Early on the Morning of January 30, 1953, the telephone brought the sad though not unexpected news of the death of Herbert Eugene Bolton at his home in Berkeley. There, since a few days before his eighty-second birthday in July, he had lain ill from a cerebral hemorrhage. Though he made a partial recovery in the ensuing months and was able to converse with friends, he finally came to the end of the long trail that he had pioneered in Western and Latin-American history. From humble beginnings on the American frontier, but stimulated by the forces it generated, he became one of the most productive scholars of the century and the ablest interpreter of the essential unity of the peoples of the American nations.

The Important Role of the religious orders in the evangelization and colonization of Spanish America is recognized by all historians. In both Mexico and Peru the Franciscans, Dominicans and Mercedarians were the earliest friars upon the scene. They traveled down from Panama to Tumbez and to San Miguel de Piura in Peru as early as 1531 when the conquest of that country was scarcely under way. Those were heroic days, when men braved the incalculable terrors of the unknown, the hostility of the natives and the rigors of extreme altitudes swept by angry winds and snows in the bitterness of winter.

When Harold Palmer Davis published his Black Democracy in 1928, after twelve years of study and of residence in Haiti, he wrote of Toussaint L’Ouverture that it would be impossible to form any true estimate of Toussaint’s character, because of the great mass of material that had been written about him from widely divergent and conflicting viewpoints.

The History of the Early contacts between the Russians and the Spanish-speaking people in this hemisphere remains to be written. A few of these meetings are common knowledge. Miranda’s visit to the Russia of Catherine the Great has been treated frequently; Concepción de Argüello’s tragic love for the Russian Rezanov became a traditional theme. Obviously, in California, where the two civilizations met, contacts were numerous. With very few exceptions they were reported as incidents of friction. Bancroft’s History of California (XIX, Chapters 4, 14 and 28) and Engelhardt’s The Missions and Missionaries of California convey the impression that the Russians were aware of the military weakness of the Spanish outposts and that the Spanish, later Mexican, leaders were generally apprehensive of the designs of their neighbors to the North. On the other hand, the friendly reception accorded by the Spanish Franciscans to Rezanov’s companion, Langsdorff, and the latter’s favorable comments on the friars’ achievements are known. Another instance of peaceful relations whose record somewhat belies the concept of an early nineteenth-century “cold war” on the Pacific coast is almost unknown.