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152 Western American Literature San Juan Bautista: Gateway to Spanish Texas. By Robert S. Weddle. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. 469 pages, map, illus., biblio., index, $8.50.) Recent president of the Texas Old Missions Restoration Association and a man of varied newspaper experience, Robert S. Weddle has written this comprehensive history of Spanish missions in Texas, from their beginnings through the years of the republic of Texas, a span of over two centuries. The excellence of this book about mission activity and military life on the frontier is ample proof of Mr. Weddle’s qualifications for the task. To control a remote, shifting frontier across the northern reaches of Nueva España, the Spanish crown had during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a series of missions and presidios built at extended intervals, the missions to civilize the Indians and incorporate them into the Spanish com­ munity, the presidios to protect missions and independent settlers. History shows that most political gambits work well when operated by intelligent leaders but fail in the hands of the vacillating, the stupid, the parochial. Spanish colonial expansion, carried out with a sword in one hand, a cross in the other (each hand at times ignoring what the other did), had, like the policies of other nations, defects as well as advantages, but with one result rarely ascribed to other colonial powers: once established, Spanish culture, the Spanish pattern of living, persisted tenaciously even when Spain withdrew politically from the scene. Mr. Weddle has logically centered his story around the San Juan Bautista mission on the Coahuila or Mexican shore of the Rio Grande because this mission, long the most advanced outpost of New Spain’s northeastern frontier, became a springboard for most of the exploration and colonizing of Spanish Texas during the eighteenth century. San Juan Bautista and its companion mission, San Bernardo, with their presidio, formed a complex from which the majority of expeditions were launched into Texas, then a battleground between invading Comanches and retreating Apaches. The site of this vanished complex is now occupied by the village of Guerrero between Eagle Pass and Laredo, nearer the former. Laredo, incidentally, ultimately superseded San Juan Bautista as the gateway into Texas, thus causing the mision’s decline, though as late as the Mexican republic General Santa Anna led an army to San Antonio via San Juan Bautista rather thn via Laredo. So, to write a book about San Juan Bautista is to write a history of Spanish colonialism, missionary and military, in Texas and northern Mexico. The wealth of detailed information available about the Spanish of this era and in this area lies in copious records kept by Spanish soldiers, friars and government functionaries right on the spot, men who seemed to have been the most literate, the most archive-minded pioneers of history. The author has done a tremendous job, having gone through quantities of such materia] to select what is significant for this story, often offering readers direct Reviews 153 quotations from letters, diaries, orders, and reports. Such quotations make fascinating reading, their tone and style affording insight into these men and their attitudes, their beliefs, and their psychology. This harsh frontier of vast empty spaces is the antithesis of our crowded epoch as this is a story of rugged individuals rather than an impersonal sociological study. One is repeatedly impressed by the small numbers of men undertaking perilous expeditions whether punitive, military, exploratory, or missionary. Yet they faced much the same tactical and military problems confronting huge armies today. Some of the political situations parallel ours though on a smaller, more leisurely scale. We note the same jealousies between branches of govern­ ment and armed services, which are so conspicuous anywhere today; we note a commander who ignores his viceroy’s orders, betraying some exposed settle­ ment of compatriots; experts are summoned to the capital from the field only to have their counsels ignored in favor of some bureaucrat’s paper theory! Among vivid personalities crowding these pages are ambitious but selfsacrificing padres as well as Spanish and Mexican mliitary leaders; at least one French adventurer is a memorable picaro playing his part on the frontier stage. Tracing the...

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