A BRIEF HISTORY of the LOWER RIO GRANDE VALLEY BY FRANK C. PIERCE 1917 The Collegiate Press GEORGE BANTA PUBLISHING COMPANY MENASHA, WISCONSIN Copyright 1917 FRANK C. PIERCE Republished March 1962 PRINTED AND BOUND BY MENASHA, WISCONSIN P611b PREFACE The present generation of Americans has known very little of that part of their country which lies along the Rio Grande and has had no realization of the ofttimes stirring scenes which have been enacted along their southern border. At different periods in the past the country has been stirred by the dramatic episodes and the conflicts growing out of the meeting of two entirely dissimilar peoples in that land of cactus and mesquite. But the present generation has known and thought little of that country until the conflict between these two races again blazed out and made the Rio Grande border once more a household topic in every village and every home in the United States. Strangely enough, there has been no connected historica1 statement of that region ever put in type or, so far as the writer knows, ever even written, and it has remained for Mr. Pierce to perform this service. Mr. Pierce has been a resident of Brownsville since 1859 and there is no one in all that long stretch bordering Mexico who has been in closer touch with the people of Mexico and with its customs and its language or has been a deeper student of its history on Both sides of the river than Mr. Pierce. He, therefore, has performed a distinct service to the cause of history in thus putting into this little book the story, brief though it is. GEORGE BANTA. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LOWER RIO GRANDE VALLEY The Lower Rio Grande Valley consists of the extreme southern and southwestern part of the State of Texas and contains about 5,000 square miles. The Rio Grande (Big River) which divides Mexico from Texas, has created the Valley and its boundary on the south and west. Rio Grande City (adjoining Ringgold Barracks), 105 miles northwest from Brownsville, is the apex of the delta and the Gulf of Mexico its base. A history of the Valley would be incomplete without a passing sketch of that of the Republic of Mexico of which it and the State of Texas at one time formed a part. In depicting its history, if this book should elaborate on specific incidents and characters, the apology is that the descendents of many of the actors who made the history left descendants who still dwell in the Valley, and in whom these lines may awaken slumbering memories. |