Massacre at the Yuma Crossing

Massacre at the Yuma Crossing PDF Author: Mark Santiago
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816536856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The quiet of the dawn was rent by the screams of war. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of Quechan and Mohave warriors leaped from concealment, rushing the plaza from all sides. Painted for battle and brandishing lances, bows, and war clubs, the Indians killed every Spaniard they could catch. The route from the Spanish presidial settlements in upper Sonora to the Colorado River was called the Camino del Diablo, the "Road of the Devil." Running through the harshest of deserts, this route was the only way for the Spanish to transport goods overland to their settlements in California. At the end of the route lay the only passable part of the lower Colorado, and the people who lived around the river, the Yumas or Quechans, initially joined into a peaceful union with the Spanish. When the relationship soured and the Yumas revolted in 1781, it essentially ended Spanish settlement in the area, dashed the dreams of the mission builders, and limited Spanish expansion into California and beyond. In Massacre at the Yuma Crossing, Mark Santiago introduces us to the important and colorful actors involved in the dramatic revolt of 1781: Padre Francisco Garcés, who discovered a path from Sonora to California, made contact with the Yumas and eventually became their priest; Salvador Palma, the informal leader of the Yuman people, whose decision to negotiate with the Spanish earned him a reputation as a peacebuilder in the region, which eventually caused his downfall; and Teodoro de Croix, the Spanish commandant-general, who, breaking with traditional settlement practice, established two pueblos among the Quechans without an adequate garrison or mission, thereby leaving the settlers without any sort of defense when the revolt finally took place. Massacre at the Yuma Crossing not only tells the story of the Yuma Massacre with new details but also gives the reader an understanding of the pressing questions debated in the Spanish Empire at the time: What was the efficacy of the presidios? How extensive should the power of the Catholic mission priests be? And what would be the future of Spain in North America?

Massacre at the Yuma Crossing

Massacre at the Yuma Crossing PDF Author: Mark Santiago
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816536856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
The quiet of the dawn was rent by the screams of war. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of Quechan and Mohave warriors leaped from concealment, rushing the plaza from all sides. Painted for battle and brandishing lances, bows, and war clubs, the Indians killed every Spaniard they could catch. The route from the Spanish presidial settlements in upper Sonora to the Colorado River was called the Camino del Diablo, the "Road of the Devil." Running through the harshest of deserts, this route was the only way for the Spanish to transport goods overland to their settlements in California. At the end of the route lay the only passable part of the lower Colorado, and the people who lived around the river, the Yumas or Quechans, initially joined into a peaceful union with the Spanish. When the relationship soured and the Yumas revolted in 1781, it essentially ended Spanish settlement in the area, dashed the dreams of the mission builders, and limited Spanish expansion into California and beyond. In Massacre at the Yuma Crossing, Mark Santiago introduces us to the important and colorful actors involved in the dramatic revolt of 1781: Padre Francisco Garcés, who discovered a path from Sonora to California, made contact with the Yumas and eventually became their priest; Salvador Palma, the informal leader of the Yuman people, whose decision to negotiate with the Spanish earned him a reputation as a peacebuilder in the region, which eventually caused his downfall; and Teodoro de Croix, the Spanish commandant-general, who, breaking with traditional settlement practice, established two pueblos among the Quechans without an adequate garrison or mission, thereby leaving the settlers without any sort of defense when the revolt finally took place. Massacre at the Yuma Crossing not only tells the story of the Yuma Massacre with new details but also gives the reader an understanding of the pressing questions debated in the Spanish Empire at the time: What was the efficacy of the presidios? How extensive should the power of the Catholic mission priests be? And what would be the future of Spain in North America?

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.

Traders and Raiders

Traders and Raiders PDF Author: Natale A. Zappia
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469615851
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The Colorado River region looms large in the history of the American West, vitally important in the designs and dreams of Euro-Americans since the first Spanish journey up the river in the sixteenth century. But as Natale A. Zappia argues in this expansive study, the Colorado River basin must be understood first as home to a complex Indigenous world. Through 300 years of western colonial settlement, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans all encountered vast Indigenous borderlands peopled by Mojaves, Quechans, Southern Paiutes, Utes, Yokuts, and others, bound together by political, economic, and social networks. Examining a vast cultural geography including southern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Sonora, Baja California, and New Mexico, Zappia shows how this interior world pulsated throughout the centuries before and after Spanish contact, solidifying to create an autonomous, interethnic Indigenous space that expanded and adapted to an ever-encroaching global market economy. Situating the Colorado River basin firmly within our understanding of Indian country, Traders and Raiders investigates the borders and borderlands created during this period, connecting the coastlines of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds with a vast Indigenous continent.

American Indian Cowboys in Southern California, 1493–1941

American Indian Cowboys in Southern California, 1493–1941 PDF Author: David G. Shanta
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666957054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
In 1769–1770, Spanish Catholic missionaries, soldiers, and Cochimí Indians traveled to Alta California. They relied on domesticated animals, like horses and cattle, for food security in the continual expansion of the Spanish empire. These rapidly increasing herds consumed traditional sources of Indigenous foods, medicines, tools, and weapons and soon outstripped the ability of soldiers and priests to control them. This reality forced the Spanish missionaries to train trusted American Indian converts in the art of cowboying and cattle ranching. American Indian Cowboys in Southern California, 1493–1941: Survival, Sovereignty, and Identity by David G. Shanta provides new insights into the impact of horses and cattle on the Indigenous peoples of the Spanish Borderlands after early colonization. He examines how the American Indian cowboys formed the backbone of Spanish mission economies, the international trade in cowhides and tallow that created the Mexican ranchero class known as Californios, and later on American cattle operations. Shanta shows that California Native peoples adopted cowboying and cattle ranching, first as a survival strategy, but then also acquiring and running their own herds and forming a new, California American Indian economy based on cattle. Their new economy reinforced their demands for sovereignty over their ancestral lands with exclusive rights to essential elements, including the essential elements of pasturage and water. This book affirms the innovative nature of American Indian Cowboys and brings to light how they survived, kept their cultures alive, and gained recognition of their sovereign status.

Contesting the Borderlands

Contesting the Borderlands PDF Author: Deborah Lawrence
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806155094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Conflict and cooperation have shaped the American Southwest since prehistoric times. For centuries indigenous groups and, later, Spaniards, French, and Anglo-Americans met, fought, and collaborated with one another in this border area stretching from Texas through southern California. To explore the region’s complex past from prehistory to the U.S. takeover, this book uses an unusual multidisciplinary approach. In interviews with ten experts, Deborah and Jon Lawrence discuss subjects ranging from warfare among the earliest ancestral Puebloans to intermarriage and peonage among Spanish settlers and the Indians they encountered. The scholars interviewed form a distinguished array of archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and historians: Juliana Barr, Brian DeLay, Richard and Shirley Flint, John Kessell, Steven LeBlanc, Mark Santiago, Polly Schaafsma, David J. Weber, and Michael Wilcox. All speak forthrightly about complex and controversial issues, and they do so with minimal academic jargon and temporizing, bringing the most reliable information to bear on every subject they discuss. Themes the authors address include the origin and scope of conflicts between ethnic groups and the extent of accommodation, cooperation, and cross-cultural adaptation that also ensued. Seven interviews explore how Indians forced colonizers to modify their behavior. All of the experts explain how they deal with incomplete or biased sources to achieve balanced interpretations. As the authors point out, no single discipline provides a complete, accurate historical picture. Spanish documents must be sifted for political and ideological distortion, the archaeological record is incomplete, and oral traditions erode and become corrupted over time. By assembling the most articulate practitioners of all three approaches, the authors have produced a book that will speak to general readers as well as scholars and students in a variety of fields.

Murder State

Murder State PDF Author: Brendan C. Lindsay
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 080324021X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Euro-American citizenry of California carried out mass genocide against the Native population of their state, using the processes and mechanisms of democracy to secure land and resources for themselves and their private interests. The murder, rape, and enslavement of thousands of Native people were legitimized by notions of democracy—in this case mob rule—through a discreetly organized and brutally effective series of petitions, referenda, town hall meetings, and votes at every level of California government. Murder State is a comprehensive examination of these events and their early legacy. Preconceptions about Native Americans as shaped by the popular press and by immigrants’ experiences on the overland trail to California were used to further justify the elimination of Native people in the newcomers’ quest for land. The allegedly “violent nature” of Native people was often merely their reaction to the atrocities committed against them as they were driven from their ancestral lands and alienated from their traditional resources. In this narrative history employing numerous primary sources and the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on genocide, Brendan C. Lindsay examines the darker side of California history, one that is rarely studied in detail, and the motives of both Native Americans and Euro-Americans at the time. Murder State calls attention to the misuse of democracy to justify and commit genocide.

An Arizona Chronology

An Arizona Chronology PDF Author: Douglas D. Martin
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816551308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 81

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Book Description
An Arizona Chronology: The Territorial Years contains the first sheaves of a newspaperman's gleaning of history from the crisp, yellowing abundance of old newspapers and other Arizona archives. Who better to choose news items giving a key to the times than Douglas D. Martin, who first set newspaper type when he was 15, filled news and magazine columns and book pages galore, and today at 75 is still writing for print? He knows newspapers from the composing room to the editor's desk—Detroit Free Press—not excepting reportorial beats, having received the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on his own.

Pox Americana

Pox Americana PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Fenn
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1466808047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
The astonishing, hitherto unknown truths about a disease that transformed the United States at its birth A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America. By 1776, when military action and political ferment increased the movement of people and microbes, the epidemic worsened. Fenn's remarkable research shows us how smallpox devastated the American troops at Québec and kept them at bay during the British occupation of Boston. Soon the disease affected the war in Virginia, where it ravaged slaves who had escaped to join the British forces. During the terrible winter at Valley Forge, General Washington had to decide if and when to attempt the risky inoculation of his troops. In 1779, while Creeks and Cherokees were dying in Georgia, smallpox broke out in Mexico City, whence it followed travelers going north, striking Santa Fe and outlying pueblos in January 1781. Simultaneously it moved up the Pacific coast and east across the plains as far as Hudson's Bay. The destructive, desolating power of smallpox made for a cascade of public-health crises and heartbreaking human drama. Fenn's innovative work shows how this mega-tragedy was met and what its consequences were for America.

Franciscan Frontiersmen

Franciscan Frontiersmen PDF Author: Robert A. Kittle
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806158387
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Pious and scholarly, the Franciscan friars Pedro Font, Juan Crespí, and Francisco Garcés may at first seem improbable heroes. Beginning in Spain, their adventures encompassed the remote Sierra Gorda highlands of Mexico, the deserts of the American Southwest, and coastal California. Each man’s journey played an important role in Spain’s eighteenth-century conquest of the Pacific coast, but today their names and deeds are little known. Drawing on the diaries and correspondence of Font, Crespí, and Garcés, as well as his own exhaustive field research, Robert A. Kittle has woven a seamless narrative detailing the friars’ striking accomplishments. Starting with a harrowing transatlantic voyage, all three traveled through uncharted lands and found themselves beset by raiding Indians, marauding bears, starvation, and scurvy. Along the way, they made invaluable notes on indigenous peoples, flora and fauna, and prominent eighteenth-century European colonial figures. Font, the least celebrated of the three, recorded the daily events of the 1775–76 colonizing expedition of Juan Bautista de Anza while serving as its chaplain. Font’s legacy includes some of the earliest accurate maps of California between San Diego Bay and San Francisco Bay. Garcés, an itinerant missionary, developed close relationships with Indians in Sonora and California. He learned their languages and lived and traveled with them, usually as the only white man, and brokered dozens of peace agreements before he was killed in a Yuma uprising. Crespí, who traveled up the California coast with Father Junípero Serra, kept meticulous journals of an expedition to reconnoiter the San Francisco Bay area, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, and the northern reaches of California’s central valley. This enthralling narrative elevates these Spanish friars to their rightful place in the chronicle of American exploration. It brings their exploits out of the shadow of the American Revolution and Lewis & Clark expedition while also illuminating encounters between European explorers and missionaries and the American Indians who had occupied the Pacific coast for millennia.

Against the American Grain

Against the American Grain PDF Author: Gary Paul Nabhan
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826366988
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
A century ago, William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain profiled Anglo, French, and Spanish conquistadors, tyrants, preachers, and thought leaders who first shaped American culture. Since then, waves of resistance and disruptive innovation have flooded into the rest of America from the arid, southwestern margins of the US-Mexico borderlands. Now, in Against the American Grain, Gary Paul Nabhan—cultural ecologist, environmental historian, and lyric poet of the American Southwest—illuminates the outlines of a history too long in the shadows. Whether Indigenous, LatinX, priests, nuns, Quakers, or cross-cultural chameleons, it is the resisters, performers, grassroots organizers, nomads, and spiritual leaders from the desert margins who are constantly reshaping America. They have, against all odds, recolored and recovered the future of North America through outrageous acts of resistance. After reading the stories of Estevanico el Moro, Maria de Ágreda, Teresita de Cábora, Coyote Iguana, Woody Guthrie, Tim X. Hernandez, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Reyes Lopez Tijerana, Arturo Sandoval, Lalo Guererro, John Fife, Danny and Luis Valdez, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, and many more, we can never think about America the same way again. In Nabhan’s magisterial, radical recounting, cross-cultural collaborations have changed the grain of American life to one that is many-colored, once again flourishing with fragrance, faith, and fecund ideas.