A close look at one of the most bloody, mysterious episodes in the history of what’s now the Southwest.
On a single August day in 1680, Pueblo Indian nations throughout New Mexico and into present-day Arizona rebelled against their Spanish rulers, coordinating their attacks over hundreds of miles with astonishing precision. “No one in New Mexico was hated more bitterly than its thirty-three Franciscan friars,” writes historian/adventurer Roberts (Four Against the Arctic, 2003, etc.), “and so the cruelest executions were reserved for them.” Other Spaniards, soldiers and settlers, didn’t have it much better, and, after having waited out a siege at Santa Fe, they withdrew from northern New Mexico. The Spanish governor swore that he would avenge the deaths of the 380 Spanish citizens who had fallen to the Pueblos, which he called “a lamentable tragedy, such as has never before happened in the world.” His bosses were not so convinced of his abilities; they relieved the governor of his post, and the Spanish stayed away for a dozen years until embarking on a bloody campaign of reconquest. Nobody much talks about the events of 1680 these days, Roberts allows—strangely, given how transformative they were. Indeed, he adds, Indian peoples do not discuss them, at least not in public, which puzzles Roberts. “If the Jemez elders still knew exactly what had happened in, say, a.d. 1270, as their people made their way from the north and west to their present heartland, why might they not retain a comparably rich story of what had happened in 1680?” Why, indeed, and Roberts’s efforts to resolve that particular mystery make up the best part of a sometimes plodding, sometimes self-indulgent narrative, which mixes archaeology, history, and anthropology into a kind of you-are-there travelogue.
Certainly enticing stuff for buffs of things southwestern, but more so to readers with an eye to the ironies and paradoxes of history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5516-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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