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HARVEST RELUCTANT SOULS southwest • new mexico • history isbn 978-0-8263-5157-9 ËxHSKIMGy351579zv*:+:!:+:! University of NEW MEXICO Press unmpress.com 800-249-7737 cover illustration: detail of the title page of the original Madrid edition of 1630. cover design: Melissa Tandysh BAKER H. MORROW’s most recent book is his translation of The South American Expeditions of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. A practicing landscape architect in Albuquerque, he is founder of and professor of practice in the landscape architecture program of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico. b b T he most thorough account ever written of southwestern life in the early seventeenth century, this engaging book was first published in 1630 as an official report to the king of Spain by Fray Alonso de Benavides, a Portuguese Franciscan who was the third head of the mission churches of New Mexico. In 1625, Father Benavides and his party traveled north from Mexico City to New Mexico, a strange land of frozen rivers, Indian citadels, and mines full of silver and garnets. Benavides and his Franciscan brothers built schools, erected churches, engineered peace treaties, gazed in awe at endless miles of buffalo grazing placidly on the Great Plains, and were said to perform miracles. Benavides’s narrative provides portraits of the Pueblo Indians, the Apaches, and the Navajos at a time of fundamental change. A riveting exploration narrative, it gives us the first full picture of European colonial life in the southern Rockies, the southwestern deserts, and the Great Plains, along with an account of mission architecture and mission life and a unique evocation of faith in the wilderness. ...

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