Escalante's Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest

Escalante's Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest PDF Author: David Roberts
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393652076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Famed adventure writer David Roberts retraces the route of the legendary Domínguez-Escalante expedition. In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayó, hunting for sources of gold and silver, and paving the way for Spanish settlements from Santa Fe to Monterey. In strict terms, the expedition failed. Running out of food and beset by an early winter, the twelve-man team gave up in what is now western Utah. The retreat to Santa Fe became an ordeal of survival. The men were reduced to eating their own horses while they searched for a crossing of the raging Colorado River in Glen Canyon. Seven months after setting out, Domínguez and Escalante staggered back to Santa Fe. Yet in the course of their 1,700-mile voyage, the explorers discovered more land unknown to Europeans than Lewis and Clark would encounter a quarter-century later. Other writers, using Escalante’s brilliant and quirky diary as a guide, have retraced the expedition route, but David Roberts is the first to dig beneath its pages to question and ponder every turn of the team’s decision-making and motivation. Roberts weaves the personal and the historical narratives into a gripping journey of discovery through the magnificent American Southwest.

Escalante's Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest

Escalante's Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest PDF Author: David Roberts
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393652076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
Famed adventure writer David Roberts retraces the route of the legendary Domínguez-Escalante expedition. In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayó, hunting for sources of gold and silver, and paving the way for Spanish settlements from Santa Fe to Monterey. In strict terms, the expedition failed. Running out of food and beset by an early winter, the twelve-man team gave up in what is now western Utah. The retreat to Santa Fe became an ordeal of survival. The men were reduced to eating their own horses while they searched for a crossing of the raging Colorado River in Glen Canyon. Seven months after setting out, Domínguez and Escalante staggered back to Santa Fe. Yet in the course of their 1,700-mile voyage, the explorers discovered more land unknown to Europeans than Lewis and Clark would encounter a quarter-century later. Other writers, using Escalante’s brilliant and quirky diary as a guide, have retraced the expedition route, but David Roberts is the first to dig beneath its pages to question and ponder every turn of the team’s decision-making and motivation. Roberts weaves the personal and the historical narratives into a gripping journey of discovery through the magnificent American Southwest.

The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest

The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest PDF Author: David Roberts
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393241890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
An award-winning author and veteran mountain climber takes us deep into the Southwest backcountry to uncover secrets of its ancient inhabitants. In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last twenty years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.

Beyond the Devil’s Road

Beyond the Devil’s Road PDF Author: Jeremy Beer
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806194995
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
The explorations of Francisco Garcés, an intrepid Franciscan friar of the eighteenth century, led to the opening of the first overland route from Mexico to California, produced new knowledge of unmapped terrain and unknown peoples, and revived dreams of Spanish imperial expansion. Beyond the Devil’s Road tells, for the first time, the full story of this extraordinary man’s epic life and journey and his critical place in the history of the American Southwest. From the moment he took up residence at the lonely mission of San Xavier del Bac in 1768, Garcés stood out among his fellow Spaniards for both the affection he showed the region’s Native peoples and his bravery. Traveling thousands of miles through modern Arizona, California, and Nevada to gather information for his superiors and preach to the unbaptized, he engaged the Indians of the Southwest with a respect for their ways and customs unprecedented among his peers, presaging a new—and better—model for cultural encounters. Along the way, he contacted more Indigenous groups than any other missionary of his time, often as the first European to do so. Garcés also paved the way and served as a guide for the famous expeditions of Juan Bautista de Anza in 1774 and 1775–76, bringing the first Spanish settlers to California—before the road he’d helped to open led to his death in the Quechan uprising of 1781. Consulting archives on three continents, including previously untapped sources and Garcés’s extensive diaries and letters, long obscured by unyielding language and handwriting, Beer crafts a nuanced and thoroughly engaging account of this incomparable explorer, groundbreaking missionary, and central actor in New Spain’s final sustained effort to expand its dominion into the lands that would become the American Southwest.

Remoteness Reconsidered

Remoteness Reconsidered PDF Author: Christopher Rossi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472129058
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Much of our understanding of the world is framed from the perspective of a dominant power center, or from standard readings of historical events. The architecture of international information distribution, academic centers, and the lingua franca of international scholarly discourse also shape these stories. Remoteness Reconsidered employs the idea of remoteness as an analytical tool for viewing international law's encounter with the Americas from the unusual, peripheral perspective of the Atacama Desert. The Atacama is one of the most remote places on Earth, although that less-than-accurate perspective comes from standard historical accounts of the region, accounts that originate from the “center.” Changing the usual frame of reference leads to a reconsideration of the idea of remoteness and of the subsequent marginalization of historical narratives that influence hemispheric international relations in important ways today. Lessons about international law's encounters with neoliberalism, indigenous and human rights, and the management and extraction of mineral resources take on new significance by following a spatial turn toward the idea of remoteness as applied to the Atacama Desert.

From Coronado to Escalante

From Coronado to Escalante PDF Author: John Miller Morris
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub
ISBN: 9780791013007
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description
Traces the history of Spanish exploration of the American Southwest and Mexico.

Finding Everett Ruess

Finding Everett Ruess PDF Author: David Roberts
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307591778
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The definitive biography of Everett Ruess, the artist, writer, and eloquent celebrator of the wilderness whose bold solo explorations of the American West and mysterious disappearance in the Utah desert at age twenty have earned him a large and devoted cult following. “Easily one of [Roberts’s] best . . . thoughtful and passionate . . . a compelling portrait of the Ruess myth.”—Outside Wandering alone with burros and pack horses through California and the Southwest for five years in the early 1930s, on voyages lasting as long as ten months, Ruess became friends with photographers Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange, swapped prints with Ansel Adams, took part in a Hopi ceremony, learned to speak Navajo, and was among the first "outsiders" to venture deeply into what was then (and to some extent still is) largely a little-known wilderness. When he vanished without a trace in November 1934, Ruess left behind thousands of pages of journals, letters, and poems, as well as more than a hundred watercolor paintings and blockprint engravings. Everett Ruess is hailed as a paragon of solo exploration, while the mystery of his death remains one of the greatest riddles in the annals of American adventure. David Roberts began probing the life and death of Everett Ruess for National Geographic Adventure magazine in 1998. Finding Everett Ruess is the result of his personal journeys into the remote areas explored by Ruess, his interviews with oldtimers who encountered the young vagabond and with Ruess’s closest living relatives, and his deep immersion in Ruess’s writings and artwork. More than seventy-five years after his vanishing, Ruess stirs the kinds of passion and speculation accorded such legendary doomed American adventurers as Into the Wild’s Chris McCandless and Amelia Earhart.

In Search of Domínguez & Escalante

In Search of Domínguez & Escalante PDF Author: Greg MacGregor
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780890135297
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Contemporary American Indian basketry in California and the Great Basin has been undergoing a significant revival over the past fifteen years.

The Spanish Exploration of the Southwest

The Spanish Exploration of the Southwest PDF Author: Leonore Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781422211311
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description


The Spanish in the Southwest

The Spanish in the Southwest PDF Author: Rosa Viola Winterburn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : California
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description


A Newer World

A Newer World PDF Author: David Roberts
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In the tradition of "Undaunted Courage" comes the first account of the partnership of two of America's great 19th-century adventurers, John C. Fremont and Kit Carson, whose expeditions transformed the nation.