El Camino Del Diablo (the Devils Highway) today is an unpaved 130 mile route along the border between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. The current route begins at Lukeville, Arizona 21 miles southwest of Ajo at the boundary between Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. From there it continues through barren and isolated Sonoran Desert to Yuma. Some of the features along the way are: San Cristobal Wash, the Agua Dulce Mountains, Papago Well; Camp Grip, the Pinta Sand Dunes and the Pinacate Volcanic Field. The road passes through the Tule Desert and Mountains and into Tule Tank Canyon to reach Tule Well where the road intersects with Christmas Pass Road. The road continues through the Lechuguilla Desert, Tordillo Mountain, and the Tinajas Altas Mountains. The route passes west of Raven Butte and Cipriano Pass. It then follows the western border of the Gila Mountains, passing by the abandoned Fortuna Mine before finally reaching the small community of Fortune Hills on the outskirts of Yuma.
The explorations of Francisco Garcés, an intrepid Franciscan friar of the eighteenth century, led to the opening of the first overland route from Mexico to California, produced new knowledge of unmapped terrain and unknown peoples, and revived dreams of Spanish imperial expansion. Beyond the Devil’s Road tells, for the first time, the full story of this extraordinary man’s epic life and journey and his critical place in the history of the American Southwest. From the moment he took up residence at the lonely mission of San Xavier del Bac in 1768, Garcés stood out among his fellow Spaniards for both the affection he showed the region’s Native peoples and his bravery. Traveling thousands of miles through modern Arizona, California, and Nevada to gather information for his superiors and preach to the unbaptized, he engaged the Indians of the Southwest with a respect for their ways and customs unprecedented among his peers, presaging a new—and better—model for cultural encounters. Along the way, he contacted more Indigenous groups than any other missionary of his time, often as the first European to do so. Garcés also paved the way and served as a guide for the famous expeditions of Juan Bautista de Anza in 1774 and 1775–76, bringing the first Spanish settlers to California—before the road he’d helped to open led to his death in the Quechan uprising of 1781. Consulting archives on three continents, including previously untapped sources and Garcés’s extensive diaries and letters, long obscured by unyielding language and handwriting, Beer crafts a nuanced and thoroughly engaging account of this incomparable explorer, groundbreaking missionary, and central actor in New Spain’s final sustained effort to expand its dominion into the lands that would become the American Southwest.
This is a work of historical fiction about the earliest days of Christianity. Recently several non-canonical documents have been discovered which describe a Christianity in which Jesus, although a holy man, was human and married to Mary Magdalene with which he had children. Some of these documents, including the Gospel of John, precede the canonical gospels which were written much later. [It wasn’t until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE that the Roman Emperor ‘Constantine chose to unite his empire under the Pauline form of Christianity and to ‘negate, banish, exile and cause to be burned at the stake those who believed in pre-Pauline Christianity. The Emperor of Rome was no more qualified to decide which form of Christianity is true than anyone else. History has proven that he is indeed qualified to determine which branch of Christianity he chose to unite his empire.
A unique collection of unusual incidents including Western humor, mystery and suspense. Realistic western adventure and human interest. A definite collection of non standard stories fast moving and entertaining involving unusual mystery solutions and tales set in the Arizona Territory of 1850 to 1880 era.A fun read for todays hectic life style that takes one back to a simple and much slower pace.Bring a smile and a laugh. You'll need both!
“From the upper bunk where I write, a narrow window allows me a southern exposure of the desert beyond this prison. Saguaro cacti, residents here long before this rude concrete pueblo, fill the upper part of my frame. If I could open the window and reach out across the razed ground, sand traps, and shining perimeter fence, I might touch their fluted sides, their glaucous and waxen skins.” For some people, even prison cannot shut out the natural world. A teacher and family man incarcerated in Arizona State Prison—the result of a transgression that would cost him a dozen years of his life—Ken Lamberton can see beyond his desert walls. In essays that focus on the natural history of the region and on his own personal experiences with desert places, the author of the Burroughs Medal-winning book Wilderness and Razor Wire takes readers along as he revisits the Southwest he knew when he was free, and as he makes an inner journey toward self-awareness. Whether considering the seemingly eternal cacti or the desolate beauty of the Pinacate, he draws on sharp powers of observation to re-create what lies beyond his six-by-eight cell and to contemplate the thoughts that haunt his mind as tenaciously as the kissing bugs that haunt his sleep. Ranging from prehistoric ruins on the Colorado Plateau to the shores of the Sea of Cortez, these writings were begun before Wilderness and Razor Wire and serve as a prequel to it. They seamlessly interweave natural and personal history as Lamberton explores caves, canyons, and dry ponds, evoking the mysteries and rhythms of desert life that elude even the most careful observers. He offers new ways of thinking about how we relate to the natural world, and about the links between those relationships and the ones we forge with other people. With the assurance of a gifted writer, he seeks to make sense of his own place in life, crafting words to come to terms with an insanity of his own making, to look inside himself and understand his passions and flaws. Whether considering rattlesnakes of the hellish summer desert or the fellow inmates of his own personal hell, Lamberton finds meaningful connections—to his crime and his place, to the people who remained in his life and those who didn’t. But what he reveals in Beyond Desert Walls ultimately arises from language itself: a deep, and perhaps even frightening, understanding of a singular human nature.
Richard Valencia is in the autumn of his life. He has suffered the tragic loss of his first wife and daughter. He has enjoyed a successful marriage of thirty years before the loss of his second wife to cancer. He has known the laughter and joy of grandchildren. Yet there remains an empty void in his heart. For several years, he has dedicated himself to the pursuit of knowledge in several disciplines to better understand the world and his purpose and destiny in it. Plasma cosmology, religion, and mythology are all disciplines that, together with traditional scientific pursuits, provide him a better understanding of the universe. He is working to index that knowledge in hopes of providing data from which he can begin to learn the answers. Will the love of a woman bring a deeper understanding to his quest?
The essential idea of the graphic novel, Walk in the Light, is simple. It is that everything in Creation is connected by a force. Many people have grasped and understood this fact, but it has taken the writings of many others in many different fields of study through human history to understand this. Those fields, those disciplines, those sources, include ancient scriptures, the works of mystics and the endeavors of no nonsense scientists who seek to understand the world and universe. It includes the experience of ancient peoples and cultures who have bequeathed us their traditions in what we today refer to as mythology. It includes those thinkers who can study and develop more deeply a better understanding of our universe and our roles in it by using all of these disciplines in an interdisciplinary synthesis.
A natural history survey covers early explorers, legends and tales of the area, the geological and archeological finds, and a reflection on the current state of affairs of the desert.
