Journal of the Southwest

Spanish &Mexican Records of the American Southwest: A Bibliographical Guide to Archive andManuscript Sources by Henry P. BeersReview by: Woodrow BorahArizona and the West, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1980), pp. 168-169Published by: Journal of the SouthwestStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40168924 .

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1 68 ARIZONA and the WEST

In brief, general readers will enjoy perusing Cities of the American West, but serious students will be distressed.

Lyle W. Dorsett

Professor Dorsett is on the history staff of the University of Denver in Colorado and is an authority on urban history of the American West. He recently published (with A. Theodore Brown) K. C: A History of Kansas City.

SPANISH & MEXICAN RECORDS OF THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST: A Bibliographical Guide to Archive and Manuscript Sources. By Henry P. Beers. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979. 493 pp. $18.50.

Spanish and Mexican records of the American Southwest - originally rela-

tively full documentary reporting in appropriate official depositories - have under-

gone the long dispersal and attrition of political upheavals, neglect, theft, and destruction, both deliberate and unplanned. Despite these ravages, they remain a

huge mass that fortunately can be restored in substantial measure by duplicating copies filed elsewhere in the complicated and meticulously bureaucratic Hispanic system. Today the records and copies are held in a variety of archives, libraries, and even private collections, to most of which keys have been prepared in the form of guides of various kinds. Their detail and quality run the gamut from

cursory to excellent. For the researcher, of course, the accidents of time and

dispersal have created a maze to which the many discrete guides, useful though they are, do not provide a solution.

Henry Putney Beers's overall guide provides substantial help to the per- plexed. His book is both history and bibliographical guide. It provides succinct accounts of territorial divisions during the Hispanic period, their relation to boundaries today, the kinds of records kept, where they lodged, the vicissitudes of those records, the more important ventures in providing copies through resort to other depositories, and the vicissitudes of those copies in turn.

The book is based upon published guides, with careful references to them, and describes current depositories and collections. Treatment is by present-day states - New Mexico, Texas, California, and Arizona - and for each state follows a uniform system: history and government, provincial records, legislative records, archival reproductions, documentary publications, manuscript collections, land records, records of local jurisdictions, and ecclesiastical records. For Arizona, because of its dependence on other jurisdictions in the period, some categories are combined and one is omitted. Maps show the location of settlements in the Hispanic period. A fifth division of the book, reference material, provides a list of repositories and a classified list of guides, inventories, and catalogues. A good index makes consultation even easier.

This thoughtful organization means that a reader may locate the items of interest to him either through the index and the text or directly through the text.

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REVIEWS 169

The footnotes then send him to the final section, where he finds the fuller listing of the publications to be consulted. So the maze becomes far less formidable.

Beers has brought his general guide as far as he could in terms of the avail- able. He also points to needs. We still do not have a comprehensive guide to microfilm of documents in various libraries and archives in the United States. That is another maze of formidable proportions. Neither do we have a compre- hensive catalogue of manuscripts in many smaller collections, public and private, throughout this and in other countries. These are projects for the future. For the present, we have this excellent research tool.

Woodrow Borah

Dr. Borah, Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, is a distinguished authority on the Spanish colonial period.

PAPERS CONCERNING ROBERTSON'S COLONY IN TEXAS, Volume VI: March 6 through December 5, 1831; The Campaigns against the Tawakoni, Waco, Towash, and Comanche Indians. Com-

piled & edited by Malcolm D. McLean. Arlington: University of Texas at Arlington Press, 1979. 631 pp. $25.00.

In Volume VI of his ongoing series on the Robertson Colony, Malcolm McLean presents materials he has ferreted out, translated, and edited for the

period March 6-December 5, 183 1. As the volume brings us nearer the story of the Robertson Colony per se, the time span begins to narrow. At the same time, the troublesome Austin-Robertson quarrels assume a larger focus, bringing to the forefront an aspect of the colonization that has not appeared in print here- tofore. McLean works on the premise of searching everywhere for materials that not only have direct importance, but also can provide tangential documentation in the form of notes, chiefly to identify persons mentioned in the documentation.

Papers Concerning Robertsons Colony in Texas will, when completed, supple- ment the Austin Papers long in print.

As Volume VI opens, the Robertson settlers are still waiting for funds and an engineer to build Fort Tenochtitlan, whose founding was described in the

previous volume. Much of the material in the volume concerns campaigns against raiding bands of Tawakoni, Towash, and Comanche Indians planned and carried out by Mexican government troops. Major figures are Mier y Teran, Colonel Antonio Elosua, and Lieutenant Colonel Ruiz. In the background another story is transpiring. Robertson is found guilty of manslaughter in Tennessee, is par- doned by the governor, and immediately resumes signing up families for his Texas colony. A basic problem to settlement in Texas is the Mexican law of

April 6, 1830, which prohibits the granting of land to Americans. At the same time Austin draws population from the Upper Colony, and is attracting colonists

brought into Texas by the Robertson and Thomson families.

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