The 1690 expedition led by Alonso de León into present day Texas proved to be a pivotal journey that had lasting effects on the development of Spain's land north of the Rio Grande. This expedition established the first Catholic mission in the area. Also, La Salle's abandoned settlement was burned, and several Frenchmen living among the Indians were captured and returned with the expedition party to Mexico. The bartering for the release of some of these Frenchmen resulted in a skirmish in which four native Indians were killed. In addition, De León chronicled a great amount of information about the land through which he traveled, leaving a lasting diary recording his experiences as well as offering a glimpse into the then unsettled lands in present day eastern Texas. The 1690 expedition diary exists in the form of six manuscripts, and their analysis is the focus of this thesis. No scholar has ever taken into consideration all six manuscripts when conducting research regarding this expedition, and therefore research conducted thus far is not thorough. A comparative analysis of these six manuscripts is undertaken in this thesis, and the manuscripts are classified as revised or unrevised. Foster (1997) was the first scholar to classify manuscripts of the 1690 expedition as unrevised and revised. He classified only the Beinecke manuscript as revised, but this thesis also incorporates two other revised manuscripts unknown to Foster, the Gilcrease 67.1 and Gilcrease 67.2. The unrevised manuscripts included in this study are the AGI, AGN, and BNMex manuscripts. Three semi-paleographic transcriptions of manuscripts of Alonso de León's 1690 expedition diary are also presented. The AGI and Beinecke manuscripts are transcribed and an in-depth comparative analysis of the unrevised and revised manuscripts is completed. This analysis presents the numerous discrepancies that exist between the two families of manuscripts. Also, a transcription of the Gilcrease 67.1 manuscript is included to present a document previously unknown to scholars. The findings of this thesis should be of interest to scholars in many different fields of study who have interest in this time period and this region of the U.S. Southwest.

From 1686 to 1690, General Alonso de León led five military expeditions from Northern New Spain into modern-day Texas in search of French intruders who had breached Spanish sovereignty and settled on lands claimed by the Spanish Crown. His first two exploratory journeys were unsuccessful, but on the third expedition, he discovered a Frenchman living among Coahuiltec Indians across the Río Grande. In 1689, the fourth expedition finally led to the discovery of La Salle’s ill-fated colony and fort on the Texas Coast and to the repatriation of two of the French survivors. On his fifth and final expedition, De León established the first Spanish mission among the Hasinai Indians of East Texas and rescued several French children who had been abducted by the Karankawa. Through archival research, I have identified sixteen manuscript copies of De León’s meticulously kept expedition diaries. These documents form a distinct corpus and hold major importance for early Texas scholarship. Several of these manuscripts, but not all, have been known to historians and have been addressed in the literature. However, never before have all sixteen manuscripts been studied as an interconnected body of work and submitted to philological treatment. In this interdisciplinary study, I transcribe, translate, and analyze the diaries from two different perspectives: linguistic and historical. The linguistic analysis examines the most salient phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena attested in the documents. This synchronic study provides a snapshot of the Spanish language as it was used in Northern Mexico and Texas at the end of the 17th century. An in-depth examination discovers both conservative traits and linguistic innovations and contributes to the history of American Spanish. The historical analysis reveals that frequent misreadings, misinterpretations, and mistranslations of the Spanish source documents have led to substantial factual errors which have misinformed historical interpretation for more than a century. Thus, I have produced new, faithful, annotated English translations based on the manuscript archetypes to address historical misconceptions and present a more accurate interpretation of the historical events as they actually occurred.