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

Edited by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz

520 pages, 6x9, with 17 color plates and 100 b&w illustrations
Trade paper, ISBN: 1-890771-48-1, $21.95

A California Legacy book

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. Conflicts between missionaries and soldiers, Indians and non-Indians, Hispanic settlers and Anglo newcomers, friends and neighbors, spill out of the pages, bringing the ferment of daily life into sharp focus. Here we find not sleepy towns, quaint missions, or comic opera military outposts; rather an ever-shifting world of struggle and opportunity, aspiration and tragedy, pride and loss.

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.

This ambitious and accessible book, further amplified by more than thirty illustrations, maps, and paintings, will influence greatly how we envision the history and legacy of Hispanic California and is sure to become the cornerstone for a new generation of early California studies.

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 (one Indian testified that the reason she had risked her life by revolting was that she had been persuaded by a gift of beads from a ringleader).

Another major theme of the history of California laid out in Lands of Promise and Despair is the role played by the Catholic Church. Junipero Serra is probably the best-remembered of the Spaniards who settled California. He was the driving force behind the chain of missions that spread from San Diego northwards, and he is well represented in the book. His letters testify to an energetic, contentious man, convinced he knew what was best for California and its people; he would prove a formidable foe to any and all who opposed him, as many Indians and Spanish bureaucrats would discover to their sorrow."—Faultline, March 2002

Editor Biographies:

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. Rose Marie and Robert live in the San Francisco Bay Area.