Calabasas, Arizona

However, by 1773 the church was functional and in 1775, Father Pedro Font said mass there during the first Juan Bautista de Anza expedition to the upper part of Las Californias.

[4][5] In 1777, the mission church, houses and the granary filled with maize, were sacked and set afire during a raid by part of a band of Apache, apostate O’odham, and Seris that had similarly attacked Magdalena and other Pimería Alta communities during 1776.

Mexican Army soldiers, in the Tucson garrison to protect the citizens from Apaches, withdrew from the Gadsden Purchase territory early in 1856.

[5] Late in 1856, the Mission church, now ranch house, became the temporary home of Major Enoch Steen, commander of four companies of the First Regiment of United States Dragoons who established Camp Moore, at the former Presidio de Calabasas, as the first military post in the New Mexico Territory's Gadsden Purchase area.

The following year, Steen received orders from Colonel Benjamin Bonneville, the departmental commander in Santa Fe, to move closer to Tucson.

Regarding the vices of Tucson as a danger to the good order and discipline of his troops, Steen instead moved his camp 25 miles (40.2 km) northeast to the headwaters of Sonoita Creek.

Ward traveled upstream to Fort Buchanan and asked the commander Lieutenant Colonel Pitcairn Morrison to send troops east to Apache Pass to retrieve the boy and the cattle.

Thinking they had defeated the Americans, the Apaches scavenged the abandoned forts and increased raiding in the Santa Cruz Valley.

There are also sites of the old Calabasas village,[1] Calabasas Store[9] (both now built over by modern development in Rio Rico) and the Santa Rita Hotel (once a fine hotel along the railroad line to Mexico), now a vacant piece of land near the old rail line and south of Sonita Creek, east of its confluence with the Santa Cruz River.