Mohave County miner., 1916-11-25
HISTORICALLY, SANTA
 CRUZ COUNTY MINING
 ACTIVITIES IMPORTANT
(From sunday.s Daily MIner.l

Historically, probably the most in
 teresting of all of the mining activi-
 ties within the State of Arizona are those of Santa Cruz County, in as
 much as it was within this area that the Jesuit fathers founded a chain of
 missions in the Valley of the Santa
 Cruz river and farther south into Mexico. According to La Historic del Nayarit" an account of the 'labors of the Society of Jesus in
 Sempitronial America, which work was written by Fra Ortega, one of that order, Father Eusebia Kino, whose name has been immortalized by his great work, came from the City of Mexico in 1886, and locating in 1878 a mission at a point about thirty miles south of the present inter national boundary between the United States and Mexico, he names the mis- sion and the river beside whose banks it stood, one the Mission Dolores and the other Rio Dolores. From that point as a base of operations the de voted missionary established missions at Cocospera, Remedies, Santa Bar bara.
 In the Santa Cruz Valley, below the Santa Barbara Mission, Fra Kino built four other missions, the first at San Felipe Guevavi, about nine miles northeast of Nogales; another at San Cayetano del Tumagacori, about nineteen miles northwest from the same town; a third at Santiago. the site of which point is not known ac- curately now; and the fourth at San Xavier del Bac, nine miles south of Tucson. San Xavier has been restored by the federal government, and it is one of the show places of Arizona.
 In the vicinity of each mission was presidio, or military post, with a garrison sufficiently strong for pro tection of the surrounding region from the marauding Apaches, who occupied regions beyond the San Pedro and the Gila, whence they were wont to make excursions of rapine and ravage into the country of the Pimas and the Papagoes, peaceable Indians occupy ing these regions, who readily em- braced Christianity, coming easily un- der the domination of the gentle priests. Those Indians were tillers of the soil and laborers. From among them were drawn the workers in the mines and on the ranches that the friars and laymen among the Span iards discovered and exploited. Tubac, on the Santa Cruz, 22 miles from Nogales, was the presidio near Yuma cacori, and recently there have been unearthed there a lot of old, rusty, twelve pound cannon balls that were no doubt for use in some of the ar tillery of the garrison. Tucson, which had been the site of an Indian village, was the presidio for protection of the country surrounding.
 According to the history of that time, and the records of the mission now preserved in Spain, the friars at l Tumacacori discovered and wrought l rich silver mines in the Santa Rita l Mountains, to the northeast, and in the Atacosa Mountains on the south | west. The Salero mines and otheH | properties in the Santa Ritas are | known to have been operated by the friars, and in places vestiges of their workings are found today. In recent | years a party from California, having | a plat or map with a written des- cription of the location, said to have come from the archives of the old | mission, has been searching in the Atascosa Mountains for an abandoned mine that the record which they have tells of having been exploited by the friars. Those operations are estab- lished to have been inaugurated very shortly after completion of the Mis- sion church and cloister at Tumaca- cori in 1888. So there is presented the record of the first mining done on the Pacific Slope of the United States.
 The whole story of mining in Santa Cruz county is told in Bulletin 29 of | the Arizona State Bureau of Mines, entitled "The Resources of Santa Cruz County, by Allen T. Bird. Copies may be obtained by writing Charles F. Willis, Director, Arizona State Bureau of Mines, Tucson, Arizona.