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Then came the Navajos, ranging up to the San Juan and above.* On the north side, below the San Juan, were the various bands of Pai Utes, while on the south were the Puebloan tribes, with the Apaches, Suppais, Wallapais, etc., while still below came the Mohaves, Cocopas, and Yumas, with, on the Gila, the Pimas, Papagos, and Maricopas.
We wrote to President Young, describing the country." The party tried some proselyting among the Pimas and Papagos. At Tucson they met Governor Safford who offered welcome to Mormon colonists. Sonora was in the throes of revolution, so they passed on to El Paso, on the way talking to a camp of Apaches, given permission by the agent, Thos. T. Jeffords.
At dinner, the good Father took me by the ear, and said, "What for you make me preach to these savages? they squat on the ground, and laugh at me like monkeys." The next place for the distribution of Indian goods was at the Mission of San Xavier del Bac, three leagues south of Tucson, among the Papagos, a christianized branch of the great Pima tribe.
We returned to Tucson, rounded up a party consisting of about fifty Papagos, forty-five Mexicans and ourselves, and set out for Camp Grant. We reached the fort at break of day, or just before, and before the startled Apaches could fully awaken to what was happening, or the near-by soldiers gather their wits together, eighty-seven Aravaipa Apaches had been slain as they lay.
This indefatigable enthusiast travelled back and forth, time and again, over the whole of northern Sonora and the southern half of Arizona, then comprised in Pimeria Alta, the upper land of the Pimas, and Papagueria, the land of the Papagos. His base of operations was a mission he established in Sonora; the mission of Dolores, founded in 1687.
This was a trip not considered so very dangerous, except for the lack of water, for the Indians along the route were mostly peaceable and partly civilized. Only for a short distance out of Tucson did the Apache hold suzerainty, and this only when sufficient Papagos, whose territory it really was, could not be mustered together in force to drive them off.
These people built their sheltering homes of boughs and the bast of the juniper. In such shelters, they lived in winter, but in summer they erected extensive booths of poles and willows, sometimes large enough for the accommodation of a tribe of 100 or 200 persons. A wide gap in culture separates the Pimas, Maricopas, and Papagos from the Chemehuevas.
If the present promises of few of these mines are realized, by working them on a scale commensurate with their extent and richness, I have no doubt but that they will equal in production the whole silver exports of Mexico. I think an appropriation ought to be made to sink artesian wells through the Papagos country, between San Xavier and the lower Gila.
I met an old friend at the Mission called "Buckskin Alick," who had lived there all through the war without reading a newspaper or changing his clothes. As nails were scarce, Buckskin Alick had constructed a mill held together by rawhides, and was grinding wheat for the Papagos. In the meantime he had taken up with a Papago girl, to the scandal of the tribe.
This firm was the biggest at that time in the Territory and the De Long of the company was one of the six men who led the Papagos in the Camp Grant Massacre. He died in Tucson recently and I am now the only white survivor of that occurrence.
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