Pima

The Pima, who called themselves O'odham, or river people, were irrigation farmers of the Gila and Salt rivers in Arizona and the Sonora and Yaqui rivers farther south. The Spanish named them Pima from a phrase meaning I don't know, heard at their first meetings. Northern bands made up the Upper Pima, while the Lower Pima held the Sonoran river valleys.

They lived in spread-out villages, watered maize, bean and cotton fields through canals, and fought off Apache and Yavapai raiders. Father Eusebio Kino first visited their villages in 1694.

In 1751 Luis Oacpicagigua united some fifteen thousand Pima in the Pima Revolt, which killed more than a hundred settlers before he surrendered in 1752. He died in a Spanish prison in 1755, and new presidios then placed the frontier under military rule.