HISTORY OF TUCSON I5 



at that time had of course a population ahnost exckisively Mexican and 

 Papago. The beginning of its present period of social and architectural 

 development dates from the advent of the Southern Pacific Railroad 

 in 1880. As late as 1850 Tucson was still walled for protection against 

 the Apache Indians. Originally it was an Indian village, at which 

 the Mexican mission church of San Xavier del Bac, nine miles south 

 of Tucson, is believed to have been built about 1690. Of the still 

 earlier history of Tucson, as a Papago Indian village, the following 

 extract from a letter written by Mr. W J McGee, the ethnologist, gives 

 some interesting facts : 



"The eastern base of the mountain lying west of Tucson, Arizona, is the site 

 of an aboriginal settlement or village of the Papago Indians. Water was taken 

 from the Santa Cruz sand wash ; the bottom lands were in part devoted to the 

 tribal crop, beans, as well as to corn, squashes, etc. ; most of the habitations, 

 chiefly grass houses, were on the low mesa west of the sand wash, which is still 

 sprinkled with potsherds, and where traces of the early mission remain ; while 

 the mountain itself is a trinchera, t. e., a fortified place of refuge from Apache 

 invasions. The Papago name for the settlement was the same as their name for 

 the mountain, /. c, Tuuk-soon (all vowels having the continental sound) or 

 Black Base. The appropriateness of this name is obvious when the mountain is 

 viewed from the south-southeast in either morning or afternoon light, when the 

 darker volcanic rock forming the base of the mountain shows clearly against the 

 gray mass above. The same name is applied also by the Indians to a modern 

 settlement some seventy five miles west-southwest of this site, /. e., to the hill 

 and Indian village commonly called Little Tucson. There are no means now of 

 determining with any degree of certainty the aboriginal population of the site on 

 which you are about to locate, though it is practically certain, first, that the in- 

 habitants for some centuries before Columbus were the ancestors of the modern 

 Papago ; second, that the settlement was a part of a series extending up Santa 

 Cruz valley to its head and beyond ; third, that the prehistoric Papago, like their 

 modern descendants, were partly migratory, moving southward in autumn to 

 hunt in the sierras during the winter, and returning in spring to replant their 

 crops ; and, fourth, that the settlement was permanent, save for the migrational 

 abandonments, for centuries before the arrival of the Spanish explorers and mis- 

 sionaries. Neither is it possible to give account of the earliest visitations of 

 Caucasians ; Cabeza de Vaca may possibly have approached the region about 

 ^535> while Marcos de Niza in 1539 and Coronado in 1540 and 1542 passed within 

 rumor-distance of it during their journeyings up and down the Rio San Pedro ; 

 'A Missionary of Arizona,' the late Archbishop Salpointe, in writing his history 

 of the old Church of San Xavier del Bac, inferred that this mission was estab- 

 lished between 1690 and 1692, while in 1699 Padre Kino knew of the Papago vil- 

 lage below the mission as San Agustin ; certainly this village was a visita, or 

 visiting charge, of San Xavier mission in 1763, and there was a Spanish settle- 

 ment hard by in 1776 when the presidio, or capital, was removed thither from 

 Tubac, this Spanish settlement being called San Agustin de Tuquison while the 

 aboriginal village was known as San Agustin del Pueblito de Tuquison ; and cer- 

 tainly Archbishop Salpointe, as well as the late Dr. Coues, the editor, and Mr. 



