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The Arrival of the Europeans 33 2 THE ARRIVAL OF THE EuROPEANS Before they learned to read and write in government schools, Akimel O’odham (River People, or Pima Indians) living along the Gila River recorded their history by carving notched symbols into the soft wood of willow or the ribs of the giant saguaro. Caressing these mnemonic marks, Piman keepers of the sticks would then “tell” the events of the past. The narratives do not march to the same rhythm as Western histories. There are no “great men,” no prime movers , no sweeping sense of historical progress. Instead, isolated occurrences are simply described—a battle, a harvest, a strange plague. Nevertheless, certain trends emerge from those terse recitations, trends that resonate with the fatalistic power of global forces glimpsed only at the local level. The earliest of the surviving calendar sticks begins in 1833, the year of a great meteor shower. Nearly seventy years later, when a tubercular anthropologist named Frank Russell wrote down the stick’s telling, the only entry for 1901 and 1902 was the opening of a day school in a nearby Pee Posh (Maricopa Indian) village. In between, there are stories about Apache attacks and epidemics, battles with the Mohave and Quechan Indians of the Colorado River, and the arrival of telegraph lines and railroads. Seven decades of Arizona history are refracted through the lenses of people who began the century as proud and independent farmers, and who ended it as impoverished wards of the state. The notches on the calendar sticks are therefore both epigrams and elegies. The world they describe was already in the process of being transformed when the records begin. By the time the sticks were entombed in a museum collection, the world was gone. The Columbian Exchange in Arizona It was a world perched on the periphery of a periphery, a frontier between the colonial expansion of Europe and the last defiant stand of native North America . Even though they had never been conquered or missionized, the Akimel 34 arizona O’odham had been drawn into the European orbit. In 1837–38, for example, the oldest Pima calendar stick recorded the following incident: One cold night in the spring a Pima at Rso’tûk was irrigating his wheat field by moonlight. Without thought of enemies he built a fire to warm himself. This the Apaches saw and came about him in the thicket. Hearing the twigs cracking under their feet, he ran to the village and gave the alarm. The Pimas gathered in sufficient numbers to surround the Apaches, who attempted to reach the hills on their horses. Two horses stumbled into a gully, and their riders were killed before they could extricate themselves. The others were followed and all killed. There is no mention of white men in this short narrative. But the reasons the O’odham and Apaches were fighting, and the very way they fought, demonstrate how thoroughly the worlds of both had been transformed by what historian Alfred Crosby calls the Columbian Exchange. Take, for example , Apache methods of transportation. In 1541 the expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado ventured onto the western fringes of the Great Plains after wintering among the Pueblo Indians of northern New Mexico. There Coronado and his men encountered Native Americans they called Querechos. The Querechos may have been Athapaskan-speaking ancestors of the Apaches, but they traveled on foot, their belongings pulled by dog train, as they pursued the great herds of bison across the plains. The daring Indian horsemen who struck terror into European settlers from Canada to northern Mexico were creations of the conquest. Like the Apaches who raided the Pimas, they did not exist until Indians learned how to steal or break wild Spanish horses. And what of the lone O’odham irrigating his wheat field that cold spring night? Neither he nor his Apache assailants had ever lived in a mission or paid homage to a Spanish king. Yet the very crop he cultivated came from seed introduced by missionaries like Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, the major Akimel O’odham food crops had been corn, beans, and squash. Those cultigens could be grown only during spring and summer months, when frosts were not a danger. Wheat, in contrast, could be sown in December and harvested in June, enabling the O’odham to farm year-round. That allowed them to live in...

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