Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1964. Reprint. Hardcover. Fine/very good. A fine 1964 reprint of the 1949 classic. Blue cloth boards with white title stamping on cover and spine. Map end papers. From the private library of Larry Southwick, collector's marginalia pencilled near edge of title page. In a very good, original, unclipped dust jacket. Dust jacket shows a 1 1/4 inch tear along front fore edge of jacket. Illustrated with maps. 491 pp. including index. Octavo, 6 x 9 inches tall. The dramatic story of the first European exploration of our continent's southwestern quarter by the Coronado expedition of 1540-1542 is here retold by a master historian, whose Berkeley seminars through the decades have fostered awhole school of Boltonian students of the Americas.This Coronado volume, first promised in 1940 for the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the expedition, is the crown of a long career-a career of documentary interpretation and personal exploration of the old trails that were blazed, less than two generations after Columbus, by the discoverers of the main landmarks of what are now the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Bolton has supplemented a careful study of the immense mass of published materials on the Coronado period by drawing upon full transcriptions of new-found legal documents taken from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. These derive from the inquiry held in 1544 concerning Coronado's conduct of his government, and from the trial in Spain in 1551 of Garcia L6pez de CArdenas, discoverer of the Grand Canyon, for misconduct during the winter battles among the Rio Grande pueblos. The chief portions of these new documents were printed by Hammondand Rey in 1940, but Bolton's further scrutiny adds some details to the main outlines already known.Perhaps the greatest contribution of this big book on Coronado is its more definite establishment of the particular routes traversed by the various parties of the expedition. Bolton's first-hand knowledge of the terrain enables him to talk with authority about many spots on the map. He brings much evidence to bear to show that the barrancas where Coronado's forces camped in the Texas Panhandle are Tule Canyon and Palo Duro Canyon, on the headwaters of the Red River. --- PACIFIC HISTORICAL REVIEW