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As Kasulaitis puts it, in the early 1800s "Arivaca was a ranch, not a town." The Ortis family had a 8,896 acre land grant that covered most of the valley and raised cattle, but when three employees and a child were killed in an Apache raid they abandoned the ranch, sometime in the 1830s. The family later reapplied for the land grant with the new Mexican government and moved back into the area. Throughout the decades that followed the Ortis family continued to play an important role in the valley and was connected to many of the elite families of Tucson.