Tom Lea's The Wonderful Country opens as mejicano pistolero 
Martín Bredi is returning to El Puerto [El Paso] after a fourteen-year 
absence. Bredi carries a gun for the Chihuahuan warlord Cipriano Castro and 
is on Castro's business in Texas. Fourteen years earlier—shortly after 
the end of the Civil War—when he was the boy Martin Brady, he killed the 
man who murdered his father and fled to Mexico where he became Martín 
Bredi.

    Back in Texas Brady breaks a leg; then he falls in love with a married
woman while recuperating; and, finally, to right another wrong, he kills
a man. When Brady/Bredi returns to Mexico, the Castros distrust him
as an American. He becomes a man without a country.

    The Wonderful Country clearly depicts life along the Texas-Mexico border
of a century-and-a-half ago, when Texas and Mexico were being settled and
tamed. 

The late TOM LEA is author of The Brave Bulls, The Primal Yoke, The
Hands of Cantú; and the two-volume history of the King Ranch. JOHN O.
WEST is professor emeritus of English at the University of Texas at El Paso.
West is author of Tom Lea: Artist in Two Mediums and Mexican-American
Folklore. 

_________________________________________________________

JOSEPH A. STOUT, JR., a professor of history at Oklahoma State
University in Stillwater, is the author of Border Conflict: Villistas,
Carrancistas and the Punitive Expedition, 1915-1920, published by TCU
Press in 1999.


Number Thirty-three: Texas Tradition Series. First published in 1952 by
Little, Brown and Company.