Historical Context.

Washington, April 1854. The Senate of the United States of America ratifies the acquisition from Mexico of the nine hundred and eighty square miles purchased through the intermediation of the Plenipotentiary Minister James Gadsen on June 24, 1853. The new territories are evidently of Latin American origin, besides that wild and inhospitable: the pockets of resistance by the native tribes of the Pueblo, Navajo and Apache are tangible. Despite this, they constitute the new frontier, an opportunity for many: for those who want to make it a new corridor for commercial exchanges, for the builders of large infrastructures, for the settlers, for the businessmen ... and for those of bad business.

Damn Loot! It's a novel set in those places and in that period. So, in the years following the Mexican War and before that of the Secession. A stimulating era as a harbinger of many changes that would have changed the political and social physiognomy of the United States forever. We began to talk about progress, whose main symbol was via ferrata. The first signs emerged of the social problems linked to the inevitable process which, over the decades to follow, would lead to the establishment of a true multi-ethnic society; while, in numerous cultured environments, and not only, slavery was questioned. From a technological point of view, the backloader, which has dominated in film productions, was not yet commercially widespread, even if it already existed; while among the explosives alternative to gunpowder, the advent of nitroglycerin was far from becoming.

In short, a wild West ... particularly wild.

In the illustrations: James Gadsen and the territories of the Gadsen Purchase.