The mission of San Xavier del Bac is on an elevation facing the Santa Rita Mountains, nine miles to the south of Tucson, Arizona, and is a conspicuous monument of the Santa Cruz Valley. An isolated church, white against the soft shades of the bare desert and the distant colors of the low-lying mountains, it is visible for miles in every direction.
Prent Duell, who calls San Xavier “the greatest of all missions” in his book on mission architecture, gives the following description of the view from the front: “The facade of the church is symmetrical, with two plain towers on either side of an ornate gabled entrance. Above the broken pediment of the gable, the noble dome may be seen between the towers. The windows and doors are symmetrically placed and thrown wholly in shadow by the heavy walls. Their blackness, contrasted with the glistening whiteness of the walls, and the reddish ornamentation about the entrance make a picture against the cloudless sky and endless desert, not to be forgotten.”
The mission was founded by Eusebio Francisco Kino, picturesque pioneer missionary of the Jesuit Order, whose purpose was to Christianize the Indian population. San Xavier is the northernmost of his mission chain, extending up the West coast from Sinaloa to Pimería Alta. Pimería Alta, meaning the upper country of the Pima Indians, included all the territory between the Gila River, in what is now Arizona, on the North and the Río del Altar in Sonora, Mexico, on the south.
Kino visited the “great ranchería” of Bac on the Santa Cruz River for the first time in 1692 and later wrote an eloquent report to King Philip V of Spain describing the beauty and fertility of the valley whose fields extended as far as the present site of Tucson. It was during this visit that Kino named the place San Xavier, in honor of his own patron saint, the great Jesuit “Apostle to the Indies.”
A visit in 1694 to Bac and the nearby ruins of Casa Grande, prehistoric fortress, convinced him that under proper tutelage the Indians might erect large and permanent buildings.
In 1697 he drove cattle up from his mission Dolores in Mexico and established the first stock farm at Bac for the support of the projected mission.