Diary of Francisco Garcés
On July 4, 1776, Spanish explorer Fray Francisco Garcés was ousted from the Hopi village of Orayvi because he represented a threat to their independence. The diary of his journey from San Xavier del Bac to Hopi, via southern Arizona, southern California, and up the Colorado River, contains invaluable information about Native societies living in these regions at the time. However, a 1900 translation of Garcés’s 1775-1776 diary by Elliot Coues, the only source used by most Anglophone scholars, contains many errors of ethnographic interpretation. These include a mistranscription of the word "Napac," which he rendered as "Napao," leading Coues to distort the record of Native Southwestern human geography. Coues argued that Napao referred to the Navajo people, who, he claimed, were living much further west in 1776 than any credible record indicates. Coues’s misinterpretation launched an inquiry into exactly who the Napac were, if not the Navajo, and further aspects of Garcés’s original manuscript diary.
Using seven different manuscript versions of Garcés’s diary, Whiteley compared texts and letter sequences to group the versions into categories that allow the diary variants to be identified chronologically. Again, with Wheeler’s assistance via POY, a "tree" of manuscripts has been developed. To test the plausibility of chronological inferences, Whiteley has further been studying watermarks on the pages of each diary (see the scans below) to try to determine the approximate date each manuscript was written.
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Dr. Whiteley has confirmed that the only version that contains any reference to the "Napao" is the erroneous 1900 Coues translation. In turn, and correlated to the Havasupai language of Garcés's companions at the time, this suggests that Napac does not, in fact, refer to the Navajo, but a band of Yavapai people who inhabited the flanks of the San Francisco Peaks, Awik ha napac in the Havasupai language.
