Mission San Xavier del Bac

Mission San Xavier del Bac was established by Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino.  Father Kino was invited by the natives to visit in the early 1690s, and he returned again in 1697, 1700, and 1702.  The mission had its ups and downs until after the Jesuit expulsion in 1767, when Father Francisco Garcés, a Franciscan, arrived.  Father Garcés traveled extensively among the natives of the southwest until he was killed during the Pima uprising in Yuma in 1781.  Work on the “White Dove of the Desert” began in 1783, just before the Apache peace of 1786, and ended in 1797.  The mission flourished until peace with the Apaches ended in 1831, at which time the mission was abandoned.  It was reopened and restored by the 1860s, but had fallen again into disrepair by the early 1900s, when it was restored again.

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