Customer Reviews

War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (The Lamar Series in Western History)

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When I was taking a course on U.S. Military History for my masters degree, there was one war for which a book was conspicuously absent from the syllabus: The U.S.-Mexico War. When I asked my professor about it, he informed me that he hadn't found a good book that covered some unusual aspect of the war to fit in with the other readings for the class.

That book is now here.

In War of a Thousand Deserts, Brian DeLay takes on a little known subject from an often neglected period in American history--the effect that Indian raids in northern Mexico had on the U.S. War with that nation. His conclusions about such topics as whether Comanche raids were conducted simply for material gain or also vengeance, or that such raids were as essential a component in the lead-up to the war as any political or expansionist motivations, are backed up by extensive research and pages of data. Professor DeLay is obviously a very careful and conscientious investigator, as evidenced by the outstanding material presented in the appendix.

But just as impressive is DeLay's writing style, which avoids the dryness of many scholarly works at this level and makes the story as enjoyable to read as it is informative. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in U.S., Indian, Mexican, or military history, as well as anyone simply looking for a good read.

The description above is from a Mexican official, Jose Maria Sanchez, writing in 1830 about the North Americans flooding into Texas (then a Mexican state). Manuel Mier y Teran also noted the North Americans' contempt for Mexican laws and refusal to learn the language. The Mexicans clearly saw the threat to their sovereignty, and outlawed immigration from the north.

However, the Mexicans were unable to stop the eventuality they clearly foresaw. The Mexican North was a "thousand deserts", laid waste by Comanche raids, terrifying attacks of up to 1,000 warriors who could travel 100 miles a day. Roiling internal politics and a poor economy meant that Mexico did not protect its north from the norteamericano or Indian menaces. American and Mexican willingness to turn a blind eye to buying branded animals created a ready market for stolen livestock.

The next time I hear someone extolling Indian simplicity and virtue, I will grit my teeth. The Comanches were renowned for their gratuitous cruelty and devotion to vengeance and retribution, leaving behind "bellowing farm animals dragging their guts behind them",slaughtered noncombatants, some burned alive, and wholesale destruction of grain stocks and wells poisoned with corpses. Because Texans appear to have matched Comanches for ferocity, most of these raids were directed into the Mexico, even as far south as San Luis Potosi and Tamaulipas, victimizing people who were no conceivable threat. Warriors would engage in a scorched earth campaign (as opposed to merely efficiently stealing animals) even when this put them in danger by giving defenders time to organize. There was plenty to seek vengeance for. For instance, in 1846, James Kirker, an American, led a party which slaughtered and scalped 130 unarmed Chiricahua Apaches in Galeana, Chihuahua, to general acclaim from the Mexican populace, an incident which discredited Apache voices advocating peace. All the while, of course, American politicians (especially those looking to expand slave territories)were observing these events with interest, realizing that the Indian raids helped create the opportunity for the United States to acquire northern Mexico, by purchase or conquest.

Professor DeLay's gripping book is full of these telling insights. I read this based on a recommendation from Larry McMurtry in The New York Review of Books. Who better to recommend readings on the American Southwest during this period?

All those maps you saw in school that show changing European borders cutting through central North America are a fiction. Those maps showed various expanses of British, French, Spanish, American and Mexican rule. Yet, arguably the largest national territory for decades was Comancheria. At it's peak Comanche military, commercial and political power extended from western New Mexico east almost to the Mississippi and from north of Okalahoma to deep in to Mexico. They influenced and sometimes destroyed the colonial dreams of great European powers. Thinking of the Comanches as anyone's as victims is non-historical and an insult.

Conventional histories may mention the Comances in passing but that's like writting a history of Asia with Gengis Kahn appearing only as a footnote.

I can also recomend a companion book on this topic "The Comanche Empire" by Pekka Hämäläinen.

The destruction that the Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches wreaked upon the people of Mexico in the era leading up the

Mexican-American War (1846-1848) is not well known, at least not in the USA. This amazing publication by Brian Delay serves to educate all who might not be so familiar with what was essentially a 15-year bloodbath. The War of a Thousand Deserts was waged by Indian warriors upon the citizenry of Mexico (mostly farmers and ranchers and the like) that was so terrible that it left much of the region north of Mexico City in utter ruin and so distraught and preoccupied they were almost powerless to deal with the American invasion when it occurred.

Delay does a brilliant and thorough job detailing many of the battles and attacks. His erudition is obvious but his writing style is nonetheless quite stirring. The only flaw in the book is that does tend to drag on at times. There's so much to tell and Delay seems to unable to edit or withhold many of the details. But readers are encouraged to read on despite of this as it's such an incredible story. Delay even lists (in the Appendix) the many fights/raids/casualties so that readers can easily see what the real numbers were.

War of a Thousand Deserts is essential reading for students of American ad Mexican history anyone looking for a great read!

Delay has written a highly readable account of Comanche interaction with Mexicans and Anglos during the early nineteenth century. One of the book's strong points is that it makes no attempt to romanticize Native Americans. (For an interesting contrast, see Gary Clayton Anderson's The Conquest of Texas, which characterizes the subjugation of Indians during this period as "ethnic cleansing.") According to Delay, Comanche raids against Mexicans in the borderlands were both destructive and brutal. While I'm not entirely convinced by Delay's argument that the severity of these raids left Mexico so debilitated that it was unable to prevent American westward expansion--the war between the two countries was won in the valley of Mexico, not the northern frontier--he does a great job recreating the struggle for dominance in the American Southwest. This is a little known story, told by a serious scholar with a flair for vivid prose. A major contribution to the field of borderlands studies.