Excerpt from A Brief History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley 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 historical 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.