Voices From The Past – The Comanche Raid of 1776 & Other Tales of New Mexico History
Voices From the Past: The Comanche Raid of 1776 & Other Tales of New Mexico History is an exploration of the vast treasure of untold and forgotten stories found in New Mexico’s Spanish, Mexican and Territorial period archives. Based on a monthly column the author has published since 1992, the stories in this volume will examine some of the accomplishments, triumphs, and tragedies experienced by individuals we probably did not learn about in history class.
Learn about the Comanche raid of 1776 and what the historical record can tell us about victims of the raid; read about the devastation inflicted by the dreaded virguela, the smallpox epidemics that swept though entire communities in the eighteenth century and of how the smallpox vaccine was introduced to New Mexico in 1805; of Apache captives sold into slavery in the early eighteenth century; of New Mexican’s struggle to prove their loyalty to the United States during the Spanish American War; of a stern frontier judge who could condemn a convicted murderer to hang and then write romantic letters to his wife; of the devastating Las Vegas fire of 1880; and of a “Chicago gangster” who hid out in northern New Mexico.
These and four dozen additional “voices from the past” that will provide the reader with fascinating and little-known details about New Mexico history.
About Robert J. Tórrez (Albuquerque, New Mexico Author)
Robert J. Tórrez was born and raised in the northern New Mexico community of Los Ojos in Rio Arriba County. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas and served as the New Mexico State Historian from 1987 until his retirement in December 2000. For more than four decades he has mined the vast documentary treasures in our own Spanish, Mexican, and Territorial archives to find the “voices from the past” that have provided material for hundreds of stories that tell of New Mexico’s long and colorful history.
He has published five books, El Primer Siglo, UFOs Over Galisteo and Other Stories of New Mexico’s History; New Mexico in 1876-1877, A Newspaperman’s View; Myth of the Hanging Tree and Rio Arriba, A New Mexico County, and Voices From the Past, The Comanche Raid of 1776 and Other Tales of New Mexico History. Since 1992 he has written a monthly history column, “Voices From the Past,” for Round the Roundhouse. He has also published more than one hundred scholarly and popular articles in numerous regional and national publications and contributed to nearly two dozen books, including a recent New Mexico history textbook.
