First as to historic records: did Coronado see Casa Grande in 1540, when he marched north across the country? He records seeing an ancient Great House, where Indians dwelt. Bandelier, Fewkes and a dozen others who have identified his itinerary, say this was not Casa Grande. Even by 1540, Casa Grande was an abandoned ruin. Kino, the great Jesuit, was the first white man known to have visited the Great House; and he gathered the Pimas and Papagoes about and said mass there about 1694. What a weird scene it must have been--the Sacaton Mountains glimmering in the clear morning light; the shy Indians in gaudy tunics and yucca fiber pantaloons crowding sideways through the halls to watch what to them must have been the gorgeous vestments of the priest. Then followed the elevation of the host, the bowing of the heads, the raising of the standard of the Cross; and a new era, that has not boded well for the Pimas and Papagoes, was ushered in. Then the Indians scattered to their antelope plains and to the mountains; and the priest went on to the Mission of San Xavier del Bac. The Jesuits suffered expulsion, and Garcez, the Franciscan, came in 1775, and also held mass in Casa Grande. Garcez says that it was a tradition among the Moki of the northern desert that they had originally come from the south, from the Morning Glow of Casa Grande, and that they had inhabited the box-canyons of the Gila in the days when they were "a little people." This establishes Casa Grande as prior to the cave dwellings of the Gila or Frijoles; and the cave dwellings were practically contemporaneous with the Stone Age and the last centuries of the Ice Age. Now, the cave dwellings had been abandoned for centuries before the Spaniards came. This puts the cave age contemporaneous with or prior to the Christian era. In the very center of the Casa Grande reservoir, across the doorways of caves in Frijoles Canyon, grew trees that have taken centuries to come to maturity. The Indian tradition is that soon after a very great flood of turbulent waters, in the days when the Desert was knee-deep in grass, the Indian Gods came from the Underworld to dwell in Casa Grande. (Not so very different from theories of evolution and transmigration, is it?) The people waxed so numerous that they split off in two great families. One migrated to the south--the Pimas, the Papagoes, the Maricopas; the others crossed the mountains to the north--the Zunis, the Mokis, the Hopis.