Marc Simmons – författare

A professional historian, author, editor, and translator, Marc Simmons has published numerous books and monographs on the Southwest as well as articles in more than twenty scholarly and popular journals.

Manuel Antonio Chaves' life straddled three eras of New Mexican history: he was born (1818) at the tag end of the Spanish colonial period, he grew to manhood in the rough and heady days of the Santa Fe trade during the quarter century of Mexican rule (1821–1846), and he spent his mature years under the territorial regime established by the United States. Manuel Chaves' long career (died 1889) was interwoven with almost every major historical event which occurred during his adult life—the Texan-Santa Fe Expedition, the Mexican War, the Civil War, skirmishes with Utes, Navajos, and Apaches. He was called El Leoncito, The Little Lion, having earned the name as an Indian fighter. He lived for two years in St. Louis and was a well-travelled man, doing business in New Orleans, New York, and Cuba.A hundred years ago when men still gathered around campfires and storytelling was a well-developed art, Chaves' exploits were known to all New Mexicans. But history has a capricious memory and his name became virtually forgotten. Around the turn of the century, Charles F. Lummis' flowery pen recalled brief attention to Chaves' life, and in 1927 he appeared as a minor character in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop—but otherwise was virtually forgotten. Alas. Too few of our Spanish frontiersmen have been studied in depth. Manuel Chaves and his life should not be lost. He was one of the legendary but real men who pioneered and built the 19th century Southwest. Howard R. Lamar laments: "The Spanish-American population of New Mexico still lacks a historian." Marc Simmons' biography of Manuel Chaves helps fill that gap.

This book chronicles the life and frontier career of Don Juan de Oñate, the first colonizer of the old Spanish Borderlands. Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, in the mid-sixteenth century, Don Juan was the prominent son of an aristocratic silver-mining family.In 1598, in his late forties, Oñate led a formidable expedition of settlers, with wagons and livestock, on an epic march northward to the upper Rio Grade Valley of New Mexico. There he established the first European settlement west of the Mississippi, launching a significant chapter in early American history.In his activities he displayed qualities typical of Spain's sixteenth-century men of action; in his career we find a summation of the motives, aspirations, intentions, strengths, and weaknesses of the Hispanic pioneers who settled the Borderlands.

When General Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West marched into Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 18, 1846, Richard Smith Elliott, a young Missouri volunteer, was included in its ranks. In addition to Lieutenant Elliott's duties in the Laclede Rangers, he served as a regular correspondent to the St. Louis Reveille. An entertaining and educated observer, Elliott provided readers back home with an account of the grueling march over the famous Santa Fe Trail, the triumphant entry of the army into Santa Fe, the U.S. occupation of New Mexico, and the volunteers' eventual return to St. Louis.Noted southwestern scholars Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons present here, for the first time, all of Elliott's letters published in the Reveille under his nom-de-plume, John Brown, using passages from his autobiography for the same period to fill in a break resulting from a few missing letters. Also included are Elliott's literary sketches, drawn from his Mexican War experiences and the people he met and served with.

When General Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West marched into Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 18, 1846, Richard Smith Elliott, a young Missouri volunteer, was included in its ranks. In addition to Lieutenant Elliott's duties in the Laclede Rangers, he served as a regular correspondent to the St. Louis Reveille. An entertaining and educated observer, Elliott provided readers back home with an account of the grueling march over the famous Santa Fe Trail, the triumphant entry of the army into Santa Fe, the U.S. occupation of New Mexico, and the volunteers' eventual return to St. Louis.Noted southwestern scholars Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons present here, for the first time, all of Elliott's letters published in the Reveille under his nom-de-plume, John Brown, using passages from his autobiography for the same period to fill in a break resulting from a few missing letters. Also included are Elliott's literary sketches, drawn from his Mexican War experiences and the people he met and served with.

Historian Marc Simmons is already a favourite among scholars, students, Hispanophiles, and borderland enthusiasts for his careful, readable histories of the American Southwest. In the twelve essays collected in here, the author's topical, in-depth approach to New Mexico's colonial period is skilfully deployed. His original research and unique insights transform New Mexico's colonial history into an engaging story of real people and the real events that shaped their lives - a true journey of discovery. Simmons finds in the commonplace moments of everyday life ways to place the reader fully within the realities of the past. Immersion in details permits us to understand the behaviour and character of a people and the true tenor of their times: how the average person lived and played, how he or she made economic choices, how worship and religious concerns were integrated into daily life. The book covers such topics as the Pueblo Revolt, New Mexico sheep and cattle ranching, Spanish irrigation practices, the settlement of Albuquerque, the smallpox epidemic of 1780-81, and the Feast of St. John. The society and economy of the upper Rio Grande were complex and richly textured, and the people who sustained themselves there became resilient and stoic, fashioning their own formulas for survival and forever impacting the directions taken by history's currents.

Kit Carson (1809-1868) has long held a prominent place in the popular imagination of the American West. However, little is known about his family life thanks largely to Carson's own guardianship of his privacy. After almost four decades devoted to researching Kit Carson's personal life, Marc Simmons provides information here to further our understanding of Carson.Viewing Kit Carson's career as a husband and father sheds new light on the life choices he made. The changing economy of the 1840s made it increasingly difficult for a trapper and scout to support a growing family. Carson's years as an Indian agent in the 1850s provided him stability although he was never able to spend as much time with his family as any of them would have liked and he was never able to bring in a comfortable income.The Kit Carson Simmons portrays offers a welcome change from recent politicized interpretations of Carson's actions.

Written by the foremost historian on New Mexico, this popular fourth-grade-level textbook introduces the young reader to New Mexico's past and present. When students finish reading this book, they will better understand how different cultures shaped the way we live today as well as know about major events and key people in New Mexico's development. Simmons approaches history as a window to the past. That is, students come to understand they are part of a long flow of human events. This book surveys the experiences of first the Indians, then the Spanish, and finally those people who have come to New Mexico since it has been part of the United States.Supplementing each of the eleven chapters are maps and photographs, about a third of them in color.Reading level: grade 4.

Studies of seventeenth-century New Mexico have largely overlooked the soldiers and frontier settlers who formed the backbone of the colony and laid the foundations of European society in a distant outpost of Spain's North American empire. This book, the final volume in the Coronado Historical Series, recognizes the career of Juan Domínguez de Mendoza, a soldier-colonist who was as instrumental as any governor or friar in shaping Hispano-Indian society in New Mexico. Domínguez de Mendoza served in New Mexico from age thirteen to fifty-eight as a stalwart defender of Spain's interests during the troubled decades before the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Because of his successful career, the archives of Mexico and Spain provide extensive information on his activities. The documents translated in this volume reveal more cooperative relations between Spaniards and Pueblo Indians than previously understood.

In the spring of 1883 Apache raiders massacred Judge McComas and his wife and kidnapped their six-year-old son, Charley, as the family traveled on a desolate road in southwestern New Mexico Territory, all victims of revenge sought by the Apaches for Gen. George Crook's campaign. At the time, the entire circumstances concerning this tragic incident had not been fully understood - or perhaps cared about. In Massacre on the Lordsburg Road, historian Marc Simmons brings to light one of the last massacres of the Indian wars, presenting exactly why and how the McComases met their end on that desolate road, the events that led up to it, and the public reactions that followed. The puzzlement of why a reputably wise and able man would lead his family into such a fatal predicament, the pursuit of the Apaches into Mexico by General Crook, and the ironic circumstance of Charley McComas's death at the hands of Crook's troops in a raid on the Apache camp, illustrates that past events were as complex and as human as those today.