Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History

Paul Horgan traces four centuries of life along the Rio Grande, using the river itself as the connecting thread through a history that otherwise spans dramatically different peoples and periods. Across two volumes, he moves from the Pueblo communities who had farmed the river valley long before any European arrived, through the Spanish conquistadors and Franciscan missionaries who pushed north along its banks, the Mexican settlers who built ranching and trading communities after independence from Spain, and finally the Anglo Americans who arrived with annexation and statehood, each group leaving its own imprint on a landscape the river itself continually reshapes.

Horgan, who had built his career writing both historical fiction and nonfiction about the Southwest, brings a novelist's attention to landscape and atmosphere to a work of genuine scholarly range, treating geography, anthropology, and straightforward narrative history as inseparable parts of a single story rather than separate disciplines occasionally borrowed from. He describes the river's own physical behavior, its floods, its shifting channel, its long dry stretches, with the same care he gives the human communities that depended on it, so that the Rio Grande reads less like a setting for the history than like the one constant force every culture along its banks eventually had to answer to. The book moves at an unhurried, panoramic pace suited to its four century scope, less interested in any single dramatic episode than in the accumulated layering of cultures along one river valley over time. It suits a reader drawn to the borderlands of the Southwest specifically, and to history written with the descriptive patience of a novelist rather than the compression of a textbook.