The Padre On Horseback

Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1963. Trade Paperback. Very Good. 90 pages perfect bound. Tight bookk with no marks or stamps. Loyola University Press February 1963 reprint series of The American West originally published by The Sonora Press, San Francisco in 1932. Includes a sixteen page Introduction by John Francis Bannon, series editor. Father Eusebio Francisco Kino was a Black Robe pioneer of the Sonora-Arizona frontier, He was a missionary, exploreer, rancher, geographer, and historian. In Spain's empire of the Americas the missionary played a dual role. He was agent of both Majesties, God and King. Regularly, besides being herald of the Gospel, he was frontiersman. In this latter capacity he was often a major factor in Spanish expansion into vast areas of the American continents which the conquistadores had ranged and claimed and which settler folk moved into, in later centuries, to occupy and exploit. Outstanding among the examples of this type of missionary-frontiersman is the Jesuit Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino, who readied much of New Spain's northwest frontier (Sonora-Arizona) for such settler occupation. Tyrolese by birth, educated in the Germanies, Kino is one of the earliest of that line of northerners whom the Spanish Crown at long last allowed to enter its Indies in the latter half of the seventeenth century, as the demands of mission manpower finally contrived to overcome royal suspicions regarding the proper orthodoxy of employing such non-Spaniards. Herein is sketched Kino's multifaceted genius-he was much more than simply the apostle of the Pimas. To do all he did and to be all he was, he truly had to be The Padre on Horseback.