Books: Professor After Jesuit

RIM OF CHRISTENDOM—Herbert Eugene Bolton—Macmillan ($5).

Eusebio Kino was born in the village of Segno, in the Tyrolese Alps, probably on Aug. 10, 1645. Educated in the Jesuit College at Trent, he became a member of the Order in 1665, studied at Ingolstadt, became a mathematician and cartographer, planned to become a missionary to China. Traveling by way of Genoa to Spain, Kino was ordered to Mexico, shipwrecked, studied the great comet of 1680, began a long correspondence with the devout Duchess of Aveiro y Arcos before he landed at Vera Cruz on Sept. 25, 1681. He died 30 years later in northwestern Mexico after having mapped and explored a great section of New Spain. An energetic, restless, fast-traveling administrator, he introduced wheat-growing and cattle-ranching into the desert areas, became one of the most vital of the Jesuits who kept up the great chain of missions from the head of the Gulf of California to Central America.

His maps gave Europe its first essentially accurate picture of Southwest North America, were widely pirated. Late in life Kino wrote his autobiography and, although later Jesuit historians often referred to the book, the manuscript was lost until 1907, when it was discovered in Mexico City by Herbert Eugene Bolton, professor of history at the University of California. A brisk, concise volume, Kino’s account of his life, together with his “chatty” letters to the Duchess and others, gives one of the clearest pictures available of the daily life in the missions that were established more than 30 years before Jamestown was founded.

Professor Bolton now offers a 644-page biography of Kino that brings together the results of more than 30 years of study. It is a strange and pleasant book, complete with maps and long quotations from Kino, in which the story is often interrupted with discussions of the author’s own trips over the routes Kino followed. Retracing Kino’s steps has given Professor Bolton a feeling of familiarity with his hero. He writes of the great explorer informally as “not a man to cry over spilled milk,” of his finding life no “bed of roses” as he struggled with the desert.

Rim of Christendom begins with a general account of the work of the Jesuits in New Spain, skips back to Kino’s life, soon settles down to a detailed account of his wanderings (and Professor Bolton’s), with incidental records of Indian rebellions, church intrigue, disputes with provincial authorities. Not a book to be read hastily, it is nevertheless of cumulative interest to readers who enjoy an abundance of facts on which their imaginations can dwell. And industrious Father Kino and Professor Bolton make a pair of travelers whose exploits are likely to remain in the memory long after the book is finished.

Kino’s horseback rides, says Professor Bolton, would “make a seasoned cowboy green with envy.” He rode more than 700 miles in 30 days on one trip, 1.500 miles in 53 days on another. Typical of his labor was his journey in November 1699, through the Santa Cruz Valley. First he put in twelve days at 23 miles a day, baptizing and preaching at every stop. Since baptized Indians were guaranteed against forced labor in the mines, conversions were rapid. Then Kino and a companion rode 23 miles to an Indian village, made a census of 400 natives, preached, pushed on 37 miles before resting. At that stop Kino counted 300 natives, “preached, baptized three sick persons, distributed presents, and then rode . . . some 75 miles over a pass in the mountains to Sonóita, arriving there in the night, having stopped to make a census of, preach to, and baptize in, two villages on the way. Next day he baptized and preached, and then rode, that day and night . . . 125 miles.” In three days he rode 250 miles, slept four hours, got up to supervise the butchering of cattle for supplies. Not content with such portraits of Father Kino as a man of action, Professor Bolton adds gravely that the work he did “as ranchman would alone stamp him as an unusual business man and make him worthy of remembrance.”