Drawing on the diaries and correspondence of three Franciscan friars, Pedro Font, Juan Crespí, and Francisco Garcés, as well as his own exhaustive field research, Robert A. Kittle weaves a seamless narrative detailing the friars’ striking accomplishments, beginning in Spain, encompassing the remote Sierra Gorda highlands of Mexico, and through the deserts of the American Southwest and coastal California. Each man’s journey played an important role in Spain’s eighteenth-century conquest of the Pacific coast, but today their names and deeds are little known.