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.

Grasshopper basin, located in southwest Montana, is an east-tilted graben bounded by the listric Muddy-Grasshopper fault and the Meriwether Lewis fault on the eastern and western margins of the basin, respectively. This basin contains a complex stratigraphy of intertonguing facies comprised of five unconformity-bounded sequences of Tertiary alluvial, flu vial, deltaic, and lacustrine sedimentary and volcanic rocks. Sequence 1 consists of the Challis volcanic Group (Middle Eocene). The sedimentary rocks of the Medicine Lodge beds (Late Eocene-Late Oligocene) represent sequence 2 and approximately 90% of the basin-fill within Grasshopper basin. Sequence 3 consists 11 of the Sedimentary Rocks of Everson Creek (Late Oligocene-Early Miocene), sequence 4 is represented by the Sedimentary Rocks of Bannack Pass (Middle-Late Miocene), and the Six Mile Creek Formation (Late Miocene?) corresponds to sequence 5. Sequence 2 is the synrift deposit for the Muddy-Grasshopper fault, and was dominated by lakes that filled axially by rivers from the north. Transverse sediment influx was present on small fan-delta complexes shed into the lake from the eastern margin and periodic large fluvial-dominated alluvial fan and deltaic deposition from the western margin. Paleocurrent analyses are consistent with these observations and show predominantly south-southeastward axial paleoflow directions with west-directed and east-directed paleoflow on the eastern and western margins, respectively. Petrologic studies, including sandstone petrography and conglomerate petrology, reveal a mixed "basement uplift" and "recycled orogen" tectonic provenance. These findings support a model for Eocene-Oligocene rifting characterized by moderate to high relief superimposed on the Cretaceous-Early Tertiary Sevier fold-and-thrust belt. Paleogeographic reconstructions of Grasshopper basin reveal the lack of a southern basin margin. A correlation of the basin-fill contained in the Medicine Lodge and Horse Prairie basins to the south with the Medicine Lodge beds (sequence 2) in Grasshopper basin suggests that each of these basins represents a third of a larger preexisting extensional basin that was partially dismembered by later phases of continued extension. Large extensional folds in Grasshopper basin had a small influence on facies architecture in the basin.

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.

Esta dissertação apresenta a tradução do libreto da Ópera de Demofoonte em Tracia, de autoria do abade italiano Pietro Metastasio, feita supostamente por Cláudio Manuel da Costa. O trabalho faz as transcrições paleográfica e crítica do apógrafo existente no Arquivo de Música da Arquidiocese de Mariana. Na transcrição paleográfica, apresentamos o texto com fidelidade, para que o leitor possa ter conhecimento de como foi escrito e das interferências feitas a partir do original italiano. Na transcrição crítica, fizemos algumas correções, na tentativa de estabelecimento do texto definitivo. Para contextualização, destacamos algumas referências sobre as peças apresentadas em Portugal que, por sua vez, tiveram como modelos obras espanholas, italianas e francesas. Como imitação do que ocorria na Metrópole, esses modelos foram adotados em Vila Rica, capital da Capitania das Minas Gerais, que viveu o apogeu do descobrimento e da exploração aurífera até a 1ª metade do século XVIII, tornando-se centro de poder político, econômico e intelectual. As representações teatrais eram apreciadas pelos letrados, nos seus espaços de convivência, e também pelos demais habitantes, nos espaços públicos, quando se promoviam festas das quais pudessem participar. / The essay publishes the translation supposedly made by Claúdio Manuel da Costa, the Luso- Brazilian poet (1729 - 1789), of Demofonte\'s opera libretto composed by the Italian poet Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782). It makes the paleographic and critic transcriptions of the existent apograph in Mariana Archdiocese\'s music archives. In the paleographic transcription, the text is exactly reproduced, in order to show to the reader the way it was written and the translator\'s interferences in the Italian original text. In the critic transcription, some corrections were made, in an attempt of establishing a definitive version. The essay makes some references about theatre and plays in 18th century Portugal, which, by their turn, had Spanish, Italian and French works as models. As an emulation of what was being played in Portugal, the theatric models were adopted in Vila Rica, the Minas Gerais captaincy capital, that lived the apogee of the gold exploitation until the first half of the 18th Century, becoming the center of political, economic and intellectual colonial power. Theatric representations were enjoyed by the literate people, in their acquaintanceship spaces, and also by other inhabitants in public spaces, when public parties and events were promoted.

Esta dissertação apresenta a tradução do libreto da Ópera de Demofoonte em Tracia, de autoria do abade italiano Pietro Metastasio, feita supostamente por Cláudio Manuel da Costa. O trabalho faz as transcrições paleográfica e crítica do apógrafo existente no Arquivo de Música da Arquidiocese de Mariana. Na transcrição paleográfica, apresentamos o texto com fidelidade, para que o leitor possa ter conhecimento de como foi escrito e das interferências feitas a partir do original italiano. Na transcrição crítica, fizemos algumas correções, na tentativa de estabelecimento do texto definitivo. Para contextualização, destacamos algumas referências sobre as peças apresentadas em Portugal que, por sua vez, tiveram como modelos obras espanholas, italianas e francesas. Como imitação do que ocorria na Metrópole, esses modelos foram adotados em Vila Rica, capital da Capitania das Minas Gerais, que viveu o apogeu do descobrimento e da exploração aurífera até a 1ª metade do século XVIII, tornando-se centro de poder político, econômico e intelectual. As representações teatrais eram apreciadas pelos letrados, nos seus espaços de convivência, e também pelos demais habitantes, nos espaços públicos, quando se promoviam festas das quais pudessem participar. / The essay publishes the translation supposedly made by Claúdio Manuel da Costa, the Luso- Brazilian poet (1729 - 1789), of Demofonte\'s opera libretto composed by the Italian poet Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782). It makes the paleographic and critic transcriptions of the existent apograph in Mariana Archdiocese\'s music archives. In the paleographic transcription, the text is exactly reproduced, in order to show to the reader the way it was written and the translator\'s interferences in the Italian original text. In the critic transcription, some corrections were made, in an attempt of establishing a definitive version. The essay makes some references about theatre and plays in 18th century Portugal, which, by their turn, had Spanish, Italian and French works as models. As an emulation of what was being played in Portugal, the theatric models were adopted in Vila Rica, the Minas Gerais captaincy capital, that lived the apogee of the gold exploitation until the first half of the 18th Century, becoming the center of political, economic and intellectual colonial power. Theatric representations were enjoyed by the literate people, in their acquaintanceship spaces, and also by other inhabitants in public spaces, when public parties and events were promoted.