"Dedicated to all those living elsewhere who would rather be in Tucson"

"Tucson" is the first comprehensive history of a unique corner of America, a city with its roots in Indian and Spanish colonial history; its skies broken by the towers of a Sunbelt metropolis.

In these pages C. L. Sonnichsen, dean of southwestern historians-and a Tucsonan by adoption--chronicles with humor and affection the growth over two centuries of one of the region's most colorful communities.

Today's metropolitan Tucson is a city of half a million people. Set along the Santa Cruz River in the Lower Sonoran Desert in a great basin surrounded by soaring mountain ranges, it is different in many ways from any other city in the United States. Like all other Sunbelt centers, however, it is growing by great leaps and bounds. A popular winter resort, it attracts fugitives from the frozen North. The site of the University of Arizona, it draws many with an intellectual bent. For artists the attractions of the "Old Pueblo" are all but endless. The city booms with new people, industries, shopping centers, and subdivisions.

Newcomers tend to bring along their ideas, life-styles, and landscapes, including Bermuda grass and mulberry trees, and have moved Tucson closer to the familiar patterns of urban America. But tradition and geography limit their efforts, for Tucson has always been the center of a separate world, with a history, population, and character of its own. It was an oasis far from other Indian cultural centers a thousand years ago.

It was a remote outpost in 1776, when the Spaniards founded a presidio there. It was not far from the edge of the world when Anglos began settling along the Santa Cruz not long before the Civil War. Even with the coming of the railroad, the airplane, and television, Tucson has remained insulated from the rest of the country by distance and by special habits of mind. Much of Tucson's charm derives from this insulation.

Beyond the separateness, says the author, is a fact too often overlooked: Deserts Were Not Made for People. Technological skills make survival possible for most of the population; only the long-resident Papago Indians are truly at home there. In such a difficult environment early-day white settlers had to make do with little, undergo much, and be prepared for the worst.

Today their successors live in what is essentially an artificial environment, using their natural resources as if they were inexhaustible-- for water Tucson depends entirely on underground sources-and continue to enjoy the genial, if sometimes superheated, climate, the casual life-style and western friendliness of the population, the Indian-Spanish-Mexican cultural and historical ambience, and the artistic and intellectual life. The problems of other great American cities are Tucson's also. Perhaps it is those very problems and the uncertainty of the future that add a special urgency to the savoring of life in this special corner of America.

This is a new release of the original 1943 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1943 edition.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Although Frederick Webb Hodge once remarked that the members of the Eastern Apache tribe called the Mescaleros were "never regarded as so warlike" as the Apaches of Arizona, their history clearly belies that statement. The record is one of hardship and oppression alternating with wars of revenge. They were friendly to the Spaniards until victimized by them. They were also friendly to the Americans until they were betrayed again. For three hundred years they fought the Spaniards and Mexicans. For forty more they fought the Americans, before subsiding into a long period of lethargy and discouragement. Only since 1930 have they made real progress.

In the early days their principal range was between the Rio Grande and the Pecos in New Mexico, but it extended also into the Staked Plains and southward into Mexico. They moved about freely, wintering on the Rio Grande or farther south, ranging the buffalo plains in the summer, following the sun and the food supply. They owned nothing and everything.

Now they are in a precarious economic condition, but at least they are American citizens and still own their reservation in the Tularosa country of New Mexico. Their children are beginning to go away to college and prepare themselves for leadership, and while in many ways they have not bridged the gap between their old life and the new, they have made amazing progress.

Their story is told here from the earliest records to the present day, from the Indian's point of view. Cruel and revengeful as these Indians were at times, they always had more than sufficient provocation, and a catalog of the sins committed against them is revealing, even appalling, to a white reader.

Once the rival of Dodge City and Cheyenne, for years Tascosa, Texas, lay a ghost town of crumbling adobes. Today almost all traces of frontier Tascosa are gone, replaced by the ultramodern stone buildings which make up a self-contained city of boys and administrative staff - Cal Farley's famed Boys Ranch. Maverick Town tells the story of the rise and decline of Old Tascosa, which epitomized the romance and danger of the early West. Tascosa's heyday was brief, yet it compressed into a few years the history of an era - that of the open range - which will never return.

The cattleman didn't vanish with the fencing of the open range. He is very much with us today - this two-fisted, hard-driving citizen of the pastures from El Paso to Butte. He is a very special kind of American, not solely because of the romantic history of his kind, but because of the way he looks at things. C. L. Sonnichsen, who talks the language of cow country folk, has written an absorbing account of the modern cattleman - full of anecdotes and the good, profane dialogue that gives warmth and vigor to western conversation. Above all, it has the quality of wit and humor. Cowboys and Cattle Kings evaluates the cattle raiser of the High Plains and Rocky Mountain areas since the fencing of the open range - how he lives, what he thinks, and how he conducts his business. Sonnichsen considers the roots and background of the present-day cowman and describes modern ranch children, ranch women, cowboys, managers, and others in the business. He clarifies the cowman's position in recent controversies concerning grazing and lease rights and control of the range. From the enormous ""ranch empires"" to the small enterprises, from the strongholds of the old-time ranchman to the popular dude ranches for tourists, Sonnichsen touches every segment of the industry. Most important, perhaps, is his sympathetic account of the troubles of modern ranching - blizzards, droughts, rustlers, financial burdens - and the counterbalancing advantages of ranching as a way of life.

After prolonged resistance against tremendous odds, Geronimo, the Apache shaman and war leader, and Naiche, the hereditary Chiricahua chief, surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles near the Mexican border on September 4, 1886. It was the beginning of a new day for white settlers in the Southwest and of bitter exile for the Indians.

In "Geronimo and the End of the Apache Wars" Lieutenant Charles B. Gatewood, an emissary of General Miles, describes in vivid circumstantial detail his role in the final capture of Geronimo at Skeleton Canyon. Gatewood offers many intimate glimpses of the Apache chief in an important account published for the first time in this collection. Another first-person narration is by Samuel E. Kenoi, who was ten years old when Geronimo went on his last warpath. A Chiricahua Apache, Kenoi recalls the removal of his people to Florida after the surrender. In other colorful chapters Edwin R. Sweeney writes about the 1851 raid of the Mexican army that killed Geronmio's mother, wife, and children; and Albert E. Wratten relates the life of his father, George Wratten, a government scout, superintendent on three reservations, and defender of the rights of the Apaches.