54 CASA GRANDE, ARIZONA [BTH, ANN. 28 
Recent students of the route of the Coronado expedition have 
followed Bandelier, who has shown that the army may have traveled 
down the San Pedro River for part of its course, thus leaving Casa 
Grande several miles to the west. 
DISCOVERY AND EARLY ACCOUNTS 
The first known white man to visit Casa Grande was the intrepid 
Jesuit Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, or Kuehne, the pioneer mis- 
sionary among the Opata, Pima, Papago, and Sobaipuri Indians from 
1687 until his death in 1711. In 1694 Lieut. Juan Mateo Mange, 
nephew of Don Domingo Jironza Petriz de Cruzate, the newly 
appointed governor of Sonora, was commissioned to escort the mis- 
sionaries on their perilous journeys among the strange and sometimes 
hostile tribes of the region. In June of that year, while making a 
reconnoissance toward the northeast from Kino’s mission of Dolores 
on the western branch of the Rio Sonora, Mange heard from the 
Indians of some casas grandes, massive and very high, on the margin 
of ariver which flowed toward the west. The news was communicated 
to Kino and shortly afterward was confirmed by some Indians who 
visited Dolores from San Xavier del Bac, on the Rio Santa Cruz 
below the Indian village of Tucson. In November (1694) Kino went 
from his mission on a tour of discovery, finding Casa Grande to be as 
reported, and saying mass within its walls.1_ The house was described 
as large and ancient and certainly four stories high. In the immediate 
vicinity were to be seen the ruins of other houses, and in the country 
toward the north, east, and west were ruins of similar structures. 
Kino believed that Casa Grande was the ruin (Chichilticalli) spoken of 
in 1539 by Fray Marcos de Niza,? whose journey was followed in the 
next year by Coronado’s famous expedition. Ortega, Kino’s biogra- 
pher, speaks of the ancient traditions of the Mexicans (Aztec), favor- 
ably received by all the historians of New Spain, that this Gila locality, 
as well as the Casas Grandes of Chihuahua, was one of the stopping 
places on their migration southward to the Valley of Mexico. This 
belief was prevalent during the period, and Casa Grande on the Gila 
is frequently marked on early maps as an Aztec sojourning place. 
For this reason it was also commonly designated Casa de Montezuma. 
Three years later, in the autumn of 1697, Kino, accompanied by 
Mange, again started from his mission of Dolores and traveled across the 
country to the Rio San Pedro, on which stream, at a point west of the 
present Tombstone, the missionary was joined by Capt. Cristébal M. 
Bernal with 22 soldiers. Proceeding down the San Pedro, the party 
reached the Gila on November 16, and on the 18th arrived at Casa 
Grande. 
1 Mange in Doc. His. Mer., 4th ser., 1, 250, 259, Mexico, 1856. 
2 (Ortega,) Apostolicos afanes de la Compania de Jesus, escrito por un Padre de la misma sagrada religion 
de su Provincia de Mexico, p. 253, Barcelona, 1754. 
