The first Mission settlement in Arizona was made in 1732. Father Felipe Segesser founded San Xavier del Bac, and Juan Bautista founded San Miguel de Guevavi. These were regular Missions; the Indian rancherias in that region were only visitas. In 1750 a presidio was located at Guevavi. The settlements formed by Father Kuehn forty years […]
Jose De Galvez, the Visitador-General of New Spain, was the practical head of the first missionary expedition of the Franciscans, and was a man of extraordinary energy, forethought, and practical ability. He fashioned and controlled the enterprise, with Junipero Serra as President of the Missions, both in Lower and Upper California. Galvez deserves a more
La Soledad, Our Lady of Solitude, was founded on the ninth of October 1791, midway between the Missions of San Antonio de Padua and Santa Clara. The site was located in a region of and plains, which depended largely upon irrigation to make them fruitful. Padre Lasuen, who chose the site and later instituted the
La Purisima Concepcion Mission was designed by Serra as one of the Channel series, but was not founded until December 8, 1787, three years after his death; and it was built not upon the coast but upon the Santa Inez River, north and beyond the mountains. The river is about one hundred miles long, rising
Junipero Serra came into possession of the most exalted qualifications for his marvelous work in Alta California by the inheritance of a loving soul and wonderful intellectual powers; he acquired remarkable erudition; his lofty ideals were nurtured in the discipline, precepts, and traditions of his monastic order; he attained an eloquence which alike convinced the
The Mission Indians, that constituted the flocks belonging to the various Missions, are and ever will be a problem to the antiquarians. Of their history before the time of the colonization we have no definite knowledge; but this much seems unquestionable: a great difference in character, disposition, and habits existed between the natives of the
In musing over the history of the old Missions, the mind is led to inquire as to the benefits that have been conferred upon mankind by the labors, triumphs and defeat of the padres during their brief sojourn in the Southwest. Through their work was confined to a few heathen tribes, its pure and unselfish
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In Lower California the Jesuits labored for eighty years with much greater immediate results than in other regions of the Southwest; but in Alta California they had at least sowed the seeds of a harvest which is being reaped by the Church to-day, through the growth and beneficence of the noted Pious Fund created by
California, the land of golden sunshine and skies of ineffable blue, starlit at night by a glittering host; of most genial climate, tempered alike to the old and the young, the delicate and the vigorous, a climate equaled nowhere on earth but along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea; the garden of the olive, the
In 1767 King Charles III of Spain organized an expedition to sail to Mexico, to proceed thence to the Californias and take possession of them, to build Missions for the conversion of the Indians there, and to protect and defend the country from the Russians. Before this time hordes of these semibarbarians had come down