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

Over the past two decades, American Indian historians have challenged and in some instances overturned operative paradigms in the field of U.S. history. Most notably, scholars of early America no longer focus exclusively upon the Anglo-American world, as borderland histories and indigenous-imperial relations outside of British North American occupy a central place in the study of colonial America. Gone now are the days when the majority of the continent's seventeenth as well as most of its eighteenth-century populations remained subplots within a larger narrative.

While now a dominant theme in the study of early America, indigenous and imperial histories do not appear as central to post-Revolutionary America. Indeed, despite a profusion of scholarship on the fate of empires in North America after 1787, numerous surveys of antebellum America casually ignore the legacies of French and Spanish imperialism in North America, continuing long-standing habits that consign global colonialism and its effects on indigenous populations to other imperial arenas. The history of American expansion still too often remains a political narrative of sectional conflict that masks the existence of diverse human societies found throughout the continent. The effects of such expansion upon both indigenous and non-Anglophone communities also often remains elided.

Writing within and against such currents, Brian Delay offers an important reassessment of not only the U.S.-Mexican war but also the history of American expansion more broadly. This book successfully conjoins the history of U.S. expansion with the history of northern Mexico and links the following three fields into a singular whole: southern plains Indian history, the early Mexican republic, and Anglo-American expansion. As such, it marks an achievement in the field of comparative history.

Long known as the Mexican-American War, the origins of the U.S.-Mexican War remain centrally found, according to Delay, in the history of indigenous raiding that raged across the American Southwest throughout the Spanish colonial era. Aptly terming the totality of such raids as a war of a thousand "man-made deserts where once there had been thriving Mexican settlements" (p. xv), Delay begins where many borderlands histories generally conclude: with the demise of New Spain and the rise of independent Mexico. Successfully exposing the forms of indigenous warfare that plagued Mexico during its two-decades hold on the U.S. Southwest, Delay illustrates the under-recognized centrality of northern Indian raiding to the fate of Mexican and U.S. national history, exploring how early Mexican leaders, such as President Anastacio Bustamante, were both familiar with, and also thought little of, northern Indian affairs. This familiarity remained preciously underutilized in Mexico City, while the neglect of Indian affairs, he suggests, may have ultimately cost Mexico much of its northern territory.

Ranging across Mexico, Jacksonian America, and the southern plains, Delay builds upon the work of several Plains Indian historians to reveal the profound effects Indian equestrianism played in the Trans-Mississippi West. Most tellingly, the shifting political alliances between various Plains Indian societies enabled the expansion of equestrian raiding deep into the Mexican interior during the 1830s and 1840s. The historic peace, for example, carved out between Comanche and Kiowa leaders, on the one hand, and Cheyenne and Arapahos, on the other, in 1840 along the Arkansas River led to the destabilization of Mexican villages from San Luis Potosí to the Rio Grande, turning the southern plains into a "busy plunderer's bazaar" (p. 85) while leading to "the depopulation of much of the rural north and to a sharp decline in the annual growth rate of northern Mexico's population" (p. 194). Such indigenous economic growth and concomitant Mexican demographic decline informed subsequent Anglo-American justifications for seizing Mexican territory. Most important, the success Indian raiders achieved in the 1840s so destabilized Mexican defenses that many U.S. campaigns essentially retraced...