Sonora, naming it Nuestra Señora de los
Dolores (Our Lady of Sorrows). The mission
became the headquarters for his tireless
exploring and missionary activities. During
his lifetime, Kino established more than 20
missions, including San Xavier del Bac, near
present-day Tucson, and Tumacácori (north
of the modern border city of Nogales and now
a U.S. National Historical Park). He also set the
pattern for modern agriculture and livestock
ranching in the region by introducing new
crops, such as wheat, and domesticated ani-
mals, such as beef cattle and sheep. Mutual
respect between the Pima and Father Kino
helped the missions flourish. The popular
priest aided the Pima in resisting Apache
attacks, and his intercession with Spanish
authorities helped prevent a small Pima revolt
in 1695 from becoming a full-fledged war.
THE ISLAND OF
CALIFORNIA
Inhis missionary efforts, Kino traveled many
thousands of miles across unexplored
Pimería on horseback. He made more than 40
journeys, ranging between 100 and 1,000
miles each, collecting information that he
incorporated into the first accurate maps of
the region and its rivers. Despite his success
in Pimería, Kino never abandoned his
deferred hopes for Baja California. When he
and Jesuit priest Juan María de Salvatierra
first toured the Arizona borderlands in 1691,
Kino wrote in his diary: “In all these journeys,
the father visitor [Salvatierra] and I talked
together of [Baja] California, saying that these
very fertile lands and valleys of the Pimería
would be the support of the scantier and
more sterile lands of California.”
Kino had arrived in the New World in
agreement with his Austrian teacher, Father
Adam Aigenler, a geographer whose world
map depicted all of California as a peninsula.
In Mexico, however, Kino was swayed by the
popular but false belief that California was an
island. In 1699 Yuma Indians near the western
Gila River presented him with a gift of blue
abalone seashells like those he had seen years
earlier on the Pacific coast of Baja California.
He theorized that if the shells could have been
transported overland, perhaps it was possible
to reach—and supply—California by land.
In the late 1690s Kino journeyed repeat-
edly to the northwest corner of Sonora where
it borders California, increasingly convinced
that the two regions were divided only by the
Colorado River. Mountains and lack of drink-
ing water made travel to California from the
Mexican mainland seem impossible, but one
of Kino’s expeditions sighted land in the dis-
tance that he was sure was California. On a
later expedition, Kino and a small party of
Pima rode south along the east bank of the
Colorado, meeting tribes who ferried him over
to the California shore in a basket, as he
described in his diary, “very comfortably and
pleasantly, without the least risk, taking with
me only my Breviary [a book with prayers,
texts, and hymns for church services], some
trifles, and a blanket in which to sleep, after-
wards wrapping up some branches of broom
weed in my bandanna to serve me as a pillow.”
Kino astutely noted similarities in the people
and flora of both regions. In 1702 he followed
the Colorado all the way down to the Gulf of
California.
Kino incorporated his findings into maps
that were printed in Paris, not in Mexico,
where their practical effect might have been
greater. For generations, in fact, the myth that
California was an island was slow to disap-
pear, even after Spanish missions lined the
coastline of upper California. The myth had
begun with Father Antonio de la Ascensión,The Road to California B 147