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.

"Priest, professor, political activist, servant for peace. This is the story of one man's unique journey around the world, in the name of human connection, peace, and active nonviolence. Father Harry J. Bury, Ph. D. is a Catholic priest unlike any you have ever met. His travels through Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Hong Kong, India, Costa Rica, Philippines, Africa, Palestine, and Israel span over 60 years. [...] His determination to help his fellow human beings put him in sometimes compromising and often dangerous situations with American law enforcement, foreign governments, and the church alike. He was: arrested at the Pentagon in 1969, chained to the gates of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1971,served at the side of Mother Teresa in Calcutta in 1971, arrested by Swiss Guards for saying Mass on the steps of the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome in 1971, participated in the release of American POWs in Vietnam in 1972, con-celebrated Mass with Pope John Paul II at Mother Teresa's Beautification Mass in 2004, kidnapped at gunpoint in Gaza in 2005, and awarded the key to Ho Chi Minh City in gratitude for his efforts to end the war in 2014"--Publisher's description

Ames wants to escape from intercity gang life in the Mission District of San Francisco, which challenges his physical, emotional and spiritual life. Attempting to break out of the gang related activities in which he is involved; he has to rely on his inner strength. His journey takes him through dangers in gang fights, into the back streets of Hong Kong, to the city room of a newspaper where a deranged reporter wants to kill him, to missionary in Central America, to prison chaplain and to storms at sea. Shadowing his life is the feeling he will slip back to being as evil as he was in the street gang. In the church, he has a reputation as a "maverick." His path to escape his problems is the sea and sailing to far distant lands. Myasthenia Gravis, a neuromuscular disease, debilitates Ames. Suddenly he looses his ability to preach, to sail, to sing. Now what does God have in store for him? Those who are interested in real life adventures, in mission work, prison ministry, or sailing will find this book entertaining and exciting. Many will find hope in this book for making their own escape from the ghettos of their lives. They also, like the author, can escape.