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Show BY PATH AND TRAIL. 173 Cones' historic, topographic and invaluable notes, the diary of the priest, in two volumes, is a splendid addi tion to the ethnographic literature of the Southwest. On the 19th of July, 1781, the great priest was mur dered at the mission of the Immaculate Conception now Yuma in an Indian uprising against the Spaniards. The cornerstone of the present beautiful church of the Bac mission was laid by the Franciscan fathers in 1783, and the date, ' i 1797, ' ' still legible over the door, records, no doubt, its completion. The historian, Hubert H. Ban croft, calls the church a ' ' magnificent structure," and devotes three pages of his History of Arizona to this mis sion. In 1828, soon after Mexico broke away from her allegiance to the mother country and declared herself an independent republic, chaos reigned, and the fathers were compelled by the force of circumstances to aban don their missions in Arizona. The Pima and Papago converts assembled in the church every Sunday and feast day, and for years, in fact until the return of a priest ap pointed by the Bishop of Durango, said the beads, sang their accustomed hymns and made the stations of the cross. The historic building shows sadly the wear and tear of time and threatens to become a melancholy ruin in a few more years. Some time, let us hope, a gifted and conscientious his torian will appear and do for the early missionaries of the Southwest, for the Kinos, the Garces, the Escalantes and the other saintly and heroic priests and martyrs, what Parkman has done for the early Jesuits of Canada and New York, and Bryan Clinch for the Spanish mis sionaries of Southern and Lower California. It is pop ularly believed that Coronado, on his way to the Zuni pueblos of New Mexico, was the first white man to gaze |