By Dave Lewis
Thus far in our series of occasional articles, we have discussed the Spanish entradas, missions and settlements south of the Gila River, Mexico’s independence from Spain, and a few of the mountain men who crossed this land -- all against the backdrop of the area’s challenging terrain and the lives and cultures of Natives who predated the arrival of Europeans by 10,000 years. By the 1840s, Mexico had population and governmental centers at Santa Fe and several places in Southern California; the small settlements at Tubac and Tucson were the only Mexican presence in what would become Arizona. The rest of Arizona was left to the Indians.
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