Western Historical Quarterly, John Jameson
In 1937 the national Park Service commissioned Walter Prescott Webb to write a history of the trans-Pecos area, a subregion of the West on the Rio Grande frontier. The University of Texas historian's $1,200 contract, a substantial sum for the Depression years, called for him to spend two months on the assignment. However, the scope of the project proved too great and Webb never finished the history. Over half a century later, Arthur Gómez, a park service historian, has finally completed the task.

This history of occupation in the Big Bend focuses on the themes of conflict between peoples; the conquest or "civilization" of desert environments; and the evolution, during the twentieth century, of a modern, progressive West where an emerging preservation ethic competes with traditional land-use practices. The term "occupation" is somewhat misleading when applied to the region. The Spanish, the first whites in the Big Bend, arrived during the sixteenth century and called it despoblada or the uninhabited land. The desert discouraged even the earliest aborigines, who centuries before the Spanish had sought temporary shelters in caves on their way to more forgiving environments. Later, Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas rode through on raids into northern Mexico, returning to the sanctuary of the Chisos Mountains. White explorers and scientists likewise passed through (or around) the Big Bend, mapping the difficult terrain comprised of mountains and deep canyons and searching for mineral wealth.

The Spanish, after unsuccessful efforts to control local Indians by conversion, established Presidio del Norte in 1760 at the confluence of the Rio Conchos and the Rio Grande. Temporarily abandoned in 1766, it was the first of several presidios on the border frontier. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that the first long-term inhabitants reached the region: Mexican and Anglo-American cattle, goat, and sheep ranchers and "rainbow seekers," miners who came to the Big Bend for silver, mercury, lead, and zinc. Farmers followed, eking out an existence on the floodplains of the Rio Grande or experimenting with irrigation at higher elevations.

Another wave of occupation was from the military. Soldiers from Mexico and the United States, who were originally stationed in the Big Bend to protect boundaries and citizens from Indian raids and revolutionary turbulence, have been superseded by other government agencies to enforce drug smuggling, immigration, and environmental laws. The key for turning the "final occupation" from a negative to a positive federal and state governmental presence on both sides of the border hinges on the success of cooperative efforts now underway to instill a preservation ethic in the citizens of Mexico and the United States. This effort will preserve and promote understanding of the diverse flora, fauna, landscapes, and human cultures of this unique area.

Arthur Gómez has thoroughly researched manuscript and archival collections (including Spanish-language sources), government documents, maps, newspapers, books, articles, theses, and dissertations and conducted over a dozen personal interviews. A Most Singular Country is proof that agency-sponsored research can result in a first-rate, well-written history that will appeal to scholar and general reader alike. Unfortunately, the full story of the prehistoric aborigines and international cooperative developments will have to wait for a second edition when more of the archeological investigations and historical and environmental studies have been completed.

Pacific Historical Review, Ron Tyler
The Big Bend country of Texas is one of nature's wonderlands. Uncounted varieties of birds and animals roam the desert and play along the Rio Grande and in the Chisos Mountains. Some, in fact, are trapped in the mountain environment because they cannot survive in the desert that surrounds the Chisos. The National Park Service has, therefore, interpreted Big Bend as a "natural history" park, focusing on the plant and animal life and staffing the park with a natural history specialist. To historians, however, the park has a rich past, and Arthur Gómez brings much of it together in this book which was written under contract to the Park Service.

The Big Bend seems to be a case study for traditional Western history, with initial settlement by peaceful Indians and exploration and settlement by Spaniards (religious and military) and Anglo-Americans (exploration, ranching, mining, farming) occurring according to the established patterns. The fact that it is now a national park also fits: it is beautiful, remote country, and according to Everett Townsend, former Texas Ranger, member of the state legislature, and the man often credited with being the "father" of the Big Bend National Park, "It's not worth a damn for any commercial purpose." Perhaps that is why Gómez resorts to few of the sources that have illuminated other local and regional history studies such as census returns, tax records, and maps and other records in the General Land Office of Texas.

What Gómez has done is summarize the history of the region over a period of more than four centuries—to the establishment of the national park in 1944—in a readable and reliable manner. There are a few obvious sources missing from his bibliography, such as Robert V. Hine's Bartlett's West, the John Russell Bartlett Papers at John Carter Brown Library, and the G. Clinton Gardner Papers at Southern Methodist University, but he makes good use of the most important sources and renders a narrative that, while it does not differ materially from similar studies, does fill in some lacunae.

A little more research into images used throughout the book would also have been welcome. In the case of the watercolor of the Spanish leatherjacket solider (p. 6), for example, the original does not reside in the National Park Service Spanish Colonial Research Center in Albuquerque, but in the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla. Ramon Murrillo painted it in about 1806 to accompany a report that he prepared on his service on the Texas frontier.

One would hope that the park service would use this and other studies to overcome the lack of historical perspective that may be seen throughout the interpretation of the park as well as of place names.