The Forgotten Founder of the American West

As the United States marks 250 years, the story of Franciscan missionary Francisco Garcés reveals a Catholic legacy that helped shape the American Southwest.

(Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

After writing about Escalante and Dominguez’s exploration of Colorado, I unexpectedly found myself driving Route 66 across Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona (as the road celebrates its own centennial). Providentially, I was already reading an account of a great missionary and martyr who first explored portions of that road in Jeremy Beer’s Beyond the Devil’s Road: Francisco Garcés and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest (volume 8 of the University of Oklahoma’s series, Before Gold: California under Spain and Mexico, 2024). It’s a gripping biography of Garcés, an often-overlooked Franciscan who should stand alongside St. Junipero Serra and Bl. Eusebio Kino as one of the great missionary-explorers of the American West.

Like Escalante and Dominguez, Garcés was also seeking new routes across the American Southwest in 1776. In fact, because Garcés had sent a letter expressing his tenuous position among the Hopi, his two fellow friars were keeping a lookout for him as they made their way into the boundaries of modern-day Colorado. Garcés, for his part, had already helped open up the first land passage from the southwest into California, taking two expeditions with the soldier-explorer (and later governor of New Mexico), Juan Bautista de Anza, a towering figure who in 1776 led an expedition of settlers to California and explored the area around San Francisco, which would enable its foundation later that year.

1776, therefore, also commemorates a new beginning for the American West. Originally colonized by Spain, New Mexico, Arizona and California would pass to Mexico in 1821 and the United States in 1848. While the thirteen colonies were forming a new republican system, the presidios and missions of the West laid a foundation that would endure even as the territory of the original colonies expanded to encompass them. The United States has a more complex history than often acknowledged, one with multiple foundings and peoples that would mix within a great melting pot. Father Garcés represents one important figure Catholics should recover to broaden the way we think about our country and the accomplishments of the Church in establishing its culture.

Garcés’s infectious personality comes out in Beer’s account. While he had trouble communicating in writing, making his missionary diaries hard to follow, he excelled as a conversationalist, often spending entire nights around the fire as he visited Native villages. More than anything else, Garcés was brave, perhaps foolhardy, and allowed nothing to stop him when he felt compelled to continue his journeys through impossible deserts, such as the Devil’s Road through the Sonoran Desert. He was so bold and could endure such difficult circumstances that Beer comments that “it is difficult to find anything comparable in the annals of American exploration” (231). He most often did not “travel in the company of another Spaniard. Most of the time he was accompanied only by two or three native guides. Sometimes he was completely alone. His supplies were limited to what he could carry on his mount. For food he depended mostly upon the generosity of the people he met. He carried no arms” (231). Though he worked in a grossly understaffed and thinly supplied mission system, he wanted to establish a mission wherever he went to bring the Gospel and broker peace between the warring tribes he encountered (and he did find temporary success in initiating peace treaties).

Beer opens the book with an account of what Garcés experienced on July 4, 1776, encountering unusual hostility among the Hopi people, which ended his eastward progress as he sought a route to connect the missions of Pimería Alta (southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico) with New Mexico. Beer then takes a step back to place this moment within Garcés’s many journeys. He “wandered on muleback and foot, often alone, two or three thousand miles through the deserts, highlands, meadows and mountains of New Spain’s far-northern, unmapped frontier — today’s states of Sonora, Arizona, Nevada and California. He had been the first European to enter what became Nevada; the first to descend to the village of Supai in the Grand Canyon; the first to cross the treacherous Colorado desert west of Yuma, Arizona; the first to describe the San Joaquín Valley and its inhabitants; the first to make contact with several Native American peoples; and now the first to enter Hopi territory from the west. In his travels he had unceasingly preached the Christian gospel of peace and salvation. He had just as unceasingly sought to serve the interests of his Spanish sovereign” (5).

Garcés possessed a grand vision of what was possible to spread the faith and Spanish civilization in the southwest, as we hear in his own words: “Thanks be to God, I see reviving in our time the old Spanish passion for discovering and taking possession of new lands in order to gather precious pearls, the souls of men!” (291). His years-long efforts to start missions at the conjunction of the Colorado and Gila rivers at Yuma among the Quechans became his crowning achievement, but one fraught with difficulty. The Quechans expected material abundance and protection from the Spanish, which never materialized, and found their own means of subsistence strained by colonists and travelers en route to California. Therefore, “in July 1781, the Spanish advance between the Devil’s Road into today’s American interior came to an abrupt end. The events of those violent days shattered Franciscan dreams of a Catholic empire stretching northward to the Grand Canyon and beyond” (323). Garcés’ final act was to give his own life, together with three other Franciscans, becoming a martyr whose blood sanctified the land and peoples he loved. Beer notes that while his original dream did not come to fruition, later Franciscan missionaries bore great fruit among the peoples to whom he had ministered.

Garcés, whose cause for canonization has been opened, stands among the great founders of Christian civilization in the Americas. Though bound up with Spanish colonial efforts, his desire to bring the faith to others and to offer his life for Christ continues to serve as a model for sanctifying our nation and dedicating it to God.