I recently had the privilege of reading an early copy of the latest offering in Mary Armstrong’s Two Valleys Saga. The fourth volume in this insightful look at southern New Mexico in the late 1800s, The Bisti Badlands follows the series’ main character, Jesús Messi as he comes to terms with his heritage, the politics of his day, and the people around him. Along his journey, we get to meet some of the people who make New Mexico’s history so vastly entertaining: Colonel Albert J. Fountain and Oliver Lee and their families, Albert Bacon Fall, Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Salpointe, and feminist Ada McPherson Morley, to name a few.
Jesús is all over New Mexico in this book, from Las Cruces to the Bistis to Santa Fe, and his emotions are all over the place, too. Armstrong does a terrific job of incorporating a young man’s search for purpose into his experience of historical events, seamlessly weaving the factual and fictional into a coherent whole. I can’t tell you more without spoiling the plot, so I’m simply going to say that, if you are interested in the history of New Mexico and the American West, or simply love a good coming-of-age story, I highly recommend The Bisti Badlands.
Fiction and Fact From Old New Mexico 