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

Reviewed by:
  • Valley of the Guns: The Pleasant Valley War and the Trauma of Violence by Eduardo Obregón Pagán
  • Jamie Starling
Valley of the Guns: The Pleasant Valley War and the Trauma of Violence. By Eduardo Obregón Pagán. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 312. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.)

At first glance, the Pleasant Valley War that occurred in central Arizona from 1881 to 1892 represents an archetypal frontier conflict of that era. In this engaging book, Eduardo Obregón Pagán recovers this history from familiar western tropes and popular mythmaking with a thoroughly [End Page 245] researched study that draws theoretical inspiration from recent scholarship on the North American borderlands. In particular, the author acknowledges the influence of Ned Blackhawk’s acclaimed book Violence over the Land (Harvard University Press, 2006) for providing a framework for understanding how conflicts that appear to stem from personal feuds tie peoples and communities to “imperial” networks. Pleasant Valley’s setting in the historic “theft corridor” of trading and raiding that extended from northern Mexican mines and presidios across the Apache lands to the Great Basin is especially significant as a background to this history. Pagán also highlights the diverse origins of the settlers who arrived in the region during the 1870s, including Protestants and Mormons, the Blevins Gang of Texas, and the Tewkesbury boys, a prominent mixed white-Native American family from California who were central participants in the war.

Texas cowboys often found a cold welcome from fellow settlers who saw many arrivals from the Lone Star State, including the Blevins clan, as “desperadoes.” Far from seeing all stockmen as intrepid frontiersmen, more civic-minded residents of territorial Arizona often condemned cowboys as “‘white Indians,’ rootless, vice-ridden thieves on horseback who lived fast and died young” (48). While the author focuses on a small and relatively thinly populated part of Arizona, many patterns familiar to historians of Texas during this period are evident in Pleasant Valley. Among these themes are conflicts between farmers and ranchers, rivalry among sheep-herders and cattlemen, and tensions between formal and informal means of resolving disputes. This study also illustrates how the later phases of conflict between American Indians and settlers immediately involved the conquest of land, but also led to the destruction of a robust Indigenous trade network across the American West. Moreover, Pagán frequently alludes to the destabilizing effect that the constant fear of a sudden attack had on life in frontier Arizona (55).

While Pagán revises older narratives on the Pleasant Valley War and engages the latest scholarship on the American West, he also aims for a broad audience beyond fellow scholars. His prose is clear and richly descriptive in a style that might appeal to enthusiasts of classic western novels as well as academic monographs. At times, Pagán uses contemporary accounts from Arizona newspapers as well as later interviews of survivors to recreate dialogues and actions meticulously from sources such as oral histories and newspaper accounts. This overt awareness of the power of storytelling to inform myths and their scholarly correctives is a major theme that runs through Valley of the Guns. Above all, Pagán poses interesting questions about the nature of violence and how a climate of fear and the growth of distrust can rapidly shatter the peace of any community. And despite the specific geographic focus, Pagán is mindful of the threads that tie the violence of “Pleasant Valley” to the wider process of conquest and economic change that marked the greater Southwest after 1848. As [End Page 246] such, this book stands as a strong addition to other recent works on violence and trauma in the Southwest borderlands.

Jamie Starling
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
...

pdf

Share