"Good Samaritans of the Desert": The Pima-Maricopa Villages As Described in California Emigrant Journals, 1846-1852 (Essay‪)‬

The discovery of gold near Sutter's Mill, California, in 1848, spawned a torrent of migration across northern Sonora, Mexico (modern southern Arizona), with perhaps 40,000 emigrants traveling over one of the four southern trails that converged at the Pima and Maricopa villages above the confluence of the Gila and Salt rivers. Some 8,000 mostly Mexican emigrants journeyed across the desert between April 1848 and January 1849, with 20,000 emigrants taking one of the southern routes in 1849 alone. All of these travelers looked forward to their sojourn among the Pima and Maricopa, aware their villages were respites where stock could be recruited, rest assured, food and forage obtained, and protection from marauding tribes secured. One emigrant penned words contemplated by thousands of California forty-niners following the southern trails. Leaving the Rio Grande and turning west towards the headwaters of the Gila River, Robert Green wrote, "We are all talking strongly of being compelled to eat mule beef on the road as we wont be able to get any provision[s] until we get among the Peima Indians." Louisiana Strentzel, one of the few women on the trail, credited the Pima with the success of her party's journey: "Had it not been for this water, the muskite [mesquite] beans, and the corn at the Pimose village," Strentzel wrote in December 1849, "not one wagon could have come through." (1) Personal recollections of the forty-niners visiting the Pima and Maricopa villages reveal much more than accounts of half-starved, thirst-crazed emigrants in need of food, water, and hospitality. While the journals describe the Pima and Maricopa villages as the last opportunities emigrants had to purchase fresh food and find good forage for their animals before arriving at Warner's Ranch some three hundred miles to the west in California, they also provide a window into the extraordinary economic output of the confederated tribes in the mid-nineteenth century. While the emigrants contemplated their visit to the villages, the Pima and Maricopa--with little foreknowledge of the torrent of emigrants heading their way--supplied the requisite food for the travelers, a testimony of the agricultural ability of the confederated tribes.