Rio Rico and the Great Arizona Land Rush‪.‬

This is a slightly modified version of chapter eight in Landscapes of Fraud: Mission Tumacacori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O'odham, published in 2006 by the University of Arizona Press. Landscapes of Fraud explores how the Upper Santa Cruz River Valley of southern Arizona was transformed from a landscape of community occupied by O'odham groups when Spanish settlers arrived in the late 1600s to a landscape of fraud as Mexican and Anglo speculators in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries traded paper titles to the Tumacacori land grant and Baca Float No. 3. In the process, two land-based communities--the O'odham at Mission Tumacacori in the 1840s and homesteaders during World War I--were destroyed as the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the valid Tumacacori grant in 1898 and confirmed the fraudulent Baca Float in 1914. The development of Rio Rico is located on the Baca Float. The present developers of Rio Rico have no connection to either Gulf American or GAC. **********