Letters from Eighteenth-Century Sonora: Father Segesser Writes to His Family in Switzerland

At the very end of the seventeenth century a ten-year-old boy in Lucerne, Switzerland, decided to become a Jesuit missionary saving souls in faraway lands. He was inspired by the missionary success of St. Francis Xavier in India and Japan in the sixteenth century. During his training for the priesthood, he vigorously campaigned for such an assignment. He was selected in 1726 to go to Paraguay, but that was not to be (Hausberger 1995:298). Unbeknownst to him, his future was being decided by events unfolding in northwestern Mexico, where Benito Crespo y Munroy was appointed Bishop of Durango in 1723.

The bishop conducted an inspection of the huge territory under his jurisdiction and discovered a severe shortage of missionaries in the Pimería Alta on the northern fringe of his diocese. On 22 August 1727 he wrote to King Philip V of Spain, urging that three new missionaries be dispatched to northwest Mexico. The king agreed, and on 20 October 1728 ordered Viceroy Juan de Acuña y Manrique to take appropriate action. On 27 April 1730 the Viceroy instructed Bishop Crespo to establish three missions in the Pimería Alta and to assign Jesuit priests to them.

As a result of this ponderous long-distance bureaucratic activity that boy, now Father Philipp Segesser, S.J., was one of the three new Jesuit missionaries Bishop Crespo welcomed to Durango on 19 July 1731 (Hammond 1929). Thus began the thirty-one-year missionary career of Father Segesser in the Sonoran missions of San Xavier, Guevavi, San Ignacio, Tecoripa, and Ures.

Although he was extremely busy assembling material for his mission, less than two weeks after being welcomed by Bishop Crespo, he wrote on 1 August to his younger brother, Ulrich Franz Joseph, city councilman and Ratsrichter (council notary) of Lucerne, Switzerland. After more than six years of disappointments and delays, months of waiting, and difficult travels, he was finally totally involved in missionary activities. The ten-year-old boy in him could not resist the desire to take time out and share with his family the excitement and promise of this development.

That letter (Letter 46, reproduced here), and others like it, enabled Father Segesser to stay in contact with the old, patrician, close-knit, wealthy, and devoutly Catholic family into which he was had been born on 1 September 1689. Such contact became very important to him after he left his homeland forever to serve as one of three new Jesuit missionaries on the northern frontier of New Spain. From the time when he was in Bavaria preparing to become a member of the Society of Jesus until his death in 1762 at the Mission of San Miguel de los Ures, he carried on a lively correspondence with his family in Lucerne.

The Segesser family was justly proud of its Jesuit missionary son and intensely interested in his life in faraway and exotic New Spain. They often copied his letters for distribution to friends and relatives outside Lucerne. More importantly, they saved seventy-six of them in a family archive (now in the Lucerne State Archive). Unfortunately, none of the letters they wrote to him have survived. Theodore Edward Treutlein (1945) translated the longest of Segesser’s letters and considered, but never found the time, to translate more.

This trove of letters constitutes the kind of archival resource that needs to be made available to scholars and the reading public. An effort to do just that began almost fifty years ago with that indefatigable chronicler of northwestern New Spain, Bernard Lee Fontana, then ethnologist on the staff of the Arizona State Museum. He learned of the existence of the letters in the Segesser family archive during his correspondence in the mid-sixties with Swiss scholar Gottfried Hotz, who was writing a book on the Indian hide paintings Father Segesser had sent home to his family (Hotz 1960).

I had just become head of the Department of Anthropology and director of the Arizona State Museum, and I supported an effort to obtain copies of the letters...