Before Arizona was Arizona, one man on horseback helped map much of the region Europeans barely understood. Eusebio Francisco Kino was born in 1645 in Segno, in what is now northern Italy. A Jesuit missionary and cartographer, he arrived in the Pimería Alta in 1687, an Indigenous homeland stretching across present-day southern Arizona and Sonora. He spent the next 24 years traveling through the region. Kino explored the Gila and Colorado rivers, visited the Casa Grande ruins and produced maps that became some of the most important European maps of the Southwest. His expeditions also helped prove that California was a peninsula, not an island. (National Park Service) He established missions and visitas across the region, including San Xavier del Bac and Tumacácori, and helped introduce large-scale cattle ranching and new forms of agriculture. The churches standing at those sites today were built later. (National Park Service) But the mission system was also part of Spain’s colonial...