The Harvard scholar Richard Marius once wrote that good historical writing gives the impression that the author has worked tremendously hard to learn something and is giving an authoritative guided tour of the knowledge he has attained. This is exactly what Richard Flint’s narrative of the Coronado expedition does. Flint is a research associate in history at the Center for Desert Archaeology in Tucson, Arizona, and has worked for many years with his wife, Shirley Cushing Flint, collecting and translating documents related to Coronado. These have been published in two evocatively titled volumes: Great Cruelties Have Been Reported: The 1544 Investigation of the Coronado Expedition (2002), and Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539-1544: “They Were Not Familiar with His Majesty, Nor Did They Wish to Be His Subjects” (2005). Flint’s latest book can be read as a meticulous guided tour of these documents.
Yet it is more than that. Flint’s...
