Kino Bay Chronicle

Bahia Kino was named for Padre Eusebio Kino who entered this region by boat from the Baja in 1687. He is credited with many heroic accomplishments. He was 55 years old when he came, and spent the rest of his life among the Mexican and Indian people, bringing them not only religion but also education and agriculture. He established a string of missions extending from northern Mexico and Baja California to what is now the southwestern United States. In 1987, people of Old Kino celebrated the 300th anniversary of his arrival with a colorful pageant.

Along with his missionary work he did extensive mapping of the region and was the first European to disprove the long-held belief that Baja California was an island.

Padre Kino was born in Trent, Italy. He changed his last name from "Chinus" because it was pronounced like the Spanish word "chinos" which means Chinese. His choice of the letter "K" is interesting because it does not exist in the Spanish alphabet and is used only in words of foreign origin.

Padre Kino died in 1711 and his remains can be seen in a shrine in Magdalena, Sonora.

W J McGee (he did not put periods after his initials) was very likely the first American (as U.S. people are called in Mexico) to launch a boat from a beach at Kino Bay.

McGee, from the U. S. Bureau of Ethnology in Washington D. C., came to Sonora in 1894 hoping to find Papago Indians still living in something like an aboriginal state. He was too late for that stage of Papago history but while in Hermosillo heard about the Seri Indians and decided to make a study of them and their culture. At the headquarters of Rancho Costa Rica, between Hermosillo and Kino Bay, he found a camp of Seris and spent a couple of days interviewing them. He got a few photographs and made plans to return the following year to visit Seri camps on both Tiburon Island and on the adjacent mainland shore.

By the time he came back, thirteen months later, relationships between the Seris and the Mexican ranchers of the area had deteriorated badly and McGee was warned that the Indians were hostile.

This did not daunt W J and at the ranch he had visited the previous year, with the help of his Mexican host, Don Pascual Encinas, he organized his expedition.

His crew consisted of three other Americans -- a photographer, a map-maker and an interpreter -- five Papago Indians, a Yaqui Indian and two Mexicans. With their help he built a 17-foot wooden boat he christened the "Anita" (for his wife). They loaded the heavy craft on a wagon pulled by six horses and the twelve men set out for a launching camp on the mainland beach opposite Alcatraz Island. On December 14, 1895, in a heavy surf, they launched the "Anita." McGee and part of his crew walked up the beach, looking for signs of Seri encampments. Six men sailed and paddled north- west, past the present site of the Caverna RV Park.

After two weeks they gave up and headed back to Rancho Costa Rica without seeing a single Seri but with a collection of artifacts including a slightly-damaged balsa canoe they found abandoned on the beach. (1)

So much for W J McGee, except for one thing: nowhere in his diary does he make mention of a village or Mexican habitation anywhere on the shores of Kino Bay. That, plus the fact that he had to send members of his party some distance inland for water, from their base camp near Alcatraz, suggests that the village we call Old Kino had not yet been established.

We did not learn exactly when the first non-Indian people settled on the coast here. They were undoubtedly Mexicans who made their living fishing. One informant who visited Kino about 1943 said there were "only about a half dozen houses there. " One of those was a "fisherman's hotel", which had been built by an American, Yates LaSalle Holmes, in 1924. Soon after came other developments. The first grocery store opened in 1933. In 1935 fishermen formed the first fishing cooperative. The first church was built in 1937.

Commercial fishing thrived for a while. Many tons of large fish, like the totoaba, now a protected species, were harvested annually in the waters around Alcatraz. For a time there was a substantial demand for shark oil. Three more cooperatives were organized and a sardine cannery was built.

(1) McGee published the results of his study in 1898 in The Seri Indians, (17th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Part 1). This was reprinted in 1971 by Rio Grande Press, Glorieta, New Mexico. Portions of his diaries were reproduced in "Tales From Tiburon, An Anthology of Adventures in Seriland", Southwest Natural History Association, Phoenix, Arizona, which also includes four other accounts of explorers who came to this area between 1826 and 1922.