"None Excel Them in Virtue and Honesty": Ecclesiastical and Military Descriptions of the Gila River Pima, 1694-1848

Between 1694 and 1848 a medley of ecclesiastical and military chroniclers attempted to describe—through their own cultural lenses and with the inherent biases that come with them—an emerging and dynamic cultural adaptation occurring among the Gila River Pima, or the Akimel O'otham—the "River People." While Pima culture was by no means static prior to 1694, it was less so after that date. A number of important changes were documented, including the adaptation to new crops and new growing patterns. Villages clustered together more than before—although the east-west anchor villages of Chukma Shugthagi (Blackwater) and Komatke remained largely intact—and other Piman groups, including some of those in the San Pedro Valley (Sobaipuris) and in the Santa Cruz Valley (Koahadk), consolidated among the Gila Pima. Core cultural values, however, such as industriousness, virtue, and honesty did not change as they were deeply embedded in the Akimel O'otham tradition.¹

The spatial parameter of 1694–1848 is somewhat arbitrary and fo-cuses solely on the early historic period. It begins with the arrival of the Jesuit priest Francisco Eusebio Kino on the Gila River and the first recorded observations of the Pima. The outside parameter closes at 1848, which parallels with the end of the Mexican War and the de facto cessation of Mexican administration on the Gila. While the Gadsden Purchase followed in 1855 and brought all of modern Arizona south of the Gila under U.S. administration, the California forty-niner emigration of 1849–1851 so thoroughly saturated the villages with American trade goods that the Pima villages were effectively under American influences.

The Setting

There are no tribes of Indians on the continent of North America more deserving of the attention of philanthropists than those of which I am speaking (Pima and Maricopa). None have [sic] ever been found further advanced in the arts and habits of civilized life. None exhibit a more peaceful disposition or greater simplicity of character, and certainly none excel them in virtue and honesty.

John Russell Bartlett, U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commissioner, 1852²

Six years before Bartlett's description of the Pima (and their Maricopa neighbors), Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny led the U.S. Army of the West down the Gila River valley into the Pima villages, telling chief Antonio Culo Azul he "had heard a great deal of the Pimos [sic] and knew them to be a good people."³ Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke, leading the Mormon Battalion to the villages from the south some six weeks behind Kearny, expressed great pleasure upon meet-ing the Indians about whom he had heard so much. Greeting Azul, Cooke remarked he was pleased to meet such a "great friend of the Americans."⁴

The Gila River, at different times labeled the Rio Grande, Rio de hila, Rio Grande de hila, Rio Azul, Rio de los Santos Apostoles, Rio del Nombre de Jesus, the River of Hila, the Jila, hee-la, Helay, Xila, and Jee-la, was simply called Akimel ("River") or Keli Akimel ("Old Man River") by the Pima. The river was the socioeconomic lifeline of the people, with its waters embodying the very life and essence of the Pima, as the Spaniards called the Akimel O'otham. With its waters, the Pima cultivated a variety of crops to sustain a salubrious diet and economy in the midst of an otherwise inhospitable desert. With its waters, a remarkably stable village-based culture flourished. Without the river the social, cultural, spiritual, and economic welfare of the people would be imperiled.⁵

Written accounts of the agricultural skill, settled nature, and moral fortitude of the Pima abound, extending back to 1694 when Kino made the first recorded observations of the Indians. These accounts, like those of eighteenth-century Franciscan priest...