War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War
by Brian DeLay
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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 show more 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.-- show lessTags
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Not sure the author intended it to be so but this book does a good job of providing a foundation necessary to understand how linked the fates of native Americans, white settlers and northern Mexicans were as far back as the US-Mexican war.
An excellent scholarly work about a little-known part of the U.S.-Mexico War. Highly recommended to anyone interested in this part of history.
Estudio histórico que reconstruye el complejo escenario geopolítico y militar en la frontera norte de México y el suroeste estadounidense, destacando el papel decisivo de las incursiones indígenas en la dinámica que condujo al estallido de la guerra de 1846-1848,
Dec 9, 2025Spanish
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War
- Important events
- Mexican-American War (1846 | 1848)
Classifications
- Genres
- History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 972.100497 — History & geography History of North America Mexico, Central America, West Indies, Bermuda Northern States
- LCC
- F800 .D45 — Local History of the United States, Canada and Latin America United States local history New Mexico
- BISAC
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- 132
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- 248,913
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (4.56)
- Languages
- English, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 1
