San Xavier is, in itself, worth a stop-over at Tucson. You may make the round trip from the railway station in a couple of hours by automobile, getting en route a taste of genuine desert scenery, with its scattered covering of creosote bush, mesquite, cat’s claw, ocotillo and sahuaro. The Mission building is one of the most beautiful examples of Spanish ecclesiastical architecture in our country; and the pure white structure, lonely in the desert, its glistening walls and stately towers and dome silhouetted against a sapphire sky, makes a striking sight, oriental in its suggestion. The church part is still used for religious services, and other portions form the residence of Sisters of a Catholic order who conduct a school for the children of the Papago Indians. The primitive habitations of the latter, scattered about within easy access of the Mission, are the Mission’s only near neighbors. A small fee admits one to the church. A feature of interest at the front is the coat-of-arms in relief of the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi.[92] This is evidence enough that the present structure, which was begun in 1783 and finished in 1797, was erected by Franciscans, although, as already stated, the Mission itself was founded about a century previously by Jesuits. In 1768 and for ten succeeding years, the resident missionary at San Xavier was Padre Francisco Garcés, one of the most remarkable characters in the Southwest’s history. An enthusiastic young priest in his early thirties when he came to San Xavier, and possessed of a powerful physique, he journeyed on foot up and down the valleys of the Gila and the Colorado (even penetrating into California and to the Hopi village of Oraibi), tirelessly searching out Indians, and preaching to them Christ and the gospel of reconciliation. He was indeed the original Christian Pacifist of the Southwest, urging upon the Indian tribes everywhere that they should settle their differences peaceably and live together as brothers. To prove his faith he would never suffer a military escort to accompany him in his wilderness pioneering, but took only an Indian companion or two as interpreter, and a mule to carry his ecclesiastical impedimenta. Neither would he bear any weapon for defense, but went “equipped only with charity and apostolic zeal.”[93] His kindly, joyous character, so endeared him to the aborigines, that, as he himself records, a village would often refuse to supply him a guide to the next tribe, wanting to keep him for themselves. Under such circumstances, he would set out alone. He was a rare puzzle to those barbarians, both because they found it difficult to decide whether in his long gown and clean-shaven face he was man or woman, and because he strangely wanted nothing of them but the chance to give them a free passport to Heaven—an inexplicable sort of white man, indeed!