The Border Rifles — Gustave Aimard

Gustave Aimard (1818-83) was a French author who wrote numerous novels set in Latin America. Named Olivier Aimard at his birth in Paris, he was the illegitimate son of a general in Napoleon's army and given away to a family who were paid to raise him. At a young age he was sent off on a herring ship and around 1838 served for a short period with the French Navy. After spending time in America, where he claimed he was adopted into a Comanche tribe, he returned to Paris in 1847. However, gaining no acknowledgment from his biological family, he left again for America, this time hired for mining work in Mexico, but when this did not go to plan he returned once more to France. In 1854 he married and published The Frontiersman, the first of around 70 books, many adventure novels about American Indians. Whilst many reviewers questioned whether his works were too violent, they included a wealth of autobiographical, anthropological and historical details. The Border Rifles, subtitled A Tale of the Texan War, is the first of a trilogy describing how events unfolded in the mid-1830s when Americans living in the then Mexican controlled colony of Texas rose up against the increasingly strict rule of the government. Reprinted from the English translation published by Ward Lock in 1861.