The Last Conquistador: Juan De Onate and the Settling of the Far Southwest (Oklahoma Western Biographies)
Couldn't load pickup availability
About this book
This book chronicles the life and frontier career of Don Juan de Oate the first colonizer of the old Spanish Borderlands. Born in Zacatecas Mexico in the mid-sixteenth century Don Juan was the prominent son of an aristocratic silver-mining family. In 1598 in his late forties Oate led a formidable expedition of settlers with wagons and livestock on an epic march northward to the upper Rio Grade Valley of New Mexico. There he established the first European settlement west of the Mississippi launching a significant chapter in early American history. In his activities he displayed qualities typical of Spain s sixteenth-century men of action; in his career we find a summation of the motives aspirations intentions strengths and weaknesses of the Hispanic pioneers who settled the Borderlands.
