In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

316 Endnotes 316 Endnotes Notes to Preface: 1 For an insightful examination of modern day violence along the United States/Mexican border the reader is referred to Ed Vulliamy’s 2010 AMEXIA: War Along the Borderline and Charles Bowden’s Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. Particularly focused in the Texas Big Bend Country is Terrence E. Poppa’s excellent treatment Drug Lord: The Life & Death of a Mexican Kingpin. For a gripping account of a drugster so rich and powerful he made Forbes magazine listings [amid considerable controversy] see The Last Narco: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo, The World’s Most Wanted Drug Lord by Malcolm Beith. A compelling primer for the reader interested in exploring background material for the rise of Mexican based drug trafficking, U.S policy infighting, political corruption, and the murder of an American DEA Special Agent is Elaine Shannon’s Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can’t Win. Also recommended is the outstanding study by Ioan Grillo, El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency. The foregoing accounts are written by print media journalists; one and all are dandy—and enlightening reads. No less readable and attention grabbing are two volumes researched and penned by professors, Howard Campbell’s Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches From the Streets of El Paso and Juárez and George W. Grayson’s Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State? 2 Leon C. Metz. Border: The U.S.-Mexico Line, 406. 3 Assistant Director DPS-Chief Texas Rangers, Kirby W. Dendy to author Sept. 25, 2012. 4 Malcolm Beith, The Last Narco. “In September 2006, five heads were rolled on to a dance floor in the central state of Michoacan. By late 2007, beheadings had become commonplace, barely even making the evening news….There were more than 300 beheadings in Mexico in 2009 alone; there are still no signs of the violence ebbing,” xvii; Ed Vulliamy, AMEXIA: War Along the Borderline. “Four decapitated seventeen -year-olds are among twenty-one people killed in Tijuana during the first week of the year [2009],” 15. And, “His [Hugo Hernández] torso is in one location, his severed arms and legs boxed in another place, and his skull found in another. His face has been flayed, left near the city hall of Los Mochis, sewn to a soccer ball,” 16. Endnotes 317 5 Don Graham, Kings of Texas: The 150 Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire, 17–18. 6 Hallie Crawford Stillwell, I’ll Gather My Geese, 12. 7 Charles H. Harris III and Louis Ray Sadler, The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910–1920. 8 C. L. Sonnichsen, Tularosa: Last of the Frontier West, 3 9 Roy R. Barkley and Mark F. Odintz, eds., The Portable Handbook of Texas, 725. 10 Two significant studies of the Rio Grande for the general reader are Paul Horgan’s two-volume treatment, Great River, The Rio Grande in North American History and Metz’s Border: The U.S.-Mexican Line. Also see, John Busby McClung, “Texas Rangers Along the Rio Grande, 1910–1919,” Ph.D. dissertation, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, 1981. 11 Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense. First part of quotation, 495; second part, 508. Along the Rio Grande in the Big Bend Country even store personnel carried guns. See, Diane Garner, Letters From the Big Bend: Legacy of a Pioneer: “Secondly, I [James Robert “Jim” Landrum] am not only a good pistol shot, but am known to be and always go armed (a wise percausion [sic] here.),” 112. 12 J. C. Cameron, Secretary/Actuary, Great Southern Life Insurance Company, to Texas Adjutant General James A. Harley, Dec. 10, 1917, Texas State Library and Archives, hereafter TSA. Clearly staking out a section of real-estate and declaring it the most perilous spot in Texas, in a law enforcing context, could arguably be injudicious: Individual perspective does matter. Texas State Police lost four officers in a single day (March 14, 1873) as result of gunfire inside and outside Jerry Scott’s saloon at Lampasas; was it the most dangerous place in Texas? The Bosque County sheriff may have thought his county was toughest of the tough after losing three deputies in 1874. Texas prison administrators, after burying three correctional officers killed in three separate episodes during 1890, might have reasonably postulated patrolling the prison yard and walking the cell blocks was...

Share