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Rio Grande

Americans have always envisioned a West. When they won independence from England in 1783, the West lay just beyond the Appalachian Mountains, a West celebrated in the adventures of Daniel Boone. Then people began to thread through the Cumberland Gap to make new homes there.

In the bright mestizo tapestry of Mexico’s thirty centuries of civilization, the Indian, the Spanish, and the modern threads interweave—and tangle

About one hundred years ago a roaring hurricane swept along the Mexican border with such fury that it radically changed the course of the Rio Grande—and consequently altered the international boundary. When the storm finally subsided, the village of El Paso, Texas, was about 630 acres larger, and the bawdy little pueblo of Juárez, Mexico, was that many acres smaller.

Paul Horgan tells a lyric story of the Rio Grande Valley, where Spanish and Indian cultures met in a conflict of arms and ideas

Great River is the story of the Rio Grande Valley and the four great cultures which have flourished there: Indian, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American.

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