of Onate might as well never have been made so far as its effect on succeeding travels was concerned.  He had crossed Arizona by the very best route, yet Escalante, 172 years afterward, goes searching for one by way of Utah Lake!  Coming from the west, the Moki Towns were ever the objective point, for they were well known and offered a refuge in the midst of the general desolation.  Garces had his headquarters at the mission of San Xavier del Bac, or Bac, as it was commonly called, nine miles south of the present town of Tucson.  Here Kino had begun a church in 1699, and at a later period another better one was started near by.  This was finished in 1797 and to-day stands the finest monument in the South-west of the epoch of the padres.  It is a really beautiful specimen of the Mexico-Spanish church architecture of that time.  No better testimony could there be of the indefatigable spiritual energy of the padres than this artistic structure standing now amidst a few adobe houses, and once completely abandoned to the elements.  Such a building should never be permitted to perish, and it well merits government protection.  Its striking contrast to Casa Grande, the massive relic of an unknown time, standing but a few leagues distant, will always render this region of exceptional interest to the artist, the archaeologist, and the general traveller.

From Bac, under the protection of the presidio of Tubac, some thirty miles farther south, later transferred (1776) to the present Tucson, Garces carried on his work.  He made five great entradas from the time of his arrival in June, 1768.  The first was in that same year, the second in 1770, but in these he did not reach the Colorado, and we will pass them by.  In the third, 1771, he went down the Gila to the Colorado and descended the latter stream along its banks perhaps to the mouth.  On the fourth, 1774, he went with Captain Anza to the Colorado and farther on to the mission of San Gabriel in California, near Los Angeles, and in his fifth, and most important one, 1775-76, he again accompanied Captain Anza, who was bound for the present site of San Francisco, there to establish a mission.  Padre Font was Anza’s chaplain, and with Garces’s aid later made a map of the country.* At Yuma Garces left the Anza party, went down to the mouth of the Colorado, and then up along the river to Mohave, and after another trip out to San Gabriel, he started on the most important part of all his journeys, from Mohave to the Moki Towns, the objective point of all entradas eastward from the Colorado.  The importance attached at that time to the towns of the Moki probably seems absurd to the reader, but it must not be forgotten that the Moki were cultivators of the soil and always held a store of food-stuffs in reserve.  They were also builders of very comfortable houses, as I can testify from personal experience.  Thus they assumed a prominence, amidst the desolation of the early centuries, of which the railway in the nineteenth speedily robbed them.