Juan Bautista de Anza led the Spanish colonizing expedition in 1775-76 that opened a trail from Arizona to California and established a presidio at San Francisco Bay. Franciscan missionary Fray Pedro Font accompanied Anza. As chaplain and geographer, Font kept a detailed daily record of the expedition's progress that today is considered one of the fundamental documents of exploration in the American Southwest. This new edition includes Font's recently discovered field journal--the actual notes he wrote on the trail. Previously published only in Spanish, this journal contains many details and perspectives not found in the two "official" versions that Font prepared after the expedition. It supplants the 1930 edition prepared by Herbert Eugene Bolton, which was based solely on Font's "official" texts. With Anza to California, 1775-1776 interweaves and correlates for the first time all existing texts of Font's journal and incorporates the latest research on this pathbreaking expedition. Editor Alan K. Brown has rendered a more accurate translation, allowing us to relive the journey through Font's eyes as the friar presents a panorama of history, geography, and ecology. Font also describes the interaction between Hispanic settlers and Native peoples--revealing Spanish relations with the Quechans on the Colorado River and the Kumeyaay uprising in San Diego. Featuring maps and relief profiles drawn by Font, along with new maps prepared by Brown, this edition includes an extensive introduction and copious explanatory notes. It is the most complete account of the Anza expedition and a foundational primary source in California and Southwest history.

Juan Bautista de Anza led the Spanish colonizing expedition in 1775-76 that opened a trail from Arizona to California and established a presidio at San Francisco Bay. Franciscan missionary Fray Pedro Font accompanied Anza. As chaplain and geographer, Font kept a detailed daily record of the expedition's progress that today is considered one of the fundamental documents of exploration in the American Southwest. This new edition includes Font's recently discovered field journal--the actual notes he wrote on the trail. Previously published only in Spanish, this journal contains many details and perspectives not found in the two "official" versions that Font prepared after the expedition. It supplants the 1930 edition prepared by Herbert Eugene Bolton, which was based solely on Font's "official" texts. With Anza to California, 1775-1776 interweaves and correlates for the first time all existing texts of Font's journal and incorporates the latest research on this pathbreaking expedition. Editor Alan K. Brown has rendered a more accurate translation, allowing us to relive the journey through Font's eyes as the friar presents a panorama of history, geography, and ecology. Font also describes the interaction between Hispanic settlers and Native peoples--revealing Spanish relations with the Quechans on the Colorado River and the Kumeyaay uprising in San Diego. Featuring maps and relief profiles drawn by Font, along with new maps prepared by Brown, this edition includes an extensive introduction and copious explanatory notes. It is the most complete account of the Anza expedition and a foundational primary source in California and Southwest history.

Thomas C. Patterson’s large-scale history of the Inland Empire of Southern California traces the social, political and economic changes in this region from the first Native American settlement 12,000 years ago to the present. Framing his discussion of this region in the general growth trajectory of California’s socio-economic history, he is able to connect landscape, resources, wealth, labor, and inequality using a Marxian framework for many key periods of the region’s history. In moving between large scale historical changes, regional adaptations and resistance to those changes, and a framework that places those responses in theoretical context, Patterson’s work allows the reader to see how inland Southern California developed into the warehouse empire of the 21st century and its prospects for the future.

Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540-1859

From Huhugam to Hohokam: Heritage and Archaeology in the American Southwest is an historical comparison of archaeologists’ views of the ancient Hohokam with Native O’odham concepts about themselves and their relationships with their neighbors and ancestors.

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.