Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846

Edited by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz

Spanish and Mexican California is generally depicted through the journals of sea captains and other visitors. This groundbreaking collection offers another perspective: early California seen through the eyes of those who explored it, colonized it, and settled it in the age before the gold rush. Over sixty selections from letters, journals, official reports and proclamations, interrogations, and interviews—many newly translated and some presented in English for the first time—lay before us a surprisingly varied and dynamic portrait of an era generally dismissed as static, pastoral, or backward.

The first-person accounts are tied together with extensive introductions and commentaries by two well-known scholars. Together the selections and commentaries give us an intimate portrait as well as a broad context, placing the exploration and settlement of Alta California within the history of Baja California and the conquest of the New World.

Reviews

"An impressive collection of primary documents...provide a rich early history of the region and the lives and the culture of the people who resided there."—Publishers Weekly

"The documents in Lands of Promise and Despair cover the whole panoply of human life as it existed in the centuries of Spanish rule. There is much to pore over in these pages: the frustrated, baffled report of the Portola expedition of 1768, sent overland to Monterey Bay, and who, unable to recognize it even as they marched on its shores, eventually gave up and returned south. Or the heartbreaking transcripts of trials of Indians arrested after revolts, where the pitiable plight of the red man in California comes through clearly."—Faultline, March 2002

About the Editors

Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz teach Spanish and History, respectively, at Santa Clara University. They translated and edited The History of Alta California by Antonio Maria Osio, prepared a catalog and finding guide to manuscripts concerning Baja California at the Bancroft Library, and have written a number of essays on Spanish and Mexican California. Rose Marie is the president of the California Mission Studies Association.