An award-winning look at how Apaches, Navajos, Kiowas, and especially Comanches played a decisive role in America's watershed victory over Mexico

"An engaging book that enlivens the debate over the clash between Indians, Mexicans, and Americans in the Southwest."-Gary Clayton Anderson, Western Historical Quarterly

"Action-packed and densely argued."-Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books

In the early 1830s, after decades of relative peace, northern Mexicans and the Indians whom they called "the barbarians" descended into a terrifying cycle of violence. For the next fifteen years, owing in part to changes unleashed by American expansion, Indian warriors launched devastating attacks across ten Mexican states. Raids and counter-raids claimed thousands of lives, ruined much of northern Mexico's economy, depopulated its countryside, and left man-made "deserts" in place of thriving settlements. Just as important, this vast interethnic war informed and emboldened U.S. arguments in favor of seizing Mexican territory while leaving northern Mexicans too divided, exhausted, and distracted to resist the American invasion and subsequent occupation.

Exploring Mexican, American, and Indian sources ranging from diplomatic correspondence and congressional debates to captivity narratives and plains Indians' pictorial calendars, War of a Thousand Deserts recovers the surprising and previously unrecognized ways in which economic, cultural, and political developments within native communities affected nineteenth-century nation-states. In the process this ambitious book offers a rich and often harrowing new narrative of the era when the United States seized half of Mexico's national territory.

About the Author

Brian DeLay is assistant professor of history, University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews
"A truly outstanding work of transnational history. It should be required reading for graduate students in American Indian, Latin American, U.S., and global and comparative history."-Matthew Babcock, Journal of World History

"War of a Thousand Deserts makes a solid contribution to diplomatic, borderlands, and indigenous history."-James N. Leiker, American Studies Vol.49 3/4

Received an honorable mention from the Texas State Historical Association

Received Honorable Mention for the 2008 PROSE Award in the U.S. History and Biography/Autobiography category, sponsored by the Association of American Publishers

Winner of the 2008 Summerfield G. Roberts Award, presented by the Sons of the Republic of Texas

Finalist for the 2008 Francis Parkman Prize sponsored by the Society of American History

Winner of the 2009 Robert M. Utley Award given by the Western History Association

"Brian DeLay is one of the most articulate and original authors writing in the Western Americana field today."-Howard R. Lamar, author of The New Encyclopedia of the American West

"With a good sense of drama and narrative, DeLay tells the story of how the interactions and preconceptions of Mexicans, Americans, and independent Indian tribes shaped the borderland region in ways none of the parties expected. This book will force many readers to rethink their basic assumptions about Indians as nineteenth-century political actors. This is not just the most significant work on the U.S.-Mexico War to appear in a generation, but a study with wide-ranging implications for the history of North America. Brian DeLay shows how enlightening transnational history can be when done well."-Amy S. Greenberg, The Pennsylvania State University

"In supple prose, DeLay analyzes the interactions in the years leading up to the war among three 'nations'-the struggling new Mexican republic, the confident and opportunistic (but also relatively new) U.S., and the older, highly dynamic peoples of indigenous America-as well as among the compellingly depicted individuals and groups that composed them."-Margaret Chowning, University of California at Berkeley

"DeLay's War of a Thousand Deserts begins with a long-neglected question: what role did Indian Nations of the Southern Plains-Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches-play in the era of the U.S.-Mexican War? His answers sweep across the borderlands in stories of violence, trauma, and the devastating cultural effects of endemic warfare on indigenous and Mexican peoples alike. A tireless researcher and gifted writer has given us a necessary, if profoundly disturbing, look at the history of our American West."-James F. Brooks, author of Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands

"Brian DeLay's compelling and well-documented narrative of a little-known subject-Indian raids into northern Mexico-offers new insights on the impact of those attacks on the affected countries and peoples."-Pedro Santoni, author of Mexicans at Arms: Puro Federalists and the Politics of War, 1845-1848

Book Information
ISBN 9780300158373
Author Brian DeLay
Format Paperback
Page Count 496
Imprint Yale University Press
Publisher Yale University Press
Weight(grams) 612g