Ecclesiastical Archives 395 
THE ARCHIVE. 
The remains of the college archive are still in the old college building, in 
the Villa de Guadalupe, which is best reached by the gravity road from 
Zacatecas. 
In May, 1820, Fray José Maria Guzman, guardian of the college, revised 
and indexed “ anew the whole contents of said Archivo”. This inventory 
(indice) shows that by that time most of the early records of the college had 
disappeared. It seems that the loss had occurred some considerable time 
before this date even, for, writing a history of the college in 1845, Father 
Freges (he wrote his name thus) remarked that he found himself under the 
same difficulty that Father Alcocer had experienced, namely, that the mate- 
rials for the early history had been lent to the College of the Holy Cross of 
Querétaro and had been lost. There is in the archive of the College of the Holy 
Cross a reference to this charge and a denial. Certainly there are few docu- 
ments of the kind in question now at that place. The disappearance of the early 
Texas records from the archive is noted also by Father José Maria Puelles. In 
the introduction to his Informe sobre Limites de la Provincia de Tejas con la 
de Luisiana ( Nov. 30,1827), printed at Zacatecas, 1828, original in the Archivo 
de Relaciones, he says that the archive had been searched for documents 
bearing on the subject, “ but not a thing is found in it; perhaps because the 
documents which at some time existed here and in the archives of the prov- 
ince of Tejas passed ” to Mexico, Chihuahua, or to some other college. 
CLASSIFICATION. 
The inventory prepared by Fray José Maria Guzman is arranged by letters, 
an attempt being made at an alphabetical grouping of the materials. 
The following are the divisions of which remains were found: 
A. Authentication of relics in the college. 
B. Bulls, briefs, decrees, privileges (facultades). 
C. Royal cédulas, documents concerning the founding of the college, 
and its interior administration. 
D. Donations to the college, etc. 
E. Instruments (escrituras) of loans, mortgages, deeds, etc. relating to 
the missions. 
M. Missions. 
Leg. 2. Missions of Tarahumara. 
Leg. 8. Missions of Seno Mexicano and Sierra Gorda. 
Leg. 4. Entrada of Father Margil to Nayarit. 
Leg. 5. Papers of the missions of Orocoquiza, Adaes, San Xavier, 
and Rosario. 
P. Miscellaneous mission documents, 
Apparently the larger portion of the documents noted in Guzman’s inven- 
tory are still preserved, but they are so scattered and so far separated from 
their former classifications that it would require a great deal of labor to state 
just how much has disappeared since 1820. 
The archive is now in two separate collections, one in the library, and the 
other in a case in the stairway leading to the attic at the rear of the building. 
The latter is the more important collection. Because of the disorganized con- 
dition of the archive, a systematic general description of it is scarcely pos- 
sible. I give, therefore, with some detail, the principal documents and 
groups of documents of specific or general bearing on the United States, with 
as definite reference to their location, by place or bundle, as is possible. Even 
