463 richly researched and documented pages detailing 450 years of southwest adventure and discovery! Very hard to put down!

Douglas Preston literally takes you in his saddle bag on two 900-mile horseback/roughing-it odysseys with his cantankerous Santa Fe artist friend Walter Nelson. Two journeys cover the same geography: Coronado’s 1540 epic exploration from New Spain/Mexico through Arizona, New Mexico and Kansas.

The chapters and episodes are written from multiple viewpoints: New Spain’s (Mexico’s) culture, Coronado’s expectations in planning and leaving New Spain, Coronado’s experiences en-route, various and numerous native American initial encounters with white Europeans – Mexican Aztecs – and black Africans, And last, but not least by a long shot, … Doug and Walter’s experiences and observations of both what had changed and how little had changed in the intervening 450 years.

I found this a tremendous context piece to open my understanding and appreciation of the nearly complete uniqueness of New Mexico in particular and America’s great southwest in general. You will be exposed to amazing repeating patterns of history from 1540s Spain and New Spain right up into today’s New Mexico business and politics.

Cites of Gold is a thoroughly charming, entertaining, amazing, irritating, enlightening, frustrating, and fulfilling read! Check it out for yourself!

“There is no country protected by our flag and subject to our laws so little known to the people of the United States as the territory of New Mexico. Its very position precludes an intimate intercourse with other sections of the Union, and serves to lock up a knowledge of the country within its own limits. The natural features differ widely from the rest of the Union; and the inhabitants, with the manners and customs of their Moorish and Castilian ancestors are both new and strange to our people. For these reasons, reliable information on this hitherto almost unknown region can not fail to be interesting to the public.”

Davis was a veteran of the Mexican War of 1846-48, and returned to New Mexico in 1853 to become United States Attorney for the territory. He traveled with only a few changes of clothes, a two-book law library and a ravenous curiosity, and he thoroughly journaled his entire travels to and throughout New Mexico.

His thousand-mile journey from Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe would take 25 days by mule train, traveling   in torrential rains and drifting blizzards. Many nights were spend sleeping on the ground under the wagons for shelter, and many meals were skipped due to inclement weather.

El Gringo was written by W. W. H. Davis (1820 – 1910) and first published in 1857. You can order from the Books page; enjoyi!

There are a couple of things you will want to know if you would like to purchase your very own  copy of the Albuquerque Historical Timeline:

• the 2 ft x 8 ft size is the smallest that is easily eye-readable
• each copy is a full-color exact replica of the 4 ft x 16 ft Convention Center original
• each copy has a very resilient laminate protecting it
• a single copy reproduction  goes for $200, and that includes any tax and shipping

New Mexico Big Prints are the good folks that produced the 4 ft x 16 ft copies of the Timeline at the Convention Center and at the Airport. They also produced the smaller, 2 ft x 8 ft copies for high school and middle school use throughout Albuquerque and the Archdiocese, and it’s this size that is available for  purchase. I suppose you could order a 4 ft x 16 ft size, but expect to come up with about $3,750 or so per copy.

The URL to contact the good folks at New Mexico Big Prints is http://www.nmbigprints.com/index3.html.

There are a few caveats.

1. With all large spreadsheets, and this one is 96 pages large, it’s impossible to have everything appear on one screen and still have the font size readable. That means you will have to scroll left/right through time, and up/down through geography and ethnic/cultural events. It took me a while to get used to all the scrolling when building the spreadsheet, but there wasn’t any good alternative. There have been many suggestions and ideas about interactive, hyperlinked formats, but none have panned out as yet.

2. You will need to zoom in to the spreadsheet 3-4-5 times until you can comfortably read the text. When I do that, the text at the top of the page kind of ‘disappears,’ but using the up-down scroll bar can bring it back into view quickly.

3. I believe the spreadsheet is ‘read only’ protected, so information can’t be added or changed, which may well be a source of some consternation to revisionist-oriented historians.  It is possible, however, to copy and paste from the timeline cells. The timeline is copyrighted with the U.S. Copyright Office (VAu674-484) so thanks in advance for asking permission via a comment before you copy/paste any content from the timeline.

4. In the original Excel spreadsheet on my hard-drive, all of the dates neatly lined up at the left of each cell for ease of reading (and yes, lining up 740+ dated events in 341 separate cells was a goodly chore). Uploading caused some events to shift within the cell so their dates follow the text of previous events rather than lining up neatly on the left on their own separate line. Tweaking that may take place at some future time when (a) I can take the time to figure out how to do that, and (b) I have the time to really dive in and actually clean each of them up.

So, with that as preface, I heartily invite you to click this link to browse: The Albuquerque History and Cultural Timeline. I would enjoy hearing your thoughts in a comment to this post.