USA > Arizona > Arizona, prehistoric, aboriginal, pioneer, modern; the nation's youngest commonwealth within a land of ancient culture, Vol. I > Part 12
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COSMOGRAPHERS OF THE OLDEN TIME
Old pictures and old maps always are of keen interest when illustrating scenes or showing the natural features and settlement of some land we know. No artists accompanied the Spanish explorers or missionaries of old, but even in those remote times there were geographers.
In the Munk Library is a very rare, quaint and beautiful volume, a "Cosmo- graphie, contayning the Chorographie and Historie of the Whole World and all the Principall Kingdomes, Provinces, Seas and Isles Thereof," by Peter Heylyn of London, of date 1677 and noted as the fifth edition. The Spanish map of New Spain herewith reproduced from this volume is notable especially for its delinea- tion of the American west coast. California is shown as an island, its eastern shores laved by the Mare Vermiglio, into which was made to flow the Rio del Norte, in the text described as rising in the land of Quivera, separating the province of Tiguex from that of New Mexico and falling into the sea above the Province of Cinaloa. Quivera is assumed to have traffic with China or Ca-
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HENRY R. GRANJON Bishop of Catholic diocese of Tucson
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thay, "for when Vasquez de Coronado conquered it, he saw in the farther sea certain ships, not of common making, which seemed to be well laden and did bear in their prows the figures of Pellicans; which could not be conjectured to come from any country but one of these two."
Equally strange and interesting are the cosmographer's references to the Vermillion Sea and to its northern extension, the so-called Rio Buena Guia, which, Heylyn insisted, was in reality a strait of the sea, with a rapid current from the northward. He wrote that it was known as a river till about 1620, "at which time some adventurers, beating on these coasts, accidentally fell upon a straight but violent passage on the north hereof, which brought them with a strong cur- rent into Mer Vermiglio; discovering by that accident that the waters falling into that sea was not a river, as formerly had been supposed, but a violent break- ing in of the Northern ocean ; by consequence, that this part of California is not a demi-island, or peninsula, but a perfect island."
Much better known is the map of Padre Kino, drawn from his own travel experience in the upper part of New Spain. In it he used three languages, Latin, Spanish and his own native German. The nomenclature is well worth careful study. Moqui is used in place of Cíbola. The Colorado is given its correct Latin name, but the Gila-Salt is the Rio Azul (Blue River) or Blan Fluss, the latter being merely the German of it. Into this flows the Hila Fluss or Spine Finss. "Spine" may have been intended either for Sping (spring) or Spinne (spider), both German. The latter theory is defensible, for tarantulas undoubtedly were to be found in the Gila valley. The Santa Cruz and San Pedro are the only other streams noted within the present Arizona. The Apaches are noted in proper locality, as are the Yumas and Coco-Maricopas, the last an early-day compre- hension of the Cocopahs, Maricopas and Chimehuevis. There was a brave show- ing of missions or places of priestly visitation. Above the Gila's mouth on the Colorado was placed the mission of St. Dionysius, with the date 1700. The ruins of this mission were found by Emory in 1846. The visitas of St. Peter and St. Paul were in the Gila valley to the eastward, with an establishment date of 1699. Similarly, most of them merely points where mass had been celebrated, were the designations farther up the Azul, St. Mathias, St. Maccabœus, St. Thaddeus and St. Simeon de Tucsam. Continuing up the Santa Cruz branch were St. Angelo, St. Bonifacius, St. Francisens, St. Catherine, St. Augustinus (the In- dian visita near the site of Tucson) and St. Xavier du Bac, which is noted as "Oberfuhr," indicating its principal place among the missions. On the San Pedro were St. Augustinus, St. Marc and St. Salvator. Casa Grande, much mis- placed, is shown as a church because two devotional services, at least, had been known within its walls.
Another missionary map was that of Padre Pedro Font, drawn by him with much skill at Tubutama in 1777 and found in the archives of California. It has its principal importance in its tracing of the two routes taken by de Anza to California, Font having been spiritual adviser on the second expedition, and an indication of the path of Padre Garcés on his Moqui trip. Most of Kino's visitas were not noted on this later map, but on the Santa Cruz have been added the presidios of Tuqulson and Tubac, the mission of Tumacacori and the village of Calabasas. There were presidios at Santa Cruz, San Bernardino and Janos and a settlement as Fronteras.
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It is evident that the Spaniards built in many places till local conditions, such as lack of water or an over-supply of hostile Indians, made them move on. The first habitations are assumed to have been the wattled huts of the natives. But there was early change to structures of adobe, sun-dried mud bricks. This was counseled or commanded by none other than the King of Spain himself, in a proclamation made public at Guadalajara, December 20, 1538, and to a degree enforced by Coronado in northern New Spain.
The good friars gave names of sanctity to every water course, hill and Indian village. Nowhere were the blessings of the saints more profusely showered than upon the natural features of the land that now is Arizona. These names so devoutly bestowed in the neighboring California, New Mexico and Sonora have been maintained, but in Arizona they have been lost, very generally, even in localities where the Spanish language long was predominant. The lordly San Francisco mountain, dominating the landscape in much of northern Arizona, owes its name to the designation of the region by Padre Marco de Niza as El Reyno de San Francisco. Of rivers, pious designations still attach to the Santa Maria, Santa Cruz, San Pedro, San Carlos and San Francisco. Of localities the postoffice list is shockingly modern. The village of Garcés in Cochise County possibly has few inhabitants who appreciate the honor of the name or who know its pronunciation. Other official reminiscences of the past are San Bernardino, near the olden-time presidio site, San Carlos and its Indian reservation, San Rafael, within an old Spanish grant and San Simon in the eastern valley earlier known as that of the Sanz. Saint David and Saint Joseph are of Mormon nam- ing, while Saint Johns was so designated by one of the sons of Moses. The saints are considered in a few other scattered examples, such as San Xavier, the Santa Catalina and Santa Rita mountains, Santo Domingo wash, ranchitos such as San José, near Solomonville, but, on the whole, the nomenclature of Arizona is secular in tone to a remarkable degree.
EARLY DESIGNATION OF THE STREAMS
Save the Colorado, all Arizona streams may he described as torrential in character, none of them deep enough or of low enough gradient to carry any sort of navigation. The largest is the Salt, rather oddly mapped as flowing into the Gila, a much smaller stream, above the junction: Early Spanish explorers named all the Arizona streams, but few of their names remain. The Colorado first was known as el Rio Tison (firebrand) and then Buena Guia. Father Kino in 1697 called it Rio de los Martires and Escalante Rio de los Cosninos, after the Indians of the country. As interpreted by an early explorer, the Colorado River by the Cuchans (Yumas) was called the Hah-weal-asientic, the first syllable apparently standing for river, for Bill Williams Fork was called Hah-weal-hah- mook and the Gila Hah-qua-si-il-la. The Maricopas called the Gila Hah-quah- sie-eel-ish. Whipple interpreted the Yuma name for the Gila as "Salt Water."
It would appear that the "il-la" part of the aboriginal designation is suffi- cient reason for the word "Gila," which in days gone by had many other forms. The name seems to have been used first in 1630, when Benairdes wrote of the "Xila." Oñate in 1604, probably on suggestion of his chaplain, called the stream Rio del Nombre de Jesus. Pattie, as late as 1825, said it had been known as Rio del Nombre Jesus Cristo. Padre Kino, 1698, named it Rio de los Apostoles, with
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its confluents, the Salado, Verde, Santa Cruz and San Pedro, grouped as Los Evangelistas. He also called the lower Gila the Blue and the upper the Hila or Spine, as noted on his map. Other names found for the stream were the Sonaca and the Coral.
The Salt seems mixed up with the visit of Friar Juan de la Asuncion in 1538, for it was known in early Spanish times as Rio de la Asuncion, as well as Asump- cion. Coues inclines to the belief that the friar really discovered the Gila. Sedelmaier about 1748 wrote of the Azul and of the Rio de la Asumpcion, "com- posed of two rivers, El Salado and El Verde, which on their way to the Gila run through a very pleasant level country of arable land, inhabited by the Coco- Maricopas, who were separated from the Pimas by a desert"-all of which is far from clear. Pattie knew it as the Black.
The Salt also was known as the Salinas, a Spanish form that should have been retained, rather than the less euphonious English name it bears. The headwaters of Salt River are not saline. The waters of the stream at any point are healthful enough, but in the lower stretches are tinctured by a strong flow from Carrizo Creek, a stream which passes through large deposits of calcium carbonate and calcium sulphate. Whipple in 1851 wrote: "The Salinas is a beautiful stream, clear as crystal, large as the Gila and, to our surprise, not salt."
In one old chronicle the Verde is named as Rio Alamos, most appropriate, for no stream in Arizona has more cottonwoods. In general the Verde best was known as the San Francisco, because its headwaters were near the San Fran- cisco mountains.
PADRES-Rather for uniformity, the designation "Padre" (Father) has been given generally to priests and friars of both Jesuit and Franciscan orders who, under Spanish auspices, took part in any of the southwestern military expeditions or missionary efforts. This is not exact, as many of the missionaries really were friars. Even Marco de Niza, who had high rank within his order, was known as Fraile.
CHAPTER VI
AMERICAN OCCUPATION
Passage of Pike, Pattie and Carson-Mexican Rule to 1846-Kearny's Victorious
March Through to the Pacific-The Mormon Battalion-Its Capture of Tucson- Old Bill Williams-American Rule in New Mexico-Peonage Accepted as Legal.
The purchase of Louisiana from the French in 1803 was the cause of the entry into the Rocky Mountain region of many bold hunters and trappers, who passed by the buffalo of the plains to look for the more uncommon pelts that were to be found on the headwaters of the Colorado and Rio Grande. Many of these trappers worked southward to Taos, whence came supplies of the grain and fruits so valued by the hunters.
A notably historic milestone was the arrival in Santa Fé, March 3, 1807, of Capt. Zebulon M. Pike and his command, the first American soldiers ever known in the Southwest, captured by the Spaniards while camped, in error, on Spanish territory on the headwaters of the Rio Grande. On the whole, Pike was well treated by the Spaniards, though compelled to go to Chihuahua, and his report of his experience was the first of consequence made by any American concerning the character of Spanish occupation of what we now know as the Southwest.
Among the mountain trappers were the Patties, Sylvester and son. The younger, James O., left a record of his journeyings. Mexico and its dependen- cies only a couple of years before had passed from the Spanish crown when the Patties, with the consent of the New Mexican authorities, late in 1824, started down the "Helay" looking for beaver, finding the trapping field a good one.
The younger Pattie in 1826, while the elder remained at the Santa Rita mines, accompanied a party of French trappers on a trip down the Gila. The narrative is interesting mainly from a circumstantial account of a conflict with the Papagos, designated as "Papawar," at a village near the junction of the Gila with the Salt. This is doubly remarkable because the Papagos usually have been friendly with Americans and secondly because the location, within the Pima country, was one very soon thereafter occupied by the Maricopas. The Indians had met the party with all expressions of amity, but were distrusted by Pattie, who, his warn- ings unheeded, made a separate camp with one of the Frenchmen. At midnight the expected happened and the French party was almost annihilated, but Pattic and his companion fled northward. They reached Salt River (noted as the Black) and for observation climbed a hill that some imaginative narrator has identified as Hayden's Butte. on the edge of the present town of Tempe, where they were joined
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by the French captain, the only member of the main party who had escaped. There is a bit of flavor of fiction about the whole narrative, especially in the opportune finding the next night of a party of twenty-nine Americans in camp nearby. With dramatic effect was told how the conjoined party marched against the offending village, how the warriors were enticed to the river by the sight of two of the white men and how in the ensuing melee 110 dead Indians were left on the field after the villagers fled. Then the town was entered, fragments of the unfortunate Frenchmen, scattered all over the village, were gathered together and decently buried and the town was destroyed by fire. One section of the new party, according to Pattie, trapped northward to the land of the "Mokee."
On one expedition the Patties worked down the Gila to its junction with the Colorado, which they called the Red River, on the way having a little trouble with the Apaches. Upon reaching the Colorado they started upstream, probably the first white men ever seen in the locality since the murder of Padre Garcés. Very little finesse seems to have been used, so there was trouble with the fearless Mojaves, who ambushed and slaughtered a number of men who had gone a short distance up what later was known as Bill Williams Fork. A rescuing party only found fragments of the bodies, apparently prepared for roasting before a great fire, probably the only assumption of cannibalism ever charged against the south- western Indians. It was told that the principal chief of the Mojaves shot a horse and himself immediately was killed by the Americans. It is to be remarked that the Mojaves on the whole seemed in the early days to be about the best disposed of all the Colorado River Indians, and so it must be assumed that the Pattie party gave cause for the treatment given it by the redskins.
A record was made in the narrative of arrival at a point on the northward - journey where there was encountered an impassable cañon, around which the party had to climb, the river seen at an immense depth below, in a great chasm. Then there followed a journey of fourteen days, in which it is claimed a distance of 100 leagues was traveled and yet such a careful commentator as Dellenbaugh can not figure it out whether the party went to the north or the south of the Grand Cañon. April 10 the river again was reached and keen pleasure was felt in the abundance of water and in the fact that the Americans again had come into a beaver country. The party finally made its way through the wilderness to the Yellowstone country and thence to Santa Fé, where the Governor confiscated all the furs brought back.
Undismayed by this experience and after the younger had made a trading trip to Guaymas, the Patties in the fall of 1827 started again for the Gila, with a numerous party and under the authority of the Governor of New Mexico. Only a section managed to reach the Colorado, where the horses were stampeded by the Yumas. The trappers burned the huts of a Yuma village, but could not regain their horses and thus were left in desperate plight. They had tools, however, and managed to construct eight canoes, assumed to have been cottonwood dugouts, with which they started down the Colorado, hoping to reach the Mexican settle- ments. The canoes were united in pairs with a platform amidships, on which were piled the supplies and the furs of the expedition, which started on its journey into the unknown December 9, 1827. There was good trapping along the river and the supply of pelts increased, so that even another canoe had to be constructed. They found the Cocopah Indians friendly, but on New Year's Day fell in with a ruder
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tribe, the Pipis, probably Papagos or Seris. They were mystified by the action of the tide and had the same experience with the great bore of the Colorado as had been known to the earlier Spanish explorers.
On February 10 at last had to be given up the plan of making the journey by water. The rich cargo of furs was buried in deep pits and the Americans started over the desolate stretches of Lower California, finally making their way to the settlement of Santa Catalina. This mission was destroyed by Indians in 1840. It was a point not far from San Diego, to which the disarmed Americans were marched and imprisoned. They were treated with much severity, the Mexicans choosing to interpret their visit as that of a hostile force. The elder Pattie died in prison. The younger was permitted to go back with a Mexican party to find the buried furs, which in the meantime had heen ruined by water. The sur- viving Pattie finally was permitted to embark upon a vessel bound southward and managed by way of the City of Mexico to return to his Kentucky home, near Cincinnati, Ohio, penniless after six years of strenuous endeavor and of keen peril.
KIT CARSON AND EARLY TRAVEL
While the noted Kit Carson never had residence in Arizona, he had much to do with its pioneer history. In 1827, at the age of 17, and a year after he had left Missouri, he was on the upper Gila. Soon thereafter, a member of a trapping party led by Ewing Young, he had his first Indian fight, with Apaches on Salt River, in which fifteen redskins were killed, without the loss of a white man. Young trapped along the Salt and San Francisco (Verde) and then crossed the desert to the Colorado, into the country of the Mojaves, who treated the party well, providing food that was badly needed. In 1829 Carson's return was made to New Mexico, by the Gila route, with trouble on the trail with Indians, presumably Yumas. In one fight ten Indians were killed. He passed again over the same route in 1846, with fifteen men, having dispatches from Fremont, with whom he had been in California. He was turned back in New Mexico to guide the Kearny column and, with Lieutenant Beale, gained large credit in creeping through the Mexican lines into San Diego. In March, 1847, with Lieutenant Beale, he carried dispatches back along the Gila route with a guard of a dozen men. Reaching Washington, he was presented to President Polk, who appointed him Lieutenant in the U. S. Rifle Corps and sent him back with dispatches, taking the northern route through Arizona, with one Indian fight. Returning, at Santa Fé he learned that Congress had refused to confirm his appointment. In August, 1853, with a well-armed force of herders, he drove 6,500 sheep from the Rio Grande to California, there selling at $5.50 a head. Returning, he was appointed Indian Agent for New Mexico. His service during the Civil War is given mention in this work. He died at Fort Lyon on the Arkansas River, May 23, 1868, of an aneurism, due to a fall from a horse years before.
In 1827 a Doctor Anderson passed down the Gila Valley to California, leading a considerable party. The expedition had no trouble whatever with Indians, and noted particularly hospitable treatment at the hands of the Pimas and of the Maricopas, the latter tribe being encountered about eighty miles to the westward of its present location on the Gila.
Another noted character of pioneer days in the Southwest was Jedediah S.
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Smith, the first white man to cross the plains, who appeared to have been as patriarchal in his demeanor as would be indicated by his name. With sixteen men, he entered what now is northeastern Arizona in the fall of 1826, coming down the Virgen River, which he named after President Adams, passing into the country of the Mojaves, whom he found peaceful. Thence he journeyed to San Gabriel, where he had trouble with the Mexican authorities, but was released. Returning to the Colorado, the Indians, possibly not Mojaves, said to have been instigated by the Spaniards, though this is a doubtful story, attacked his party, killing ten men and capturing all its equipment. With two others, Smith es- caped into California. He was killed in 1831 by Comanches in Northern New Mexico.
In 1832 Isaac J. Sparks led an expedition down the Gila River to Yuma and made his way through to Los Angeles. This party had much trouble with Indians. In one encounter about fifteen Indians were killed of a band that had been acci- dentally encountered while on its way to Sonora on a horse-stealing expedition.
In 1834 a party of northern trappers, said to have been 200 in number, marched from the mouth of Bill Williams Fork to the Moqui villages and thence to the northward. Apaches about 1836, on the upper Gila, killed the Charles Kemp party of twenty-two trappers.
A party of nearly fifty passed through Arizona in 1844, including Francois de van Cœur, who was one of Kearny's scouts two years later. This party had continued encounters with hostile Apaches and lost one man on the trip. South- ern Arizona was reached by following the valley of the San Francisco River (Verde) to its junction with the Salt.
A number of parties of trappers, hunters and prospectors drifted into Arizona during the score of years following, before the Mexican regime had passed, while many New Mexicans passed though to California. Pauline Weaver, a French trapper, early established personal relations with the Indians of several tribes and made comprehensive trips throughout the southwestern part of the present Arizona long before he led the famous Rich Hill expedition in 1863. He is said to have visited the Pima villages as early as 1832.
Two years after the road had been made clear by American military expedi- tions, in 1848 a party, organized in New Orleans and headed by Dr. O. M. Wozen- craft, made its way through southern Arizona, probably the first to traverse what later became one of the principal transcontinental highways, by way of Apache Pass and the Sonoita, finding protection and food among the Pimas and ferrying the Colorado by means of a rawhide boat. Thereafter the same road, though usually by way of Tucson, was taken by no less than 60,000 travelers, bound for California and the gold fields. Supply stations were established at different points along the route, and a regular ferry was started at Yuma.
These were days of harvest for the Apaches, who made southern Arizona a veritable charnel ground. In the vicinity of Apache Pass, bones of slain cattle paralleled the road for miles, and little clumps of human graves were in sight from any point. The emigrants usually traveled in companies. Careless ones separated themselves only to be spied by the savage watchers of the hills and swept down upon and destroyed. The Apaches of those days had no occupation other than that of rapine and plunder, and the passage of the well-provided and
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almost defenceless Americans offered opportunities for bloodshed and pillage that appealed to them as ideal.
FREMONT AND BILL WILLIAMS
John C. Frémont, the "Pathfinder," passed through Arizona in 1849, leaving Kit Carson's home in Taos in February and making his way to California by the Gila route, through Socorro, Santa Cruz, Tubac and Tucson, apparently without incident of importance. The trip was made possible by Felix Aubrey, who, at Taos, had loaned him $1,000, with which to purchase mules for the trip. Fremont at the time had hardly recovered from the hardships of his fourth expedition, in which, despite the warnings of western hunters, he had tried to cross the high passes of the Rockies in the dead of winter. He laid the blame elsewhere than on himself. In a letter to his wife, dated January 27, 1849, he wrote : "I had engaged as a guide an old trapper well known as Bill Williams, and who had spent twenty-five years of his life in trapping various parts of the Rocky Mountains. The error of the journey was committed in engaging this man. He proved never to have in the least known or entirely to have forgotten the whole region of country through which we were to pass." This guide was the same Bill Williams whose name is borne by a mountain and by a river in northern and western Arizona, wherein he had trapped for years. He is said to have been a Methodist preacher in Missouri, but showed no piety when he drifted, about 1825, into the Columbia river region, where he soon became noted as an Indian fighter, as well as for a broad knowledge of Indian tongues and for his habit of hunting alone. The Utes called him "Lone Elk."
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