Few figures in Latin American history have attracted more attention from North American biographers than the mid-nineteenth-century filibuster William Walker. This restless product of the Tennessee frontier studied medicine and law in the United States and Europe before turning to journalism in New Orleans in 1849. A tragic romance contributed to his decision to leave the Crescent City to join the rush to California in 1850. Neither law nor business nor journalism satisfied him there, however, and he soon became involved in filibustering schemes, first to Mexico and later to Central America.
Before a Central American national army defeated him in 1857, Walker had made himself military commander and president of Nicaragua, and embarked on a conscious policy of "Americanization" and "democratization" of that state's institutions. Expelled, he conspired repeatedly to return to Central America, only to die before a Honduran firing squad in 1860. Most of the details of the Walker episode were long ago published by Central and North American historians. Few works, in fact, have improved upon William O. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers (1916). Yet new volumes on the man and his times continue to appear. The work presently under review, however, is not just one more biography. Instead, it analyzes the presence of the William Walker story in American literature as a reflection of the recurrent strain of imperialism in American culture. (H-net)
William Walker and "the recurrent strain of imperialism in American culture"
They used to call them filibusters:
