Kino, Eusebio Francisco (1645–1711)

Eusebio Francisco Kino (b. 10 August 1645; d. 15 March 1711), Jesuit missionary and explorer of northwestern New Spain. A native of Segno, near Trent, in the Italian Tyrol, educated in Austria and Germany, Kino was among the foreign-born Jesuit missionaries permitted by the Spanish crown under quota to serve in the Spanish Indies. He excelled in mathematics, astronomy, and cartography, and could have had a university chair in Europe. Instead, he put these skills to good use during a thirty-year career in New Spain, first as royal cosmographer of Admiral Isidro de Atondo's failed effort to occupy Baja California in the mid-1680s and then as the pioneer missionary of Pimería Alta (present-day northern Sonora and southern Arizona), capstone of the Jesuits' northwest missionary empire.

An irrepressible expansionist, Kino had a restless nature better suited to exploration and first contact with the Pimas and Pápagos (Tohono O'Odam) than for everyday administrative routine at mission Dolores, which he established as his headquarters in 1687. On numerous expeditions, traveling the valleys of the San Pedro, Santa Cruz, Gila, and Colorado rivers, he introduced cattle, created demand for European goods, and mapped the country. His crowning cartographic achievement, which he drew the year before his death, showed California not as an island, a misconception of the seventeenth century, but as a peninsula.

In 1966, Kino's grave was discovered in Magdalena, Sonora, since renamed Magdalena de Kino. The Jesuits in the early twenty-first century promoted his cause for canonization. A mineral, a hospital, a table wine, and much else bear his name, and statues abound.

See alsoJesuits; New Spain, Colonization of the Northern Frontier.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Herbert E. Bolton, Rim of Christendom: A Biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer (1936; repr. 1984).

Ernest J. Burrus, e.g., Kino and the Cartography of Northwestern New Spain (1965).

Ernest J. Burrus Kino and Manje, Explorers of Sonora and Arizona, Their Vision of the Future (1971). See also Charles W. Polzer, Kino Guide II, rev. ed. (1987).

Additional Bibliography

Montané Martí, Julio C. Intriga en la corte: Eusebio Francisco Kino, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, y Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Hermosillo, México: Universidad de Sonora, 1997.

Polzer, Charles W. Kino, a Legacy: His Life, His Works, His Missions, His Monuments. Tucson: Jesuit Fathers of Southern Arizona, 1998.

                                          John L. Kessell