Even more threatening were the very vivid memories of the fresh graves marking the final resting place of isolated pioneer families which they had seen along the trail from Yuma. Ranchers had warned of the dangers along the way and told of the depredations of Cochise and his marauding bands. If the rigors of the journey itself had not been enough to have the Sisters thirsting for an end to it, then certainly a new sense of danger must have had them praying for a quick arrival in Tucson, as the little party of seven nuns, a driver, and the Vicar-General of the Vicariate of Arizona, Father Jouvenceau, who met them at Yuma, had by now come well within the range of an Apache sweep. Eleven days later, they had passed through the worst of the desert, following the course of the Gila River as far as the ruins of Casa Grande where they had turned south for the final leg of the journey to Tucson. Finally, it took them across the Colorado to Fort Yuma one week after they left San Diego. The trail cut south through the mountain passes in Baja California, eastward through the ranges along the border and north again into the sand dunes west of Yuma.

After a brief rest, they had set out once again, this time by wagon for Arizona. Louis to San Francisco by rail, thence to San Diego by sea. They had been traveling to Tucson on a circuitous route that had taken them from St. Joseph of Carondelet, Missouri, had left their motherhouse over a month before. Without a doubt, the tomorrow on the minds of seven determined women who were approaching Picacho Peak from the north on the evening of May 25, 1870, must have been the twenty-four hours that lay immediately ahead.

This, perhaps, is the fascination of history - the realization that the humdrum, taken-for-granted today was someone else's completely unpredictable tomorrow. Yet, it is a story of continuous living that reaches back to yesterday, touches today, and leaps toward the unknown tomorrow. Its beginnings already go back beyond the memory of living men. This microcosm of modern, technological society where dozens of sciences converge to serve the talents and energies of hundreds of professionals engaged in a single pursuit: the welfare of their fellow humans - this hospital that is St. It was not always so - this humming, organic reality that we know today, pulsating round the clock in its shell of mortar and steel.

Fidelia torrent