We arrived at the mission well before sunrise, found our way around back into a small, private parking area and set up the tripod and camera in the dark to await sunrise. After a few minutes, a man began opening the building to set up for the day and was quite startled (and a bit alarmed) to find us standing there in the dark. But he decided we were harmless, and we waited for the rising sun to kiss the bell towers and dome with warm dawn light. San Xavier Mission was founded as a Catholic mission by Father Eusebio Kino in 1692. Construction of the current church began in 1783 and was completed in 1797, when Southern Arizona was part of New Spain. Franciscan missionary Fr. Juan Bautista Velderrain used money borrowed from a Sonoran rancher to hire an architect, Ignacio Gaona, and a large workforce of O'odham to create the present church. The Tohono O'odham of today is a nation with a population of more than 24,000 people. For years, many have known the people as Papago, but during the 1980s, Papago was officially changed to the Tohono O'odham, meaning Desert People in the O'odham language. [Mission website]