In the late 1880s, Pleasant Valley, Arizona, descended into a
nightmare of violence, murder, and mayhem. By the time the Pleasant
Valley War was over, eighteen men were dead, four were wounded, and
one was missing, never to be found. Valley of the Guns explores the
reasons for the violence that engulfed the settlement, turning
neighbors, families, and friends against one another. While popular
historians and novelists have long been captivated by the story,
the Pleasant Valley War has more recently attracted the attention
of scholars interested in examining the underlying causes of
western violence. In this book, author Eduardo Obregon Pagan
explores how geography and demographics aligned to create an
unstable settlement subject to the constant threat of Apache raids.
The fear of surprise attack by day and the theft of livestock by
night prompted settlers to shape their lives around the expectation
of sudden violence. As the forces of progress strained natural
resources, conflict grew between local ranchers and cowboys hired
by ranching corporations. Mixed-race property owners found
themselves fighting white cowboys to keep their land. In addition,
territorial law enforcement officers were outsiders to the
community and approached every suspect fully armed and ready to
shoot. The combination of unrelenting danger, its accompanying
stress, and an abundance of firearms proved deadly. Drawing from
history, geography, cultural studies, and trauma studies, Pagan
uses the story of Pleasant Valley to demonstrate a new way of
looking at the settlement of the West. Writing in a vivid narrative
style and employing rigorous scholarship, he creatively explores
the role of trauma in shaping the lives and decisions of the
settlers in Pleasant Valley and offers new insight into the
difficulties of survival in an isolated frontier community.
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