besieged yet again by Apache and Navajo and Pima, the beleaguered
priests took refuge in these towers, and came down to die, only to save
their Mission. Against Indian arms, it may be said, San Xavier would be
an impregnable fortress. Yet the priests of San Xavier were three times
utterly destroyed by Indians.

When you come to seek the history of San Xavier, you will find it as
difficult to get, as a guide out to the Mission. As a purely tourist
resort, leaving out all piety and history, it should be worth hundreds
of thousands of dollars a year to Tucson. Yet it took me the better part
of a day to find out that San Xavier is only nine miles and not eighteen
from Tucson.

And this is typical of the difficulty of getting the real history of the
place. Jesuit Relations of New France have been published in every kind
of edition, cheap and dear. Jesuit Relations of New Spain, who knows?
The Franciscans succeeded the Jesuits; and the Franciscans do not read
the history of the Jesuits. It comes as a shock to know that Spanish
_padres_ were on the Colorado and Santa Cruz at the time Jacques
Cartier was exploring the St. Lawrence. We have always believed that
Spanish _conquistadores_ slaughtered the Indians most ruthlessly. Study
the mission records and you get another impression, an impression of
penniless, friendless, unprotected friars "footing" it 600, 700, 900
miles from Old Mexico to the inmost recesses of the Desert canyons. In
late days, when a friar set out on his journey, twenty mounted men acted
as his escort; and that did not always save him from death; for there
were stretches of the journey ninety miles without water, infested every
mile of the way by Apaches; and these stretches were known as the
Journeys of Death. When you think of the ruthless slaughter of the
_conquistadores_, think also of the friars tramping the parched sand
plains for 900 miles.

While Fray Juan de la Asuncion and Pedro Nadol are the first
missionaries known in Arizona about 1538, Father Kino was the great
missionary of 1681 to 1690, officiating at the Arizona Missions of San
Xavier del Bac and Tumacacori. There are reports of the Jesuits being
among the Apaches as early as 1630--say early as the days of the Jesuits
in Canada; but who the missionaries were, I am unable to learn.
Rebellion and massacre devastated the Missions in 1680 and in 1727; but
by 1754, the missionaries were back at San Xavier and had twenty-nine
stations commandin