Spanish and Mexican Arizona

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado rode north from Compostela, in western Mexico, in fifteen forty with several hundred Spanish soldiers and more than a thousand Indigenous allies, looking for cities of gold. He found the Colorado Plateau. He found the Hopi villages. He found the Grand Canyon. He found Zuni Pueblo. He did not find gold.

Coronado turned around in fifteen forty-two, but Spain did not abandon what it had seen. Missionaries followed soldiers. Jesuit Father Eusebio Kino arrived in the Sonoran Desert in sixteen eighty-seven and spent the next twenty-four years building a chain of missions, including San Xavier del Bac, just south of present-day Tucson, where a later church, built in the seventeen eighties, still stands and still holds Mass. Kino mapped the region, introduced cattle ranching, and established the missions as the economic anchors of what Spain called the Pimería Alta, the high land of the Pima people.

Spain held Arizona until eighteen twenty-one, when Mexico won independence. For the next thirty years, Arizona was Mexican territory. Ranchers grazed cattle in river valleys. Small mining operations poked at ore outcrops in the mountains. The presidio at Tucson, founded seventeen seventy-five, was the main military post in the region, garrisoning about a hundred soldiers to defend against Apache raids.

Mexican Arizona left marks that never faded. The place names are still Spanish: Rio Verde, Sierra Estrella, Casa Grande, Santa Cruz, Yuma. The legal framework for land grants that shaped property disputes for a century came from Spanish colonial law. The cattle culture that became the cowboy culture began with Mexican vaqueros on Mexican land.

When the U.S. took the top half of Arizona after the Mexican-American War in eighteen forty-eight, it was inheriting a world already centuries in the making.