TUMACACORI Historic Resource Study

¹Garate (1995, 2003) provides a thorough account of the controversial discovery of the bolas y planchas de plata at the place that gave the state of Arizona its name. In late October 1736, Antonio Siraumea, a Yaqui prospector living at the small mining camp of Nuestra Señora de la Límpia Concepción del Agua Caliente, discovered a large ball of silver in a canyon about fifteen miles southwest of Guevavi and the San Luis Valley. When other prospectors at Agua Caliente learned of his find, they rushed to the canyon and found huge chunks and slabs of silver. No one had ever encountered silver like that before, and when Juan Bautista de Anza, captain of Fronteras presidio, arrived to protect royal interests, he did not know whether the silver was a natural deposit, buried treasure, or the remains of an illegal mining operation. He therefore impounded the silver until its origin could be determined. If it were natural, the Spanish Crown was only entitled to its royal fifth. If it were treasure, however, it belonged to the king, although some authorities asserted that a quarter should be given to its discoverer. Examples were sent to Mexico City. Anza also assembled five mining experts, who concluded that the silver was natural, not a treasure. The controversy dragged on for more than a decade, but most of the silver was returned to the miners who found it. No other major deposits were discovered, however. Like most booms, Arizonac petered out. But its legend and name lived on, promoted by U.S. and European speculators more than a century later (Officer 1987, 1991).

²According to Garate, Sicurisuta is a place name of Basque origin. "Siku means 'dry' and can be used to describe a rocky outcropping. Erizut means a 'vertical finger.' The letter a means 'the,' and the letter c (more properly k) pluralizes whatever it follows. Thus, siku-erizut-a is possibly the 'upright rocky finger,' which is a perfect description of Thumb Rock above Peña Blanca Lake northwest of Guevavi and present-day Nogales, Arizona" (Garate 2003:266, n.47).

³Mexican gray wolves (Canis lupus baileyi) favored the Madrean evergreen woodlands of southeastern Arizona and northeastern Sonora, where their preferred prey were Coues white-tail deer (Odocoileus virginianus couesi). According to biologist David Brown, "The Santa Rita, Tumacácori, Atascosa-Pajarito, and Patagonia mountains were all well known as wolf country, as were the Canelo Hills. At least equal numbers inhabited the steeper and rougher, but larger Chiricahua, Huachuca, and Pinaleño mountains. A number of wolves were also recorded from the Catalina Mountains—some of them as recently as the 1950s. All these mountain ranges were, and are, good Coues white-tailed deer country" (Brown 1992:22-23).

The Weekly Arizonian, Arizona's first English-language newspaper published in Tubac, reported several encounters with grizzlies in the Santa Rita Mountains in the late 1850s (Brown 1985). Geoscientist Paul Martin (personal communication) speculates that grizzlies may have expanded their range southward in response to Spanish livestock in northern Sonora and southern Arizona.

⁴Withing the comunidad of Cucurpe, Sonora, surface flow of the San Miguel River is controlled by local waterusers' associations called communes de agua. Water pumped from wells, on the other hand, is unregulated even though most of the wells are shallow and located along the floodplain, tapping the same aquifers that feeds surface flow (Sheridan 1988, 1996).

⁵In 1640, Pedro de Perea, captain of the presidio of Sinaloa from 1626 to 1630, received concessions from the viceroy to found a new alcaldia (district) in central Sonora. Twenty-five soldiers from the presidio of Sinaloa accompanied him at his own expense. He also paid to bring their families to the new alcaldia, called Nueva Andalucia. The expedition established its headquarters near Tuape along the San Miguel River in 1641. When the captain of the presidio demanded his soldiers back, Perea recruited twelve new soldiers and their families from New Mexico. He also brought along five Franciscan missionaries, triggering conflict with the Jesuit missionaries already working in Sonora. Perea died in 1644; in 1651, the viceroy sided with the Jesuits and ordered the Franciscans out of Sonora (Almada 1983; Atondo Rodríguez and Ortega Soto 1996).

⁶Politica Indiana Libro VI, Capitulo 12, número 3 (Solórzano Pereira 1930[1647]).

⁷Ortiz, who resided in Tucson at the time, paid $747 and three reales at the public auction of the grant in Arizpe. But even though there is an entry in the treasury book for that amount, the Ortiz family either never received formal title or lost the title. In 1833, Tomás and Ignacio Ortiz, sons of Agustín, petititioned the alcalde of Tubac to reconfirm their ownership of the two sitios. Three witnesses stated that the Ortiz family had occupied the grant since 1812 and gave vague boundaries for it. Apparently, no survey was conducted, however, and in 1902, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to confirm the grant because its exact location had not been specified (Wagoner 1975).

⁸The earliest known título de merced to Canoa was issued to the Ortiz brothers in Ures, Sonora, in 1849. The original title, if it ever existed, has not been located. The Ortiz brothers claimed it was destroyed in a fire in Tubac. Willey (1979) argues that the present boundaries of Canoa Ranch are incorrect. He believes that the resurvey conducted by deputy surveyor John Harris in 1880 ignored the point from which Elías González started—La Canoa—and failed to locate any of the landmarks Elías González designated as corners of the grant. In his words, Harris' survey "must stand as a monument to incompetent land surveying in Arizona history" (Willey 1979:155).

⁹Two cousins—José Ignacio Ramón Elías González and his sister Eulalia—obtained the San Ignacio del Babocómari grant on a tributary of the San Pedro that same year. The following year, another cousin—José Florentino Rafael Elías González—received the San Rafael del Valle grant. The Elías González family or families related by marriage like the Ortiz and Pérez (owners of the San Bernardino grant) controlled most of the land grants issued in Arizona (Officer 1987).

¹⁰San José de Sonoita, Arizona Surveyor General's Office Journal of Private Land Claims, University of Arizona Library Film 2174:304.

¹¹Ibid., pg. 306.

¹²In 1762, Spanish authorities ordered all Sobaipuris to abandon the San Pedro in order to reinforce the communities of the Santa Cruz. Some of the O'odham frontiersmen settled at Sonoita, where thirty-four O'odham families, plus two widowers and two widows, resided in 1763 (Kessell 1970). Seven years later, only about twenty-five O'odham remained. Then, in the spring of 1770, Apaches surrounded the visita and massacred nineteen of the inhabitants, including eleven children (Kessell 1976). By 1773, Sonoita was abandoned.

¹³Apparently, the Sobaipuris from Sonoita dreamed of returning. Both they and refugees from Guevavi and Soamca maintained distinct identities and lived in separate rancherías when they withdrew to Calabasas (Kessell 1976). But those dreams flickered out in the face of Apache hostilities. Plans to reestablish the visita never materialized. The deserted pueblo became a funnel through which the Apaches descended upon the Santa Cruz.

¹⁴San José de Sonoita, op cit., pg. 306-307.

¹⁵Ibid., pg. 308.

¹⁶Ibid., pg. 309.

¹⁷Ibid., pg. 308.

¹⁸James Officer, who compiled genealogies of the Elías family, notes that even though Joaquín identified himself as his brother Rafael's agent when he petitioned for the San Rafael del Valle grant, "Descendants of Rafael Elías do not include Joaquín among his brothers. The exact relationship remains obscure" (Officer 1987:356 n.52).

¹⁹Tumacácori had a population of 121 in 1820 (Jackson 1994:62).

²⁰Wagoner (1975) identifies him as Francisco Elías González, married to Balvanera Redondo and father of José Elías, who received title to the grant on January 7, 1843. Officer (1987:374 n.2) is not so sure, arguing that he could have been Francisco González Forano, the prefect at San Ignacio during the 1850s.

²¹Joaquin Quiroga, Cucurpe, [May] 31, 1843. AHES, Carpetón 121, AHS, Tucson.

²²Ibid.

²³Ibid.

²⁴The displacement of the O'odham occurred even more rapidly in the western Pimería Alta. The two major O'odham rebellions of 1695 and 1751 originated in the Altar-Magdalena-Concepción drainage. But the transfer of the ancient presidio of Sinaloa to Altar in the mid-1750s provided a nucleus for non-Oodham settlement in the watershed. (Polzer and Sheridan 1997). Then, in 1770, muleskinners accompanying Spanish soldiers chasing Seris discovered gold at Cieneguilla to the south. By 1773, 7,000 gambucinos (prospectors) and the people who preyed on them had descended upon the placer deposits, making the new real of San Ildefonso de Cieneguilla the largest settlement in Sonora. Spaniards, castas (people of mixed race), Yaquis, and Mayos, the prospectors scattered along local arroyos and dry-winnowed their gold because there was so little water (Del Río 1981; Escandon 1985; Stern and Jackson 1988).

And as Cieneguilla's deposits played out, gambucinos hopped from strike to strike—Santa Rosa de Buenavista (1775), San Francisco de Asís (1803), La Basura, Las Palomas, and Quitovac (1835), El Tren and El Zoni (1844)—bartering their gold to rescatadores (itinerant merchants) for cloth, foodstuffs, and water at one peso a muleload. Gold coinage in Mexico rose sharply, spiking after the discoveries of Cieneguilla and San Francisco de Asís. According to geographer Robert West (1993:79), Cieneguilla sparked "the first authentic gold rushes in North America."

After their defeat at the hand of Gándara, O'odham fought on for two more years. When Gándara's rival, Tucson-born José de Urrea, took over the governorship in 1841, he ordered Lieutenant Colonel Felipe Flores to mount another campaign against the O'odham rebels. In April and May 1842, Flores' force engaged the O'odham in the Baboquivaris once again, killing six and seizing more livestock. The remaining rebels scattered throughout the Papaguería or fled northward to take refuge with the Akimel O'odham and Maricopas on the Gila River. A strong show of military force and offers of amnesty for the rebels brought the so-called "Papago War" to an end by the summer of 1843 (Officer 1987).

By then, Hispanic settlers had taken over most of the former mission communities of the Magdalena-Altar-Concepción watershed. Much of the displacement was due to high O'odham mortality rates. As historian Robert Jackson has demonstrated, O'odham mission populations declined steadily despite continued resettlement by Tohono O'odham and Sobaipuris. When Kino first evangelized the O'odham in the 1690s, 8,645 individuals lived in the missions. By 1821, that number had plummeted to 1,127, a drop of 87 percent. Meanwhile, the total population of the Altar district had risen to 3,879 by 1834. Both epidemic and endemic diseases took their toll on the O'odham, especially upon the young. At Tumacácori, for example, 73 percent of the 123 children born between 1773 and 1825 died before age five and only 7 percent lived to be older than ten (Jackson 1994). The Pimería Alta was receding northward into the basin-and-range country of the Papaguería and the fertile Gila River Valley. Only Bac, Tumacácori, and Tucson sheltered O'odham along the Santa Cruz.

²⁵Ignacio Lopez, Título de Venta, Tesoreria del Departamento de Sonora, Año de 1844. Senate Executive Document (SED) 207:13-14.

²⁶SED 207:13-14.

²⁷SED 207.

²⁸Ures was the state capital of Sonora from 1838 to 1842 and from 1847 to 1879 (Almada 1983).

²⁹Probably the fiesta de San Francisco in Magdalena, Sonora.

³⁰According to folklorist James Griffith (personal communication), the reclining statue of San Francisco at San Xavier Mission was originally the santo entierro (entombed Christ) at Tumacácori.