The Beginnings Of Mission Nuestra Senora Del Refugio

The Beginnings of Mission Nuestra Señora del Refugio is a historical study by Herbert Eugene Bolton, the American historian who lived from 1870 to 1953 and who was the leading academic specialist on the Spanish colonial period in what is now the American Southwest and California. Bolton taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1911 until his retirement in 1944, and his various books and monographs essentially established the academic field of Spanish borderlands history in American universities.

Mission Nuestra Señora del Refugio was the last of the Spanish missions established in what is now Texas, founded in 1793 near the present site of Refugio on the Gulf coast. The mission was established by Franciscan missionaries from the College of Zacatecas to serve the Karankawa and other indigenous peoples of the coastal region. It operated under various difficulties across the following decades until secularisation in the 1830s following Mexican independence and the eventual establishment of Texas independence from Mexico.

Bolton’s study presents the documentary history of the mission’s founding and early years, drawing on the extensive Spanish colonial archival sources that he had spent his career working with. The Bancroft Library at Berkeley, which Bolton directed for many years, holds one of the most important collections of Spanish colonial documents outside of Spain and Mexico, and Bolton’s various publications drew on this archival material to reconstruct the actual day to day history of the Spanish missionary, military, and administrative work in the borderlands during the colonial period.

The study reflects the methodological standards that Bolton helped establish for the field. He worked from the primary documentary sources rather than from the older secondary literature, presented the evidence in careful detail with substantial footnoting, and addressed the various controversial questions about Spanish colonial policy with the kind of measured judgement that distinguished his work from the more polemical writing on the same subjects by writers with strong contemporary political commitments.

The book is mostly of interest now to specialists in Spanish colonial Texas history, in the history of the Franciscan missions in northern New Spain, and in the broader academic field of borderlands history that Bolton essentially founded.