Padre Kino

This is the last work of Father Polzer on Padre Kino sent by father Charles himself to the Cultural Association in June 2003

Padre Kino – A Dream Denied

Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino, the seventeenth century Jesuit missionary to Northwest New Spain, entered my life nearly fifty years ago. Well, not exactly, when I was ten, I sat before a fireplace screen at my Grandmother’s home in San Diego; it depicted the pioneers of California and the very first figure on the illustrated border of the huge map was a Blackrobed figure. It identified the first missionary to California – Eusebio Kino! As a proud native of the state, I insisted this was a terrible mistake because everyone knew the missionary to California was Fray Junipero Serra. It took me twenty years to realize that the history painted on that screen was absolutely correct.

Surely, Padre Kino is no stranger to any of you in this audience. But I do worry that he is nothing more than just a fairly prominent name in the colonial history of Mexico. As savory as that history may be, Kino is often considered not much more tantalizing than frijoles refritos. Tasty and familiar, but nothing really new on the menu of humanity. And if any of you are among those who ask, “Is there anything new on Padre Kino,” you are bound to be disappointed because we historians have combed the archives for decades; nothing has emerged out of the archival dust. Nothing that is except newer and richer understandings about the man and his work. That is why I have chosen as a topic today: “Padre Kino, a Dream Denied.”

Over the past several years I began work on a new translation of Kino’s memoirs – the famous “Favores Celestiales.” I was able to retrieve only one fairly well worn copy of the translation made by Dr. Herbert E. Bolton in 1919, entitled Kino’s Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta, a title that on the bookshelves of most stores was destined not to sell. The title was an academician’s way of avoiding the flowery and pious one Kino gave to his grant proposal to King Philip V of Spain – the Heavenly Favors of Jesus, Mary Most Holy, and the Most Glorious Apostle of the Indies, Saint Francis Xavier. He was quite right in addressing the King as he did, but in a marketing sense, it was a disaster — the manuscript never made it to print. Kino finished it just a year before his death in the desert; and his treatise was shelved in the library of the Jesuit college in Mexico City for lack of a living promoter. His dreams about a major expansion of the northwest missions were not readily shared either by companions or the newly appointed Bourbon administration in Spain.

Working on the retranslation was tedious. Often I would ask “why doesn’t he get on with the details of history?” Time and again he laments about the opposition he encountered from colonial officials and Spanish speculators. Time and again he praises the industrious and docile Indians of the Pimería. Chapter by chapter the memoirs reveal a generous, positive minded apostle stung by reversals and rewarded by successes. Part One of Kino’s Favores Celestiales is a recasting of his first tract that he wrote after the murder of Padre Francisco Xavier Saeta at Caborca in 1695. The manuscript of that tract resides today in the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City; like the Favores, it, too, was never published although the manuscript was widely known to successions of Jesuit superiors.

From the manuscripts on Saeta and the Favores it is clear that Kino kept meticulous records of his journeys and explorations, including detailed maps and inventories. He carefully archived letters from superiors and colonial officials. His headquarters at Dolores in Sonora was a treasure trove of the early history of northwestern New Spain. Tragically, that archive has been scattered and lost over the centuries. What we have remaining is his compilation of events that he composed, not as history but as a paean to the promise of North America. If you overlook that aspect of his writings, you are on the virtual edge of misinterpreting his life and his importance. In my own writing and research on Kino I have tried to puzzle out the historical sequences and human interactions of this frontier missionary and apostolic visionary; in most cases I have failed because Kino cloaked over the details of daily life, although he left enough evidence in his writings to piece together an incomparable history. However, to come to know the man behind the pen, one has to pay minute attention to the scope of his dreams.

As a young man Kino envisioned himself following in the tracks of his cousin Father Martino Martini, the Jesuit missionary to China. His fervent interest in mathematics, physics and astronomy was fueled by his recognition of their apostolic usefulness in the Orient. But fate sent him West, not East. In his quest for the Orient he got only as far as the crashing waves on the Pacific shores of Baja California and the swells of that same ocean in search of pirates that would seize the China Ship. Providence kept pulling him back to the mainland of Mexico and the frontiers of Spanish expansion to the northwest.

His assignment to join the expedition of Don Isidro Atondo y Antillón to the “California islands” in 1683 was a profound failure that shaped the rest of his mortal life. Wealth and courtly influence made no sense in that God forsaken, destitute land. It was human misery and deprivation that burned deeper into his soul than the sun into his skin. Never had he encountered a people more abandoned than those on that desert island, where even the Spaniards recognized their total dependence on supplies over the seas. California was less a conquest than an exercise in survival.

Kino’s return to the mainland and his assignment to the missions of the northwestern frontier was obediently accepted, and eased somewhat by the knowledge that he would be only a few days sail away from those poor isolated humans. Although his original hopes to evangelize the Seris and Guaymas Indians on the Gulf coast were dashed by an assignment to open missions among the Pima Alta, he kept the memory of California and its people firmly in mind. Like so many frontier tribes, the Pimas were considered fair game for slavers who enriched themselves by selling them as laborers to the grueling mines of the Sierra Madre. But Kino saw them as an industrious, docile people who built excellent farms in the valleys of the foothills. This was a land of immense opportunity far beyond the extraction of silver and gold. In a matter of a few years Kino had sold himself and several companions on the value of developing these natives and their lands into prosperous missions that could care for each other, and through their surplus production to aid others far away. And Kino remembered that California was not all that far off.

In a matter of only eight years the Pimería Alta was prospering. The threat of jealous colonials to oust the Italo-German Jesuit in 1690 was crushed by bushels of wheat, ollas of corn, and trampled by herds of cattle and horses. The Pimería was coming alive. But the brutal slaying of Saeta seemed to contradict all of Kino’s assessment of these Indian peoples; he rode to Mexico City in near desperation in 1695 to plead for more missionaries. And once again the hand of Providence was laid upon the unsuspecting Eusebio. There in Mexico City in early ’96 while urging the Jesuit provincial to find more missionaries for the northwest, he learned of his reassignment to California in consort with his old Italian superior, Padre Juan María Salvatierra, who had come in response to complaints about the missions of the Pimería – only to be convinced of the rectitude of Kino’s apostolate. With the opulence of the Piman missions and the generous benefactions of friends in Mexico as collateral the austerity of abandoned California could well be overcome. The dream was born again.

In the fall of 1697 Kino loaded his saddle bags and spurred his horse toward the port of Guaymas. Salvatierra was waiting for him to join the new, independent California expedition. But this time, it wasn’t Providence that handed him a turn of fate, it was the people of Sonora. They feared his loss to the management of the missions might mean the loss of peace on the frontier; Kino was simply too important a player to be allowed to leave. Couriers of the governor intercepted him with orders to return to his headquarters at Dolores. No California redeux.

Stung by the suddenness of the reversal of his assignment, Padre Kino plunged into an even more vigorous campaign of development. If he couldn’t work in California, at least those in California would never suffer want from a lack of food and supplies. A shorter road to Guaymas would be opened; the port would be readied to store more food and house more livestock. And he would incorporate even more Indian communities into the mission economy, priests or not. Once again the drying timbers for his boat building at Caborca would be cleaned off and shaped for creating a reliable vessel to ply the Gulf with supplies for California.

For most historians this is the portion of the Favores that defines Kino’s importance in history – the explorations that led to the discovery of an overland passage to California and the definitive proof that California was not an island, but a long, slender peninsula. And precisely at this point is where most writers miss the apostolic and historic significance of the life of Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino. His enthusiasm to develop more Indian pueblos into productive agricultural centers to aid California had driven him west to the shores of the Gulf and across the deserts to the fabled lands of the Yuma and Quiquima. As he spied the glimmering Colorado delta from the barren hills at the edge of the Camino del Diablo, he wondered what lay beyond. As the stared at the blue shells, a gift of those same delta tribes, he wondered how they acquired shells he had only seen once before on the shores of the Pacific. It was all beginning to make sense – California had to be conjoined with the mainland!

It was not Kino’s geographical curiosity that enticed him to climb the Sierra Santa Clara, today’s Pinacate. It was his realization that there might be no need to ship supplies over the desert and the Gulf to aid California. That need could be better met by simply improving the rich lands of the Colorado delta that could not be far from the Pacific.

Then and there Kino’s dream took final shape. It was no longer sufficient for him to think only in terms of sending aid to the abandoned people of California. All of the Pimería could be joined with the newly discovered peoples of the Colorado. There had to be a way, probably a very short way, to reach the Pacific where a port could be opened to relieve the suffering of the crews of the China Ship. The bounty of the Colorado delta could sustain the establishment of a Spanish villa that might well justify expansion along the upper California coast, eventually to open trade with the Orient. All the pieces of the apostolic puzzle were falling into place.

At the turn of the 18th century Padre Kino was consumed with the tasks of exploration. The crossings of the desert, the building of mission San Marcello at Sonoidag (Sonoyta), and the possibility of more conversions beyond the Gila were all projects that required time, careful attention, and consummate diplomacy. His detractors, who were not as enthused about forging an overland passage to California, insisted that he spend his efforts at building up the missions he had already established in the Pimería. In a way, Kino agreed because he knew the strength of Sonora would be the underpinnings for a stronger economy and the guarantee to open trade with California. The carpenters and bricklayers he had so laboriously trained were assembled into teams that rode the frontier trails erecting new churches and mission compounds that hopefully would serve the new missionaries he was so urgently requesting. When the finest churches he ever built were completed in late 1703, he planned elaborate dedications – originally to take place on the feast of St. Francis Xavier, December 2. But complications with security on the Apache-ridden frontier forced postponement until January, 1704. It may have been just as well because it gave more time to the Yumas and Quiquimas to cross the winter trails from the Colorado delta to join the Pimas and the neighboring Opatas in celebrating the visible accomplishment of the Indian craftsmen. Kino was immensely proud of them and more ambitious than ever.

Somehow that enthusiasm was not shared by others, especially by Father Francisco María Piccolo, who was the economic overseers of transport to California. There were political differences to resolve in Mexico City which touched the stability of the California missions. Piccolo wanted no controversy to tip the balance in the wrong direction, and he feared that Kino’s dreams might just be the wrong medicine. Using his temporary powers as Father Visitor, he wrote Kino in 1707 forbidding him from making further explorations and directing him to focus his attention on his local responsibilities. Piccolo long been a friend and compatriot, but now he harbored a troubling concern over Eusebio’s health. Strenuous expeditions were not his idea of prudence for a man of sixty-two years.

In 1701 there had been a cédula from the King asking for detailed information about the plans to expand the northwest missions. Piccolo himself composed a very complete response, but it lacked the specificity and experience of Padre Kino. So Piccolo used the occasion to suggest that Kino set his hand to a more direct response to the King’s inquiries. It was a marvelous excuse to keep Kino at this desk instead of on his horse.

So, in translating the Favores, a significant, abrupt change takes place just after Kino finished his descriptions of the dedications of the churches at Cocóspera and Remedios. He opens Part V that is a summary and response to the cédula just as Piccolo had requested. It is a swift overview of his involvement in the establishment of the California missions and the development of the Pimería Alta. As historians will admit, there isn’t much that’s new in these pages. Well, perhaps not. But the summations soar with ambitious remarks about the rich lands of North America, about the hard-working, docile Indian populace, and the certain possibility of opening new land passage that will shorten the trade routes not only to the Orient, but Europe as well! Eusebio may have been sitting in the foothills of the sierra, but his head and heart were as vast as the whole continent. He had enduring confidence in the strength of his mission communities and certitude about his discoveries – if he just had the money and men to accomplish what he knew was possible. Part V of the Favores is a plea for expansion, for the means to make a dream come true, for Spain and the Church.

Kino’s pen scrawled the last lines. His signature sprawled across the page. It was done. It was February, 1710, at Mission Dolores, which for Kino was the Cape Kennedy of the centuries to come. The folio pages were bundled together and sent off to Mexico on their journey to the King and Council. Now it was time to get back into the saddle. He rode the mission circuit with aching bones and faithful heart. Then, just thirteen months later, having finished his favorite Novena of Grace, he rode to Magdalena to dedicate a splendid little chapel in honor of St. Francis Xavier, his patron. His sixty-five year old body gave out during the Mass of dedication, and he retired to the tiny quarters near the chapel to breathe his last – his head resting on his pack-saddle pillow and protected from the chill midnight air by a saddle blanket. His last ride was done. The world was left with his dreams.

While Padre Agustín de Campos buried his missionary companion by the altar in the new chapel, the bundle of papers that was more appeal than memoir sat on a shelf in Mexico City. Why appeal to the King now for the means to expand the frontier? The champion was dead, and few others had the human capacity or talents to match those that Providence had brought to the northwest. Eusebio lay quietly in his grave as time and change overwhelmed his grave. Only the reclining figure of San Francisco survived over his casket, ultimately to be the focal point for pilgrimages of thousands who eventually forgot the man, his works, and his dreams. The Favores found its way to the crammed and dusty shelves of the Archivo Nacional, guarding a story barely told and a dream denied.

In time, however, Providence again set hand on human endeavor and the Favores came to life two centuries later. And the story of Padre Kino came to be told again to newer generations that are now learning the dimensions of his dreams for the people of the northwest and the whole of North America. Not surprisingly, Sonora today has become the heir apparent to the dreams that Kino was denied. It’s splendid and fertile fields raise immense crops of wheat, corn, grapes, and cattle that find their way to markets in North America and Japan. Kino would be tremendously proud to know that this part of the world has given birth to new economic and even religious hopes. He would probably not share the environmental atrocities of the damming of the mighty Colorado or the shrinking estuaries of the Gulf. And he might be somewhat astonished that California still suffers maritime isolation; after all he himself was building a boat. Indeed, if Kino were to climb out of his crypt, he would undoubtedly look for a SUV to drive to the centers of power and planning to ask: “Gentlemen, what have you done to my dreams?”