried adobe bricks set in mud mortar, with fired adobes used in points of extra stress, surfaced with two layers of lime plaster, still stands to its original height, and has the old ceilings over all rooms except the nave. Restoration has been limited to the extent necessary to stabilize original structural parts, and thus leaves for visitor inspection the many interesting details of construction.

A visit to this singularly impressive old church leaves one with a combined feeling of humility and admiration. It is hard for us to conjecture the zeal and moral strength which made it possible for the priests to come into this wild and hostile region, take over a band of primitive yet intelligent Indians who could not read or write, and knew nothing whatever of this type of architecture, and not only teach them how to build a beautiful church, but get them to voluntarily donate their best energies to its construction.

It took stout hearts and souls for those men, both white and red, to set foundation stones for our present Southwestern civilization. Our roots run deep out here, and we are as much a part of that Spanish and Mexican colonial period as we are of the powerful Saxon push which followed. We are just typical Americans, and Tumacacori helps us realize that.