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

Comanche history has been enjoying a robust revival in recent years. Pekka Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire and Brian DeLay's War of a Thousand Deserts, both published by Yale University Press in 2008, have given historians of North American Indians, the American West, and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands cause to refocus their sights on the presence and role of Comanche economics, politics, warfare, and power in what is today the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. Both of these well researched and written studies go a long way to help scholars re-envision that borderland region in terms of competing French, Spanish, Comanche, and later U.S. hegemonies, and should help make it easier for classes and seminars on the region to include this important, and often underrepresented, Comanche history. They both go deeper and ask different questions to explain the Comanche hegemony in the region than did Gary Clayton Anderson in his earlier The Indian Southwest, 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman, 1999). Between all of these books there is no longer any excuse to give the Comanches short shrift in North American borderlands history!

What sets DeLay's War of a Thousand Deserts apart is his focus on the early nineteenth century and especially the years surrounding the Mexican-American War, or as he appropriately re-labels it, the U.S.-Mexican War—a fitting revisionist term and a far better one than the still-extant, but preposterous, "Mexican War." However, the subtitle of the book ("Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War") is somewhat misleading here, as DeLay does not really get to the lead-up of war until page 225 and the war itself until Part III (chapters 9 and 10). This does not distract from the importance or quality of the book, rather it points to a now common trend of publishers mistakenly changing original titles that are not as well crafted as dissertation titles. Case in point here is that DeLay's dissertation subtitle, "Indian Politics in the Era of the U.S.-Mexican War," while only slightly different, represents the book's focus much better. In fact, the majority of this book deals with pre-war Comancheria, overlapping somewhat with Hämäläinen's book but not going as far back in time and dealing much more with the Comanche presence in northern Mexico. It was there—the site of the "War of a Thousand Deserts" reflected in an amazing number of abandoned Mexican villages, ranches, and communities in the northern states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, and Durango that Comanche Indians had raided and ravaged—that DeLay uncovers this transboundary history of competing powers. West of there in Sonora and Sinaloa, similar raiding was taking place by Apache Indians coming south from Arizona. Combined, DeLay deals with the entire northern Mexico borderlands and how Mexican-Comanche-U.S. relations begin to change during the years of the Republic of Texas and the U.S.-Mexican War. His thesis at this point is that invading American troops witnessed the Comanche destruction in northern Mexico and used it to their benefit to try to prove that the United States was there to restore order and to rescue the norteños from Apache and Comanche savagery.

To do so, DeLay uses a combination of archival, governmental, Indian, and newspaper resources. There is perhaps a preponderance of material based on newspaper accounts, especially in the book's middle chapters, but DeLay's point is to show the extent of the raiding and to reflect on the reaction of northern Mexicans to the Comanches themselves. In some ways, the outcome is predictable: the Mexicans hated the Indians for the raids, destruction, captive-taking, and horse-stealing, without recognizing the extent of how Spaniards basically did the same against native groups in the region two centuries before. But that analysis is not really needed here; the story is to show the...