Spur Award-Winning Author 2019 Elmer Kelton Award Winner Eight months have passed since Sam DeJarnett lost his wife and unborn child to Mescalero Apaches, and now he is one of ten Texas Rangers pursuing those very hostiles in 1881. He lives only for vengeance, and the fresh Mescalero trail in the snow is leading straight into the bitterly cold Sierra Diablo of Texas. In the Mescalero band is Nejeunee, a twenty-year-old woman with a baby. She has lost her husband to the Indaa, or white men, and she lives every moment in hatred. High in the Diablo snows, Sam the Apache hater and Nejeunee the Indaa hater are fated to meet, and what follows will test everything each of them has believed about the other's race. This novel is based on actual events.

2023 FINALIST, PEACEMAKER AWARD OF WESTERN FICTIONEERS 2023 FINALIST, WILL ROGERS MEDALLION AWARD It's 1917, and the Mexican Revolution has the Big Bend of Texas aflame. But the firestorm is no greater than the one inside newspaper reporter Jack Landon. Disillusioned, he flees down the road to nowhere and finds himself in Esperanza. Populated by people of Mexican heritage, the small village on the Texas bank of the Rio Grande is a target of Texas Rangers Company B, which unjustly considers it a bandit den. Jack befriends a teenaged boy and his adult sister, Mary, who teaches in the Esperanza school. As Jack assimilates to life in Esperanza, the threat of Rangers looms large. Eventually a day of reckoning descends, and it envelops Jack and Mary and the entire village. This novel is based on what actually happened at Porvenir, Texas, on January 28, 1918—the darkest moment in Texas Rangers history.

Spur Award-Winning Author A story that could have come out of today’s headlines, this revised edition of the acclaimed novel explores a Mexican national’s desperate attempt to provide for his family. Ricardo has known only poverty in Mexico, but he dreams of a better life in the United States. He enlists a “coyote” to smuggle him across the Rio Grande, a river that separates not only one nation from another, but one world from another. The Illegal Man is also the story of Ann Rawlings, a recent widow struggling to preserve her West Texas ranch. There is a troubled Border Patrolman and her bigoted foreman, who considers Mexican ranch hands to be little more than animals. For Ricardo, it’s a world in which he will suffer hardship and indignity, but one he will gladly endure to support his family. The Illegal Man grew out of a newspaper series by Patrick Dearen, who interviewed Mexican and American officials and accompanied Border Patrolmen along the Rio Grande. He based his character Ricardo on an actual Mexican national he interviewed on a West Texas ranch. “A warm, gripping novel that explores a subject of intense interest to all Americans. Wonderfully told, this novel should endure.” —Norman Zollinger, two-time Spur Award winner. “A vivid description of what a common man goes through seeking work in a different country than his own. It is a powerful story filled with adventure, sadness, persecution, and loneliness.” —San Angelo (Texas) Standard-Times. “Dearen's writing is so perfect, so descriptive, so charged with emotion, it sucks the reader into the very marrow of the story. . . Stretches the mind and the heart as the good and the bad in life play out on its pages . . . It is a good story: a story of love, of justice, and of redemption.” —Permian Historical Annual. “A beautifully written story that speaks eloquently.” —Roundup Magazine.

Pervasive myths of European domination and indigenous submission in the Americas receive an overdue corrective in this far-reaching revisionary work. Despite initial upheavals caused by the European intrusion, Native people often thrived after contact, preserving their sovereignty, territory, and culture and shaping indigenous borderlands across the hemisphere. Borderlands, in this context, are spaces where diverse populations interact, cross-cultural exchanges are frequent and consequential, and no polity or community holds dominion. Within the indigenous borderlands of the Americas, as this volume shows, Native peoples exercised considerable power, often retaining control of the land, and remaining paramount agents of historical transformation after the European incursion. Conversely, European conquest and colonialism were typically slow and incomplete, as the newcomers struggled to assert their authority and implement policies designed to subjugate Native societies and change their beliefs and practices. Indigenous Borderlands covers a wide chronological and geographical span, from the sixteenth-century U.S. South to twentieth-century Bolivia, and gathers leading scholars from the United States and Latin America. Drawing on previously untapped or underutilized primary sources, the original essays in this volume document the resilience and relative success of indigenous communities commonly and wrongly thought to have been subordinated by colonial forces, or even vanished, as well as the persistence of indigenous borderlands within territories claimed by people of European descent. Indeed, numerous indigenous groups remain culturally distinct and politically autonomous. Hemispheric in its scope, unique in its approach, this work significantly recasts our understanding of the important roles played by Native agents in constructing indigenous borderlands in the era of European imperialism. Chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9 are published with generous support from the Americas Research Network.

2022 Elmer Kelton Award Winner Spur Award-Winning Author Patrick Dearen "Fast-paced, gripping, and exciting . . . An unusual but interesting concept for a western story."—Historical Novel Society. In 1870, Jake Graves faced a choice: allow Comanches to carry off his sister, or shoot her. Unwilling to fire, he has been tortured for decades by the brutal end that he could have spared her. The incident bred in him a hatred for Indians that persists to this day in 1917 on the Cross C Ranch on the Texas-Mexico border. Now Jake learns that his daughter Dru wants to marry Apache foreman Nub DeJarnett. Even before Jake can process the news, Mexican bandits kidnap Dru and her cousin Ruthie. The bandit leader, Rentería, considers himself a tlahuelpuchi, a shape-shifting agent of evil, and he needs the women’s blood to survive. Whether man or monster, Rentería is a killer. Through a stretch of Chihuahuan Desert teeming with mystery, Jake and Nub take up the chase on horseback, for Rentería believes that Dru is his reincarnated sister and plans to slay her on the Rio Grande where his sister became his first kill. Haunted Border is based on a taped account by a survivor of the true-life Brite Ranch Raid of 1917.

A gripping story of the cultural resilience of the descendants of Geronimo and Cochise This book reveals the conflicting meanings of power held by the federal government and the Chiricahua Apaches throughout their history of interaction. When Geronimo and Naiche, son of Cochise, surrendered in 1886, their wartime exploits came to an end, but their real battle for survival was only beginning. Throughout their captivity in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma, Naiche kept alive Chiricahua spiritual power by embodying it in his beautiful hide paintings of the Girl’s Puberty Ceremony—a ritual at the very heart of tribal cultural life and spiritual strength. This narrative is a tribute to the Chiricahua people, who survive today, despite military efforts to annihilate them, government efforts to subjugate them, and social efforts to destroy their language and culture. Although federal policy makers brought to bear all the power at their command, they failed to eradicate Chiricahua spirit and identity nor to convince them that their lower status was just part of the natural social order. Naiche, along with many other Chiricahuas, believed in another kind of power. Although not known to have Power of his own in the Apache sense, Naiche’s paintings show that he believed in a vital source of spiritual strength. In a very real sense, his paintings were visual prayers for the continuation of the Chiricahua people. Accessible to individuals for many purposes, Power helped the Chiricahuas survive throughout their history. In this book, Griffin-Pierce explores Naiche’s artwork through the lens of current anthropological theory on power, hegemony, resistance, and subordination. As she retraces the Chiricahua odyssey during 27 years of incarceration and exile by visiting their internment sites, she reveals how the Power was with them throughout their dark period. As it was when the Chiricahua warriors and their families struggled to stay alive, Power remains the centering focus for contemporary Chiricahua Apaches. Although never allowed to return to their beloved homeland, not only are the Chiricahua Apaches surviving today, they are keeping their traditions alive and their culture strong and vital.