In the first part of my study I investigate the background in which Marcus Kappus had lived in his youth, before his departure for America. I consider that analysis of these early European formative ...years of a person who later had a visible role in his part of America can be a useful contribution to American studies. To this I add a brief summary of our present knowledge of Kappus' life in Sonora, and a survey of Slovene studies on him.
This is the sixth - and also the last - in the present series of letters which Marcus Antonius Kappus ( 1657 - 1717, since 1687 Jesuitic missionary in the colonial Sonora) had sent to his relatives ...and acquaintances in Slovenia that have been preserved to the present day. Of the five letters which we have published so far, two were written in Latin and three in German; four of these letters we have published from manuscripts preserved in Ljubljana archives, and one (letter IV) from Der neue Welt-Bott - a well known German compilation of letters sent by Jesuitic missionaries from various parts of the world- which in the period from 1726 till 1761 appeared periodically in press in Augsburg, Graz, and Vienna.
The letter of Marcus Antonius Kappus which we publish in our present - the fifth - continuation of his letters from Colonial America is the last of his letters in the Erberg Collection that is ...preserved in the Archives of Slovenia. The text is preserved on a single sheaf of paper, 25.5 X 20.3 cm, written on both sides. The preserved text is a copy of a now lost original. The copy was made at the latest in the beginning of the XIXth century. The text is now published for the first time.
The letter of Marcus Antonius Kappus which we publish in our present the fourth - continuation of his letters from Colonial America, is not preserved - as the first three letters are - in a ...manuscript. Instead we find it published in the famous contemporary collection of Jesuitic letters which appeared from 1728 till 1758 under the editorship of Joseph Stöcklein and his successors in Augsburg and Graz under the title Der neue Welt-Bott mit Allerhand Nachrichten derer Missionariorum Soc. Jesu. Kappus' letter can be found in vol. I, part II, p. 86-88 under the number 56. It has never since 1728 been reprinted in German, neither has it ever been published in an English translation. Our reprint of the German text is justified because Stöcklein's collection is generally not available even in the largest libraries, especially in America. An English translation can be useful because of the difficulties the old form of its German with its localisms can cause to its readers.
The letter of Marcus Antonius Kappus (1657-1717) from Cucurpe in Sonora (Mexico), dated 20. January 1691, which is now published for the first time in the present study, is historically important, ...because it speaks in considerable detail o the revolt of the Tarahumara Indians in 1690. It is one of the few contemporary accounts of this revolt and brings a number of facts unknown so far.
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