d understand why a desert is not
generally considered beautiful; the kind, at least, we have in the
South-west, with all the cacti, the yucca, and the other flowering
plants unfamiliar to European or Eastern eyes, and the lines of coloured
cliffs and the deep canyons. There is far more beauty and variety of
colour than in the summer meadow-stretches and hills of the Atlantic
States. So the good Padre Kino, after all, was perhaps to be
congratulated on having those thirty years, interesting years, before
the wilds could be made commonplace.

Arizona did not seem to yield kindly to the civilisers; indeed, it was
like the Colorado River, repellent and unbreakable. The padres crossed
it and recrossed it on the southwestern corner, but they made no
impression. After Kino's death in 1711 there was a lull in the entradas
to the Colorado, though Ugarte, coming up along the eastern coast
of Lower California, sailed to the mouth of the river in July, 1721.
Twenty-four years later (1744) Padre Jacobo Sedelmair went down the Gila
from Casa Grande to the great bend, and from there cut across to the
Colorado at about the mouth of Bill Williams Fork, but his journey
was no more fruitful than those of his predecessors in the last two
centuries. It seems extraordinary in these days that men could traverse
a country, even so infrequently, during two whole centuries and yet know
almost nothing about it. Two years after Sedelmair touched the Colorado,
Fernando Consag, looking for mission sites, came up the gulf to its
mouth, and when he had sailed away there was another long interval
before the river was again visited by Europeans. This time it was over
a quarter of a century, but the activity then begun was far greater than
ever before, and the two padres who now became the foremost characters
in the drama that so slowly moved upon the mighty and diversified stage
of the South-west, were quite the equals in tireless energy of the
Jesuit Kino. These two padres were Garces and Escalante, more closely
associated with the history of the Basin of the Colorado than any one
who had gone before. Francisco Garces, as well as Escalante, was of the
Franciscan order, and this order, superseding the Jesuit, was making
settlements, 1769-70, at San Diego and Monterey, as well as taking a
prominent part in those already long established on the Rio Grande.
There was no overland connection between the California missions and
those of Sonora and the Rio Gra