The explorations of Francisco Garcés, an intrepid Franciscan friar of the eighteenth century, led to the opening of the first overland route from Mexico to California, produced new knowledge of unmapped terrain and unknown peoples, and revived dreams of Spanish imperial expansion. Beyond the Devil’s Road tells, for the first time, the full story of this extraordinary man’s epic life and journey and his critical place in the history of the American Southwest.

From the moment he took up residence at the lonely mission of San Xavier del Bac in 1768, Garcés stood out among his fellow Spaniards for both the affection he showed the region’s Native peoples and his bravery. Traveling thousands of miles through modern Arizona, California, and Nevada to gather information for his superiors and preach to the unbaptized, he engaged the Indians of the Southwest with a respect for their ways and customs unprecedented among his peers, presaging a new—and better—model for cultural encounters. Along the way, he contacted more Indigenous groups than any other missionary of his time, often as the first European to do so. Garcés also paved the way and served as a guide for the famous expeditions of Juan Bautista de Anza in 1774 and 1775–76, bringing the first Spanish settlers to California—before the road he’d helped to open led to his death in the Quechan uprising of 1781.

Consulting archives on three continents, including previously untapped sources and Garcés’s extensive diaries and letters, long obscured by unyielding language and handwriting, Beer crafts a nuanced and thoroughly engaging account of this incomparable explorer, groundbreaking missionary, and central actor in New Spain’s final sustained effort to expand its dominion into the lands that would become the American Southwest.