On the Trail of Converts

April 30, 1689. The "very great heat" of summer loomed over the

Far northern reaches of the Spanish-Colonial New World when a tall, slender German with red hair and blue eyes sat down to write a letter to his aunt. Once he had served as a page to Hapsburg Emperor Leopold I. But now, through his own choosing, Marcus Antonius Kappus, 32, a native of the Carniolan village of Steinbuchel, labored as a rancher, nurse, and itinerant preacher in a region he described to his aunt that day as "the end of the underworld... 2,400 German miles from home."

GERMAN SPEAKING Jesuit Missionaries WERE THE FIRST TO TAME PIMERIA ALTA

The end of the underworld? Northern Sonora, Mexico, which then included modern-day southern Arizona, was often called the Pimeria Alta, or "Land of the Upper Pima Indians."

Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, Kappus' good friend, close neighbor, and occasional traveling companion, is by far the most famous missionary in the Spanish-Colonial era of Arizona history. But between 1689 and 1767, numerous other Jesuits lived in, traveled through, and influenced the history of southern Arizona. Many of them, like Kappus, came from German-speaking families living in western and central Europe. In the 1700s, the term "German" was primarily a cultural and linguistic designation. People whose native language was German often called themselves and each other - Germans no matter where they came from.

"In this strip of land, Pimeria... we were practically all German missionaries," observed one Pimeria Alta Jesuit, Wurzburg native Josef Och, adding, "[We] sat as lone sentries on the farthest borders."

Surrounded by people whose customs and life-styles were foreign to them the Indians on the one hand and the scattered Spanish-Colonial miners, settlers, merchants, and soldiers on the other - the German-speaking Jesuits of the Pimeria Alta led isolated, difficult lives. As 20th-century Jesuit scholar Charles Polzer of the University of Arizona quips, "This was not the Peace Corps. They couldn't go home in two years."

Yet, although often exasperated and frequently in danger, these highly educated, talented, and determined men seldom gave in to despair. Instead they fought loneliness and homesickness by improving their Spanish, learning the Indian languages, working long hours, and observing the land and people around them. Several, including Och, Mannheim native Ignaz Pfefferkorn, Swiss-born Philipp Segesser, and Schlessen native Johann Nentvig, wrote vivid accounts of life in the Pimeria Alta of their day. Because the international boundary did not exist then, they did not distinguish between what is now Sonora and what is now Arizona. It was all Sonora to them. But they did often stress that what they were reporting was common to the whole region. Again and again, their point of reference was Germany. "The desire for beauty is just as strong in the women of Sonora as it is in German women," wrote Pfefferkorn, who lived in present-day Arizona, at Guevavi, between May, 1761, and May, 1763. A close climate watcher, he observed that from October through December the weather was "comparable to the mild spring months in Germany," and that January was "very similar to that which one is accustomed to experience along the Rhine River in March." He also reported that the Pima Indians roasted rodents on spits "as are larks in Germany."

Yet, although often exasperated and frequently in danger, these highly educated, talented, and determined men seldom gave in to despair. Instead they fought loneliness and homesickness by improving their Spanish, learning the Indian languages, working long hours, and observing the land and people around them. Several, including Och, Mannheim native Ignaz Pfefferkorn, Swiss-born Philipp Segesser, and Schlessen native Johann Nentvig, wrote vivid accounts of life in the Pimeria Alta of their day. Because the international

boundary did not exist then, they did not distinguish between what is now Sonora and what is now Arizona. It was all Sonora to them. But they did often stress that what they were reporting was common to the whole region. Again and again, their point of reference was Germany. "The desire for beauty is just as strong in the women of Sonora as it is in German women," wrote Pfefferkorn, who For his part, Och, who had traveled with Pfefferkorn from Germany to Sonora in an oft-interrupted journey that began on July 9, 1754, and lasted more than two years, claimed that the Pimeria Alta "pretty much resembles Germany." He may, however, have been the only person ever to think so. Frustrated by what to him seemed like laziness on the part of the Indians and the Spanish colonists, the arthritis-crippled Och added, "If industrious Germans were in the country, matters would certainly be handled differently."

Much of our knowledge of the customs and life-styles of the early Spanish settlers in the region comes from the quills of the Germans. Pfefferkorn gives wonderfully detailed descriptions of Spanish-Colonial dress in the Pimeria Alta, right down to the footgear: The colonists wrapped their feet in red cloth, and wore leather sandals over that. Segesser and others talk about the Spanish foods, which included posole, tortillas, and roasted red and green chiles. "It bites the tongue mightily," complained Segesser of the chile pepper, adding, "[It] is too hot for me; I burned my tongue upon it only once." Nentvig mentions the traditions of curanderas, "women folk doctors," whom he called "the old Spanish women who have set themselves up as a sort of royal tribunal of medicine."

Because their lives revolved around the Indians, the German-speaking Jesuits wrote in even greater detail about Indian customs, folkways, character, and interactions with the missionaries. One of the first things Segesser discovered when he arrived at his new post, the long abandoned Kino mission of San Xavier del Bac, in the spring of 1732, was that the Indians there performed dance ceremonials nightly. By day, however, they avoided the tasks their new missionary assigned them. Soon the frustrated 42-year-old Swiss, who had grown up in a wealthy family, found that he himself had to become "gardener, mender, cook, sheep-, goat-, and cowherd." Later though, Segesser praised the Pimas for their generosity, their skill as runners, and above all their fine talent as craftspeople: "What the Pima has once seen made, he can imitate."

The longevity and good health of the Indians impressed the Germans, too. Pfefferkorn found himself particularly dazzled by their teeth, which, he wrote, With little else surviving to record their missionary efforts in Spanish Arizona, the letters of Father Marcus Antonius Kappus and Father Philipp Segesser reveal extraordinary details on the hardships of provisioning the Kino missions in the first half of the 18th century.

COURTESY BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND

MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY

care in cleaning them." What a pity that their secret if they had one has been lost to us today.

The Indians had had centuries to devise herbal and other cures for illnesses and injuries, and the Jesuits observed and recorded many of them. Nentvig, in particular, who was ill when he wrote his famous Talked extensively about medicine. He reported an inventive Indian cure for snake-bite. It required that the offending viper be caught and firmly secured with its head between two sticks so that it couldn't bite again. Meanwhile, someone else held the tail out straight so that the snake could not coil. Now put this article down for a moment and try to guess what happened next. Give up? The snakebite victim bit the snake. "At this point something truly re-markable happens," Nentvig insisted. "The patient does not swell, but the snake does, monstrously so, until it bursts." Well, maybe. Or perhaps it was all just a practical joke, and Nentvig didn't know it. Certainly the Indians' good sense of humor shines through in these early anthropolog-ical reports, including their ability to laugh at their own numerous misfortunes. For in-stance, because the Pimas constructed their houses of twigs, straw, and mud, the struc-tures were vulnerable to the wind. "More than once I saw a Sonoran hut, in which an entire family was gathered, torn loose, blown to shreds, and scattered far and wide by a gust of wind," wrote Pfefferkorn. The inhabitants' response to this disaster, he added, was to "laugh with all their might," then busily build another. Not surprisingly, the Indians' good humor sometimes faded when they saw the profound upheavals the missionar-ies' presence produced in their lives and cultures. At Guevavi in 1733, the Pimas retaliated by poisoning Bleiburg native Johann Grazhoffer. Near present-day Luke-ville, Arizona, others murdered big, blond Hildesheim-born Heinrich Ruhen during the 1751 revolt. Several other German-speaking Jesuits, including Nentvig, bare-ly escaped Ruhen's fate in that uprising. And in May, 1757, Indians at Tucson at-tacked and drove out Westphalian native Gottfried Bernhardt Middendorff, 34, who had moved there just four months earlier. But most of the time, the Indians and the Germans found ways to get along. Pfefferkorn, a virtuoso musician, reported-ly discovered that by playing his violin, he could induce the Indians to move their huts close to his. Segesser, who found that the nightly singing and dancing of the Indians at San Xavier del Bac kept him awake, worked out a compromise with them: When he absolutely couldn't stand it any longer, he rang the church bell, and the Indians stopped. Bohemian-born Ignaz Keller and the Indians he worked among became so fond of each other that when his superiors tried to remove the admit-tedly quirky cleric in the early 1750s, the Indians pleaded for, and won, his return. As the Germans moved from mission to mission and traveled to far-flung Indian villages to baptize, preach, and care for the sick and dying, they came to know the countryside well. But the two most ardent explorers were Keller and Bavarian native Jakob Sedelmayr. Keller, who spent nearly three decades interacting with the Indians of the San Pedro and Santa Cruz river valleys of southern Arizona, traveled north-ward toward Hopiland in 1743 but had to abandon the expedition when Indians ambushed his party. Also searching for the Hopis, Sedelmayr took the long way around in 1744, traveling north to the Gila River, west to the Colo-rado, and north to the Bill Williams River.

FOLK TALES IN THE Lukeville-Sonoita

AREA CLAIM THE INDIANS MURDERED Heinrich Ruhen BECAUSE HE REFUSED TO STOP RINGING THE CHURCH BELL.

But he lacked guides, and finally the disappointed explorer had to turn back. Predicting mining booms of the 19th century he wrote, "If these rivers ever be colonized, there remains the hope of discovering precious metals." The difficulties of frontier life run like a muted leitmotiv through the Jesuits' writings. After Nentvig's eyesight failed, he had to wait years for glasses until another missionary died and Nentvig inherited his. Worse, there were no wells in the Pimeria Alta, and bacteria-contaminated water led to frequent illnesses. Moreover, what Nentvig labeled as "insects and disgusting creatures" bothered them all. The spider-phobic Segesser believed that black widow spiders passed their time waiting to leap out and grab people. Och grumbled about the "thousand-million fleas," as well as the endless nightly howling of the Indians' multitudinous dogs. Once Pfefferkorn returned from an eight-day trip to find that while he was gone, moths had devoured all the blue cloth he had bought for the Indians. And one morning, he woke up to find a coral snake under his pillow. Such tribulations, along with the isolation, made for a "wearisome and irksome kind of life," he admitted.

Jesuit Missionaries

But the greatest hardship of all came in 1767, when anti-Jesuit advisers to King Charles III of Spain persuaded him to expel all Jesuits from the Spanish colonies of the New World. In the brutal months that followed, many died, including Nentvig. After the Jesuits left, the Indians at San Xavier del Bac passed on to their children stories of the Black Robes, including the legend that the Jesuits would one day return. By chance, when Charles Poston, Arizona Territory's first superintendent of Indian affairs, visited San Xavier del Bac early in 1864, two Jesuit priests from California accompanied him. "They were received by the Indians with great demonstrations of joy," Poston wrote, with the "ringing of bells and explosion of fire-works.' Today the legacy of the German-speaking Jesuits survives on both sides of the border. Folk tales in the Lukeville-Sonoita area, for instance, claim the Indians murdered Heinrich Ruhen because he refused to stop ringing the church bell. Legends of wandering Jesuits, searching for lost souls or lost gold (riches which, by all reliable accounts, never existed) - circulate in the Pimeria Alta still. Over the centuries, the medical writings of Jesuit brother Johann Steinhoffer of Moravia have been incorporated into the lore and treatments that curanderas on both sides of the border use even now. And scholars concede cautiously that some Indian and Mexican-American musical traditions could have originated with the German-speaking Jesuits, as folk history asserts. But the best legacy of all is the writings they left behind and the world these writings evoke. Today, driving the roads of Pimeria Alta in southern Arizona and northern Sonora with books by Pfefferkorn, Nentvig, and others in hand, it's easy to slip back two centuries and more and see the world through their eyes. Easier still is to follow the advice of Philipp Segesser, who in many letters home mentioned the magic of the moon-light on the desert and the hills. In a letter he wrote to his brother from San Xavier del Bac on June 8, 1732, but which he could have written to us today, Segesser said that whenever they saw the moon-light, it "should remind my dear friends that Father Philipp greets them all and asks them not to forget him."