For over a thousand years beginning circa 400 CE the valley of the Santa Cruz River was inhabited by the indigenous Hohokam culture. A primarily agrarian people they established extensive canal systems to water their fields. It is possible that a multi-decadal drought in the mid to late 1400’s helped to put an end to many aspects of that culture and made groups more nomadic. There is no clear division for when that culture ended in the Santa Cruz River Valley and the region's remaining people were today’s Tohono O’odham meaning “Desert People”.
Historically the O'odham inhabited a large area in the Southwest extending from Sonora, Mexico into Central Arizona. In the Santa Cruz River Valley they lived in semi-permanent settlements during the wet season and cultivated corn, beans, melons, and squash with irrigation farming. During the dry months groups hunted rabbit and deer, harvested agave, cholla, saguaro fruit, prickly pear Desert Archaeology, Rob Ciaccio
cactus, and other wild foods. The settlement near the Santa Cruz River when the Jesuit explorer Padre Eusebio Kino arrived was a Tohono O'odham town called Wa:k, a native word having to do with water. During the wet season rain would flood the arroyos and overflow the banks of the River, but during the dry season the river bed might be completely dry. Water still flowed underground in the deserts porous soil. Irrigation farming in the intermittently flowing Santa Cruz River was possible area around Wa:k, because the presence of volcanic outcrops forced the underground flow of water upwards and the river used to flow year round at the site.
The leading edge of the Spanish colonization of North America was usually the missions, like at San Xavier del Bac, established by members of Catholic orders. The purpose wasn’t to make friends, but to proselytize the indigenous people and provide forced labor. The Europeans completely misunderstood the manner in which the indigenous people had adapted to the desert environment. Culturally the Spanish considered the indigenous people to be inferior and made no effort to understand the environment of the Desert Southwest. This attitude and turmoil in Mexico led to the eventual abandonment of the region by the missionaries.
With the Gadsden Purchase the United States acquired what is now southern Arizona and divided the Tohono O’odham and the Santa Cruz River Valley into two parts leaving the southernmost sections in the Mexican State of Sonora again showing a complete disregard for the environment and the indigenous people. With control by the United States came another European culture that allowed for the consolidation of an extractive ranching economy that relied upon the dispossession of customary land and water sources accessed seasonally by Tohono O’odham. Agricultural irrigation projects, development, and groundwater pumping depleted the Santa Cruz River in the middle of the 20th century. The near-continual supply of water was gone by the 1940s. Now, ranching has been supplemented by organized smuggling and the militarization of the Mexico/USA border, generating new pressures and threats to the survival of Tohono O’odham and the Santa Cruz River Valley.
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