Schoolboy, Cowboy, Mexican Spy

Jay Monaghan’s Schoolboy, Cowboy, Mexican Spy is anything but the typical historian’s memoir. Rather than recounting the slow evolution of monographs or scholarly debates, Monaghan tells the story of his early life with the verve of a born storyteller and the authenticity of one who lived on the edge of the frontier. Before he became a distinguished historian of the Civil War and the American West, Monaghan spent his youth in pursuit of adventure, trading the quiet halls of Quaker schools for the rugged landscapes of Colorado, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. What emerges is a vivid portrait of a young Easterner who fell in love with the West, experiencing firsthand the challenges and exhilarations of ranch life, wild horse taming, and the camaraderie of cowhands with names as colorful as the land they roamed.

The centerpiece of the memoir is Monaghan’s extraordinary detour in 1911, when news of the Mexican Revolution lured him from his studies at Swarthmore into the turmoil of El Paso and Juárez. His eyewitness account of border skirmishes and revolutionary fervor carries the immediacy of a thriller, yet it is told with the reflective perspective of one who later devoted his career to preserving and interpreting the past. Though the book concludes with his return to college, it hints at the further exploits—ranching, wool growing, and teaching among Native communities—that preceded his eventual turn to professional history. Both adventure tale and cultural document, **Schoolboy, Cowboy, Mexican Spy** captures a frontier world already vanishing, while offering insight into how lived experience shaped one of America’s most prolific historians of the West and the Civil War.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.