American
trapping
In early November, Ignacio Pacheco, the mayor of
Tucson, reported that "the Gila Pimas, represented by a village governor and two
of his men, arrived at this presidio with news of sixteen foreigners bearing
arms along the
banks
of their river. The Gila governor demanded papers of identification...their
leader replied that they came only to visit the Indians along the Gila in order
to obtain mules
and horses from them and to find out where there might be other rivers abounding
in beaver."
The foreigners Pacheco referred to were a group
of Anglo American
trappers
led by
Ceran St. Vrain and William Sherley Williams, better known to his fellow
mountain men as Old Bill. The movement of American trappers and
traders blazing
the
Santa Fe trail soon became a torrent. Ten years after Pacheco warned about
foreigners in Arizona, Anglo rebels took Texas from Mexican hands, and, in 1848,
Mexico ceded more than half its territory to the United States, including
Arizona north of the Gila River. By 1856 the United States expanded past Tucson.
In Pacheco's time, Arizona was already a part of the American frontier.
Despite their
romanticizations by later generations, the first American frontiersmen in
Arizona were adventurers and businessmen rather than mountain men. They entered
Arizona from their
headquarters in
Taos, New Mexico, to hunt the beavers between the upper Gila River and the
Colorado
delta. Independent trappers like Old Bill flourished in the Southwest until
people in the eastern United States began to wear hats made from
silk rather than
beaver felt.
The first American trappers to set foot on
Arizona soil were Sylvester Pattie and his son James, who spent the winter of
1825-1826 trapping along the
San Francisco, Gila, and San Pedro rivers. James left an account of his
travels that described encounters with bears, "panthers," Indians, and "wild
hogs," or
javelina. Pattie was the first Anglo to describe Arizona and the first of
many to exaggerate the ferocity of its human and animal inhabitants.
Despite its embellishments, Pattie's narrative
constitutes the most extensive firsthand account of early trappings in the
Southwest, which was much different from trapping in the
North, where Indians participated in the trade and formed close
relationships with many non-Indian trappers. During the winter of 1826-1827,
Pattie returned to Arizona with a group of French trappers led by Miguel
Robidoux, one of six brothers who had grown up trapping and trading along the
Missouri River. After visiting a
village of
Spanish-speaking Pimas who cultivated corn, wheat, and
cotton along
the south bank of the Gila, Robidoux and his companions made their way to a "Papawar"
settlement about a mile up the Salt River. The Indians were likely Yuman-speaking
Maricopas,
allies of the Pimas who had engaged in extensive warfare with their
Mohave and
Quechan enemies for centuries. That evening they killed all of the trappers
except for Pattie, Robidoux, and another
Frenchman.
After fleeing, the three men met another group of trappers led by
Ewing
Young, and returned to exact their revenge. Pattie claimed that 110 Indians
were killed in the incident. Similar hostilities broke out whenever trappers
traveled through the Apachería or trapped beaver in Mohave territory along the
Colorado.
Trappers continued to explore Arizona and travel
to California, where they sold the
furs to
ships trading
with the Mexican settlements of the Pacific Coast. By the time the Southwestern
fur trade had declined in 1833, most of the famous mountain men in Western
history had
passed through Arizona. Because they exported their furs through northern New
Mexico and California, they had little reason to visit Tucson and Tubac, causing
them to avoid confrontations with the Mexicans along the Santa Cruz. The
mountain men had little effect on Arizona's economy and
ecology.
Beaver populations had recovered by the next decade.
Mexican-Indian relations
During the 1830s and early 1840s, Apaches
threatened the Mexican settlers of Arizona. As early as 1824, Apaches began
running off horse herds from Tumacacori and other Santa Cruz communities. Then,
to the south, a Yaqui leader named Juan Banderas envisioned a pan-Indian nation
taking shape in northwestern Mexico and launched a series of revolts in Sanora.
Antuna, chief of Tucson's Apache Mansos, warned that the Yaquis were planning to
attack Tucson with Tohono O'odham, Yumas, and Western Apaches, and though the
assault never
materialized, this marked the end of the peace of the late colonial period.
During the following decades, the Republic of
Mexico plunged into
bankruptcy
and civil war. The first to collapse was the provincias internas, which had
centralized political and military power in the north under the authority of the
comandante general. In 1824, Mexico dismembered the system and partitioned
itself into states, which frequently acted independently of one another even in
military affairs. In April 1835, for example, Chihuahuan authorities negotiated
a peace
treaty with Chihuahua Apaches (so-called Mimbreños, Gileños, and
Mogolloneros) led by "General" Juan José Compá and sixteen other chiefs at the
mining community of Santa Rita del Cobre in southwestern New Mexico. That left
the Chiricahuas free to raid Sonoran communities like Sahuaripa on the western
slopes of the Sierra Madre. Sonoran officials protested the treaty and mounted a
counterattack against the Chiricahuas, but Chihuahuan forces did not join their
countrymen. Mexican
authority
became almost as diffuse as authority among the Apaches.
Struggles for power within the
Mexican states compounded disunion among the states themselves. In Sonora, a
series of military strongmen dominated
politics
during the nineteenth century. These strongmen, including José de Urrea and
Manuel Mariá Gándera, who owned a
hacienda at
the old mission of Calabasas, manipulated factions among the Yaquis, Opata, and
Apaches to advance their own ends. They also drew presidial forces into their
interminable civil wars, leaving the northern frontier exposed and defenseless
for months at a
time. In 1832, many families had to abandon Tubac because its garrison had been
reduced to the
captain, his aide, and three retired soldiers. The Tubaqueños probably
sought refuge with their Tucson neighbors, hoping that strength of numbers would
keep the Apaches at bay.
The biggest blow to Arizona was the dismantling
of the Apache rationing system in 1831. Ethnohistorian William Griffen estimated
that 2,496 Apaches received weekly supplies of beef, corn, sugar, and other
foodstuffs from presidial commanders in Chihuahua, Sonora, and New Mexico in
1825. Such rations had been an important part of the economy of many Apache
groups since the 1790s. Their abrupt withdrawal forced Apaches to leave their
peace camps and return to raiding.
One particularly brutal incident occurred on
April 22,
1837 when a group
led by John Johnson, an Anglo living in Sonora, pursued an Apache raiding party
that had stolen Sonoran cattle. Johnson's party followed the cattle tracks into
the Animas Mountains in southwestern New Mexico, where it encountered the camp
of Juan José Compá, the same Apache who had made peace with the Chihuahuans the
year before. For two days Johnson and the Apaches talked, and then Juan José and
other chiefs relaxed enough to gather around some
brown
sugar and parched corn Johnson offered. When they did, Johnson turned what
may have been a
swivel gun
upon them and cut down at least twenty Apaches including Juan José.
The cycle of attack and counterattack accelerated
during the 1830s and reached its peak the following decade. The attacks were
particularly devastating because of the Anglo American gunrunners in New Mexico.
With the opening of the
Santa Fe Trail in 1821, Anglo American traders began exchanging firearms and
ammunition
for stolen horses and mules. Comanches received the weapons first, followed by
Navajos, Apaches, and Utes. While Mexico reeled from one
coup to another,
Indian access to firearms transformed the balance of power in the Southwest. The
Apaches lost the battle against the Commanches for control of the Southern
Plains, but held their grounds in the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico long
after the Apachería became part of the
United States.
Not all Mexican-Apache alliances broke down
during the 1830s. When Apaches from most peace camps rose in revolt, many Apache
Mansos in Tucson under the leadership of Chief Antuna resisted the call to arms.
At a parley with the Pinal Apaches, a band who lived near modern Globe,
violence
erupted when the Tucson contingent refused to join their kinsmen. One Manso and
one Pimal were killed. Thereafter, Antuna and his people served as scouts for
the Tucsonese, extending the effective range of the Tucson presidio far beyond
the valley of
the Santa Cruz.
Tucson in the 1830s was as much an Apache as a
Mexican community. Sonoran census of 1831 listed only 465 Mexican inhabitants,
whereas Tucson's Apache Manso community in 1835 was said to include 486
individuals. Many lived north of the presidio along the east bank of the Santa
Cruz. Some cultivated their own fields or occasionally worked for Mexican
farmers, and they also moved freely back and forth between Tucson and the
surrounding mountains, hunting deer and
bighorn sheep, gathering cactus fruit, and roasting agave. During the first
half of the nineteenth century, their way of life remained Apachean despite the
fact that they were allies, not enemies, of the Mexicans living along the Santa
Cruz.
Relations between the Mexicans and the Pimas
steadily declined. Hispanic settlers had been moving onto O'odham lands across
the Santa Cruz River since the eighteenth century. Following Mexican
independence, the pressure grew more intense, especially after the Franciscan
missions began to wither and decay. By 1843, the fields at Calabasas, Guevavi,
and Sonoita were completely deserted. At San Xavier only about one-eighth of the
land previously cultivated for mission purposes lay under the
plow. Throughout
the colonial period, missions served as a buffer between Indians and Hispanic
settlers in the Pimería Alta. When the mission system crumbled, O'odham land
tenure
disintegrated as well.
Land
grants
The most blatant land grab occurred in 1844. Far
to the south, in the port of the
Guaymas, the
Mexican government declared that the mission lands of Tumacacori had been
abandoned and auctioned them off for five hundred
pesos
to Francisco Alejandro Aguilar. The few Pimas who had not been driven away by
Apache depredations neither knew about nor consented to the
sale. Aguilar was
the brother-in-law of Manuel Mariá Gándara, one of the most powerful military
strongmen in Sonora. He turned Calabasas into his own private hacienda, and by
the late 1840s Pima disposession along the Santa Cruz was nearly complete.
During the 1820s and 1830s, Sonoran ranchers
strove to colonize the grasslands of southeastern Arizona. Their legal tool was
the land
grant and their instrument of occupation was the mixed-breed
longhorn cow. These longhorn, or their descendants, roamed the range as
feral survivors long after their masters were gone.
Before Mexico won its independence from Spain in
1821, the Spanish government had made a few small grants of land in southern
Arizona. In 1789, Toribio de Otero petitioned for a lot from the Tubac presidio
in return for military service. The land remained in the Otero family until
1938. In 1807, the O'odham of the Tumacacori mission received title to a long
strip along the Santa Cruz River south of Tubac encompassing the former mission
lands of Tumacacacori, Calabasas, and Guevavi. Part of this grant was the land
auctioned off in Guaymas in 1846. In 1812, Agustín Ortiz purchased the site of
Arivaca, an important mining and ranching center since the mid eighteenth
century, at public
auction.
Charles Poston purchased that hacienda from Ignacio Ortiz in 1856 for
$10,000.
However, most grants in Arizona were made after
Mexico gained independence. In 1821, Tomás and Ignacio Ortiz received a total of
about 17,000 acres
(69 km²) of land known as San Ignacio de la Canoa and located between Tubac and
modern
Sahuarita. The following year, the ranch of San Bernardino east of modern
Douglas became the property of Lieutenant Ignacio Pérez. It totaled more than
73,000 acres (300 km²) in Arizona and northeastern Sanora. León Herreros
acquired San José de Sanoita in 1825, while "Ramón Romero and other
shareholders, their children,
heirs, and
successors received title to San Rafael de la Zanja in the San Rafael Valley the
same year. The Mexican government issued five more grants, including Buenavista,
San Rafael del Valle, San Juan de las Boquillas y Nogales, Tres Alamos, and the
Babocómari ranch, between 1826 and 1831.
Hispanic Arizona was again making an effort to
roll back the borders of the Apachería. The land grants established Mexican
title to much of the Santa Cruz and San Pedro valleys. They also extended
Mexican domain over the plains south of the Chircahua Mountains. Most of the
cattle country ended up in the hands of the Elías-González family or their
relatives. During the colonial period, the Spanish government supported the
mission and the presidial systems in order to insure
royal control
over the northern frontier. By the 1820s, however, private
capital had become the usual method of colonization, and most of that
capital belonged to a network of elite families who dominated northern Sanora at
the time. They provided the livestock and took the risks.
If the Elías-Gonzálezes and their neighbors had
received the land grant twenty years earlier, when they would have been
protected by the presidios and the Apache peace program, they might have
succeeded, but beginning in the 1820s, the Apaches began to burn their
buildings
and kill their
cowboys, run off their horses, and slaughter their beef. By 1840 most of the
grants had been abandoned. Even though the
U.S. Court of Private Land Claims eventually confirmed eight of the Spanish
and Mexican land grants in the early
twentieth century, none of the descendants of the original grantees managed
to hold on to their titles.
John Slaughter owned the San Bernardino Ranch north of the
U.S.-Mexico border, and Colin Cameron's San Rafael Cattle Company had
acquired the San Rafael de la Zanja grant. Largescale ranching did not return to
the area until the 1880s after most of the Apaches had been confined to
reservations. When it did, American land-and-cattle companies, not the
Mexican elite, held them.
Some presidial soldiers became so poor that they
had to sell their
weapons to feed their families. In 1840 and 1841 the Mexican government
campaigned against the Tohono O'odham of the western deserts, their former
allies. The colony reached its nadir at midcentury. In 1843 the Apaches killed
at least thirty shareholders of the San Rafael de la Zanja grant at La Boca de
Noria near modern Lochiel. Ranching ceased in the San Rafael Valley. Five years
later, at least fifteen Tucsonenses, including nine presidial soldiers, rode
into ambush in the Whetstone Mountains. By the time the bodies could be
recovered, they were so decomposed that the remains had to be carried back to
the presidio of Santa Cruz in sacks. Tubac itself was abandoned once again after
an Apache assault in January 1849.
The
Mexican War
The Spaniards had long feared that other European
powers were planning to invade their sparsely populated northern frontier. They
sparred with the French and
English in the Mississippi Valley and watched the Russians expand down the
Pacific coast, but after Mexico won its independence from Spain, it was the
growth of the United States that proved most significant. The process began with
Texas in 1836. Six years later, Mexico's
secretary of state, Lucás Alamán, warned, "Where others send invading
armies...[the Americans] send their colonists." Desperate to fill empty spaces,
Mexico invited Americans and other foreign colonists to settle in Texas in 1824.
By 1830 there were already more than twice as many Anglos as Mexicans there
(7,000 to 3,000). By 1836 the ratio had risen ten to one. When
Sam
Houston led his rebels to victory at
San Jacinto, Texas remained an independent republic until 1845. Mexicans of
Texas soon became a
minority in
their native land.
Many citizens of the United States felt they had
a God-given mandate to extend their "area of freedom" across North America. On
December
27, 1845,
John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the New York Morning News, wrote that
it was "our
manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent
which
Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of
liberty and
federated self-government entrusted to us." Mexico had already broken off
relations with the United States in March 1845 after the
annexation of Texas. Six months later, President
James Polk
sent
John Slidell to Mexico City to buy California and New Mexico. When the
Mexican government refused to negotiate, Polk ordered General
Zachary Taylor to occupy disputed territory between the
Nueces
River and the Rio Grande. A Mexican attack on U.S. troops preceded a U.S.
declaration of war on Mexico in May 1846.
A primary U.S. objective in the war was the
acquisition of California. Most American pioneers and politicians considered
Arizona a wasteland, a desert, and an Indian-infested obstacle between Santa Fe
and
San Diego. Although several U.S. military expeditions passed through the
area on their way to the west, they did so as quickly as possible, and none of
them stayed.
General
Stephen Watts Kearny, commander of the Army of the West, led the first group
of soldiers. Following his conquest of New Mexico, Kearny and a detachment of
"wilderness-worn dragoons" left Santa Fe on
September 25, 1846.
They were guided by
Kit Carson,
who had been impressed into service along the way. Under Carson's direction,
Kearny and his men descended the Gila and spent the next two months following
the river's passage to the Colorado. The expedition marched through the villages
of the Gila Pimas, but completely bypassed Tubac and Tucson. It therefore
avoided any confrontation with Mexican
troops, but it
first introduced American soldiers to the Arizona desert.
The next expedition swung farther south and went
through Tucson on its way to California. This was the
Mormon Battalion, a company of
Latter Day Saints from the
Midwest who
volunteered for duty in order to prove their
patriotism
and diffuse the religious hatred of their neighbors. The main purpose of their
journey was to blaze a wagon trail across the southern Great Plains and the
Southwest. When they reached Santa Fe, Lieutenant Colonel
Philip St. George Cooke took command and led the battalion to San Diego. The
Mormons left Santa Fe in October 1846. They had to double-team their wagons to
get over the Sacramento Mountains in south central New Mexico and lower them by
rope down Guadalupe Pass in the northern Sierra Madre. While their encounters
with the Indians were generally peaceful, the wild bulls of southeastern Arizona
charged their caravan and gorged their mules.
Because of Cooke's firmness, wild bulls were the
only antagonists the battalion had to face. The Mormons were the first
representatives of the U.S. government to meet the Mexican population of
Arizona. The initial encounter took place at a
mescal
distillery between the San Pedro and Santa Cruz valleys. There the
teetotaling Mormons met a
sergeant
and several soldiers from the Tucson presidio. The sergeant politely requested
that Cooke and his men make a detour around Tucson. Cooke politely declined.
Several days of sparring followed as Tucson's
veteran commander, Antonio Camadurán, attempted to persuade the
battalion
not to enter the community. When all threats and pleas for an armistice failed,
Comadurán withdrew his outnumbered garrison to San Xavier. The result was a
peaceful day of trading between the Mormons and the Mexican inhabitants of
Tucson. The battalion lumbered into town on
December
17. The Tucsonenses offered the soldiers food and water, and the soldiers
responded by bartering clothing for the beans and flour they needed.
By the time Cooke and his troops had left the
next morning, the only shots that had been fired came from one of the
battalion's pickets, who mistook the returning
civilians
for Mexican soldiers during the night. No one was injured and no one died. Cooke
sent a note apologizing to Comodurán for the inconvenience. With it he enclosed
a letter to the governor of Sonora. The letter assured the governor that Cooke
had not come "as an enemy of the people whom you represent; they have received
only kindness at my hands."
After General
Winfield Scott seized Mexico City in September 1847 following bloody
hand-to-hand combat,
Nicholas Trist sat down with Mexican authorities and helped to write the
Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which
Congress ratified the following March. In return for $18,250,000 in cash
payments and claims assumed by the U.S. government, the United States won
confirmation of its title to Texas. It also annexed California and New Mexico,
which included Arizona north of the Gila River.
The
Gold Rush of 1849
The following year, commerce united people in
both countries for a time. The
Gold Rush of 1849 ignited the largest mining rush in American history. Since
Coronado's expedition, Spaniards had dreamed of Quivara and the Seven Cities of
Cíbola, but when gold was found at
Sutter's Mill along the
American River, Alta California belonged to the United States. The
gold rush
drew thousands of Americans and Mexicans, leaving many towns in Sonora nearly
depopulated. Gold-seekers overwhelmed the little communities of southern
Arizona. By the time the rush was over, 50,000 people had gone through the
region on their way to the California goldfields.
The Gila Trail leading to the California mines
crossed the Sierra Madre at Guadalupe Pass and swung down the Santa Cruz Valley
through Tumacacori, Tubac, and Tucson. From there it followed Cooke's wagon road
north to the Pima villages and west to the junction of the Gila and Colorado.
Ninety-two miles of the trail were without water, and another was across the
Mojave Desert west of the Colorado. As perilous as it was, however, the Gila
Trail became the main path connecting Arizona to the United States.
Miners also provided valuable information about
Arizona's Native Americans. Though they were impressed with the Gila Pimas, who
gave them wheat and corn, they viewed the Quechans of the Colorado River with
suspicion. Apaches left the Anglo Americans alone, viewing them as potential
allies in their continuous war against the Mexicans. After one inconsequential
skirmish near Guadalupe Pass, the Chiricahua war chief Mangas Coloradas even
told a group of Americans that he loved them.
Despite their hatred of Mexicans, the Apaches
depended upon Mexican livestock for food and to see them through hard times. At
about 9:00 A.M. of
December
16, 1850, a
large number of Apaches, perhaps as many as 361, came out of the Catalina
Mountains and caught Tucson by surprise. The Tucsonenses fled to the presidio or
to the large adobe
convent on the west bank of the Santa Cruz River. The Apaches rounded up their
animals, killed four of their neighbors, and took two Mexican boys and Apache
Manson women captive. Suddenly afterward the Apaches offered to make peace. A
treaty might have been secured if the O'odham had not ridden in from San Xavier
and descended upon the Apaches, driving them away. Apaches often made truces
with one Mexican community in order to raid another, and livestock stolen in
Sonora was often bartered in Chihuahua and New Mexico.
A
cholera
epidemic broke out in 1851. The establishment of "military colonies" in Tucson
and Tubac by Americans aggravated the situation of Anglo American invasion. To
prevent the loss of any more territory, the Mexican government decided to grant
each recruit a plot of land in return for a six-year tour of duty. In Tucson,
military officials confiscated land already being cultivated by civilians or
retired presidio soldiers, turning farmers against the soldiers who were
supposed to protect them.
The
Gadsden Purchase
The Gadsden Purchase (shown with
present-day state boundaries and cities)
Many residents of Mexican Arizona greeted the
Treaty of Mesilla with relief. In 1853, President James Buchanan dispatched
James
Gadsden, a railroad speculator from
North Carolina, to present Mexican president
Santa Anna with five different plans to purchase more of northern Mexico.
The most ambitious offered $50 million for Baja California and much of Sonora,
Chihuahua, and Coahuila. The least extensive sought Arizona south of the Gila
River and the Mesilla Valley of New Mexico. That was the one Santa Anna
accepted. In return for $10,000,000, the United States received nearly 30,000
square miles of deserts and mountains. With it came Tucson, Tubac, and
Tumacacori.
When the
House of Representatives ratified the
Gadsden Purchase on
June 29,
1854, Mexican
Arizona became a part of the United States. Most inhabitants of the region
welcomed the change. Mexican Arizona fell under U.S. law, and presumably, U.S.
protection. There were possibilities of new markets for beef and flour, and of
the Apaches finally being kept at bay. Mexican troops remained in Tucson until
March 1856, but when they headed south, only a few civilians went with them.
U.S. troops rode into southern Arizona in late 1856 to take possession of the
region, and
Mexican as well as Anglo
immigrants
began to trickle into the area.
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