First Mass

November 1697

Photos

Documentation

• Herbert E. Bolton, ed. & trans., "Kino's Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta" (1919), quoting Juan Mateo Manje's diary

Notes

Fr. Eusebio Francisco Kino, S.J. first sighted the Hohokam ruins known as the Casa Grande in November 1694, describing them in his own memoir as "a four-story building, as large as a castle and equal to the largest church in these lands of Sonora." The explicit Mass claim comes from a later visit: Lieutenant Juan Mateo Manje, who accompanied Kino on the government-escorted November 1697 expedition to the Gila River, recorded in his diary that the party "arrived at noon at the 'casas grandes,' within which mass was said by Father Kino, who had not yet breakfasted"- quoted directly in Herbert E. Bolton's annotated translation of Kino's own memoir. Fray Zephyrin Engelhardt's The Franciscans in Arizona (1899) also describes Kino saying Mass at the Casa Grande, but attaches it to the 1694 sighting rather than 1697. Manje's own diary, a primary eyewitness account with an exact quote, is the stronger and more specific source, so 1697 is used here. Casa Grande Ruins is now a National Monument near Coolidge.