SOUTHWESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY最新文献

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• The Falls of Wichita Falls: An Environmental History of the Red Rolling Plainsby Jahue Anderson
• Andrew C. Baker

The Falls of Wichita Fallsis a western story about the troubled relationship between the dreams of city boosters and the harsh environmental realities of the region. Wichita Falls faced the predictable unpredictability of the Red Rolling Plains with its aridity, salinity, and perennial vulnerability to tornadoes and floods. As Jahue Anderson explains, the region’s geography, climate, geology, and history created “these pumpjack-filled, cattle-laden, mesquite-infested red plains” (p. xii).

The opening chapter has all the makings of a great Texas tale. On a sunny day in April 1905, a train bearing President Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Frederick, Oklahoma, about sixty miles northwest of Wichita Falls. The hunter-in-chief had come to chase wolves across the 480,000 acre “Big Pasture,” one of the few remaining places where a man could gallop into the horizon without hindrance. Joining him was a cast of historical characters who could not help but be Western archetypes. There was wolf-grabbing lawman Jon R. Abernathy, western cattlemen Samuel Burk Burnett and W. Tom Waggoner, Texas Ranger captain and rancher William J. “Bill” McDonald, and famed Commanche leader Quanah Parker. The result was a testosterone-fueled collision of Turnerian historical stages that went storming across the Red Rolling Plains.

Eor Anderson, the event offers a tangle of interpretive possibilities. He seizes some of these moments deftly, finding in Roosevelt’s wolf hunt both epilogue and prologue to the region’s environmental history. At other points, though, Anderson clutters the narrative with ecological asides: “what Roosevelt did not understand. . . is that the wolf is a ‘keystone’ species” (p. 19); “modern range management science indicates” (p. 28); and “unfortunately, the president failed to realize the selective killing of predators unbalanced the ecosystem” (p. 34).

The hunt sets the stage for the century of development to follow. That story begins and ends with the twice-mentioned falls of Wichita, which becomes the book’s central metaphor. Stormwaters destroyed the original falls along the Big Wichita River in 1886. As with so many Texas rivers, flash flooding was a persistent reminder of the costs of untamed nature and the need to dam and control. Yet, in this case, the destruction of the falls was also the result of a predictable failure of engineering. The storm overpowered an upstream dam “built by ambitio

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• Emmet J. Scott: Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine by Maceo C. Dailey Jr.
• Mark Stanley

Emmet J. Scott was born in Houston, Texas in 1873. He attended Wiley College in Marshall before leaving school to found a successful African American newspaper, the Texas Freeman. The connections he cultivated with African American business and political leaders around the state, along with his organizational skills, soon brought him notice from Norris Wright Cuney, the African American leader of the Texas Republican Party in 1894. Under Cuney's tutelage, Scott gained national political connections and valuable political acumen. As a political operative and a newspaper man, Scott was well acquainted with the work of Booker T. Washington. He had written several pieces in his Texas Freeman supportive of Washington's famous Atlanta Cotton Exposition speech in 1895. His skills and connections allowed Scott to be charged with the [End Page 354] responsibility of arranging Washington's trip to Texas in 1897. Scott's attentive performance was such that Washington offered him a position as his personal secretary. He held the position until Washington's death in 1915, and in the course amassed power and influence of his own under the "Tuskegee Machine."

The author notes that by 1902, "Emmet and Booker had a Tuskegee Machine that guaranteed them significant political power and influence." (p. 87) The two travelled around the country on speaking engagements, with Scott introducing Washington in generous terms that praised his ideas concerning race relations. The two worked hard to cultivate access for African Americans to the inner workings of the Republican Party at both the state and national levels. Securing patronage jobs to the friends of Tuskegee Institute as well as other African Americans, and their ability to influence racial policies, were particularly useful. Ultimately, Washington's and Scott's work with Tuskegee made "realistic and concrete gains… in changing the economic and educational status of Blacks." (p. 214) Furthermore, without their work between 1905 and 1915, "advancement that would most likely have been postponed or may not have taken place at all" was brought forward. (p. 215) Scott's contribution to that process is significant and bears the attention of future scholars.

This book is, in a sense, the life work of Maceo Dailey, originating as a doctoral dissertation in 1983 that he never published in his lifetime. Will Guzmán and David Jackson have done an excellent job of

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• These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border ed. by Andrew J. Torget and Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle
• Trinidad Gonzales

These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border edited by Andrew Torget and Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle provides a chronological overview of violence along what is today the U.S.-Mexico border from the early nineteenth century to the present. Most of the chapters focus on the Texas-Mexico border. All the chapters provide important insights that contribute to our understanding of the forces that shape border violence. The only defect of the book is that one author engaged in a marinization of another scholar's work through non-citation.

Torget and Gurza-Lavalle stated that the aim for their collection was to provide a structural understanding that illuminates circumstances that create and perpetuate violence on the border. They refer to the chapters as "case" studies (p. 6) that should be viewed collectively to find the "evolution of conditions" (p. 9) for why violence occurs, as opposed to the view that violence is "endemic and natural" (p. 9) to the border.

The collection is divided into four parts. In "Livestock, Markets, and Guns" three chapters focus on how weak sovereign control and the United States' market economy contributed to livestock theft and smuggling. From the U.S.-Mexico War to the post-Civil War period, the lack of state control over the newly created boundary allowed Comanches and other livestock rustlers to commit cross-border theft and find sanctuary from prosecution on either side. Of historiographic note is Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez's rejection of Hämäläinen's imperial desires and DeLay's vengeance explanation for Comanche raiding in Chapter 2. Instead, he argues Comanche raiding resulted from economic opportunity.

The second section, "State Power in Transition," examines the rise of strongmen. Interestingly, Alice L. Baumgartner rejects Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga's intra-ethnic cooperative violence thesis by focusing on the issue of citizenship as disrupting cooperation. J. Gabriel Martínez-Serna [End Page 358] ends this section noting the Porfiriato did not monopolize violence during its early phase, as traditionally understood.

The third section "Violence at the Turn of the Century," centers on state-sanctioned violence. Brandon Morgan examines the Santana Pérez insurgency against the Díaz regime during the late nineteenth century, and Sonia Hernández uncovers the tra