Download Brian DeLay. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the US

Comparative/World
BRIAN DELAY. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids
and the U.S.-Mexican War. (The Lamar Series in Western History.) New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the William P. Clements Center for
Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
2008. Pp. xxi, 473. $35.00.
This innovative political history presents a compelling
interpretative framework for the U.S.-Mexican War of
1846–1848. It expands the usual roster of historical actors to foreground the tribal units and confederations
of the Great Plains and the U.S. Southwest: the Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, and Navajo peoples. Brian
DeLay shows that independent indigenous peoples developed distinct political cultures and coordinated
strategies through networks of alliances that spanned
Mexico and the United States during the first threequarters of the nineteenth century. They articulated an
agenda that leveled material demands on both American and Mexican authorities and exacted terrible reprisals for slain warriors according to “the politics of
vengeance.” These Native American wars fill the main
script of DeLay’s narrative, focusing on the first half of
the nineteenth century and overshadowing the conflict
between Mexico and the United States. He argues that
the multitiered and interethnic forays, ranging from the
Great Plains southward into Mexico as far as Zacatecas
and San Luis Potosı́, constituted the principal theater
of war, leaving in its wake abandoned ranches, towns,
and villages. These wars produced the “deserts” that
rendered the Mexican north all the more vulnerable to
the Anglo-American revolt in Texas (1835), the U.S.
invasions of the 1840s, and the forced cession of additional territory in 1853. Indeed, these were not merely
parallel wars. Rather the War of a Thousand Deserts
shaped the binational war and affected its outcome.
Within this scenario the Comanches occupy center
stage during the first two parts of the book, but as the
story unfolds, they share space with Kiowas, Apaches,
and Navajos. These four tribal groups are the most
commonly named, although many other Native Americans played vital roles as protagonists of their own political ends and defenders of their cultural life ways during this period of geopolitical upheaval and territorial
realignment.
Three-quarters of the book deals with the three decades leading up to the U.S.-Mexican War, from Mexican Independence to the U.S. invasions of 1846–1848.
The final two chapters narrate the binational war in
both its military and political phases, and the epilogue
extends this history, in summary fashion, to the end of
the century. In this final chapter DeLay highlights the
consequences of both wars for Mexico, the United
States, and the tribal peoples whose patterns of warfare
and raiding began to erode the resource base on which
their subsistence depended. U.S. military forces following the Civil War and Mexican state-building after the
losses of mid-century—through the War of the Reform,
the French Intervention, and the centralist politics of
the Porfiriato—curtailed their freedom of movement at
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the same time that the collapse of the bison herds and
episodes of drought and disease threatened their very
survival. Forced resettlement north of the Rı́o Grande
and reduced access to raiding in Mexico turned these
once mighty equestrian tribes into refugees of sorts,
obliged to accept rations and settle in reservations
carved out of deserts that were partly of their own making.
DeLay dialogues well with Mexican historiography
for this period, particularly with historians and anthropologists like Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, Leticia
Reina, José Cuauhtémoc Velasco Ávila, Héctor Cuauhtémoc Hernández Silva, Luis Aboites Aguilar, and Josefina Vázquez Zoraida, who have focused their research on northern Mexico and on the contentious
relations between Mexican settlements and raiding
bands of nomadic Indians that traveled freely in the relatively unpatrolled borderlands between Mexico and
the United States. He captures the major issues of Mexico’s prolonged political debate between federalists and
centralists, resulting in weakened public administration, the failure to mount effective defensive policies,
and the loss of over one-half of Mexico’s national territory. DeLay deals forthrightly with Anglo-American
racism and the United States’ failure to uphold Article
XI of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, by which the
American government committed to preventing raiding
parties from invading Mexican territory; the article was
abrogated in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, when Mexico ceded even more territory to the United States.
DeLay’s archival sources are wide and varied, with
references to several Mexican state archives. His interpretations of politics and the security issues of northern
Mexico, however, rely heavily on official newspapers, in
which governmental decrees, editorials, and correspondence were selectively published. At times he seems to
accept at face value the dramatic rhetoric of northern
political factions that battled one another, confronted
the central government, and exaggerated the abandonment of the northern frontier. DeLay observes somewhat obliquely that not all the raiders were tribal peoples: Mexican intermediaries and Anglo-American
livestock rustlers and bison-hunters often accompanied
raiding bands or disguised themselves by “playing Indian.” One set of historical actors who receive only brief
mention in this history are the sedentary indigenous
communities whose territories and polities were sorely
challenged during this period.
CYNTHIA RADDING
University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
THOMAS ADAM. Buying Respectability: Philanthropy and
Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to
1930s. (Philanthropic and Nonprofit Studies.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2009. Pp. x, 239.
$39.95.
The past few decades have seen a remarkable revival of
interest among historians in the rich traditions and
JUNE 2010