rado River seemed, until the coming of the railroads, to be the perfect boundary, which theorists have imagined for separating nations. It was almost a desert. It was not valuable land. A sparse population was all it could support where it could support any at all. Small land-ownership was unthinkable.
Mexican efforts to control this region had always been futile. They never had effective control over the region north of the Rio Grande before the war with the United States, and it was long after the middle of the last century before any true policing of the district south of it was attempted. Even up to the time of the present revolution the native tribes of her northwest disputed her authority with fair success.
Effective American control extended south west ward more rapidly than Mexican governmental authority came to meet it, but it would be easy to overemphasize the fact. At all times it is difficult to police a sparsely settled, arid country, such as the lands along the Mexican border were a generation ago. They continued up to our own day to be a region wherein things were done with impunity—on both sides—that neither government would approve, a territory in which each man was, to a large degree, a law unto himself. It was a place where individualism thrived, where self-help was at a premium, and where the strong one was too often the judge of the rights of the weak.
A region like the Mexican border produced and drew to itself from other regions a not too gentle population. The only life that could be lived there was one on which adventurous spirits thrived. Those who had ventured
