Sobaipuri

The Sobaipuri were O’odham people of the San Pedro and Santa Cruz river valleys, where villages and fields lay among the dry mountains of the Southwest. They farmed along the rivers and maintained ties with neighbouring communities. Quiburi, on the San Pedro, was an important settlement under the leader known to the Spanish as Captain Coro.

In 1698 a force of Sobaipuri from Quiburi and the Santa Cruz valley fought a raiding party that had attacked another village on the San Pedro. Coro’s people later moved west, returning to rebuild Quiburi in 1705. Continued warfare made life in the valley precarious; by 1762 the remaining Sobaipuri there had left for communities including Bac and Tucson, although their connections to the San Pedro endured.