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  • Franciscan Frontiersmen: How Three Adventurers Charted the West by Robert A. Kittle
  • Blaine P. Lamb
Franciscan Frontiersmen: How Three Adventurers Charted the West. By Robert A. Kittle. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. 296. $29.95 hardcover)

The Spanish settlement of Alta California is an oft-told tale. Father Serra; Gaspar de Portola; the hardships endured by the friars, soldiers and settlers; and the destructive impacts of the European arrival on the Native population have been related by popular and academic historians for decades. With the exception of the expeditions of Juan Bautista de Anza, however, the ultimately unsuccessful attempt by Spain to maintain an overland route between northern Mexico and its new colony is less well known. In Franciscan Frontiersmen, retired newspaperman Robert Kittle ties these narratives together through the exploits of three intrepid missionaries: Francisco Garces, Pedro Font, and Juan Crespi.

These three Franciscans, along with other padres who play important supporting roles in the book, led lives of study, prayer, and action. They left their homes for the perilous transatlantic voyage to assignments that took them to the fringes of the Spanish Empire and participation in the expeditions that would mark the final expansion of that frontier. In recounting these adventures, the author does not quite explain how the three friars "Charted the West," as stated in the title. While they kept useful journals and made occasional maps, their travels were limited largely to portions of Alta California and Arizona, hardly "the West." Nevertheless, their stories are exciting, and the author recounts them in a readable style. Readers have no trouble envisioning themselves with a frustrated Garces trying to make inroads at unfriendly Oraibi, or with a desperately seasick Crespi on the pitching deck of the Santiago, praying for better weather in the fog- and rain-shrouded Pacific Northwest.

Kittle diverts occasionally from his main subjects to tell other stories, such as the 1775 Kumeyaay revolt at Mission San Diego, which resulted in the martyrdom of Fray Luis Jayme. This event should have warned the Spaniards that inadequate protection of missions, even among supposedly friendly tribes, was a recipe for disaster. He also tells of Fray Thomas Eixarch, an almost forgotten pioneer who stuck it out alone at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado rivers for months while Garces went off exploring. [End Page 69]

All three Franciscans died within months of one another—Garces in the violent 1781 Quechan uprising at Yuma Crossing and, a short time later, Font in his bed at Pitiquito in Sonora's Altar Valley. Both were forty-three. Crespi, the old man of the group, passed at age sixty on January 1, 1782, at Mission San Carlos, after receiving last rites from his companero, Serra.

In telling the stories of these missionaries, Kittle plows little new scholarly ground. His sources—diaries, journals, correspondence, and reports—have been published and available to researchers for years. In his concluding chapter, Kittle attempts a balanced assessment of Spain's occupation on Native peoples in the Southwest. While not an out-and-out apologist for the Spanish, he sees their motivation to save souls as in tune with the times and the devastation which followed as a largely unintended consequence. This interpretation remains open to debate.

Blaine P. Lamb
Rancho Murieta, California
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