Editor’s Note: Author Richard Parker died early last month, days after publication of his book The Crossing. “My dad was a person that loved learning about the world around him, and we saw that in his writing,” his daughter Olivia told the Albuquerque Journal. He was 61.
For years, one of my favorite places to visit in El Paso was the crossing where the Spanish conquistador Don Juan Onate and several hundred Spanish, mestizo, and Indigenous settlers crossed the Rio Grande/Río Bravo—El Paso del Norte—in 1598 on their expedition from Mexico to northern New Mexico.
