War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (review)

In the history of the Americas, frontiers and borderlands have long been defined as regions just beyond the reach of centralized power exercised by colonial European or Euro-American governance and, as such, disassociated with processes of the nation-state. Seeking to unite the state, borderlands, and Indians, DeLay explores how frontiers defined nation making for Mexico and the United States from the early to mid-nineteenth century. Using as his touchstone the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo's Article 11 (which required the United States to stop the incursions of Plains Indians into Mexico), he argues that these processes, or the course of the U.S.–Mexican War, cannot be understood without recognizing the far-reaching consequences of the raiding warfare of Plains Indians before and throughout the war. Indeed, the ongoing raiding warfare—what DeLay calls the War of a Thousand Deserts—converged with, and often profoundly influenced, the causes and outcome of the conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 through 1848.

DeLay divides his book into three sections, beginning with the disintegration of peace between Spanish-Mexicans and Plains Indians. He next looks at the divide between Mexico's northern states and its central government in Mexico City, which emerged in response to increasingly devastating Indian raids and erupted into federalist uprisings across northern Mexico in the 1830s. The final section examines the U.S. government's use of these political and violent tensions to justify its war with Mexico and the annexation of great swaths of northern Mexico in the war's aftermath. DeLay makes clear that, contrary to prevailing understandings, Indian polities were just as central to mid-century power struggles as were those of their Mexican and Anglo neighbors. The fate of newly developing nation-states in nineteenth-century North America, he concludes, was inseparable from the history of interethnic violence among Mexicans, Texans, norteamericanos, and Plains Indians.

In border crossings of another kind, DeLay's research methodology utilizes a broad array of sources from both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border not only to amass an impressive database in a twenty-eight-page appendix that conveys the magnitude of Mexican-Comanche violence from 1831 to 1848 but also to give readers entry to the wide-ranging perspectives of a complex story. Although DeLay includes some discussion of Apaches and Navajos, his main focus remains on Comanches and Kiowas. He mines ethnographical scholarship, but to a far greater extent Mexican and Texan contemporary accounts, to speculate on potential Indian motivations and goals. In this context, the book's analysis seems to falter, reflecting its larger struggle to argue for the crucial importance of Indians to its narrative despite the fact that its primary vantage point remains that of Anglos and Mexicans. Though it persuasively and conclusively argues for the importance of Indian polities in the U.S.-Mexican War and in the general pursuit of public goals, the nation building of the Indian polities does not merit the same scope as does that of Mexico and the United States. This imbalance seems most clear in the book's tension between the economic and political rationales supposedly underlying native raiding and the less rational "vengeance" adduced to explain the violence and destruction that accompanied the raids.

Most importantly, however, this analytical struggle reflects the challenges boldly undertaken by DeLay's thoroughly researched, lucidly written, and imaginatively argued work. Those seeking a provocative retelling of the borderland narrative of interethnic warfare and nation making along the U.S.-Mexican border would do well to read it.