This office has been unable to find any reference connecting Merrill's
later experiences in the San Pedro Valley with the time when he was an
officer of the Mormon Battalion, though it can be imagined that his later
associates had the benefit of many reminiscences of that period of the
march just prior to the taking of Tucson.
The San Pedro Valley is a historic locality. Down it passed Friar Marco
de Niza, in 1539, and the Coronado expedition of the following year. The
waters of the stream were a joyous sight to the Mormon Battalion, when it
passed that way during the Mexican War. The country then had been
occupied to some extent by Spaniards or Mexicans, who had established
large ranches, with many cattle, from which they had been driven by the
Apaches, years before the Battalion came. The country once had been the
ranging ground of the friendly Sobaipuri Indians, but they too had been
driven away by the hillmen and had established a village on the Santa
Cruz, near their kinsmen, the Papago, almost on the site where Tucson was
founded as a Spanish presidio in 1776.
The river, when the Merrill party came, was found usually in a deep
gully, in places twenty feet below the surface of the silty ground.
Naturally, difficulty has attended the attempts to dam the stream.