Mexican Saddle

This book offers a lot of insight into the Mexican American history. This book is a secondary source for those who want to understand the lives of Mexicans in the early 1900's. This book also gives a vivid description on the culture, living, and hardships endured by the vato Mexicanos.

This is an interesting little Western set well outside the usual time period for the genre (in Mexico, Porfirio Diaz is "on the way out," which sets the story solidly in 1911, and one of the major characters carries a Krag rifle, first widely used during the Spanish-American War). It was originally published serially in Smith's weekly "Western Story," but was apparently never before brought out in book form. It is also the first example of Foster's writing--certainly the first novel by him--that I can remember reading.Jim Barre, a former Texas Ranger, and his partner, Waco Ibold, are in Carver City, Texas, at the close of the working season, jobless and with only a hundred-dollar stake (the money is Jim's). Waco suggests that they use the money to outfit themselves as wolfers and spend the winter making a stake--but Jim has already lent the hundred to Dale Clark, a fellow cowhand, who in turn has left as security a battered old Mexican saddle displayed for sale in a local shop window at a price of $10. Then Clark is found dead, having obviously been strenuously questioned by person or persons unknown--on the very day his twin sister Marilee arrives in town. Next a ranch owner named Tayler (formerly the partner of the Clarks' late father, who was killed in Mexico while on his way home from having discovered a lode of wire gold) approaches Waco with an offer to buy Jim's saddle for $150. Seeing visions of stake money, Waco sells him, not the old Mexican hull, but Jim's good $100 saddle, and they gather up an outfit and head into the Chisos to trap wolves. Happening upon a stone shack where something sinister is going on (as a desperate cry from within testifies), they are shot at and driven off, then proceed to Gaskin's Crossroads, a trailside store run by the Clarks' uncle, where they find Ranger Captain Ringgold and a force of 10, whose assignment it is to try to keep the anti-Diaz excitement from spilling northward. Gradually they discover that the old Mexican saddle is supposed by more than one person to conceal some secret hint to the location of Clark's lost gold mine, and that everyone and his brother--Tayler, a Carver City deputy named Stupe Waddell, a Mexican bandido-revolutionary who goes by Agapito deGriego--seems to want to get his hands on it. A cross-Border gunrunning scheme and the possibility that Tayler actually stole the ranch from the young Clarks add even more complications.As might be expected in a story written for the pulps, Foster concentrates much more on action than on character; there is little explanatory depth to his people, except when we learn that Jim left the Rangers because he was forced to go after a man who had once been his friend, and his romance with Marilee Clark seems very sudden, almost as if Marilee herself was added to the story as a convenient pawn or because a love story of some kind was expected in any pulp Western. That much said, the story is fast-paced and holds the attention thoroughly, a