A Crooked River

A surge of revisionist histories of borderlands violence has occurred in recent years. Juliana Barr, Ned Blackhawk, Lance R. Blyth, Brian DeLay, Andrew R. Graybill, Pekka Hämäläinen, and Natale Zappia, among others, have discussed varying shapes and temporal and geographical spaces of violence, covering ground from intimate threads among families and communities to indigenous empires and transnational raiders, while also transcending the early West and the settler colonial period. Now Michael L. Collins has set his sights on the violent landscape of mid-nineteenth-century south Texas. There, numerous rival groups, including independent Indians, Confederates, Union troops, deserters, refugees from Reconstruction, Mexican rebels and loyalists, French troops, Texas Rangers, the U.S. Army, and various other independent operators used violence for survival, political power, and economic gain (often centering on land or cattle acquisition). Collins approaches the border wars as a “another chapter in the ongoing racial and cultural conflict for supremacy over the Rio Grande Valley” (p. 6). Claiming to debunk some of the myths of Texas history, most notably the claim that all cattle rustlers on the border were Mexicans, he offers a fast-paced and action-packed narrative history of military leaders, campaigns, and skirmishes

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