TRAVEL

This Hallowed Ground TUMACÁCORI

TEXT BY TOM DOLLAR PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACK DYKINGA It's three o'clock in the morning, and I'm wide awake. Under a full moon, the early leaves of the young cottonwoods hanging over my sleeping bag gleam like silver minnows. I'm awake often tonight, hips aching to remind me it's been too long since I last slept on the ground. And each time there's the moon beaming full in my face, and the same dog barking somewhere off in the distance, and the same dove, fooled by the moon, cooing mournfully since midnight. But I don't think it's sore hips and moonbeams, dogs and doves that disturb my sleep. The ground where I lie is storied ground - hallowed to some. The white man's history in this place stretches back more than four and a half centuries, and the people who were already here go back much further, thousands of years to the late Pleistocene. Perhaps it's the spirit of the place that troubles my sleep. Footsteps echoing out of the past. Ghosts, maybe. I can't say for sure.

They called themselves O'odham, the people. The Spanish called them Pimas and their land the Pimería Alta, "the upper lands of the Pimas." I'm camped beside one of their villages near where the Santa Cruz River makes a long bend only a few miles north of the Mexican border. They named this place gi vavbia, Big Spring, or Well. No one knows for sure how long they had been here.

Black-robed Jesuit missionaries followed the Spanish conquistadors into the “new world,” making their way along the Río Altar, the Río Magdalena, the Río Sonoyta, the Río Santa Cruz. The rivers were their highways, their lifelines. Maps that interpret the history of that time are dotted with steeples where they built mission churches along the riverbanks and crosses where they established visitas, mission outposts. Eusebio Francisco Kino, “the padre on horseback,” came in 1691. I see him dismount, handing his reins to one of the natives. They are friendly. They have heard of this man bearing gifts — beads you can see through, scissors and knives with blades that split sunlight into twinkling points. Kino stands beside the river he calls Santa María and looks up toward their village on a small plateau above the river. He asks its name and hears “Guevavi.” He notes its position on high ground in a long narrow valley, the riverbanks lined with tall cottonwood trees. Natural ramparts at the south end of the plateau guard its approach from the upstream side. There’s water and plenty of sweet grass for livestock. And Kino thinks that with a cabecera, a main church, here a priest could easily serve visitas in Sonoita, Calabazas, and Tumacácori. Ten years later, in 1701, the mission Los Santos Angeles de Guevavi is established. A chorus of coyotes awakens me. Violet tints the undersides of clouds above the hill. I check the small thermometer lying atop my duffel. It is 40° F., but I’m snug, zippered inside my goose-down mummy bag. A nifty self-inflating air mat insulates me against the cold ground. My head rests on a small pillow. I step into my trousers, dressing quickly. Wool-blend socks, sweater, jacket, mittens, cap — all spun out of the latest space-age synthetic fibers. Instantly the chill is off the morning. I think of the hardships endured by the Christian fathers — a dangerous sea voyage, then an arduous overland ride on horseback into the interior of a land they could not have imagined. Intense summer heat, winter freezes, rain, and sometimes snow. Supplies were meager, creature comforts small. This was boggy ground 300 years ago, and their diaries speak of persistent fevers that strip the meat from their bones and leave them weak. “I am not fat,” one of them notes, writing home for an order of new clothes. Still, they managed somehow to minister to their converts — baptizing, marrying, and burying them. Though they could convert them, not even the best of the priests ever fully understood them, nor could they change their habits. “The natives eat their fruit uncooked,” a Jesuit priest wrote. When he asked them to stop eating the lice they picked off their children, they wondered that he “had not noticed the hens also eat their lice.” And they bathed too often, “even after a meal,” an unhealthy practice the good father thought was killing them. He does not mention measles, typhus, and smallpox introduced by Europeans, diseases that killed his vulnerable flock faster than he could baptize them.

TUMACÁCORI

I tiptoe across planks laid over the Santa Cruz River, a thin ribbon running through dense beds of watercress. A dirt ramp rises to level ground 25 feet above the river. Famous men have walked this ramp. The young captain of the Tubac Presidio, Juan Bautista de Anza, came often to check on the safety of the priests living here. In 1775, three years after Guevavi was abandoned, he led a party from Tubac into northern California, blazing an overland route to what is now San Francisco.

The sun is up now, and I shed my jacket. Mexican poppies and spreading fleabane dot the grassy slope. Filaree is everywhere. A cardinal sings incessantly from the topmost branch of a mesquite. At the top of the cliff, I discover round holes in the basalt. Here Pima women sat grinding dried mesquite beans into flour while they watched their children splash in the river below.

At first I don't see the walls. The top of the plateau is thick with mesquite where none grew 100 years ago. Cows brought them. Browsing on the sweet mesquitebean pods as they moved upslope, cows dropped the undigested seeds. Out of habitat away from the river bottoms where they once grew tall in vast bosques, the trees are dwarfed and scrubby.

Three adobe walls remain. The tallest is about 12 feet high. Mesquites sprout from a layer of pulverized adobe on the floor of the mission. Dust mixed with water and dried in the sun to make bricks has returned to dust. Peering at one of the weathered walls, I see small stones and bits of twig in the adobe. I look for peach pits. The workers who built this place, I'm told, spit peach pits into the adobe mud as they were mixing. But I find none.

Looking north toward the Santa Rita Mountains, I see a cluster of beehives about 200 yards off. Between me and the hives is a low spot, closed on three sides like a box canyon. Perhaps horses and other livestock were corralled there where they could be watched and protected from marauding Apaches. I murmur my respect for the wisdom of those who picked this place. About a mile beyond the beehives lies an automobile graveyard, junked cars piled high, a monument to the industrial age. A jackrabbit lopes up the hill across the wash. I am standing in what remains of Guevavi, the oldest surviving Spanish Colonial Jesuit structure in North America. Three crumbling walls.

“They deserve to be protected,” says Nicholas J. Bleser, who retired last June from the National Park Service after 27 years, 18 at Tumacácori. Bleser had campaigned to expand Tumacácori National Monument to include Los Santos Angeles de Guevavi and the visita at San Cayetano de Calabazas, and last August President Bush signed legislation designating all three areas a National Historical Park.

We are sitting beside the fireplace in a brand-new adobe house Bleser has built in Tubac. Bleser loves adobe. Between five and six thousand adobes are in the walls around us. Real adobes, made in Sasabe, Sonora, Mexico, no asphalt or cement added, and mortared with mud, real mud. For a long time, he has lived and worked in adobe buildings. The adobe walls in the Tumacácori Mission church, where Bleser spent part of every day, are six feet thick, transferring heat and cold so slowly that “you're getting last week's weather in there,” he says. Two Mexican abuelas, grandmothers, came to watch the house going up. “Oh, you're building an old house,” one exclaimed.

Franciscan missionaries and members of the Tohono O'odam Indian tribe constructed San Jose de Tumacácori Mission (ABOVE) in the Santa Cruz Valley on a site established by the Jesuits.

The old, history, continuity with the past, and making others see them were Bleser's life. He was an interpretative specialist. His job was to get the attention of passersby, to make them want to spend a few minutes soaking up the history of these very old places. "It was a real challenge. People just came breezing through from some other culture. They stayed for 40 minutes on average, and you tried to pump several hundred years of history into them. When you walked into a ruin - the pyramids, Tumacácori - you were walking into the last day of its existence as an active site, and you had no idea what went on before. That to me was the interesting part - trying to uncover what went on."

What went on, the puzzle, the fascination. Political intrigue in Europe doomed the missionary priests of the Society of Jesus in the Pimería Alta. In the summer of 1767, Carlos III of Spain ordered them rounded up and expelled. The missions were abandoned until Franciscan missionaries arrived a year later. But as Guevavi was finished, Friar Juan Crisostomo Gil de Barnabé, the Franciscan assigned to Guevavi, almost immediately moved mission headquarters to the broad Santa Cruz valley at Tumacácori. Why? Indian uprisings, illness, royal court politics a world away, better grazing, a taste for peaches. What went on? What complex webs of event and chance destine one place to live as a national monument, another to fall into ruin?

Jack Dykinga and I have driven over to Calabazas from Tumacácori. There's a photo he wants of sunlight slanting through a doorway. The ruin is enclosed by a chain-link fence topped by three strands of barbed wire looped with coils of razor wire. A sign on the fence says the property is owned by the Arizona Historical Society. I wander around as Jack sets up his equipment.

A corrugated tin roof on a steel frame protects the ruin from the elements. Still, it crumbles. It's not just weathering. Salvagers have been here. Vandals, too, and pot hunters. Treasure hunters are the worst. Holes pockmark the ground where their metal detectors went off. The ones at the base of the walls are the most destructive. Hastening erosion, they weaken the walls and drop them.

What did they suppose they would find? These old missions were very poor. Inventories the padres made to their superiors upon leaving their posts attest to this. In 1761, Father Miguel Gerstner made the following accounting for Calabazas: "The village has a new house with door and lock. The church I leave nearly half built. In the house there is a holy water pot, 1 hand bell, 1 table, 3 plates and 2 cups, an earthenware pitcher, and a hand mill. In the village, 1 axe." There are no pots of gold here. Never were. And there's not much to see, either.

But Guevavi and Calabazas are an interpreter's dream, especially Calabazas. "It's got everything," Nick Bleser says. "It's got prehistory. It was a visita of both Guevavi and Tumacácori. It became a rancho. Gándara, provisional governor of Sonora, comes in and tries to buy the whole damn thing and make it his headquarters. Then there's the Mexican Period, and the Civil War, when it was the commanding officers' headquarters for Camp Moore just across the wash. You've got mining; you've got the first land scheme; the railroad; the Apaches and their nemesis, Pete Kitchen, right down to modern Río Rico and the produce industry.

TUMACÁCORI

"And that's the point of everything I did. History didn't end at a certain time. It continues."

Suggested Reading

Tumacácori: From Ranchería to National Monument, by Nicholas J. Bleser. Tucson: Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, no date.

Mission of Sorrows: Jesuit Guevavi and the Pimas, 1691-1767, by John L. Kessell. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970.

"Calabazas of the Río Rico," by Bernard L. Fontana. Pamphlet reprinted from The Smoke Signal, Volume 24 (Fall, 1971); available at Tumacácori Mission.

Tom Dollar, a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways, also has written for Omni, Mother Earth News, and Audubon.

Award-winning photojournalist Jack Dykinga photographed "Coral Reefs of the Desert" in the August 1990 issue of Arizona Highways.

WHEN YOU GO

To reach Tumacácori, take Interstate Route 19 about 35 miles south of Tucson. A map to Guevavi is available at the headquarters; although Calabazas is shown on the map, the site is fenced and locked. Hours are 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. daily; closed Christmas and Thanksgiving. Telephone (602) 398-2341. Nearby attractions: Tubac Presidio State Historic Park, a few miles north of Tumacácori on Interstate 19, is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in Arizona. Today the village is an artist's colony.

In Nogales, about 20 miles south on the Mexican border, visit the Pimería Alta Historical Society Museum, featuring displays and information about Pimería Alta.

YOU CAN TRAVEL With Our Photographers and Other Friends of Arizona Highways

The Friends of Arizona Highways, the magazine's volunteer support group, conducts a variety of tours to some of Arizona's most spectacular locales. Trips vary from one-day Shutterbug Safaris to threeto five-day Photo Tours led by Arizona Highways contributing photographers. Here is a partial list of 1991 trips you may want to take: These are workshops for advanced amateur photo buffs offered in some of the most scenic places in Arizona. The Photo Tours include:

Photo Tours

January: Share the excitement of the Old West and Tucson's rodeos with Edward McCain and P. K. Weis.

March: Follow our picture editor, Peter Ensenberger and Jerry Sieve to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

April: Frank Zullo, the West's premier photographer of the night sky, leads a workshop into the Superstition Mountains.

May: Explore the unforgettable beauty of Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness Area with Christine Keith.

July: Dale Schicketanz guides photo buffs into the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park.

August: Gordon and Theresa Whelpley focus on the Chinle Native American Pow Wow and Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Indian Reservation.

October: Investigate the ghost towns of southeastern Arizona with Tom Weiwandt, or explore the Chiricahua Mountains with P. K. Weis.

with Tom Weiwandt, or explore the Chiricahua Mountains with P. K. Weis.

Shutterbug Safaris

These are one-day photo excursions for the casual snapshot taker. Contributing Arizona Highways photographers lead tours to such scenic destinations as the Apache Trail, San Xavier Mission, and the Catalina Mountains. For complete information on Photo Tours or Shutterbug Safaris, call the Friends' Travel Desk, (602) 271-5904.

Scenic Tours

Twoand three-day tours, sponsored in association with the Arizona Automobile Association, are scheduled regularly to the Grand Canyon and Lake Powell. For information or to make reservations, telephone the AAA at (602) 274-5805 in Phoenix, or call 1 (800) 352-5382 statewide.

Longer tours visit the state's most historic cities and towns, significant prehistoric sites, museums, gardens, and nature preserves. For information and reservations on these longer scenic tours call the Friends' Travel Desk at (602) 271-5904.

A Scenic Tour highlight will be: May: Ray Manley, a senior Arizona Highways photographer, leads a five-day tour of northern Arizona's Indian country, including overnight stays at Gouldings in Monument Valley and at Thunderbird Lodge in Canyon de Chelly.