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Read MoreAbout Paul
I’ve been writing about the history of the American Southwest for a dozen years, specifically efforts to secure law, order, and justice along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during times of economic dislocation, political corruption, and criminal violence. My first book, Salt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande, relates how the corruption of law and politics and the legal theft of economic resources in El Paso led Tejano citizen soldiers to take up arms against Texas Rangers, Buffalo Soldiers, and a posse of outlaws and mercenaries. Salt Warriors won the Robert A. Calvert Book Prize (2007) and was named a Southwest Book of the Year for 2008. While digging through the archives at the Arizona Historical Society, I came across newspaper accounts of an extraordinary crime, the kidnapping of June Robles of Tucson in 1934. That story led me to the wider history of the FBI’s War on Kidnapping, an element of FDR’s 1930s War on Crime, waged by the Justice Department’s Attorney General Homer S. Cummings and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In Public Enemies, Bryan Burrough’s fast-paced masterpiece on the War on Crime, the author brings to life the early FBI’s 1930s war on the violent bank robbers and ransom kidnappers. He focuses on Hoover’s campaign to end the bloody careers of Dillinger, Nelson, Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, Kelly, and the Barker-Karpis gang. While Burrough touches on ransom kidnappings, he necessarily leaves out the wave of child kidnappings that took place in the 1930s. My current project focuses on the early FBI’s efforts to end ransom kidnappings, the dedication to duty of Hoover’s special agents in the field, the “G-men,” and the price of failure when a crime can’t be solved. The unsolved 1934 kidnapping of June Robles is the vehicle for telling that story. My first blog posts provided some background, dealing with major crimes that occurred before the so-called “Crime of the Century,” the Lindbergh baby kidnap/murder that led to federal legislation and FBI involvement. The book project is tentatively titled, The Girl in the Iron Box: Devotion to Duty & the Price of Failure in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The website also contains some photos my father took of fellow flyers in the famous 19th Bombardment Group and an article on Wyatt Earp’s nemesis, Curly Bill Brocius. Enjoy. I look forward to your...
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Read MoreSalt Warriors
Winner of the 2007 Robert A. Calvert Book Prize Winner of a Southwest Book Award for 2008, Border Regional Library Association Honorable Mention, 2009 Tejano Book Prize, Tejano Genealogy Society of Austin Finalist for 2009 Wild West History Association Book Award Published by Texas A&M University Press, 2008 “The author elegantly navigates the shaky alliances, the deep enmities, the hubris of some and the courage of others in the struggle over control and use of the salt lakes near El Paso. The Salt War ranks with the Lincoln County War in its drama and complexity, and in its evidence of a troubled American past with issues that reverberate into the 21st century. This is an authoritative and important work by a gifted scholar.” —Paula Mitchell Marks, author of To Die in the West “No previous work on the Salt War has mined such a quarry of primary sources, explicated the political power plays (involving both Tejanos and Anglos) in the conflict with such clarity, interpreted the insurgency of those relying on the salt lakes so incisively, and chronicled the aftermath that the episode had on the common people of the El Paso Valley so skillfully. The book is destined to become the definitive treatment of the subject.” —Arnoldo De León, author of Mexican-Americans in Texas: A Brief History “… an exceptionally well researched piece of scholarship that goes way beyond what has previously been written. It is obvious from the first page that Cool has made great efforts to uncover every piece of evidence that might in any way shed any new facts on his dramatic but bloody event.” —Jerry Thompson, author of Cortina: Civil War to the Bloody End “The so-called El Paso Salt War of 1877 undoubtedly ranks among th least known conflicts of the late 19th century. Paul Cool’s account is a fascinating study of an insurgency, with a cast of characters including laborers, land barons, corrupt politicians, lawmen of questionable backgrounds, the national press, the Texas governor, the Texas Rangers, President Rutherford B. Hayes, and last but not least, the United States Army. Among the civilian participants in this tragic events were Anglos, Mexican-Americans, and Mexicans. Many of the soldiers were African Americans…. The author unravels the incredibly tangled web of villains, heroes, and the not-so-heroic…. Salt Warriors is a well-researched and competently written work, with photographs of many participants, maps, and an extensive and useful bibliography. —Lt. Col. G. Alan Knight, US Army (ret.), in the Journal of American’s Military Past...
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Read MoreCurrent Project: The Robles Kidnapping Investigation
At the height of the Depression-era War on Crime, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI G-men,Tucson and Pima County lawmen,and outraged citizens hunt the men who abducted a six-year-old child. The 1934 ransom kidnapping of June Robles created a nationwide sensation, rivaling the Lindbergh case in itstangled puzzle of mishandled evidence, disputed forensics, conflicting eyewitnesses, dodgy tipsters, large cast of suspicious characters, and media frenzy. When court records were sealed, the dramatic events were left to recycled newspaper articles, folk music, dramatic theater, and 75 years of rumor built upon rumor. Using newly discovered documents, Paul Cool will reveal the 3-year search for the truth behind a mysterious crime that once transfixed...
Most Recent Articles
El Paso Salt War comes to Las Cruces NM on April 18
Less than one month until the New Mexico-Arizona Joint History Conference in Las Cruces, April 18-20. I have the honor of being the opening plenary session speaker. The topic? New Mexico and Arizona Territories involvement in the El Paso Salt War of 1877. Murderous politicians, Gilded Age hustlers, Texas Rangers good and bad, Buffalo Soldiers, a sheriff’s posse of outlaw deputies, and an army of Tejano “minute men” fighting for their rights as American citizens. Link to the...
Read More2013 Arizona/New Mexico Joint History Conference
Borderlands historian Paul Cool will speak on the El Paso Salt War and New Mexico’s most notorious rustler, John Kinney, during the 2013 Arizona/New Mexico Joint History Conference in Las Cruces, NM, April 18-20.
Read MoreTombstone Territorial Rendezvous
Interested in the Old West? In meeting dozens of fellow Old West buffs? In learning what really happened (or didn’t) in the Gunfight at the OK Corral? In learning about Doc Holliday’s youth in Georgia? In day trips to locate ghost towns, long lost rustler ranches, sites of stagecoach holdups, or the spot where Wyatt Earp did (or didn’t) kill Curly Bill? Have a taste for Byronic Heroes of the Old West? Interested in how facts become legends, and...
Read MoreThinking about writing a history book?
THINKING OF WRITING YOUR FIRST HISTORY BOOK AND GETTING NEW YORK TO PUBLISH IT? I published my first unpaid article in 1998, my first book, published by a university press, in 2008. For the second book, I hope to land a New York publisher. I’ve not chosen the easiest path. Publishers prefer a trade-publishing record. I’ve been told, and I’ve no reason to doubt it, that a magazine article in your field yields more respect in New York than...
Read MoreA reading list for the well-read FBI G-man, 1936 (or so)
The early 20th century saw a rising tide of criticism against certain traditional methods used by police to catch killers and crooks, especially the too-easy reliance by unprofessional local law enforcers on unconstitutional and often barbaric third degree interrogations. In response, enlightened police administrators and policemen joined lawyers, scientists, and others in pushing for adoption of “scientific policing,” the contemporary term for what we now generically call CSI. FBI histories and biographies of J. Edgar Hoover uniformly credit the...
Read MoreBert Rovere’s Paris Inn & the lighter side of FBI undercover work – 1936
This was in the first draft of The Girl in the Iron Box. As much as I love the story, it had to go. Enjoy! If an undercover special agent wanted to show his “date” a good time, impress her with his life style, spill a few drinks, and trick her into spilling what she knew about the kidnapping of June Robles, he could do worse than take her to Bert Rovere’s Paris Inn. A favorite with the Hollywood...
Read MoreWriting grassroots history
I think it was C.L. Sonnichsen who coined the title “grassroots historian.” Certainly, he wrote about and defined such non-academic (and often non-academically trained) historians in an article of the same name appearing in a 1970 issue of Southwestern Historical Quarterly (Vol. 73, No. 3, January, 1970, pp. 381-392). You can find the article at http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30238074?uid=3739960&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21100835322691 . I can’t speak for other fields of history, but in the niche of Old West lawmen/outlaws/gunfighters/armed & dangerous sodbusters, the grassroots historian probably...
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