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About the Book

This volume includes the complete journals of Juan Crespí in Spanish and English. Este tomo incluye los diarios completos de Juan Crespí en español y inglés.

This work makes available for the first time the complete journals of Juan Crespí, the Franciscan friar who accompanied the first expeditions that established Spanish presence in Alta California. Beginning at the northern edge of the mission frontier of Baja California, the 1769 expedition trekked overland some three hundred miles to establish San Diego. From there, Crespí and the contingent of military personnel and Indian auxiliaries traveled northward to Monterey and back again. Crespí's journals provide the first detailed observations about the new land of Alta California and its peoples, and remain an essential source for the history of Spanish occupation of Alta California and the Native peoples inhabiting the land.

This deluxe masterwork of Californiana and American history is the result of some forty years of research by Alan K. Brown, bringing together everything Juan Crespí wrote in its entirety. All other printed and manuscript versions were censored, heavily edited, condensed, and excerpted by Serra, Palóu, and others — alterations that dropped critical detail and valuable information. This edition makes all other printed versions of Crespí's journals obsolete.

Brown has stitched together the complete journals from different manuscript versions held in archives across Europe and the Americas, presenting them in the original Spanish with detailed annotations and comparisons of alternate versions, along with a new English translation of the full texts.

The work includes an extensive introduction by Alan K. Brown that is itself a valuable contribution to the history of the period, along with detailed explanatory notes, an index of sites, a general index, and a list of references.

Advance Praise

“Thanks to the erudition and detective work of Alan K. Brown and the high scholarly standards of SDSU Press, we no longer have to depend on a flawed version of this essential account of the founding of Spanish California. This is the definitive edition, in English and Spanish.” David J. Weber, Dedman Professor of History, Southern Methodist University

“This work will be an integral part of any collection of basic California historical materials. Alan K. Brown deserves immense credit for his monumental research, editing, and analytical effort that produced this volume.” Harry W. Crosby, author of Antigua California

“Alan K. Brown has provided historians, scholars, and researchers with a tremendous gift. His monumental and authoritative translation of Crespí's complete journals will quickly become an indispensable work for all who study the history of California.” Rose Marie Beebe, President, California Mission Studies Association

“Juan Crespí wrote A Description of Distant Roads, his observations about the environment and cultures during the 1769 Spanish overland expedition into California. The Spaniards met successful dryland farmers, many of whom provided lavish feasts for the sojourners and guides to water and pasture, who believed there was enough bounty for everyone. The manuscripts languished for two centuries in Catholic Church archives until Alan K. Brown discovered them in Mexico and Spain, a valuable contribution to California history that I share with others.” Keith Ensminger, Framer, Teacher, and Translator

Sample Page Spreads

Opening spread with the introduction and a period
map

Title page facing a hand-drawn expedition map

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$72.95

Book details
Publisher	San Diego State University Press
Pub. date	2001 (First Edition); Sixth Printing, 2025
ISBN-10	1879691647
ISBN-13	978-1879691643
Dimensions	890 pages, deluxe hardcover, 4 lbs

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Keywords: Juan Crespí, Alta California, Spanish missions, California history, Alan K. Brown, Portolá expedition, Californiana

About Juan Crespí

Juan Crespí (1721–1782) was a Spanish Franciscan explorer in the Southwest who came to America in 1749. In 1767 he traveled to the peninsula of California to lead Mission Purísima Concepción. In 1769 he joined the expedition of Gaspar de Portolá to occupy San Diego and Monterey, and the following year founded Mission San Carlos Borromeo in present-day Carmel-by-the-Sea, which became his headquarters. He later served as chaplain on Juan Pérez's 1774 expedition to the North Pacific. His diaries were published in H. E. Bolton's Fray Juan Crespi (1927; reprinted 1971), providing valuable records of these expeditions.

About Alan K. Brown

Alan Kelsey Brown, editor and translator of A Description of Distant Roads, was a scholar of formidable range: an Ohio State professor of Old English and medieval literature, a philologist and lexicographer, and an authority on languages stretching from Latin and Old Spanish to the medieval Scandinavian and Celtic tongues. He was also the rare medievalist who could make the archive sing—quite literally. Brown performed Beowulf from memory in Old English, accompanied by an Anglo-Saxon lyre he had constructed from his study of early musical modes and Germanic poetry.

That same appetite for language, manuscripts, and material history powered a second distinguished career in Californiana. Brown's studies of California place-names and the Native peoples of the American West, together with his award-winning translations of the journals of Juan Crespí and Pedro Font, earned him an international reputation among historians of Spanish-American relations. A Description of Distant Roads crowns decades of that archival detective work.