Betancourt, Remesal, Beaumont, Cogolludo, Villa Gutierre, Burgoa, Clavigero—all in good editions, either original or copies, and many in several editions and translations.
Of works devoted to the history of the native races, there may be mentioned the writings of Garcia, Ixtlilxochitl, Camargo, Tezozomoe, Boturini, Veytia, and Leon y Gama. Of works on antiquities, those of Kingsborough, Waldeck, Dupaix, Del Rio, Cabrera, Stephens and Catherwood, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Nebel, and Charnay. On the early voyages and explorations, with their correlative history, may be cited, first, Grynzus, Ramusio, Hakluyt, and Purchas; and secondly, Churchill, Pinkerton, Aa, Godfriedt, Navarrete, Ternaux-Campans, Pacheco, and Icazbalceta. Of the northwest coast and its early history, the most valuable are by Ribas, Mota Padilla, Alegre, Arricivita, Kino, Salvatierra, Venegas, Clavigero, Bzgert, Salmeron, Palou, Fages, Mofras, Voyage of the Sutil y Mexicana, Cabrera Bueno, Forbes, Greenhow, and others.
In addition to this mass of material, are many thousands of pamphlets—five thousand in a single collection made in Mexico on government and other matters—and periodicals and publications of learned societies, besides the works of such modern writers as Humboldt, Buschman, Prescott, Irving, Alaman, Orozco y Berra, Stephens, and Squier, to which might be appended an almost innumerable list of books of miscellaneous matter, bearing in some degree on the character of history or the natural resources of the vast area of country constituting the Pacific States; and it is doubtful if any library in the world contains more or better authorities on the Spanish states in North America.
The material for the history of California in the Bancroft Library—over and above all the thousands of written and printed books—of a comparatively and of a really modern date is as unique and interesting as the earlier portions. This consists of mission archives, biographical sketches, and early reminiscences, to the number of several hundred volumes, including the Vallejo collection of original documents, in thirty-seven volumes; the Hayes collection of originals, copies, and maps, in one hundred volumes; documents from the archives of the Bandini, Castro, and Pico families; the Larkin collection of official papers; manuscript histories of California, written from the personal recollection and private memoranda of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Don Juan Bandini, Captain Jose Fernandez, Colonel Manuel Castro, Governor Juan B. Alvarado, and Captain John A. Sutter, with historical reminiscences in manuscripts by hundreds of the earliest American settlers in California.
In obtaining these materials, which are of the greatest advantage to the historian, Mr. Bancroft either went himself or sent an assistant to every old mission, and interviewed every prominent family of Spanish or Mexican origin. At some of these places the original documents were easily procured; at others persuasion procured permission to make copies; and at others money proved the open sesame. It was in this personal manner that Judge Hayes, the enthusiastic collector, gathered up the hundred volumes of matter that passed into Mr. Bancroft's hands. The passion for historical research is one that, when it gets possession of an individual, never leaves him, but presses him ever onward.
But it was not manuscripts alone for which the collector plied the possessor of historical material The vast bulk of unprinted originals was supplemented by a vaster bulk of newspaper files, United States Government documents, and printed matter of every description, including costly reports in now rare sets of quarto volumes. The collection for the history of California is absolutely complete; and it should be regarded as of the greatest importance to the State, not only that such a collection exists, but that there exists in its owner a man with the high ambition to extract from it, with infinite labor and ample resources, a perfectly accurate as well as
