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.
Paul Horgan: A Biographical Note
Paul Horgan was born in Buffalo, New York, on August 1, 1903, the son of Edward Daniel and Rose Marie (Rohr) Horgan. In 1915, when he was twelve years old, he and the rest of his family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. For most of his life, New Mexico—Albuquerque, Roswell, and Santa Fe—was his home territory, until in 1962 he was called to Wesleyan University to become director of its then active Center for Advanced Studies, a post he filled for five years. Following that assignment he became an adjunct professor of English at Wesleyan, and later professor emeritus and author-in-residence.
He was educated at the Nardin Academy in Buffalo, the Albuquerque public schools, the New Mexico Military Institute, and the Eastman School of Music and the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York.
In 1926, in order to pursue his work as a writer, he accepted the post of librarian at the New Mexico Military Institute, which gave him daily time for writing. In 1942 he entered the army and served until 1946 (captain to lieutenant-colonel) in the General Staff Corps, becoming chief of the Army Information Branch in the Information and Education Division, for which he received the Legion of Merit.
Following his military service he returned to New Mexico, and soon was able to give his whole time to writing. He is the author of seventeen novels, of which the most recent, Mexico Bay, was published in his seventy-ninth year, on February 25, 1982, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. For his first novel, The Fault of Angels, he received the Harper Prize in 1933. His total of some two-score books includes also four volumes of short stories, and works in history, biography, and literature. For works in history he twice received the Pulitzer Prize (Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, 1955) (Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times, 1975), and, also, a Bancroft Prize and the Robert Kirsch Award. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships, and he held twenty honorary doctorates of letters, the first from Wesleyan University in 1956, the last from Yale in 1977. In 1976 he was awarded the Laetare Medal of the University of Notre Dame, and in 1981 the Baldwin Medal of Wesleyan University. He taught at Wesleyan, the University of Iowa, and Yale. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. An associate fellow of Saybrook College, Yale, he was also a life fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library and an honorary trustee of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. Upon the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he was appointed by President Johnson to a six-year term as a member of the Endowment’s National Council. His writing has appeared in seventeen foreign countries. Paul Horgan lived in Middletown, Connecticut, until his death in 1995.
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