Tumacácori National Historical Park

Long before it was a mission, this was an O'odham place. The people who farmed the Santa Cruz River here, raising corn, beans, and squash on flood-fed fields and drawing water through hand-dug acequias, called themselves O'odham, "the people," and had lived in the valley the Spanish would name the Pimería Alta for generations beyond counting. In January 1691 the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino rode up the river to their village of Tumacácori. The mission he began here was the first in what is now Arizona, one of more than twenty he planted across the Pimería Alta before his death in 1711.

What followed was neither simple conquest nor simple welcome. The O'odham took Spanish wheat, which ripened in the lean winter months, and made it their own; they also rose against Spanish demands in the Pima Revolt of 1751, after which the mission crossed to the west bank and was rechristened San José de Tumacácori. When Spain expelled the Jesuits from its empire in 1767, Franciscan priests took over. Around 1800 they began the tall adobe church whose ruin still stands, modeled on San Xavier del Bac to the north. It was never finished. Poverty, Mexican independence, the loss of the last resident priest in 1828, and relentless Apache raids stalled the work.

The end came in the winter of 1848. After another raid, in bitter cold, the people of Tumacácori gathered their saints and walked north to join the O'odham at San Xavier near Tucson. The church stood empty, weathering and looted, until Theodore Roosevelt made it a national monument in 1908, among the first in the country. In 1990 Congress enlarged it into a national historical park, folding in the older mission ruins of Guevavi and Calabazas nearby.

Today the park holds the roofless church, a walled cemetery and round mortuary chapel, the convento and granary, a restored orchard, and a rebuilt O'odham ki of bent saplings and brush. The Santa Cruz Valley was always a crossroads, where O'odham, Yaqui, Apache, Spanish, and Mexican lives met and mixed, and Tumacácori tells that braided story without flattening it. On the first weekend of December the O'odham, Yoeme, and their neighbors gather here for the Fiesta de Tumacácori, and the old ground fills with living voices again.