Eduardo Dawson had thought the state of Sonora, Mexico would be hot and dry, but the Sierra Madre was not like that at all. It was cool and coniferous, with hemp bridges swinging across deep gorges and fields of yellow maize planted up sheer green mountainsides. The vast majority of the people were indigenous, the most primitive he’d ever seen. Everyone went barefoot, and the machetes the men wore at their waists – made in Toledo, Ohio – were among the few changes in their lives since the coming of Cortéz. One late afternoon in October 1885, Eduardo – pale, slender and rather clerkish-looking, wearing a derby hat, fustian jacket and twill trousers a bit worse for wear – was standing over his carpetbag beside a dirt road near the little mud-walled pueblo of Algarrobas. A faded sign on the collapsing wall behind him proclaimed the road as “La Carretera…
