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Stretching from the Pacific Ocean in the West to the Gulf of Mexico in the east, the border between the United States and Mexico cuts across nearly 2,000 miles of mountains, rivers, brush country, and open desert.

It's one of the most argued over politicized and heavily scrutinized

stretches of land on earth. But long before walls, drones, floodlights, and surveillance towers,

this was frontier country. The modern border was largely shaped in the aftermath of the

Mexican-American War, fought from 1846 to 1848.

When it ended, Mexico lost an enormous portion of its northern territory to the United States,

land that would become California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, along with

parts of several other states.

A few years later, the Gadsden purchase helped finalize much of the line that we know today.

But back then, that line mostly existed on paper.

There were no steel barriers, no checkpoints, no thermal cameras scanning the dark,

just vast, punishing country where the desert itself could kill you faster than any man.

And in unforgiving places like that, stories tend to grow.

The borderlands became home to smugglers, raiders, soldiers, lawmen, revolutionaries,

and outlaws whose names still echo through American and Mexican folklore. Bands of Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa warriors moved through the lands their people had known

long before either nation drew borders across them.

And in 1916, Pancho Villa carried the violence north, raiding Columbus, New Mexico,

and reminding Americans that this frontier was never as distant as it seemed.

Over time, the old borderlands were romanticized in western films, dime novels, and comic books.

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