Jerry Thompson – författare

Growing up, Jerry Thompson knew only that his grandfather was a gritty, ""mixed-blood"" Cherokee cowboy named Joe Lynch Davis. That was all anyone cared to say about the man. But after Thompson's mother died, the award-winning historian discovered a shoebox full of letters that held the key to a long-lost family history of passion, violence, and despair. Wrecked Lives and Lost Souls, the result of Thompson's sleuthing into his family's past, uncovers the lawless life and times of a man at the center of systematic cattle rustling, feuding, gun battles, a bloody range war, bank robberies, and train heists in early 1900s Indian Territory and Oklahoma.Through painstaking detective work into archival sources, newspaper accounts, and court proceedings, and via numerous interviews, Thompson pieces together not only the story of his grandfather - and a long-forgotten gang of outlaws to rival the infamous Younger brothers - but also the dark path of a Cherokee diaspora from Georgia to Indian Territory. Davis, born in 1891, grew up on a family ranch on the Canadian River, outside the small community of Porum in the Cherokee Nation. The range was being fenced, and for the Davis family and others, cattle rustling was part of a way of life - a habit that ultimately spilled over into violence and murder.The story ""goes way back to the wild & wooly cattle days of the west,"" an aunt wrote to Thompson's mother, ""when there was cattle rustling, bank robberies & feuding."" One of these feuds - that Joe Davis was ""raised right into"" - was the decade-long Porum Range War, which culminated in the murder of Davis's uncle in 1907. In fleshing out the details of the range war and his grandfather's life, Thompson brings to light the brutality and far-reaching consequences of an obscure chapter in the history of the American West.

For a half century, John Ellis Wool (1784-1869) was one of America's most illustrious figures - most notably as an officer in the United States Army during the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. At the onset of the Civil War, when he assumed command of the Department of the East, Wool had been a brigadier general for twenty years and, at age seventy-seven, was the oldest general on either side of the conflict. Courage Above All Things marks the first full biography of Wool, who aside from his unparalleled military service, figured prominently in many critical moments in nineteenth-century U.S. history.At the time of his death in 2016, Harwood Hinton, a scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of western history, had devoted fifty years to this monumental work, which has been completed and edited by the distinguished historian Jerry Thompson. This deeply researched and deftly written volume incorporates the latest scholarship to offer a clear and detailed account of John Ellis Wool's extraordinary life - his character, his life experiences, and his career, in wartime and during uneasy periods of relative peace. Hinton and Thompson provide a thorough account of all chapters in Wool's life, including three major wars, the Cherokee Removal, and battles with Native Americans on the West Coast.From his distinguished participation in the War of 1812 to his controversial service on the Pacific coast during the 1850s, and from his mixed success during the Peninsula Campaign to his overseeing of efforts to quell the New York City draft riots of 1863, John Ellis Wool emerges here as a crucial character in the story of nineteenth-century America - complex, contradictory, larger than life - finally fully realized for the first time.

For a half century, John Ellis Wool (1784–1869) was one of America’s most illustrious figures—most notably as an officer in the United States Army during the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. At the onset of the Civil War, when he assumed command of the Department of the East, Wool had been a brigadier general for twenty years and, at age seventy-seven, was the oldest general on either side of the conflict. Courage Above All Things marks the first full biography of Wool, who aside from his unparalleled military service, figured prominently in many critical moments in nineteenth-century U.S. history. At the time of his death in 2016, Harwood Hinton, a scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of western history, had devoted fifty years to this monumental work, which has been completed and edited by the distinguished historian Jerry Thompson. This deeply researched and deftly written volume incorporates the latest scholarship to offer a clear and detailed account of John Ellis Wool’s extraordinary life—his character, his life experiences, and his career, in wartime and during uneasy periods of relative peace. Hinton and Thompson provide a thorough account of all chapters in Wool’s life, including three major wars, the Cherokee Removal, and battles with Native Americans on the West Coast. From his distinguished participation in the War of 1812 to his controversial service on the Pacific coast during the 1850s, and from his mixed success during the Peninsula Campaign to his overseeing of efforts to quell the New York City draft riots of 1863, John Ellis Wool emerges here as a crucial character in the story of nineteenth-century America—complex, contradictory, larger than life—finally fully realized for the first time.

With more than 150 images, many never before published, historian Jerry Thompson tells the story of what Pulitzer Prize–winning historian William H. Goetzmann has called a "wild and vivid land." From the Coahuiltecan Indians and the Spanish colonizers who clustered along the banks of the Rio Grande, to the cattlemen and oil wildcatters who conquered the brush country, Thompson details six centuries of exciting and entertaining history in a thoroughly researched and comprehensive text, lavishly illustrated by the work of artists Lino Sanchez y Tapia, Theodore Gentilz, and Frederic Remington, photographers Robert Runyon, E. O. Goldbeck, and Russell Lee, and many others.It was on the South Texas border that the Mexican War began and the Civil War ended. Over the centuries the border area has been the setting for extraordinary endeavors and events, many of them related in A Wild and Vivid Land: José de Escandon's gallant band of colonizers, the grandiose dreamers who struggled to shape the 1840 Republic of the Rio Grande, the ill-fated Mier expedition, and the soldiers who fought at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma in 1846. The dramatic historical events and the strong personalities that influenced the region's growth and development are skillfully presented in words and pictures. Readers will see the steamboat commerce on the Rio Grande, where Richard King of King Ranch fame began to amass his fortune; the Civil War cotton trade; the sheep and cattle industries; the coming of the railroads in the 1880s; and the citrus and oil and gas industries of the twentieth century. Thompson also recounts Juan Cortina's brazen raid on Brownsville; the Union occupation of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in December 1863 and the Confederacy's legendary defense of Laredo in 1864; Catarino Garza's run from the Texas Rangers in the chaparral in the 1890s; and the ordinary men and women who, throughout, survived floods and depressions, bandits, revolutions, and drought.The exciting history presented here is distinguished by scrupulous scholarship and by the author's clear enthusiasm and love for South Texas. This book of remarkable pictures and stories is the kind of book one returns to again and again, that causes one to muse and dream on the past. The South Texas border becomes vivid in the mind—a singular and an unforgettable encounter.Contents:• The Land• Coahuiltecans• Spanish Exploration• José de Escandón• Camargo, Reynosa, Revilla, and Mier• Dolores• Laredo• San Patricio, Corpus Christi, and Dolores• Revolutions• Republic of the Rio Grande• Second Texas-Mexico War• Mier Expedition• Mexican War• Steamboats on the Rio Grande• Brownsville• Cortina War• Secession and Civil War• Guerrilla Warfare in the Nueces Strip• Reconstruction• Catarino Garza• Gregorio Cortez• Mexican Revolution• Railroads• Sheep and Cattle Industry• Jovita and Nicasio Idar• Citrus• Oil and Gas• Falcon Dam and Reservoir

In western New Mexico in 1905 there rode a notorious outlaw from the Mexican border named Henry Coleman. With a Colt .45 strapped to his hip, Coleman (alias Street Hudspeth from the well-to-do Texas family) came to be either despised as a deceitful rustler and ruthless murderer or admired as a man of honor and great courage, a popular and charismatic cowman who was fast with a gun. No one seemed indifferent.  In less than a decade, Coleman, who was fluent in Spanish and popular with many of the Hispanics of the area, became as famous in the western part of the state as Billy the Kid was in Lincoln County. Sheriff Elfego Baca of Socorro County, who was careful not to confront Coleman, referred to him as the last of the “bad men of New Mexico.” Especially spellbinding are the recollections of how Coleman came to be associated with several murders. Also intriguing is how he died so violently at the hands of a posse of cattlemen in October 1921.  From her ranch on Largo Creek, not far from where Coleman was said to have committed more than one murder, Eleanor Williams worked hard to interview anyone who had known him or had any knowledge of his daring deeds. Williams first published Coleman’s story in the New Mexico Electric News, a monthly electrical co-op magazine, from 1964 to 1965. Award-winning historian Jerry Thompson edited and annotated it with additional historical context; also included is a short biography of Williams by her daughter, Helen Cress.

At a time when the U.S.-Mexican border was still not clearly defined and when the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and land hunger impelled the Anglo presence ever deeper and more intrusively into South Texas, Juan Nepomucino Cortina cut a violent swath across the region in a conflict that came to be known as The Cortina War. Did this border caudillo fight to defend the rights, honour, and legal claims of the Mexicans of South Texas, as he claimed? Or was his a quest for personal vengeance against the newcomers who had married into his family, threatened his mother's land holdings, and insulted his honour?Historian Jerry Thompson mines the archival record and considers it in light of recent revisionist history of the region. As a result, he produces not only a carefully nuanced work on Cortina - the most comprehensive to date for this pivotal borderlands figure - but also a balanced interpretation of the violence that racked South Texas from the 1840s through the 1860s.Cortina's influence in the region made him a force to be reckoned with during the American Civil War. He influenced Mexican politics from the 1840s to the 1870s and fought in the Mexican Army for more than forty-five years. His daring cross-border cattle raids, carried out for more than two decades, made his exploits the stuff of sensational journalism in the newspapers of New York, Boston, and other American cities. By the time of his imprisonment in 1877, Cortina and his followers had so roiled South Texas that Anglo reprisals were being taken against Mexicans and Tejanos throughout the region, ironically worsening the racism that had infuriated Cortina in the beginning. The effects of this troubled period continue to resonate in Anglo-Mexican and Anglo-Tejano relations, down to this very day.Students of regional and borderlands history will find this premier biography to be a rich source of new perspectives. Its transnational focus and balanced approach will reward scholarly and general readers alike.