War of a Thousand Deserts

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