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

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 Mis...