Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Adventures in the Southwest


A Review of Doniphan’s Expedition, Containing an Account of the Conquest of New Mexico . . .  by John T. Hughes.  Cincinnati, 1847 and Reid’s Tramp, or a Journal of the Incidents of Ten Months Travel Through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Sonora, and California by John Coleman Reid.  Selma, Ala., 1858.

The Mexican War and its aftermath turned American attention to the Southwest—an immense, sparsely settled, unmapped, and unknown territory of plains, deserts, mountains, dangerous savages and alien Mexicans. Two antebellum Southerners wrote first-hand books about this region that sold well and were nationally popular.

John Taylor Hughes (1817-1862) was born in Kentucky and was a schoolteacher in Missouri when he enlisted in the 1st Missouri (Mounted) Volunteer Regiment at the beginning of the Mexican War.

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