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Our Catliolic Heritage in Texas
after founding Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe at El Paso, appears to have visited these pueblos. According to the Julimes themselves, the good friar had come to their people some time before 1671, and, before returning to El Paso, had said Mass among them. On June 13, 1684, when Captain Juan Dominguez de Mendoza stopped in their pueblos on his return march from Texas, these Indians, on being asked if they had been visited by Spaniards before, or if any missionaries had preached to them, declared that Father Garcia had come and said Mass for them several years before, but that he had left, promising to return soon. After this visit, they said, another religious had come, but he had not gone farther than their first pueblo. They said that he was a Franciscan named Fray Juan de Sumesta and that since his visit, no one else had come to live among them. 45 From the statements of the Indians, it is not possible to determine with any accuracy the time when these two missionaries were among them, but it is safe to deduce that the visit of Father Garcia must have been before 1671, since after that year he retired to the Monastery of Socorro at Senecu, sick and worn out. Father Sumesta, therefore, must have come to the J ulimes after this date. By a strange coincidence, it was in the darkest hour in the history of the struggling settlement at El Paso that emissaries from the natives that lived in the region of La Junta de los Rios came to solicit mis- sionaries. When the refugees from New Mexico were reduced to the greatest extreme and at the very time when the Mansos and Zumas, encouraged by the successful rebellion of the New Mexico pueblos and the cunning Apaches, were contemplating the massacre of the reduced and weakened Spanish settlers in the vicinity of El Paso, several delega- tions of Indians from the present Presidio area, then inhabited by the J ulimes, Conchos, and other tribes, appeared before the governor and the Custodio, Father Nicolas Lopez, to request missionaries to go to their lands to teach their people. The courage and enthusiasm of the new Custodio of New Mexico is truly admirable. Undaunted by the discour- aging circumstances that surrounded him, his faith unshaken by the fickleness of the Indians of New Mexico and the El Paso region, he. listened with genuine interest to the petitioners and was most anxious to set out immediately to carry to this new people the comforts of religion. But his religious zeal did not blind him to the facts. Before venturing forth, he decided to test the sincerity of the solicitors. He explained
â—„SAuto of Captain Juan Dominguez de Mendoza, at La Junta de los Rios, June 18, 1684. A. G. M., Provincias lnternas, Vol. 37, pt. 2, p. 32.
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