Bloody Border: Riots, Battles, and Adventures Along the Turbulent U.S.-Mexican Borderlands (Great West and Indian Series ; 58)

Throughout history the U.S.-Mexican border has always been an unending scene of fighting and adventure. Indian raids, cavalry battles, bordello shootouts and bandido attacks have punctuated its bloody history. In the early part of the 20th Century the violence of the old west was giving way to a new barbarism as Mexico exploded in a twenty year orgy of revolution. It was a wild, exciting time. It was twilight of the horse cavalry, the dawning of the motor ear, and the machine gun. It spawned some of the most fabulous characters in the history of mortal combat. There was Tracy Richardson, the world's greatest machine gunner; the mercenary soldier, Sam Dreben, "The Fighting Jew"; Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian idealist who helped forge an army out of peons; Emiliano Kosterlitzky, the Russian Cossack who led the feared Rurales; Pancho Villa, bandit chieftain turned revolutionary and his nemesis Colonel Tommy Tompkins, the bourbon-swilling cavalry commander who led the last mounted charge in the history of the U.S. Army. As the old western towns of legend like Tombstone and Deadwood faded into legend, new names flared across the headlines of American newspapers. New names like Naco, Arizona the "fightingest town in the West"; El Paso and Juarez, the Sodom and Gomorrah for gun runners, mercenary soldiers and political plotters; Porvenir, the scene of a pitiful massacre of innocents caught in the frenzy of racial war; and Bisbee, from where a band of drunken miners and hell-raising cowboys launched an expedition that might have created a new star in the American flag. As murderous battles, cruel raids, and wild adventures of these men of the horse and the gun raged across the frontier, new heroes and villains were created on the pages of far away newspapers, new songs were sung to the crude strings of homemade guitars and legends born during this last bloody hurrah.