The Big Bend, A History of the Last Texas Frontier, by Ron Tyler

THE SOUTH. 
History, National Park Travel. 

The far western panhandle of Texas is a forbidding place, mostly desert, filled of venomous snakes and arachnids, prickly vegetation, and terrain formidable to traverse and survive. It is also remarkably beautiful. Both were surely involved in drawing humans here: the challenge and the beauty. But the story of humans inhabiting this large rocky parabola bordered by the Rio Grande to the south is mostly one of challenges. In the mid 1970s, area historian Ron Tyler published this history of humans contending with the area as frontier on through to the creation of The Big Bend National Park in 1950s, an act directly inspired by the desire to preserve some large portion of this landscape as frontier, as it had been for millennia. Tyler’s history was viewed as the authoritative history upon its publication and has remained a primary resource since. The story is complex, multi-faceted, often inspirational, often violent; in short the kind of conditions one would expect in a land, and contest for that land, involving many different ethnic groups with competing, often conflicting, views and desires. Tyler begins with the region long before humankind, it being one of ancient fossils and millions of years of hard-bitten rock formation. The human story begins with the earliest Spanish explorers, who were inevitably followed by Catholic missionaries out of today’s Mexico, and their encounters with those already long established in the region, mostly Pueblo and the ancestors of the Apache and Comanche. Tyler documents this leery weave of cultures clashing, influencing, but mostly clashing, early chapters leading to the more nationalist yearnings of Mexico and a youthful restless America. It can be an inspiring story of those surviving a forbidding place against long odds and a brutal one, both Mexicans and Americans driven to remove the “Indian threat” (a section of the book devoted to the “scalp hunters” of the 1840s), those same native tribes raiding with little mercy; and this, without even mentioning the constant stream of criminals and cast-offs passing through. Yet by the late 1800s, the “Anglo-Americans” held sway, a decades-long project of frontier exploration and military foray leading to the establishment of permanent white settlements, many of which exist to this day. Despite the unfortunate inclusion in the foreword of what is now an ugly slur slung at Mexicans crossing the border “without permission” (which seems even worse considering it went to print as late as 1975 in an official National Park Service publication), Tyler’s classic history / story of The Big Bend region is still considered a milestone. [Condition: Used Good. This grading is the tale of cover and interior. A thick paperback volume, it shows a good deal of shelf-wear at the spine, indicative of most 50 year old softcovers, show volume or not. There is also a slight tear, some creasing, and a few bent corners on the cover too. But the cover did its job in protecting the interior pages, which are in fantastic shape, the many modern and archival photos providing significant visual support to the narrative.] 

Condition: Used Good. 
Nonfiction / History. 
Ron Tyler. 
National Park Service, 1975. 
Softcover (First Edition), 272 pgs, 5.75 x 9" / 1 lb 4 oz