Early History of the Southwest Through the Eyes of German-speaking Jesuit Missionaries

This book deals with the history of Jesuit missionary activities in northern Mexico and in present-day Arizona, a region determined by the Sonoran Desert, during the eighteenth century. These missionaries arrived here by the late seventeenth century and quickly established, under the leadership of Father Eusebio Kino, a large network of missions that soon became the foundation for all future settlements. Many of the subsequent missionaries originated from German-speaking lands and made great efforts to reflect upon their experiences and observations. They left behind both excellent maps and highly detailed reports, some of which were even encyclopedic in nature. The history of these German Jesuits came to a sudden halt in 1767 when they were all ordered to leave the Americas, and in 1773 when the entire Jesuit order was banned globally-certainly a tragic development as result of global tensions and mistrust of the Jesuit Order.
The missionaries, if they survived the long journey back home, continued to write about the world they had left behind and provided their audiences with most impressive accounts that shad important light on the world of northern Mexico and southern Arizona even today.