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Preface to the Fourth Edition

i

In its length of nearly two thousand miles and its cultural evidence encompassing ten centuries and more, the Great River remains the unifying vein of history not only of the life adjacent to its banks, but also of the greater Southwest. There, if often far afield, the political, social, and geographical significance of the river can be traced through the times of five sovereignties—those of the Indian, Spain, Mexico, Texas, and the United States.

To do my subject anything like justice, I have hoped to produce a sense of historical experience rather than a bare record. This required me wherever possible to see events, societies, and movements through human character in action. While respecting the responsibilities of scholarship, I took every opportunity, when the factual record supported me, to stage a scene. Moreover, if here and there I halted the narrative of events to describe the various ways and customs of the people, then I had precedent for it, for Herodotus did the same, to our enrichment. Only when events are rooted in the soil of the culture might they seem to have a reality that endures.

ii

In manners of living, a long, slow sequence unfolded for the early river peoples. Prehistoric intuitions among them gradually gave way to knacks and simple ingenuities—primitive technologies to do with water, fire, agriculture, shelter, travel, weaponry. For centuries all these were developed without that sense of shock that accelerated rates of discovery produce. But with the waves of activity and means of control of the natural world that rose with the industrial revolution and the migratory imperatives of the nineteenth century, man’s impact on the environment brought swift and radical change within a single human lifetime.

Into the Rio Grande country, ranging through the area of what became three immense modern states and touching the great length of the river’s immediate course, came railroads, electricity, exploitation of mineral resources, colonization, urbanization at key points, and—not to be undervalued—the popular discovery of the natural aesthetic of generally benign climate over a landscape of most desirable beauty.

In modern days, therefore, population not only changed in character, it grew in a few generations to a size that threatened to create a dangerous imbalance between what was available to sustain life and what was demanded by headlong social increase. The problem was not exclusive to the Southwest, it plagued the nation and, indeed, with Latin America included, it invaded the hemisphere.

But it was in the Southwest that technological change became most rapidly visible. The desert country, having sustained sufficiently the modest requirements of the Indian, the Spaniard, and the Mexican, now had to meet the environmental levies of the United States genius for industry. Added to these were a foreshortened vision of the good life, which the American citizen and his suppliers made commonly necessary without much common foresight for the future effects of the technological society on such matters as pollution of air, earth, and water, and—most significant for the Southwest—dangerous depletion of the very sources of water itself.

The Rio Grande, long an adequate though never a voluminous river except in flood tide, has been attended in modern times by concerned management in its government conservancy districts; but in many places the river has become only a trickle, and in others entirely dry, to be replenished only by flood from otherwise dry or meager local tributaries and by diminishing ground water, this always in the face of increasing needs of its resources in both the United States and Mexico.

iii

In the late twentieth century, the cultural history of the Rio Grande country turned toward the devices and applications of science for a redefinition of its modern character. None of these has had a stronger regional association than the fateful development of nuclear science.

Before the mid-century in several nations, searching experiments in the revolutionary process of creating nuclear fission worked to bring vast new powers of energy within man’s grasp. It took fears and antagonisms and the stakes of war for the United States to apply atomic energy with all haste as a means of destruction on behalf of victory. The ultimate site for this development in weaponry was at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in rugged mesa country west of the Rio Grande, and the history of the atomic bomb and its allied technical supports found location at other stations in the river empire such as Albuquerque, the White Sands, Alamogordo, and the Jornada del Muerto* in central New Mexico, where the first test detonation of the bomb took place in August, 1945.

The welcome clarity of the sky brought another world-changing technic to a Rio Grande tributary, the Pecos River, when Robert Hutchings Goddard chose Roswell, New Mexico, in the Pecos Valley for the continuation, and the eventual fruition, of his experiments in liquid fuel rocketry, which directly led to the achievement of space travel.

Added to these technical disciplines, with their ultimate administrative sprawl, was the wide use of southwestern lands for training the armed forces in World War II.

Through all such energies the Southwest, the Rio Grande ambience, was discovered by the nation at large, and the characters of its traditional life, with all the vestiges of its previous centuries still holding to the commingled styles of three races, was changed more swiftly and radically than ever before. The chronicle of life in the region always could be told in terms of change, whether at the pace measured by geology, archaeology, exploration, or successive national conquests; but the changes wrought by machine technics over life in the southwest desert empire have come so fast that designs for its future integrity seem almost to be overtaken before they can be effected.

To retain the past of the Great River, a course through historical time, remains the aim of the chronicle here.

* Translated as the Day’s March of the Dead Man, the grim suitability of this place name could not have been lost on the ironic and poetic genius of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the bomb’s production at Los Alamos.

iv

In order to give the reader an immediate sense of locality in the vastly scattered backgrounds of the river empire, I have in many cases used recent or modern place names in speaking of persons or events belonging to earlier times. For example, “Mexico,” properly speaking, was not the name of a nation or a whole integral area until 1821, but I use it for events before that date rather than the designation “New Spain” because I hope to give the reader a more ready sense of where he is on the map. Similarly, pressing ahead with early events near the site of modern river towns, I use their modern names (e.g., “near Eagle Pass”) as a quick means of orientation. On the other hand, intending to revive a period atmosphere, I have on occasion used older forms: the modern Port Isabel is given as Point Isabel after the usage of Ulysses S. Grant in his Personal Memoirs.

I have not used footnotes or running references with superior numbers to identify sources not because I did not have precise references for my information, or because I did not want to share these with the reader, but because it seemed to me to be to the reader’s advantage to give him the story without diverting his interest to the anatomy of my framework. But of course I identify my sources under two obligations: to acknowledge my debt to those authors whose works I have consulted, and to provide those interested in the source material—its range and authenticity—with general evidence for my statement. Accordingly, such information appears in brief form at the end of each volume, with sources listed by chapters, from which the reader may refer to the complete bibliography at the end of volume two in Appendix C.

Two works of distinction are absent from my bibliography. They were omitted not because they would have given me little, but because if I had reread them for the purposes of my study I feared that their persuasiveness in style and vision would have led me into unintended echoes in my own treatment of their subjects. These are Rio Grande by Harvey Fergusson (1933), a native New Mexican’s superb account of life in the middle river valley of New Mexico, and The Year of Decision by Bernard De Voto (1943), a vivid recreation of the experience and impact of the War with Mexico.

Otherwise I am deeply indebted to a great number of men and women who in person or in their works helped me in every phase of my long task. Contributing much to whatever successes my work may show, they are in no wise responsible for its shortcomings. Acknowledgments appeared in full in my earlier editions, where they remain to be consulted as a voluminous record of my wide indebtedness and abiding gratitude.

P.H.

Middletown, Connecticut,

1984.