Spanish America.

When Americans headed west in the nineteenth century, they were not entering "virgin land." Native Americans, of course, had lived in the West for thousands of years, but Spanish settlers and their descendants had also lived there for two centuries. Much of the area that would become the American West was part of the viceroyalty of New Spain when the nineteenth century opened. Although Indians had inhabited the territory for countless generations, the area was not densely populated. Many colonists regarded the region as a distant backwater of an empire centered in Spain. In 1800 a Spanish mining engineer commented that the people of central Mexico "speak with as much ignorance about the regions immediately to the north as they might about Constantinople." Despite their relatively small numbers, colonists in California, New Mexico, and Texas created a distinctive culture...