Mission San Francisco de los Julimes

Duane's take

The marker's got the word on this one, and here's how I'm tellin' it. Way out in the Big Bend country, where the land runs hard and the sky runs forever, there was a time when nine missions rose up from that rugged earth. Nine of them.

Not one, not a handful. Nine. And this place, Mission San Francisco de los Julimes, was among them.

The year was 1683, rolling into 1684, and the men behind that undertaking were Father Fray Nicolas Lopez of the Franciscan order and Don Juan Dominguez de Mendoza. Together they planted those nine missions across the Big Bend, one after another, out in country that did not make anything easy. The Franciscan missionaries who followed kept this one going, working among the Jumano, the Julimes, and other Indian peoples of the area, with the purpose of what the record calls civilizing and Christianizing them.

That was the mission, in every sense of the word. Out here in Presidio County, where the Big Bend holds its secrets close, that history still stands in the stone of the marker and in the ground beneath your feet.

What the marker says

One of nine Missions established in the Big Bend country by Father Fray Nicolas Lopez, O.F.M., and Don Juan Dominguez de Mendoza in 1683-1684. Maintained by Franciscan missionaries for the civilizing and Christianizing of the Jumano, Julimes and other Indians of this area. (1936)