The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 20, July 1916 - April, 1917 Page: 199

Bookc Reviews and Notices

this criticism would be captious but for the fact that it emphasizes
the principal defect of the book, its exaggeration of detail.
The book will necessarily find a place on the shelves of all well
furnished libraries and in the hands of professors of history, but
students and readers who desire a clear-cut presentation of the
essentials of Anglo-American Isthmian relations must continue
to use some of the excellent manuals listed in Miss Williams's
bibliography.
EUGENE C. BARKER.
History of Arizona. By Thomas Edwin Farish, Arizona Historian.
Two volumes. (Phoenix: Printed and Published by Di-
rection of the Second Legislature of the State of Arizona,
A. D., 1915. Pp. xii, 392; viii, 348.)1
The background of Arizona history is large. On the one side
one may trace it from the Spanish conquest of Mexico through
the northward advance of missionaries and conquistadores in the
early sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and on the
other from the English settlements of the Atlantic seaboard through
the westward movement of American pioneers in the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. But in the period
covered by these volumes, that is, down to 1863 or 1864, there is
little distinctive, individualistic history for the region. It is
mainly incidental, episodal. Spanish priests and explorers; Amer-
ican fur-traders, prospectors, and soldiers, generally destined else-
where, passed through the country and recorded their experiences-
frequently stirring enough to make a thrilling tale;-but of col-
onization and purposeful development of a commonwealth there
was none.
These volumes are a fairly skillful and quite entertaining com-
pilation of quotations from Bancroft and Bandelier on the Spanish-
Mexican period and from the reminiscences and reports of Amer-
ican pioneers and military officers thereafter. Three-fourths of
the text is quoted. Six chapters are devoted to "Early Spanish
Explorations" and "Early Spanish Missions and Missionaries";
but Kino, the only missionary who ever gave his primary attention
'Reprinted from the Mississippi Valley Historical Review for Septem-
ber, 1916.

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