The University of Arizona Press
A Peregrine Ethnography
Reinterpreting Francisco Garcés's Diary of Native Arizona and the Californias, 1775–1776
In 1775–1776, Francisco Garcés, O.F.M., undertook a remarkable three-thousand-kilometer journey through modern Arizona and the Californias. As a participant in a side-branch of Juan Bautista de Anza’s colonizing expedition to San Francisco, Garcés recorded a diary that provides a fascinating glimpse of Native peoples, several who had minimal or no prior contact with the Spanish empire. Garcés described customs, detailed alliances and enmities, and offered recommendations, both missionary and military. When he reached Hopi from the west (the first European to do so), Garcés completed a route between Monterey and Santa Fe, in effect completing a road across North America a generation before Lewis and Clark. The Hopi leaders, who clearly understood the implications, expelled him, declaring their independence on July 4, 1776.
Garcés’s diary remains vital for the Indigenous history of western North America. Yet the standard translation is flawed, not least owing to the state of ethnographic knowledge when it was made (1900), resulting in more than a century of reiterated misinterpretations of Indigenous history by anthropologists and historians. Peter M. Whiteley identifies the ur-version of Garcés's diary—a previously unknown copy written up by Pedro Font—and offers a new translation focusing on ethnographic significance in geographic context. Presenting also the Spanish text, Whiteley engages directly with Garcés’s account and provides readers with new interpretation and context.
Garcés was a genuine ethnographer and his accounts of Hopi, River Yumans, Takic, Yokuts, Numic, and Pai peoples, contain unparalleled and foundational insights.
“The product of almost a quarter century of research, this book provides a multidisciplinary analysis and new translation of the diary of Father Francisco Garcés by Peter M. Whiteley. Elegantly written and thoroughly contextualized with the deep knowledge by one of the leading anthropologists of the Native peoples of the Southwest, this book should be on the shelf of everyone with an interest in the region.”—Rick Hendricks, editor of Baron Lahontan’s Mysterious Quest: A Reappraisal of the 1688 Long/Platte River Inland Passage Expedition
“Peter M. Whiteley’s new translation of the diary of Franciscan Father Francisco Garcés (1775–1776) is a masterwork in regional historiography and of great value for all interested in the early non-Indigenous exploration and settlement of the Southwest and California. The editor’s exhaustive research and extensive commentary on the identity, location, and conditions of the Indigenous peoples he visited, their knowledge of their neighbors near and far, conditions of their lands, and much more are invaluable contributions.”—Catherine S. Fowler, author of In the Shadow of Fox Peak: An Ethnography of the Cattail-Eater Northern Paiute People of Stillwater Marsh
