To the Corner of the Province: The 1780 Ugarte-Rocha Sonoran Reconnaissance and Implications for Environmental & Cultural Change ed. by Deni J. Seymour and Oscar Rodríguez (review)

Maps from the Spanish colonial period of northern Mexico nearly always present information that transcends the written word. For example, Father Eusebio Kino's 1705 map of Mexico's northwest (drawn because he was a geographer at heart) fills a broad gap in our knowledge of the land and its people of the early eighteenth century. Later maps reflected orders from Spanish officials concerned about the locations of sites for settlers, supply and protection of mineral riches, functioning of missions, protection of key trade routes, and above all, satisfying defensive concerns.

In this book, Deni Seymour and Oscar Rodríguez feature such a map and the diaries that accompanied it. The 1780 reconnaissance expedition was ordered by Commandant General Teodoro de Croix stationed at Arizpe on the Río Sonora in northern Sonora. Jacobo de Ugarte y Loyola was military governor of Sonora at the time. Croix ordered him and military engineer Gerónimo de la Rocha y Figueroa to travel north from Arizpe to the confluence of the San Pedro and Gila River in what is now southern Arizona to gather information and recommend the best possible site(s) for locating presidios in the region. Rocha's famous maps and diaries were formative in strategic considerations faced by the Spanish Crown in its need to strengthen defenses against Indigenous attacks and rebellions that followed the expulsion of the Jesuit Order in 1767, especially from Apaches and Seris. The Crown had four requirements for a presidio: adequate crop land, water, wood for fire and construction, and pasture for livestock. Presidios were expensive to found, fund, and maintain, and needed to fill a strategic location in a northern line of defense. Although King Carlos III had expressed a desire to locate a presidio at the confluence of the San Pedro and the Gila, Rocha took great pains to discourage that plan.

The Ugarte-Rocha reconnaissance took roughly a year. Seymour and Rodríguez use the results, especially Rocha's maps and diaries, composed with crystal clarity and superb penmanship, to illustrate the engineer's sophisticated knowledge of the geography and cultures of the region. Rocha's descriptions of natural features, especially water courses, wetlands, and springs, written in a year of drought, yield important details that help us understand today's hydrology and landscapes. They also help correct the belief that arroyo cutting was initiated by catastrophic overgrazing and subsequent drought in the 1880s. Rocha's observations reveal that for many miles around presidios, landscapes of 1780 were already devastated by overgrazing and woodcutting and arroyo cutting had begun. His descriptions of settlements along the drainages of the San Pedro and Santa Cruz Rivers, both occupied and abandoned, provide intriguing archaeological and ethnographic information about the native Sobaipuri O'odham, who, Seymour says, are a subgroup of the Akimel O'odham or River Pimas to the north, not the Tohono O'odham to the west and northwest, as commonly believed. (This claim is disputed.)

Seymour adroitly combines her archaeological experience and knowledge and environmental history of the region using Rocha's map and diaries to critique received doctrines about the environmental and cultural history of the two pivotal watersheds. Neither the Santa Cruz nor the San Pedro ran continuously throughout their courses prior to the arrival of Spaniards, but then, as now, contained long stretches of intermittent flows only. Sobaipuris did not live in fixed settlements in harmony with nature, but relocated their hamlets frequently as local resources were exhausted. Defense against Apache attacks had become an equally important factor in choosing a site for settlement. And Apaches were not recent newcomers to the Southwest, but had frequented the region for more than five hundred years.

This is an important and authoritative contribution to the environmental and...