When the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino and his party approached the Pima settlement of Tumacácori in January 1691, they were riding the wave of a century of missionary expansion northward along New Spain's west coast corridor.  The Jesuits had reaped tens of thousands of baptisms and made themselves the most powerful social and economic force in the region.  But the tide carried them no further north than the Pimeria Alta, the home of the upper Pima Indians.

It was here that Kino founded mission San Cayetano de Tumacácori on the east bank of the Santa Cruz River.  The next day Mission San Gabriel was founded at Guevavi, 15 miles upriver.  After Guevavi was made mission headquarters in 1701, the priest there periodically traveled to preach at Tumacácori and other visitas without resident missionaries.

"During the eighteenth century, relations between Jesuits and neighboring Spaniards were sometimes severely strained.  The mission communities often included the best agricultural and grazing lands in the area, as well as the most reliable sources of water.  As the Indian population declined, other settlers pressured civil and military administrators to divide the mission lands, something resisted by the priests.  Also, Indians were the principal workers on the ranches and in the mines, and, to a large extent, the Jesuits controlled this labor force and opposed efforts to make greater use of it.  Finally, the missionaries concentrated attention on the needs of the Indians and were sometimes reluctant or unable to perform religious services for others.  As a result of the resentment some settlers felt toward the Jesuits, civil and military administrators were quick to blame the priests for Indian uprisings such as the Pima Revolt of 1751." (The Pimeria Alta, Southwestern Research Center, Tucson, Arizona)

During the Pima Revolt, the Indians at Tumacácori fled to the hills. One result of the Pima Revolt was the founding of a 50-man presidio at Tubac.  When the Indians returned to Tumacácori, the mission was resettled on the west bank of the Santa Cruz River.

In 1767 King Charles III, for political reasons, abruptly banished the Jesuits from all his realms.  The Franciscans who took over the missionary effort in Pimeria Alta inherited all the woes that had frustrated the Jesuits: restless neophytes, Apache hostility, disease, encroaching settlers, and lack of government support.  The mission at Guevavi was abandoned by 1776. The Tubac garrison was transferred to Tucson in 1776, and by 1786 only a hundred Indians remained at Tumacácori.  The next year an 80-man Pima Indian company reoccupied Tubac, but as Apache pressure mounted, Calabazas too was eventually abandoned.

About 1800 Fray Narcisco Gutiérrez began building a large church to replace Tumacácori's modest Jesuit structure.  But his mission's poverty and the Mexican wars for independence slowed construction, and when all Spanish priests were forced by a Mexican decree to leave the missions in 1828, the scaffolding still clung to the bell tower.  The Indians and a few settlers, with the aid of visiting native-born Mexican priest, hung on for another 20 years, but a series of Apache raids and the hard winter of 1848 drove the last residents from Tubac and Tumacácori.

The mission at Tumacácori wa sustained for a century and a half by members of two religious orders. Jesuit "blackrobes" laid the foundation and Franciscan "greyrobes" carried on their work with the same courage and perseverance.  In addition to the Jesuits and Franciscans, there were also secular priests and priests with affiliation to no particular order.  In a climate of exploitation, they were often the only ones who had the Indians' interests at heart.  The final abandonment of Tumacácori broke the 157-year thread of continuity begun by Father Kino.