Diary of the Alarcón Expedition Into Texas, 1718-1719

Diary of the Alarcón Expedition Into Texas, 1718-1719
Author: Francisco Celiz (fray.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 166
Release: 1935
Genre: California
ISBN:
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"When in January, 1933, the diary of the Alarcón expedition into Texas and Louisiana was found in the Archivo General de la Nación by Mr. Luis Ceballos and Miss María Viamonte, paleographers in the archives, it was not until the document was shown to the noted Mexican historian and scholar, Ing. Vito Alessio Robles, that its full importance came to be known. Ing. Alessio Robles, being an authority on the early history of northern Mexico and Texas, immediately had several transcript copies made of the manuscript, one of which he gave to me with the suggestion that I translate the document and have it published with notes. In accordance with his wishes, I have translated the diary, consulting the transcript and the original in the archives, and have made the notes with the aid of other historical manuscripts furnished me in the Archivo General and by using the historical works so generously lent me by Ing. Alessio Robles. The diary, lost for more than two centuries, had been misplaced in an expediente entitled Medidas de Tierras efectuadas en las Misiones de San Bernardino de la Candela y Santiago de Valladares, 1718 (Survey of Lands effected at the Missions of San Bernardino de la Candela and Santiago de Valladares, 1718), at the end of volume 360 of the section of the archives known as Tierras. In the meantime Senor Alessio Robles has published the original Spanish text, without notes, in the review, La Universidad de Mexico, Tomo V, Nos. 25-26 (Noviembre-Diciembre, 1932), pp. 48-69, and Tomo V, Nos. 27-28 (Enero-Febrero, 1933), pp. 217-239. Since the original manuscript was not discovered until January, 1933, it must be noted that both numbers of this review appeared several months later, the November-December number appearing in February and the January-February number in March of 1933. The original manuscript consists of twenty-six sheets, 15 x 21.5 cms., written on both sides in a small hand by the chaplain of the expedition, Fray Francisco Céliz, a priest of the mission of El Dulcísimo Nombre de Jesús de Peyotes in Coahuila. The document carries no title. Alarcón's son, Francisco de Alarcón, in a letter written July 19, 1719, attached to the diary, calls it El Diario de la conquista y entrada a los Thejas (The Diary of the conquest and entrance to the Thejas)"--Leaves 1-2

Spanish Expeditions into Texas, 1689–1768

Spanish Expeditions into Texas, 1689–1768
Author: William C. Foster
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292793138
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Based on official Spanish expedition diaries, a fascinating account of the daily routes taken and the Indigenous tribes, terrain, and wildlife encountered. Mapping old trails has a romantic allure at least as great as the difficulty involved in doing it. In this book, William Foster produces the first highly accurate maps of the eleven Spanish expeditions from northeastern Mexico into what is now East Texas during the years 1689 to 1768. Foster draws upon the detailed diaries that each expedition kept of its route, cross-checking the journals among themselves and against previously unused eighteenth-century Spanish maps, modern detailed topographic maps, aerial photographs, and on-site inspections. From these sources emerges a clear picture of where the Spanish explorers actually passed through Texas. This information, which corrects many previous misinterpretations, will be widely valuable. Old names of rivers and landforms will be of interest to geographers. Anthropologists and archaeologists will find new information on encounters with some 139 named Indigenous tribes. Botanists and zoologists will see changes in the distribution of flora and fauna with increasing European habitation, and climatologists will learn more about the “Little Ice Age” along the Rio Grande. “Foster offers readers as accurate an estimate as could ever be hoped for for the eleven routes as whole.” —The Journal of American History “Foster does an excellent job sorting out his predecessors’ fallacious interpretations of the significance and location of certain routes.” —Colonial Latin American Historical Review “To have a single authoritative source of these early expeditions [is] enormously useful . . . Foster’s work [is] the most authoritative on the subject.” —David J. Weber, Southern Methodist University

Historic Native Peoples of Texas

Historic Native Peoples of Texas
Author: William C. Foster
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2009-02-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292781911
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An incredibly detailed account of Indigenous lifeways during the initial rounds of European exploration in south-central North America. Several hundred tribes of Native Americans were living within or hunting and trading across the present-day borders of Texas when Cabeza de Vaca and his shipwrecked companions washed up on a Gulf Coast beach in 1528. Over the next two centuries, as Spanish and French expeditions explored the state, they recorded detailed information about the locations and lifeways of Texas’s Native peoples. Using recent translations of these expedition diaries and journals, along with discoveries from ongoing archaeological investigations, William C. Foster here assembles the most complete account ever published of Texas’s Native peoples during the early historic period (AD 1528 to 1722). Foster describes the historic Native peoples of Texas by geographic regions. His chronological narrative records the interactions of Native groups with European explorers and with Native trading partners across a wide network that extended into Louisiana, the Great Plains, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Foster provides extensive ethnohistorical information about Texas’s Native peoples, as well as data on the various regions’ animals, plants, and climate. Accompanying each regional account is an annotated list of named Indigenous tribes in that region and maps that show tribal territories and European expedition routes. “A very useful encyclopedic regional account of the Europeans and Native peoples of Texas who encountered one another during the relatively unexamined two hundred years before the Spanish occupation of Texas and the French establishment of Louisiana.” —Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Let There Be Towns

Let There Be Towns
Author: Gilbert R. Cruz
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1988
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780890966778
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Three pillars supported the empire of New Spain. The first two, the presidio and the mission, have lived on in history and the popular imagination. The third, less studied and less understood, has lived on in the traditions of local self-governance and the distinctive cultural and social patterns of the Southwest. That third pillar is the civil settlement, or town, with its distinctive governmental institutions. Town councils, or cabildos, brought to the northern frontier a high degree of law and order, patterns of local government, a rough democracy, and the principle of justice based on rule of law. The towns populated the Borderlands, introduced industry, and contributed to the economy and defense of Hispanic territories. Let There Be Towns presents the origins and contributions of six of the early settlements of New Spain--San Antonio and Laredo in Spanish Texas, Santa Fe and El Paso in Nuevo Mexico, and San Jose and Los Angeles in Alta California. In Let There Be Towns, Gilbert R. Cruz carefully assesses their importance as part of the Spanish government's policy for implanting in North America the linguistic, social, religious, and political values of the crown. Ten years of archival study, as well as travel through Spain and Mexico researching the origins of colonial towns in parent institutions, have led the author to the provocative conclusion that town settlements and their civil governments were even more important than the more glamorous missions and presidios in establishing Spanish dominion over the northern Borderlands.

Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga

Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga
Author: Tamra Lynn Walter
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292773919
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San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2009 In the early part of the eighteenth century, the Spanish colonial mission Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga was relocated from far south Texas to a site along the Guadalupe River in Mission Valley, Victoria County. This mission, along with a handful of others in south Texas, was established by the Spaniards in an effort to Christianize and civilize the local Native American tribes in the hopes that they would become loyal Spanish citizens who would protect this new frontier from foreign incursions. With written historical records scarce for Espíritu Santo, Tamra Walter relies heavily on material culture recovered at this site through a series of recent archaeological investigations to present a compelling portrait of the Franciscan mission system. By examining findings from the entire mission site, including the compound, irrigation system, quarry, and kiln, she focuses on questions that are rarely, if ever, answered through historical records alone: What was daily life at the mission like? What effect did the mission routine have on the traditional lifeways of the mission Indians? How were both the Indians and the colonizers changed by their frontier experiences, and what does this say about the missionization process? Walter goes beyond simple descriptions of artifacts and mission architecture to address the role these elements played in the lives of the mission residents, demonstrating how archaeology is able to address issues that are not typically addressed by historians. In doing so, she presents an accurate portrait of life in South Texas at this time. This study of Mission Espíritu Santo will serve as a model for research at similar early colonial sites in Texas and elsewhere.