General Alonso de León's Expeditions into Texas, 1686–1690 trans. and ed. by Lola Orellano Norris (review)

In General Alonso de León's Expeditions into Texas, 1686–1690, linguist Lola Orellano Norris reminds scholars to check their sources, especially those based on translations of copies published long after the original. Even Herbert E. Bolton, the venerable historian of the Spanish borderlands in North America, made this mistake when he relied on the archivist and librarian Elizabeth Howard West's 1905 published translation of the diary that General Alonso de León kept during his fourth and most significant expedition in 1689 to locate the site of La Salle's colony in Texas. West utilized "the least reliable" version of de León's diary, copied in 1792, which contained transcription errors by a Franciscan scribe who "misread [h]arina'flour' as armas'arms'" (p. xiv). This mistake led the reader to believe General de León distributed weapons among the Caddo Indians of East Texas rather than food. Norris reveals how this significant error led to "distortions of meaning" and, with the inclusion of West's translation in Bolton's classic work, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542–1706(New York, 1916), "legitimized" these distortions for historians who followed (p. xv).

Indeed, Norris explains the sheer difficulty scholars must overcome when dealing with early exploration and settlement of the region, especially since so few documents exist in their original Spanish language. Despite modern technology making resources available online, accessibility remains problematic since complete digitization is an ongoing process even for well-funded archives. In addition, researchers rely more on existing English translations or narrative summaries, as the paleography of the original Spanish documents is difficult to read. There is also the complexity of having multiple contemporary and subsequent copies that cast doubt on the reliability of a source as the likelihood of scribal errors increases. Norris notes one such example of non-native-speaker errors in another version of de León's 1689 diary written by Rose O'Neale Greenhow, who was originally from Maryland and the daughter of a plantation owner. Greenhow and her husband, Dr. Robert Greenhow, a physician and scholar from a wealthy Virginia family, spent six months in Mexico City researching the land claims of American citizens after the U.S.-Mexican War concluded in 1848. Rose Greenhow, who later became a famous Confederate spy, was less fluent in Spanish than her husband, which may have contributed to mistakes.

Norris discusses more errors that West and Bolton committed in yet another version of the 1689 diary. For example, "West confuses the word 'robalos,' which is 'bass' (a type of fish), with 'robles' 'oak trees,'" indicating that de León and his men pulled oak trees from a creek, not fish (p. 161). Interestingly, Norris adds the problem of traditional Spanish-language publications of early Texas documents that are modified and adapted to modern-day language standards, which as a result lose the tone and tenor of the original Spanish in that particular setting.

Norris uses a philological approach in this extraordinary work that scholars from multiple disciplines will find enlightening if not humbling. Her book is well organized into three clearly written sections. It includes a concise overview of Spanish explorations, a biographical portrait of de León's family, deeply enriched footnotes, transcriptions of Spanish manuscripts, and English translations of six of the sixteen copies of de León's diaries that she found. Overall, Norris finds that the scholarship on the de León expeditions is "fragmented" at best as some studies rely on "partially inexact and erroneous information" (p. 205). She is unforgiving, even to trailblazing scholars of the Spanish borderlands, so we should be careful.