Bryce
Tucson, Arizona
On September 29, 1775, Juan Bautista de Anza led 240 colonists out of Horcasitas, the provincial capital of Sonora, on one of the most ambitious overland journeys in the history of Spanish colonial North America. Father Pedro Font, the expedition's meticulous diarist, recorded the scene vividly: 13 field tents arranged in circles around a central bonfire, the sprawling camp resembling 'a little city' with 155 women and children, 340 horses, 165 pack mules, and over 300 head of cattle. The caravan stretched for nearly a mile along the trail, soldiers riding guard at front and rear while families settled into the daily rhythm that would carry them 1,200 miles.
From Horcasitas the expedition followed the corridor of missions and river valleys northward through Pimeria Alta. At Santa Maria Magdalena — today Magdalena de Kino, burial place of the great Jesuit missionary Father Eusebio Kino — the colonists replenished supplies and rested in relative security before entering less settled country. They passed through O'odham villages at Ymuris and San Ignacio, mission towns founded by Kino a century before, where modest adobe churches and irrigated fields offered waypoints of civilization along an otherwise wild route.
The leg culminated at Tubac Presidio, where the full party assembled between October 15 and 23. Seventy-seven additional recruits joined there, and Anza inventoried supplies while contending with the aftermath of Apache raids that had stolen 500 horses just weeks earlier. Father Font celebrated mass at nearby Mission Tumacacori, blessing the journey ahead. Then, on the very first night out from Tubac, tragedy struck: a woman named Maria Ignacia Manuela Pinuelas died in childbirth at Paraje la Canoa, the expedition's only civilian death across the entire journey. Her infant survived and was baptized at Mission San Xavier del Bac, the great White Dove of the Desert, where the colonists paused to mourn and to celebrate three weddings before pushing on into Arizona.
