Jeremy Beer is a historian and also an institution leader, the CEO of Am Phil.

That's an organization that links philanthropists to projects that revivify civil

society in our nation, and we know how much we need that. He's the author of Oscar Charleston,

the life and legend of America's greatest forgotten player. He has a new book, a lengthy

historical study called Beyond the Devil's Road, Francisco

Garces and the Spanish encounter with the American Southwest. That's our topic today. You may

want to correct my pronunciation there. No, I think you did it very well. Welcome. Yeah, thank you,

Mark. Thanks for having me on. First, I mean, we've got a simple geography is very important here. A lot of maps in the book. Tracing passages travels by different people. Just a simple geographical question. What is the Devil's Road? Where is it? What was it for?

So the Devil's Road is still there today. It runs essentially right along the international

border between Mexico and the United States from about where organ pipe cactus National

Monument stands today westward to, not quite to the California, Arizona arizona line uh it was it's an ancient trail

was used by native peoples for nobody knows for how long uh and um it was used later on by

uh 49ers and others coming across uh the west from the anglo-american east and the title of the book suggests, it was also used by

our hero here, Francisco Garcés, who found the trail from a Spanish perspective and used it to find

what they didn't know how to do, which was to get overland from northern New Spain, today's

Sonora, and today's Arizona, to what they called

Alta, California, our California. And that was a big deal. Well, a lot of people don't realize

how high some of those mountains are down in Mexico. Yeah, the mountains are high and the deserts

are low. It's incredibly hot. It's incredibly dry. And that was why it was pretty much unknown territory.

The Spanish would call areas like that despoblado, which means depopulated.

Nobody really lived there.

I mean, there were little bands of Odom people who would move around.

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