BY C.M. MAYO — October 21, 2019
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
Just last week the 2018 issue (vol. 30) of the Journal of Big Bend Studies landed in my mailbox. I am proud to say that this is my second publication in this excellent US-Mexico borderlands scholarly journal published by Sul Ross State University in the Big Bend of Far West Texas. (My essay on Francisco I. Madero’s secret book was my first publication in the JBBS.) This is the paper I presented at the Center for Big Bend Studies Association conference in 2017: “John Bigelow, Jr.: Officer in the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, Military Intellectual, and Nexus Between the West and the Eastern Establishment.”
It’s in some fine company in this issue. Herewith the table of contents:
Writing such a lengthy, seriously-serious article all abristle with endnotes and straight-jacketed diction is unusual for me; my focus is writing poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Those of you who follow this blog well know that I have been at work on a memoir / portrait of Far West Texas– definitively creative nonfiction– for more than a little while now. It was because I had done a heap and a half of research on John Bigelow, Sr. in writing my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, that I knew there was much more to say about his son, John Bigelow, Jr., than I had come across in the literature on Texas and the Indian Wars and, well, I just felt I had to do it.
I find writing can be funny that way; for all one’s careful goal-setting and planning, sometimes a work seems to have a will of its own, to demand it be written, and in a certain way. This essay on John Bigelow, Jr. is one of those works. It truly surprised me. I hope it may prove of interest and useful to anyone looking at borderlands and military history, as well the genesis of ideas about the American West. Certainly, writing it has helped me further arrange the furniture, smooth out the rugs, and dust off the trophy heads in my thinking about Far West Texas.
Notes on John Bigelow, Jr. and
Garrison Tangles in the Friendless Tenth:
The Journal of Lt. John Bigelow, Jr., Fort Davis, Texas
Further Notes on John Bigelow, Jr. (1854-1936):
On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo,
the Rare Westernlore Press Edition
On the Trail of the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos
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