Last Conquistador: Juan de Onate and the Settling of the Far Southwest

by Marc Simmons

Overview

This book chronicles the life and frontier career of Don Juan de Oñate, 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, Oñate 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806123684
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	03/15/1993
Series:	Oklahome Western Biographies Series , #2
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	195
Sales rank:	393,796
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Historian Marc Simmons is a founder and the first president of the Santa Fe Trail Association. His forty-nine books include six about the Trail and The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest.