Pima villages
First, recorded by Spanish explorers in the late 17th century as living on the south side of the Gila River, they were included in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, then in Provincias of Sonora, Ostimuri y Sinaloa or New Navarre to 1823.
These were the Pima villages encountered by American fur trappers, traders, soldiers and travelers along the middle Gila River from 1830s into the later 19th century.
Tutumaoyda lay on the south side of the Gila River a few miles from modern Agua Caliente.
The introduction of cotton and weaving cloth from it may have been by Sobopuri refugees who had grown it before being driven out of the lower San Pedro River valley by the Apache in the 1730s.
Peace negotiations failing, Jabanimó and his men were driven from a hilltop and fled into the local wetlands for safety.
On August 20, 1775, Presidio San Augustin del Tucson was established to protect the missions and the region of the Santa Cruz River valley generally from the Apache who now began raiding there.
Too distant to rely on the help of the garrison at Tucson, the Pima Villages developed their own unique militia organization capable of offense and defense.
It required universal military service by able bodied males, its warriors trained with fighting skills, organization and efficiency equal to a presidial garrison.
Their mode of warfare rose above the level of economic raiding or retaliation, with little of the individual search for plunder or recognition and became more of a professional operation.
Persistent Apache raids over decades led this military organization to reach its peak efficiency in the mid 19th century.
This according to Padre Pedro Font's journal in 1775, quoted in Russell's, The Pima Indians, wherein Font says that the Pima Indians of Sutaquison (Sedelmayr's Sudac-sson) were asked the reason for moving their village away from the Gila River bank to open land away from the river.
"[5] Soon after Mexico achieved its independence, interest in reopening land communications with Alta California was revived with the arrival of a Dominican missionary, Father Félix Caballero, in Tucson in 1823.
He and three companions walked from Misión Santa Catarina Virgen y Mártir in Baja California, crossing the Colorado River among the Cocopah.
A military expedition under Brevet Captain José Romero, commander of the Tucson presidio, was organized to return the priest to his mission and pioneer a route to the Californias.
[6] In 1825, Colonel Mariano de Urrea, the civil and military governor of Sonora, wrote a report listing the names and locations of the Pima Villages on the road from Tucson to the Gila River and downstream along the south bank.
[9] In the next years 200,000 victims died of cholera in Mexico, including many in the villages of the Pima and Maricopa along the Southern Emigrant Trail.
B. Chapman, First Dragoons, U. S. Army, made the first U. S. census of the Maricopas, Pimas and Papagos which was submitted to and appeared in the report of G. Bailey, Special Agent Indian Department.
The census records the Pima Villages as: Buen Llano, Hormiguero, Hormiguerito, Casa Blanca, Cochinilla, Arenal No.
