Tag: Southern New Mexico

BOOK REVIEW: The Bisti Badlands

BOOK REVIEW: The Bisti Badlands

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.

Book Review: Mariana’s Knight

 

Marianas Knight cover
Publisher: Five Star Publishing (May 17, 2017)
ISBN-13: 978-1432833923

It’s one of New Mexico’s perennial mysteries: What happened to Albert Fountain and his son Henry? By the mid-1890s, southern New Mexico attorney and special prosecutor Albert Fountain had made a lot of enemies. It wasn’t surprising that those enemies would take advantage of Fountains’ trip across the Tularosa basin to take him out.

As a matter of fact, he and his wife expected as much. That’s why Fountain’s wife insisted that he take their eight-year-old son, Henry, with him to Lincoln, where Fountain was scheduled to present evidence against suspected cattle rustlers. Surely no one was wicked enough to kill a little boy, or murder his father while he watched.

When Fountain and the boy disappeared, the entire Territory was stunned.

And that’s where Mariana’s Knight diverges from the historical record. To this day, no one knows what happened to Albert and Henry Fountain in early February 1896. All that remained of them was a patch of blood soaking into the southern New Mexico sand.

Michael Farmer provides an interesting and vivid take on what might have happened that day and afterward and, in the process, gives his reader a look at New Mexico in the late 1800s.

If you’re interested in the Fountain mystery or the history of southern New Mexico, or if you’re just looking for a riveting Western tale, you’ll find Mariana’s Knight a fascinating read. I recommend it!