Catarino Garza and Captain Bourke:
a tentative bibiliographic essay

By Robert Mendoza

While researching "En La Margen del Río Bravo: Catarino Garza and his War with the US and Mexico" (LareDOS, Nov 2002), I read Garza’s autobiography La Lógica de los Hechos, and Joseph Porter’s biography of Captain John Gregory Bourke, Paper Medicine Man. I ferreted out scores of disparate historical references to Garza, the fighting journalist, and his quixotic, pre-Revolution attempt to unseat Porfirio Diaz. I reached the early conclusion that more ink than blood was shed during the conflict. In retrospect, the 1891-94 rebellion of Catarino Garza was of greater literary than military interest.
The villages Garza raided remain at the obscure and dusty periphery of Texas and Mexico; the names of the casualties erode on slanting tombstones in untended cemeteries. Yet Garza’s vigorous editorial efforts and his autobiography are widely admired as precursors to contemporary civil rights activism on behalf of Latino-Americans. And Garza’s US cavalry nemesis, Captain Bourke, was a pioneer in the ethnological study of the Lower Río Grande Valley and its people.
More recently, the antagonistic encounter between the Mexicano-journalist and the soldier-anthropologist has been polemically interpreted by academics as an archetypal clash between indigene and foreign imperialist. Despite the larger-than-life characters and the dramatic raids that spurred a hard-riding cavalry pursuit, the Garza rebellion and its protagonists have inspired no significant work of fiction or film, and heretofore only Bourke has been the subject of a published biography.
What follows could be subtitled a tentative bibliographic essay, an examination of published and unpublished references to Garza and his turbulent career.

Catarino at the Margin
of Border History

A biography of Catarino Garza is scheduled to be published by Duke University Press. When it finally appears (academic publishing is notoriously dilatory if not glacial), it will be the first book-length assessment of Garza. Celso Guajardo’s 1989 En Busca de Catarino Garza is lifeless -- merely an anthology of Garza’s writings and official documents related to the Garza war.
This is not to say that Catarino Garza heretofore has been absent from the pages of history. While the escritor fronterizo-turned-guerilla has avoided the spotlight, he has always lurked in the sidebars and footnotes of South Texas chronicles. Folklorist Americo Paredes and legendary Texas Ranger William W. Sterling both focused on Garza in the 1940s, although from disparate angles. Paredes boasted that his father had logged raid time with Garza, while Sterling related a cautionary tale of the deadly consequences of being led down the wrong road by one bad meskin.
In 1968, Agnes Grimm dedicated the greater part of a chapter to Garza in Mustang Plains, her guide to the vast brushland that lies between the Nueces and Río Grande rivers. Grimm’s is an ingenuous, gushing account, insufficiently distanced from that of her informants -- Garza’s grandchildren. In her book, Garza emerges as folk-hero redux, a six-foot-three, blue-eyed wily coyote who knocks rinches down like ninepins, yet is able to conceal himself within his mother-in-law’s skirts when the cavalry comes calling.
In 1975, Gilbert M. Cuthbertson devoted an entire essay to Garza in the journal, Texana 13. While this is, to date, the most extensive and detailed assessment of Garza’s career to be published in English, it is marred by its patronizing, annoyingly florid tone. I surmise that Cuthbertson (Professor of History at Rice University) was reacting to the unabashedly uncritical tone of Grimm’s version of Garza.
The following decade of the 1980s saw the emergence of a cadre of Chicano academics bent on the revision of South Texas history. (Americo Paredes had, of course, preceded and anticipated them in the 1950s by challenging the received interpretations of Anglo Texan historians Walter Prescott Webb, Eugene Barker, and J. Frank Dobie.) Scholars David MonTejano, Arnoldo De Leon, and José Limon have characterized Garza’s rebellion as a paradigm of Mexicano resistance to Anglo-American domination in South Texas. As a result of their efforts, Garza has not been forgotten and remains a viable symbol of cultural re-vindication.
In this context of shifting paradigms, it is interesting to compare Cuthbertson’s entry about Garza in the 1995 New Handbook of Texas with his 1975 essay in Texana 13. In the New Handbook, Garza is no longer condescended to, and donnish sarcasm has been redacted. The escritor fronterizo is no longer dissed, but digno, is an icon of Mexican-American diversity. Again, I surmise that the metal ruler of political correctness has rapped the professor’s knuckles and guided his hand to revise his 1975 view to produce a heroic Texan of color.

La Lógica: Catarino
in his Own Write

Catarino Garza, of course, saw himself as el prohombre, the male lead, who never deigned to creep about in footnotes. All real prohombres write autobiographies; truth is too important to be left to the historians. However, Garza’s autobiography, La Lógica de los Hechos, was never published. The large (11x16-inch) bound book, handwritten in pencil and ink, was seized by the US Army at Palito Blanco in 1892. After being held as evidence in trials for violations of US neutrality laws, it was returned to Garza’s relatives, who eventually donated it to the University of Texas.
La Lógica de los Hechos covers a period of 12 years, beginning with an account of Garza’s arrival in Brownsville in 1877, and interrupted in 1889 when he first arrived at Alejandro Gonzalez’ ranch in Palito Blanco to deliver a Cinco de Mayo speech. Shortly thereafter, Garza divorced his wife and married the wealthy rancher’s daughter Concepcion.
The autobiography is subtitled "Observations on the Circumstances of Mexicans in Texas." Garza relates details of business trips and his perceptions of individuals he meets in St. Louis, San Antonio, and other US cities. He finds much to admire in American efficiency and technological progress; he is also often offended by Anglos who treat him with disrespect, which Garza assumes is fueled by racism. There are at least eight descriptions of brawls or gunfights, and invariably, Garza whips his Anglo. On the other hand, Anglo women find him irresistible. He details their serial seductions, beddings, and abandonments.
Garza’s writing is facile and often lucid, but one wearies of the tetchy tone and braggadocio. There is no great breadth of insight or cultural vision; he is not in the league of Henry Adams or Jose Vasconcelos. La Lógica de los Hechos should be viewed as an unedited diary or interrupted commonplace book that provides a rare insight into the mind of an eccentric and colorful personality.

Catarino among the Doctors:
A Pharisaical Way of Knowing

Elliot Young is the author of the 1997 University of Texas doctoral dissertation about Garza, Twilight at the Border: Catarino Garza and Identity at the Crossroads, and has written a forthcoming biography to be published by Duke University Press. I disagree with his estimation of the literary value or political significance of La Lógica; he asserts that Garza’s autobiography remains under-appreciated and unpublished due to Anglo racial bias.
Young’s dissertation views La Lógica and Garza’s rebellion in terms of Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist theory of struggle for hegemony (physical and cultural dominance) in South Texas. He contends that the indigenous Tejano and Mexicano population were led by Garza (a Gramscian intellectual) in a struggle to protect their land and culture from imperialist forces (US Cavalry, Federal marshals, Texas Rangers). According to Young, the seemingly mundane and often petty quarrels that occupy Garza in La Lógica are in reality stages in Garza’s defining himself as a leader/hero of recalcitrant Mexicanos. As for Garza’s seduction of gringas, Young writes "penetrating and occupying Anglo women’s bodies and then discarding them was equivalent to controlling contested territory (South Texas) -- a gender ideology." I don’t know about all this sexual hegemony; to paraphrase Freud, sometimes an Anglo woman’s body is just an Anglo woman’s body.
It would be one thing if Garza had argued for or offered up ideological justification for his womanizing or misogyny (i.e., a precursor to Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, in which the oppressors’ daughters are not seduced, but violently raped). However, for an academic such as Young who espouses progressive, if not radical, ideals to extrapolate such a motivation seems repugnant, after 30 years of feminist activism to re-educate and eradicate such objectification of women and their bodies. I hope that he leaves this sort of thing out of the new biography.
In order to further bolster his argument that Garza’s musings in La Lógica are tantamount to an anti-hegemonic screed, Young enlists the examples of José Marti and Edward S. Said. Said, a Palestinian-born professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, perhaps is imperialism’s most well-known intellectual adversary. Young quotes Said: "Novels, narratives are a means used by colonial people to assert their own identity." By this I understand La Lógica is meant to be read as an encoded text of some sort. This is nonsense. Garza freely published six newspapers in South Texas without hindrance from US authorities (excepting adjudicating the libel actions filed by private individuals).
Young’s invoking José Marti’s example of truth-telling to power from "within the monster of imperialism" is equally irrelevant to La Lógica. There is no parallel between the plight of the Cuban poet-activist martyred by the colonial Spanish authorities and Garza’s feisty, freewheeling journalistic career in South Texas. It was Garza’s flaunting of US neutrality laws (not a failure of the First Amendment) that got him into trouble. Garza’s problems with the US Army stemmed from publishing incendiary proclamations, arms trafficking, and ill-conceived raids into Mexico that cost the lives of Mexican and American citizens.
Young ruefully laments that Garza’s writings have not attracted scholarly attention as literature or history. He cites the excellent reputation of Bourke’s historical and groundbreaking ethnographic writing. "Garza’s writing has not enjoyed nearly the same exposure as Bourke’s," Young writes, and adds with some bitterness that, as a consequence, Garza has been "virtually erased from the historical record." Young’s use of the verb "erased" hints at Stalinesque historical revision, or "rubbing out."
However, there is no mystery here. Bourke’s work was widely published and Garza’s was not. Bourke attracted the interest of ethnographic scholars and he wrote historical narratives that captivated the general public; Garza wrote polemic, topical, and ephemeral editorials. La Lógica is mothballed in a rare book room (a fitting repository for a holograph work that is unique and of interest to a small group of scholars). This situation does not demean the work’s value, but attests to the writing’s inaccessibility in both senses of the word. It is one of the enduring ironies of the Garza War that the major antagonists were both men of letters, and even more intriguing that the gendarme was more accomplished than the insurgent.

Bourke: Devil in a Blue Coat

In 1891, when Garza began leading raids into isolated villages in Tamaulipas, Captain John Gregory Bourke was comfortably ensconced in the Bureau of Ethnology in Washington, DC. Bourke was looking forward to revising and publishing his extensive ethnological field notes gathered during years of combat service campaigning against Lakota, Cheyenne, and Apache warriors. He had already published five books -- A Winter Campaign in Wyoming, The Medicine Man of the Apache, An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre, The Snake Dance of the Moqui of Arizona, and Mackenzie’s Last Fight with the Cheyenne -- that had earned him the respect of John Wesley Powell and Francis Parkman. Bourke had also published articles on Native American pottery, distillation, cosmogony, snake ceremonials, sacred hunts, Apache mythology, and the urine dance of the Zuni. His writings were sourced from years of fieldwork and his 124-volume diary.
Unfortunately, Bourke ran afoul of Army politics and, instead of his expected armchair position in Washington, he received a punitive assignment to Fort Ringgold in Río Grande City with orders to capture Catarino Garza. Relocated to South Texas, he organized and led his Third Cavalry troopers in pursuit of Garza, while dedicating his evenings to revising proofs for Along with Crook, which became a bestseller in 1891 and remains in print today.
Bourke never caught up with Garza, but consoled himself with ethnographic exploration of the Río Grande Valley. He consulted curanderas, collected plants, sketched animals, and tasted menudo. His leave time was dedicated to traveling to Mexico City, Michoacan, and San Luis Potosi, all the while observing and scribbling away. Bourke published articles on a wide variety of Valley topics in Scribner’s Magazine and ethnographic journals, including the first monograph dedicated to the pastorelas, Christmas shepherd plays that are unique to the region.
Recent academic renderings of the Garza War, while admitting Bourke’s ethnological expertise and contributions, have cast him in a sinister, if not demonic, role. In Dancing with the Devil (1994), José Limon (professor of English and Anthropology at the University of Texas) dedicates a chapter to deconstructing Bourke. Limon views Bourke as, first and foremost, a military officer on a mission to impose imperialist Anglo hegemony on the Río Grande Valley. He readily acknowledges Bourke’s ethnological credentials, but nevertheless casts him as a more finessed successor to General Zachary Taylor, who devastated the region in 1846. According to Limon, Bourke’s anthropological research was in reality the compiling of military intelligence in order to destroy Garza’s forces, demoralize Mexicano rancheros, and prepare the area for Anglo colonization and development. Limon asserts that Garza’s violation of US neutrality laws was in fact only a pretext for an Anglo-American imperialist invasion.
Limon’s turgid academese, larded with 1970s’ post-structuralist jargon, makes for a pretty rough read, but it sporadically dissolves into the shrill, unsubstantiated rhetoric of 1960s’ campus activism. It is a fact that Bourke, on several occasions, without a search warrant, forcibly entered houses where he had been informed Garza was hiding. Frustrated that Mexicanos would not inform on Garza’s whereabouts, at least once, he threatened to burn down their shacks. Limon compares these incidents to Vietnam-era search-and-destroy missions and the indiscriminant napalming of villages. Throughout the chapter titled "John Gregory Bourke," Limon cannot resist diatribes inspired by Zachary Taylor’s 1846 invasion, the Nuecestown anti-Mexican riot of the 1870s, the US Army and Texas Ranger anti-sedicioso campaign of 1915, and most puzzling of all, General Walton Walker’s strategy in the Korean War in the 1950s.
After grudgingly acknowledging Bourke’s credentials as an eminent ethnologist, Limon demonizes him as an archetypal imperialist, a sinister link in a continuum of gringo oppressors visited upon the Lower Río Grande Valley. Limon posits Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist strategies and stilted paradigms (inspired by 1930s European anti-fascism) as relevant to Mexicano resistance and cultural survival.
Limon denotes quite a bit of space to a Gramscian interpretation of the 1915-18 sedicioso insurgency in South Texas. This period, on the grim cusp of the waning Mexican Revolution and US involvement in the First World War, was marked by extreme violence in the Río Grande Valley. Bands of Mexicanos variously identified as Carrancista agents provocateurs, Bakunist anarchists, Imperial German mercenaries, or dispossessed Mexicano ranchers, attacked US Army troops, blew up trains, massacred Anglo ranchers, and even shot up an outlier station of the King Ranch. Although Captain Bourke had been buried in 1896, Limon insists on associating him with the US Army, Texas Ranger, and federal law enforcement’s response to the sediciosos. He reduces the complex sedicioso affair to just another punitive expedition into South Texas.
Most egregiously, Limon purports to reference the writing of Walter Prescott Webb to bolster his (Limon’s) assertion that as many as 5,000 South Texas Mexicanos were killed by the Texas Rangers. Limon states, "the eminent historian, Walter Prescott Webb, an ardent partisan of the Rangers, was forced to conclude that as many as five thousand Mexicanos, mostly non-combatants, may have died." Webb, in fact, made no such conclusion. Limon has, as a result of ideological zeal or appallingly sloppy research, misrepresented the facts.
The "conclusion" that Limon attributes to Webb is, in fact, quoted out of context from the testimony of a witness before a 1919 Texas legislative committee. The witness, William Morrison, stated that the enemies of the Rangers claimed 5,000 Mexicano deaths. He goes on to say that many believed that Mexicanos murdered 5,000 Anglos, and that only 500 Mexicanos were killed by Rangers. It is obvious to all who have more than a rudimentary knowledge of Texas Ranger history that Webb was a Ranger sycophant. If he had reached a conclusion about the number of Mexicano casualties, it would certainly have been lower than the 500 dead that Morrison notes (and Limon studiously ignores) as the other extreme of the disparate and partisan estimates.
Limon and his predecessors, Americo Paredes and Julian Samora in Gunpowder Justice (1979), are dead wrong in their fabrication of a Mexicano holocaust in the Valley in 1915-18. I grant that no Mexican-American who came of age in the 1960s needs to be disabused of the received notion that the Rangers are larger-than-life heroic icons. Captain A. Y. Allee’s strikebreaking and voter intimidation will live in Mexicano infamy. However, Allee and his ilk pale in comparison to the atrocities committed by his contemporaries in Mississippi and Alabama. Paraphrasing Gertrude Stein’s comment to Hemingway ("Remarks are not literature"), sloganeering is not scholarship. I find it particularly disturbing that Limon holds a tenured professorship (mercifully not in history) at the same university that employed Webb for the greater part of his illustrious career.
Limon’s discussion of Bourke as ethnologist is equally questionable. Ever the anachronist, or better yet, "presentist," Limon views Bourke through the distorting lens of post-modernist linguistic theory multitasking as psychoanalysis. In trying to explain how Bourke could function so brilliantly as an ethnologist while brutally oppressing the Mexicano population, Limon uses post-modern textual analysis to get inside the cavalryman’s head. He also makes much of Bourke’s Irish-Catholic background. Limon posits Bourke’s denigration of lower-class Mexicans in the essay "An American Congo" as "degraded, turbulent, ignorant, and superstitious," as evidence of its author’s psychological malaise. Bourke as a self-hating Paddy is projecting his self-loathing upon the downtrodden Mexicanos. The soldier-anthropologist, a profoundly conflicted colonial agent of imperialism cannot forget his fellow Irishmen’s oppression at the hands of the British (and Americans). In Limon’s words, Bourke, "coping with his own repudiated and projected self-ambivalence," cannot help but identify with and oppress the degraded Mexicanos.
Limon has a field day harrying Bourke with theory, parsing the soldier-ethnologist’s "poetics," and discovering instances of something called "thick description." In all this, there is no consideration of Bourke’s upper-middle-class background followed by a lifetime within the military’s brutal caste system. Neither does Limon mention the fact that Valley Mexicanos of the upper and gente decente classes also despised the quasi-peonized chusma that Bourke maligns in "An American Congo."
Limon selects a long, descriptive sentence from "An American Congo" and, after textual analysis, concludes that it reveals his "uneasy and ambivalent ethnic identity." It also seems that the conflicted Bourke also projects the "deep-rooted tension" onto the Mexicanos in the form of racist comments. Limon reveals that "Bourke’s use of a single long, unbounded sentence is comparable to an analysand’s outpourings to an analyst at a critical point of self-revelation"; that Bourke’s sentence style outs him as a bundle of psychological contradictions that can only find release in an unmeasured flow of words, an agitated formal expression reflecting his anxiety.
There is more of this sort of thing. Limon concludes his chapter dedicated to Bourke with a Gramscian, hegemonic interpretation of the city of Laredo’s Washington’s Birthday celebration. An admittedly peculiar festivity, Limon finds it not coincidental that the initial (1897) instance followed on the heels of the rout of the garzistas. He writes, "It is not at all improbable that the quite recent war against the garzistas influenced these individuals [Laredoans] as they planned a new image for a city and region opening up to Anglo-American development." For Limon, the Washington’s Birthday celebration is Gramscian because it hegemonically overshadows the traditional Mexicano commemorations of 16 de septiembre and 5 de mayo. It is ideologically inconvenient for Limon’s premise that 105 years of Washington’s Birthdays have not managed to anglicize the population or character of Laredo, which remains staunchly Mexicano, if not rascuache.
Bourke also looms large in a Gramscian, imperialistic sort of way in Elliot Young’s 1997 doctoral dissertation entitled Twilight at the Border. Young relies heavily on Limon’s interpretations of Bourke’s military and ethnological activities in the Río Grande Valley. Moreover, Young manages to ratchet up the rhetoric quite a bit in terms of Limon’s imperialists/Vietnam paradigm. Poor Bourke, "having nourished himself on a global culture of imperialism . . . saw [himself] as [one] of the principal managers of the development and opening of the Valley to Anglo entrepreneurs and industry." Young sees Bourke’s ethnographic descriptions and mapwork as the groundwork for "a war of imperial conquest," and he compares Bourke to Joseph Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz. "Much like Kurtz, he went to the jungle to pacify the natives and ended up going mad." Bourke might have replied (referencing Salvador Dali), "the only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad." Bourke, of course, could get mad, but instead, he left South Texas, not in a strait jacket to an asylum for deranged imperialist/hegemonists, but to curate the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Since Young’s dissertation is unpublished and has not benefited from the ministrations of editors, it is not fair for me to keep flogging away. Young has graciously offered to provide LareDOS (this brushland rascuache journal of record) with a review copy of his forthcoming Catarino Garza biography, so enorabuena, felicitaciones, ya veremos.

Myths of Empire, or
How Mexicanos Lost the Ranch

At this point, it is necessary to address the question of US imperialism in the Trans-Nueces and Río Grande Valleys. In 1846, the Nueces River was the northern boundary of Mexico. General Zachary Taylor’s invading army was confronted immediately by the region’s armed Mexican citizens. Taylor prevailed, at considerable cost in lives and property, and marched on to Monterrey and Mexico City. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 determined that the Río Grande would be the international boundary, and henceforth, the Mexicans became US citizens who self-identified as Mexicanos or Tejanos. US imperialist efforts ended in 1848; Mexico lost the war and the territory.
These faits accompli of 19th-century history and the subsequent Anglo cultural hegemony (that discomfits Limon and Young) is, to my mind, inevitable when a democratic, dynamic, and prosperous nation borders a benighted, underdeveloped and impoverished one. Franglish, baseball-crazed Japanese, and metastasizing MacDonald’s restaurants may be annoying, but to view them as sinister is hyperbole. South Texas is not Palestine.
Another hoary hyperbole concerns the, by turns deceitful or violent, large-scale dispossession of South Texas Mexicano landowners by Anglos. Having spent my formative years on a brush-infested ranch in sight of the Río Grande and then attended college during the 1960s, I was convinced that the Lakota and the Tejano shared a heritage on the wrong end of Anglo hegemony.
Anglo ownership of South Texas land increased from 2% in 1850 to 31% by 1900. However, this had nothing to do with Catarino Garza’s demise, Captain Bourke’s botanizing, or even the Texas Rangers’ six-guns. There were indeed individual victims of outrage, Tejanos who were murdered and robbed of their land. However, the "Black Legend," popularized by Americo Paredes and further exaggerated and propagandized by Chicano civil rights activists, was a useful myth. The decline of Tejano ranchers was due more to bad weather, falling prices, and lack of available credit. Ranchero inheritance patterns -- subdividing large tracts so that each of multiple children got a ranch -- also determined that land parcels diminished in each succeeding generation, so that when weather improved and stock prices rose, the landholdings in arid brushlands were too small for successful grazing. Bankers were unwilling to extend loans to smallholdings, resulting in well-capitalized outsiders (often Anglos) becoming ranchers, and later farmers and citrus growers, in South Texas. All of this is analyzed in minute and much more sophisticated detail in Armando Alonzo’s 1998 book, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas 1734-1900.
Since this article is subtitled "a tentative bibliography," I should mention how I happened to horn in on the Catarino Garza material. Several years ago, I studied and wrote about the murder of Lucio Blanco in Laredo in 1922. One of the indicted murderers had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for capturing vital documents from garzistas. I found the Garza rebellion intriguing and made some inquiries. At the time, I was unable to locate any significant information beyond the breezy and impressionistic Harper’s Weekly articles written during the rebellion by journalist Richard Harding Davis. Recently, however, I read Robert M. Utley’s new Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers, where I found Garza sources that led me to yet additional sources, then to writing "Catarino Garza: En La Margen del Río Grande" for the November 2002 issue of this newspaper, and ultimately, to this disquisition on the writings of and about Garza and Bourke, two writers and men of action whose fascinating lives coincided and clashed in pre-Revolution South Texas.
Bibliography

Alonzo, Armando, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas 1734-1900, University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

Cuthbertson, Gilbert M., "Garza, Catarino Erasmo," New Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association, 1995.

Cuthbertson, Gilbert M., "Catarino E. Garza and the Garza War," Texana 13, 1975.

Garza, Catarino E., "La lógica de los hechos": O' sean observaciones sobre las circunstancias de los Mexicanos en Tejas, desde el año 1877 hasta 1889, unpublished manuscript, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas.

Grimm, Agnes G., Llanos Mesteñas: Mustang Plains, Texian Press, 1968.

Guajardo, Celso Garza, En Busca de Catarino Garza,1859-1895, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, 1989.

Limon, José, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas, University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

Mendoza, Robert, "En La Margen del Río Bravo: Catarino Garza and his War with the US and Mexico," LareDOS, November 2002.

Porter, Joseph, Paper Medicine Man, University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

Samora, Julian, Joe Bernal, and Albert Pena, Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979.

Utley, Robert M., Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Young, Elliott Gordon, Twilight at the Border: Catarino Garza and Identity at the Crossroads, doctoral dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 1997.