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Warm Weather & Bad Whiskey
Jerry D. Thompson
其他書名
The 1886 Laredo Election Riot
出版Texas Western Press, 1991
主題History / General
ISBN08740421279780874042122
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=2HF5AAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋The bloody riot between Laredo's Botas and Guaraches, in the decade from 1884 to 1894, is one of the most violent yet least known of the political feuds of the American West. It overshadows the notorious El Paso Salt War, the killings in New Mexico's Lincoln County, the genocidal Graham-Tewskbury feud in Arizona's pine-shrouded Pleasant Valley, and the war in Johnson County on Wyoming's frigid Powder River. The "boots and sandles" rivalry reached its sanguinary peak on April 7, 1886, during a victorious political parade in Laredo's St. Augustine Plaza when the Guaraches fired on the Botas with a cannon--certainly the only example of feuding with artillery in the history of the Old West. Even the U.S. Army from nearby Fort McIntosh had to be called out to stop the carnage, a battle which left at least sixteen and perhaps as many as thirty citizens dead. The violence between the two partidos gave rise to the all-powerful Independent Club, the Partido Viejo as it came to be known locally, which dominated Laredo politics for over eighty years and had a major influence on regional, state and even national politics. Jerry Thompson, a historian at Laredo State University known for his work in chronicling the Civil War of the Southwest, has researched the Bota-Guarache confrontation almost entirely from primary sources. He says, "The feud was not sheepmen against cattlemen, homesteaders against ranchers, the unscrupulous against the righteous, or the powerful against the weak. It was a feud between several closely related and powerful families with shifting and often confusing allegiances that cut across racial, religious and class lines. It was an economic and political struggle for power and money, a struggle to determine whether an existing political machine or an aspiring new party, parading under the banner of reform, would dominate Laredo and border politics. Warm Weather and Bad Whiskey fills a huge gap in the history of South Texas and U.S.-Mexico border politics. Thompson's tenacious research is enhanced by his engaging literary style; his meticulous examination of the political corruption that was a way of life on the border is both tragic and humorous -- Book jacket.