The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 78, July 1974 - April, 1975 Page: 217
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Book Reviews
on the other hand, their conclusions also point to the destructive impact of
racism in a free competitive society on a people who, regardless of their
material conditions and their ability to achieve under slavery, were not pre-
pared for freedom.
This study will outrage those who cannot accept the authors' views on
the physical well-being and productivity of slaves. But those who insist on
extending a moral indictment into all aspects of slavery must consider
whether or not it is possible to attack the institution as absolutely brutal and
dehumanizing without undercutting the humanity of the slave and discre-
diting his contribution to the South at the same time. To continue the old
arguments may be to ignore the authors' injunction that 350 years on the
cross are enough. In any case, Time on the Cross is now required reading
for all students of United States history.
North Texas State University RANDOLPH B. CAMPBELL
Los Primeros Pobladores: Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier. By
Frances Leon Swadesh. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, I974. Pp. xxiii+262. Bibliography, glossary, illustrations, index,
map, notes. $3.45.)
This thoughtful, probing, and sensitive study is advertised as sociology
and anthropology, but it also contributes to the social and ethnic history of
the Southwest. Frances Swadesh, Curator of Ethnology at the Museum of
New Mexico, examines a small group of Espafioles Mexicanos (her useful
term), who settled in the Chama Valley of north central New Mexico
early in the eighteenth century. Swadesh follows these pobladores and their
descendents for over two-and-a-half centuries to the present day. She de-
scribes their economic activities, settlement patterns, social relations, and
institutions, as their communities expanded to the north and northwest, into
the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado and the San Juan basin along
the New Mexico-Colorado border. Remarkably, Swadesh found that today,
"most of the Spanish-speaking population from Abiquiu [on the Chama]
north into Colorado is descended from those early [eighteenth century]
settlers" (p. I).
Anthropologist Swadesh raises provocative questions about the past, some
of which historians have neglected. She has utilized archival sources and
church records and has combined these with oral tradition gathered from
over two hundred interviews. This has resulted in more complex and inter-
esting explanations of events and behavior than would the use of a single
approach. Her account of how Thomas B. Catron took control of the Tierra217
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 78, July 1974 - April, 1975, periodical, 1974/1975; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117149/m1/252/?rotate=0: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.