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Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest


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Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest

by J. Frank Dobie

August, 1995  [Etext #314]


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Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest
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Guide to Life and Literature
of the
Southwest

REVISED AND ENLARGED IN BOTH KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

J. FRANK DOBIE

DALLAS . 1952

SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY PRESS


_Not copyright in 1942
Again not copyright in 1952_

Anybody is welcome to help himself to any
of it in any way



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 52-11834

S.M.U. PRESS


Contents

A Preface with Some Revised Ideas
1. A Declaration
2. Interpreters of the Land
3. General Helps
4. Indian Culture; Pueblos and Navajos
5. Apaches, Comanches, and Other Plains Indians
6. Spanish-Mexican Strains
7. Flavor of France
8. Backwoods Life and Humor
9. How the Early Settlers Lived
10. Fighting Texians
11. Texas Rangers
12. Women Pioneers
13. Circuit Riders and Missionaries
14. Lawyers, Politicians, J.P.'s
15. Pioneer Doctors
16. Mountain Men
17. Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail
18. Stagecoaches, Freighting
19. Pony Express
20. Surge of Life in the West
21. Range Life: Cowboys, Cattle, Sheep
22. Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads
23. Horses: Mustangs and Cow Ponies
24. The Bad Man Tradition
25. Mining and Oil
26. Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists
27. Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters
28. Bears and Bear Hunters
29. Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers
30. Birds and Wild Flowers
31. Negro Folk Songs and Tales
32. Fiction-Including Folk Tales
33. Poetry and Drama
34. Miscellaneous Interpreters and Institutions
35. Subjects for Themes
Index to Authors and Titles


Illustrations
Indian Head by Tom Lea, from _A Texas Cowboy_
     by Charles A. Siringo (1950 edition)
Comanche Horsemen by George Catlin, from
     _North American Indians_
Vaquero by Tom Lea, from _A Texas Cowboy_
     by Charles A. Siringo (1950 edition)
Fray Marcos de Niza by Jose Cisneros, from
     The Journey of Fray Marcos de Niza by
     Cleve Hallenbeck
Horse by Gutzon Borglum, from Mustangs
     and Cow Horses
Praxiteles Swan, fighting chaplain, by John W.
     Thomason, from his Lone Star Preacher
Horse's Head by William R. Leigh, from The
     Western Pony
Longhorn by Tom Lea, from The Longhorns
     by J. Frank Dobie
Cowboy and Steer by Tom Lea, from The
     Longhorns by J. Frank Dobie
Illustration by Charles M. Russell, from The
     Virginian by Owen Wister (1916 edition)
Mustangs by Charles Banks Wilson, from The
     Mustangs by J. Frank Dobie
Illustration by Charles M. Russell, from The
     Untamed by George Pattullo



Pancho Villa by Tom Lea, from Southwest
     Review, Winter, 1951
Frontispiece by Tom Lea, from Santa Rita by
     Martin W. Schwettmann
Illustration by Charles M. Russell, from The
     Blazed Trail by Agnes C. Laut
Buffaloes by Harold D. Bugbee
Illustration by Charles M. Russell, from Fifteen
     Thousand Miles by Stage by Carrie
     Adell Strahorn
Coyote Head by Olaus J. Murie, from The
     Voice of the Coyote by J. Frank Dobie
Paisano



A Preface With Some Revised Ideas

IT HAS BEEN ten years since I wrote the prefatory "Declaration"
to this now enlarged and altered book. Not to my
generation alone have many things receded during that
decade. To the intelligent young as well as to the intelligent
elderly, efforts in the present atmosphere to opiate the public
with mere pictures of frontier enterprise have a ghastly
unreality. The Texas Rangers have come to seem as remote
as the Foreign Legion in France fighting against the Kaiser.
Yet this _Guide_, extensively added to and revised, is mainly
concerned, apart from the land and its native life, with
frontier backgrounds. If during a decade a man does not
change his mind on some things and develop new points of
view, it is a pretty good sign that his mind is petrified and
need no longer be accounted among the living. I have an
inclination to rewrite the "Declaration," but maybe I was
just as wise on some matters ten years ago as I am now; so
I let it stand.

          Do I contradict myself?
          Very well then I contradict myself.


I have heard so much silly bragging by Texans that I
now think it would be a blessing to themselves--and a relief
to others--if the braggers did not know they lived in Texas.
Yet the time is not likely to come when a human being will
not be better adapted to his environments by knowing their
nature; on the other hand, to study a provincial setting from
a provincial point of view is restricting. Nobody should
specialize on provincial writings before he has the perspective
that only a good deal of good literature and wide history
can give. I think it more important that a dweller in the
Southwest read _The Trial and Death of Socrates_ than all the
books extant on killings by Billy the Kid. I think this dweller
will fit his land better by understanding Thomas Jefferson's
oath ("I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility
against every form of tyranny over the mind of man") than
by reading all the books that have been written on ranch
lands and people. For any dweller of the Southwest who
would have the land soak into him, Wordsworth's "Tintern
Abbey," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," "The Solitary
Reaper," "Expostulation and Reply," and a few other poems
are more conducive to a "wise passiveness" than any native
writing.

There are no substitutes for nobility, beauty, and
wisdom. One of the chief impediments to amplitude and
intellectual freedom is provincial inbreeding. I am sorry to see
writings of the Southwest substituted for noble and beautiful
and wise literature to which all people everywhere are
inheritors. When I began teaching "Life and Literature of the
Southwest" I did not regard these writings as a substitute.
To reread most of them would be boresome, though _Hamlet_,
Boswell's _Johnson_, Lamb's _Essays_, and other genuine literature
remain as quickening as ever.

Very likely I shall not teach the course again. I am positive
I shall never revise this _Guide_ again. It is in nowise a
bibliography. I have made more additions to the "Range Life"
chapter than to any other. I am a collector of such books.
A collector is a person who gathers unto himself the worthless
as well as the worthy. Since I did not make a nickel out
of the original printing of the _Guide_ and hardly expect to
make enough to buy a California "ranch" out of the present
printing, I have added several items, with accompanying
remarks, more for my own pleasure than for benefit to
society.

Were the listings halved, made more selective, the book
might serve its purpose better. Anybody who wants to can
slice it in any manner he pleases. I am as much against forced
literary swallowings as I am against prohibitions on free
tasting, chewing, and digestion. I rate censors, particularly
those of church and state, as low as I rate character assassins;
they often run together.

I'd like to make a book on _Emancipators of the Human
Mind_--Emerson, Jefferson, Thoreau, Tom Paine, Newton,
Arnold, Voltaire, Goethe.... When I reflect how few writings
connected with the wide open spaces of the West and
Southwest are wide enough to enter into such a volume, I
realize acutely how desirable is perspective in patriotism.

Hundreds of the books listed in this _Guide_ have given
me pleasure as well as particles for the mosaic work of my
own books; but, with minor exceptions, they increasingly
seem to me to explore only the exteriors of life. There is in
them much good humor but scant wit. The hunger for
something afar is absent or battened down. Drought blasts
the turf, but its unhealing blast to human hope is glossed
over. The body's thirst for water is a recurring theme, but
human thirst for love and just thinking is beyond consideration.
Horses run with their riders to death or victory, but
fleeting beauty haunts no soul to the "doorway of the dead."
The land is often pictured as lonely, but the lone way of a
human being's essential self is not for this extravert world.
The banners of individualism are carried high, but the higher
individualism that grows out of long looking for meanings
in the human drama is negligible. Somebody is always riding
around or into a "feudal domain." Nobody at all penetrates
it or penetrates democracy with the wisdom that came to
Lincoln in his loneliness: "As I would not be a SLAVE, so I
would not be a MASTER. This expresses my idea of democracy.
Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference,
is no democracy." The mountains, the caves, the forests, the
deserts have had no prophets to interpret either their silences
or their voices. In short, these books are mostly only the stuff
of literature, not literature itself, not the very stuff of life,
not the distillations of mankind's "agony and bloody sweat."

An ignorant person attaches more importance to the
chatter of small voices around him than to the noble language
of remote individuals. The more he listens to the small, the
smaller he grows. The hope of regional literature lies in out-
growing regionalism itself. On November 11, 1949, I gave a
talk to the Texas Institute of Letters that was published in
the Spring 1950 issue of the _Southwest Review_. The paragraphs
that follow are taken therefrom.

Good writing about any region is good only to the extent
that it has universal appeal. Texans are the only "race of
people" known to anthropologists who do not depend upon
breeding for propagation. Like princes and lords, they can
be made by "breath," plus a big white hat--which
comparatively few Texans wear. A beef stew by a cook in San
Antonio, Texas, may have a different flavor from that of a
beef stew cooked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but the essential
substances of potatoes and onions, with some suggestion
of beef, are about the same, and geography has no effect on
their digestibility.

A writer--a regional writer, if that term means
anything--will whenever he matures exercise the critical
faculty. I mean in the Matthew Arnold sense of appraisal
rather than of praise, or, for that matter, of absolute
condemnation. Understanding and sympathy are not eulogy.
Mere glorification is on the same intellectual level as silver
tongues and juke box music.

In using that word INTELLECTUAL, one lays himself liable
to the accusation of having forsaken democracy. For all that,
"fundamental brainwork" is behind every respect-worthy
piece of writing, whether it be a lightsome lyric that seems
as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal epic, an impressionistic
essay or a great novel that measures the depth of human
destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as education
without mental discipline, or as "character building" in
a school that is slovenly in scholarship. Billboards along the
highways of Texas advertise certain towns and cities as "cultural
centers." Yet no chamber of commerce would consider
advertising an intellectual center. The culture of a nine-
teenth-century finishing school for young ladies was divorced
from intellect; genuine civilization is always informed by
intellect. The American populace has been taught to believe
that the more intellectual a professor is, the less common sense
he has; nevertheless, if American democracy is preserved
it will be preserved by thought and not by physics.

Editors of all but a few magazines of the country and
publishers of most of the daily newspapers cry out for brightness
and vitality and at the same time shut out critical ideas.
They want intellect, but want it petrified. Happily, the
publishers of books have not yet reached that form of delusion.
In an article entitled "What Ideas Are Safe?" in the
_Saturday Review of Literature_ for November 5, 1949, Henry
Steele Commager says:

If we establish a standard of safe thinking, we will end up with no
thinking at all.... We cannot ... have thought half slave and half
free.... A nation which, in the name of loyalty or of patriotism or of
any sincere and high-sounding ideal, discourages criticism and dissent,
and puts a premium on acquiescence and conformity, is headed
for disaster.

Unless a writer feels free, things will not come to him, he
cannot burgeon on any subject whatsoever.

In 1834 Davy Crockett's _Autobiography_ was published.
It is one of the primary social documents of America. It is
as much Davy Crockett, whether going ahead after bears
in a Tennessee canebrake or going ahead after General
Andrew Jackson in Congress, as the equally plain but also
urbane _Autobiography_ of Franklin is Benjamin Franklin.
It is undiluted regionalism. It is provincial not only in
subject but in point of view.

No provincial mind of this day could possibly write an
autobiography or any other kind of book co-ordinate in
value with Crockett's "classic in homespun." In his time,
Crockett could exercise intelligence and still retain his
provincial point of view. Provincialism was in the air over his
land. In these changed times, something in the ambient air
prevents any active intelligence from being unconscious of
lands, peoples, struggles far beyond any province.

Not long after the Civil War, in Harris County, Texas,
my father heard a bayou-billy yell out:

 Whoopee! Raised in a canebrake and suckled by a she-bear!
 The click of a six-shooter is music to my ear!
 The further up the creek you go, the worse they git,
 And I come from the head of it! Whoopee!

If it were now possible to find some section of country so
far up above the forks of the creek that the owls mate there
with the chickens, and if this section could send to Congress
one of its provincials untainted by the outside world, he
would, if at all intelligent, soon after arriving on Capitol
Hill become aware of interdependencies between his remote
province and the rest of the world.


Biographies of regional characters, stories turning on local
customs, novels based on an isolated society, books of history
and fiction going back to provincial simplicity will go on
being written and published. But I do not believe it possible
that a good one will henceforth come from a mind that does
not in outlook transcend the region on which it is focused.
That is not to imply that the processes of evolution have
brought all parts of the world into such interrelationships
that a writer cannot depict the manners and morals of a
community up Owl Hoot Creek without enmeshing them
with the complexities of the Atlantic Pact. Awareness of
other times and other wheres, not insistence on that awareness,
is the requisite. James M. Barrie said that he could not
write a play until he got his people off on a kind of island,
but had he not known about the mainland he could never
have delighted us with the islanders--islanders, after all, for
the night only. Patriotism of the right kind is still a fine
thing; but, despite all gulfs, canyons, and curtains that
separate nations, those nations and their provinces are all
increasingly interrelated.

No sharp line of time or space, like that separating one
century from another or the territory of one nation from
that of another, can delimit the boundaries of any region to
which any regionalist lays claim. Mastery, for instance, of
certain locutions peculiar to the Southwest will take their
user to the Aztecs, to Spain, and to the border of ballads
and Sir Walter Scott's romances. I found that I could not
comprehend the coyote as animal hero of Pueblo and Plains
Indians apart from the Reynard of Aesop and Chaucer.

In a noble opinion respecting censorship and freedom
of the press, handed down on March 18, 1949, Judge Curtis
Bok of Pennsylvania said:

It is no longer possible that free speech be guaranteed Federally and
denied locally; under modern methods of instantaneous communication
such a discrepancy makes no sense.... What is said in Pennsylvania
may clarify an issue in California, and what is suppressed in
California may leave us the worse in Pennsylvania. Unless a restriction
on free speech be of national validity, it can no longer have any local
validity whatever.


Among the qualities that any good regional writer has in
common with other good writers of all places and times is
intellectual integrity. Having it does not obligate him to
speak out on all issues or, indeed, on any issue. He alone is to
judge whether he will sport with Amaryllis in the shade or
forsake her to write his own _Areopagitica_. Intellectual integrity
expresses itself in the tune as well as argument, in choice
of words--words honest and precise--as well as in ideas,
in fidelity to human nature and the flowers of the fields as
well as to principles, in facts reported more than in
deductions proposed. Though a writer write on something as
innocuous as the white snails that crawl up broomweed
stalks and that roadrunners carry to certain rocks to crack
and eat, his intellectual integrity, if he has it, will infuse
the subject.

Nothing is too trivial for art, but good art treats nothing
in a trivial way. Nothing is too provincial for the regional
writer, but he cannot be provincial-minded toward it. Being
provincial-minded may make him a typical provincial; it
will prevent him from being a representative or skilful
interpreter. Horace Greeley said that when the rules of the
English language got in his way, they did not stand a chance.
We may be sure that if by violating the rules of syntax
Horace Greeley sometimes added forcefulness to his editorials,
he violated them deliberately and not in ignorance.
Luminosity is not stumbled into. The richly savored and
deliciously unlettered speech of Thomas Hardy's rustics was
the creation of a master architect who had looked out over
the ranges of fated mankind and looked also into hell.
Thomas Hardy's ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey,
but his heart, in accordance with a provision of his will, was
buried in the churchyard of his own village.

I have never tried to define regionalism. Its blanket has
been put over a great deal of worthless writing. Robert Frost
has approached a satisfying conception. "The land is always
in my bones," he said--the land of rock fences. But, "I am
not a regionalist. I am a realmist. I write about realms of
democracy and realms of the spirit." Those realms include
The Woodpile, The Grindstone, Blueberries, Birches, and
many other features of the land North of Boston.

To an extent, any writer anywhere must make his own
world, no matter whether in fiction or nonfiction, prose or
poetry. He must make something out of his subject. What
he makes depends upon his creative power, integrated with
a sense of form. The popular restriction of creative writing
to fiction and verse is illogical. Carl Sandburg's life of
Lincoln is immeasurably more creative in form and substance
than his fanciful _Potato Face_. Intense exercise of his creative
power sets, in a way, the writer apart from the life he is
trying to sublimate. Becoming a Philistine will not enable a
man to interpret Philistinism, though Philistines who own
big presses think so. Sinclair Lewis knew Babbitt as Babbitt
could never know either himself or Sinclair Lewis.
                              J. F. D.
_The time of Mexican primroses_
1952


_1_

A Declaration

IN THE UNIVERSITY of Texas I teach a course called Life
and Literature of the Southwest." About 1929 I had a brief
guide to books concerning the Southwest mimeographed; in
1931 it was included by John William Rogers in a booklet
entitled _Finding Literature on the Texas Plains_. After that
I revised and extended the guide three or four times, during
the process distributing several thousand copies of the
mimeographed forms. Now the guide has grown too long, and I
trust that this printing of it will prevent my making further
additions--though within a short time new books will come
out that should be added.

Yet the guide is fragmentary, incomplete, and in no
sense a bibliography. Its emphases vary according to my own
indifferences and ignorance as well as according to my own
sympathies and knowledge. It is strong on the character and
ways of life of the early settlers, on the growth of the soil,
and on everything pertaining to the range; it is weak on
information concerning politicians and on citations to studies
which, in the manner of orthodox Ph.D. theses, merely transfer
bones from one graveyard to another.

It is designed primarily to help people of the Southwest
see significances in the features of the land to which they
belong, to make their environments more interesting to
them, their past more alive, to bring them to a realization
of the values of their own cultural inheritance, and to stimulate
them to observe. It includes most of the books about
the Southwest that people in general would agree on as
making good reading.

I have never had any idea of writing or teaching about
my own section of the country merely as a patriotic duty.
Without apologies, I would interpret it because I love it,
because it interests me, talks to me, appeals to my imagination,
warms my emotions; also because it seems to me that
other people living in the Southwest will lead fuller and
richer lives if they become aware of what it holds. I once
thought that, so far as reading goes, I could live forever on
the supernal beauty of Shelley's "The Cloud" and his soaring
lines "To a Skylark," on the rich melancholy of Keats's "Ode
to a Nightingale," on Cyrano de Bergerac's ideal of a free
man, on Wordsworth's philosophy of nature--a philosophy
that has illuminated for me the mesquite flats and oak-
studded hills of Texas--on the adventures in Robert Louis
Stevenson, the flavor and wit of Lamb's essays, the eloquent
wisdom of Hazlitt, the dark mysteries of Conrad, the gaieties
of Barrie, the melody of Sir Thomas Browne, the urbanity
of Addison, the dash in Kipling, the mobility, the mightiness,
the lightness, the humor, the humanity, the everything of
Shakespeare, and a world of other delicious, high, beautiful,
and inspiring things that English literature has bestowed
upon us. That literature is still the richest of heritages; but
literature is not enough.

Here I am living on a soil that my people have been
living and working and dying on for more than a hundred
years--the soil, as it happens, of Texas. My roots go down
into this soil as deep as mesquite roots go. This soil has
nourished me as the banks of the lovely Guadalupe River nourish
cypress trees, as the Brazos bottoms nourish the wild peach,
as the gentle slopes of East Texas nourish the sweet-smelling
pines, as the barren, rocky ridges along the Pecos nourish the
daggered lechuguilla. I am at home here, and I want not only
to know about my home land, I want to live intelligently
on it. I want certain data that will enable me to accommodate
myself to it. Knowledge helps sympathy to achieve harmony.
I am made more resolute by Arthur Hugh Clough's
picture of the dripping sailor on the reeling mast, "On
stormy nights when wild northwesters rave," but the winds
that have bit into me have been dry Texas northers; and
fantastic yarns about them, along with a cowboy's story of
a herd of Longhorns drifting to death in front of one of
them, come home to me and illuminate those northers like
forked lightning playing along the top of black clouds in
the night.

No informed person would hold that the Southwest can
claim any considerable body of PURE LITERATURE as its own. At
the same time, the region has a distinct cultural inheritance,
full of life and drama, told variously in books so numerous
that their very existence would surprise many people who
depend on the Book-of-the-Month Club for literary guidance.
Any people have a right to their own cultural inheritance,
though sheeplike makers of textbooks and sheeplike
pedagogues of American literature have until recently, either
wilfully or ignorantly, denied that right to the Southwest.
Tens of thousands of students of the Southwest have been
assigned endless pages on and listened to dronings over Cotton
Mather, Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Bradstreet,
and other dreary creatures of colonial New England
who are utterly foreign to the genius of the Southwest. If
nothing in written form pertaining to the Southwest existed
at all, it would be more profitable for an inhabitant to go
out and listen to coyotes singing at night in the prickly pear
than to tolerate the Increase Mather kind of thing. It is very
profitable to listen to coyotes anyhow. I rebelled years ago
at having the tradition, the spirit, the meaning of the soil to
which I belong utterly disregarded by interpreters of literature
and at the same time having the Increase Mather kind
of stuff taught as if it were important to our part of America.
Happily the disregard is disappearing, and so is Increase
Mather.

If they had to be rigorously classified into hard and fast
categories, comparatively few of the books in the lists that
follow would be rated as pure literature. Fewer would be
rated as history. A majority of them are the stuff of history.
The stuff out of which history is made is generally more vital
than formalized history, especially the histories habitually
forced on students in public schools, colleges, and universities.
There is no essential opposition between history and
literature. The attempt to study a people's literature apart
from their social and, to a less extent, their political history
is as illogical as the lady who said she had read Romeo but had
not yet got to Juliet. Nearly any kind of history is more
important than formal literary history showing how in a
literary way Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob.
Any man of any time who has ever written with vigor has
been immeasurably nearer to the dunghill on which he sank
his talons while crowing than to all literary ancestors.

A great deal of chronicle writing that makes no pretense
at being belles-lettres is really superior literature to much
that is so classified. I will vote three times a day and all night
for John C. Duval's _Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace_, Charlie
Siringo's _Riata and Spurs_, James B. Gillett's _Six Years with
the Texas Rangers_, and dozens of other straightaway chronicles
of the Southwest in preference to "The Culprit Fay" and
much other watery "literature" with which anthologies
representing the earlier stages of American writing are padded.
Ike Fridge's pamphlet story of his ridings for John Chisum--
chief provider of cattle for Billy the Kid to steal--has more
of the juice of reality in it and, therefore, more of literary
virtue than some of James Fenimore Cooper's novels, and
than some of James Russell Lowell's odes.

The one thing essential to writing if it is to be read, to art
if it is to be looked at, is vitality. No critic or professor can
be hired to pump vitality into any kind of human expression,
but professors and critics have taken it out of many a human
being who in his attempts to say something decided to be
correct at the expense of being himself--being natural,
being alive. The priests of literary conformity never had a
chance at the homemade chronicles of the Southwest.

The orderly way in which to study the Southwest would
be to take up first the land, its flora, fauna, climate, soils,
rivers, etc., then the aborigines, next the exploring and
settling Spaniards, and finally, after a hasty glance at the
French, the English-speaking people who brought the Southwest
to what it is today. We cannot proceed in this way, however.
Neither the prairies nor the Indians who first hunted
deer on them have left any records, other than hieroglyphic,
as to their lives. Some late-coming men have written about
them. Droughts and rains have had far more influence on
all forms of life in the Southwest and on all forms of its
development culturally and otherwise than all of the Coronado
expeditions put together. I have emphasized the literature
that reveals nature. My method has been to take up
types and subjects rather than to follow chronology.

Chronology is often an impediment to the acquiring of
useful knowledge. I am not nearly so much interested in
what happened in Abilene, Kansas, in 1867--the year that
the first herds of Texas Longhorns over the Chisholm Trail
found a market at that place--as I am in picking out of
Abilene in 1867 some thing that reveals the character of the
men who went up the trail, some thing that will illuminate
certain phenomena along the trail human beings of the
Southwest are going up today, some thing to awaken observation
and to enrich with added meaning this corner of the
earth of which we are the temporary inheritors.

By "literature of the Southwest" I mean writings that
interpret the region, whether they have been produced by
the Southwest or not. Many of them have not. What we are
interested in is life in the Southwest, and any interpreter of
that life, foreign or domestic, ancient or modern, is of value.

The term Southwest is variable because the boundaries
of the Southwest are themselves fluid, expanding and
contracting according to the point of view from which the
Southwest is viewed and according to whatever common
denominator is taken for defining it. The Spanish Southwest
includes California, but California regards itself as more
closely akin to the Pacific Northwest than to Texas;
California is Southwest more in an antiquarian way than other-
wise. From the point of view of the most picturesque and
imagination-influencing occupation of the Southwest, the
occupation of ranching, the Southwest might be said to run
up into Montana. Certainly one will have to go up the trail
to Montana to finish out the story of the Texas cowboy.
Early in the nineteenth century the Southwest meant
Tennessee, Georgia, and other frontier territory now regarded
as strictly South. The men and women who "redeemed Texas
from the wilderness" came principally from that region. The
code of conduct they gave Texas was largely the code of the
booming West. Considering the character of the Anglo-
American people who took over the Southwest, the region
is closer to Missouri than to Kansas, which is not Southwest
in any sense but which has had a strong influence on Oklahoma.
Chihuahua is more southwestern than large parts of
Oklahoma. In _Our Southwest_, Erna Fergusson has a whole
chapter on "What is the Southwest?" She finds Fort Worth
to be in the Southwest but Dallas, thirty miles east, to be
facing north and east. The principal areas of the Southwest
are, to have done with air-minded reservations, Arizona, New
Mexico, most of Texas, some of Oklahoma, and anything
else north, south, east, or west that anybody wants to bring
in. The boundaries of cultures and rainfall never follow
survey lines. In talking about the Southwest I naturally
incline to emphasize the Texas part of it.

Life is fluid, and definitions that would apprehend it
must also be. Yet I will venture one definition--not the
only one--of an educated person. An educated person is
one who can view with interest and intelligence the
phenomena of life about him. Like people elsewhere, the people
of the Southwest find the features of the land on which they
live blank or full of pictures according to the amount of
interest and intelligence with which they view the features.
Intelligence cannot be acquired, but interest can; and data
for interest and intelligence to act upon are entirely acquirable.

"Studies perfect nature," Bacon said. "Nature follows
art" to the extent that most of us see principally what our
attention has been called to. I might never have noticed rose-
purple snow between shadows if I had not seen a picture of
that kind of snow. I had thought white the only natural
color of snow. I cannot think of yew trees, which I have
never seen, without thinking of Wordsworth's poem on
three yew trees.

Nobody has written a memorable poem on the mesquite.
Yet the mesquite has entered into the social, economic, and
aesthetic life of the land; it has made history and has been
painted by artists. In the homely chronicles of the Southwest
its thorns stick, its roots burn into bright coals, its trunks
make fence posts, its lovely leaves wave. To live beside this
beautiful, often pernicious, always interesting and highly
characteristic tree--or bush--and to know nothing of its
significance is to be cheated out of a part of life. It is but one
of a thousand factors peculiar to the Southwest and to the
land's cultural inheritance.

For a long time, as he tells in his _Narrative_, Cabeza de
Vaca was a kind of prisoner to coastal Indians of Texas.
Annually, during the season when prickly pear apples
(_tunas_, or Indian figs, as they are called in books) were ripe,
these Indians would go upland to feed on the fruit. During
his sojourn with them Cabeza de Vaca went along. He
describes how the Indians would dig a hole in the ground,
squeeze the fruit out of _tunas_ into the hole, and then swill
up big drinks of it. Long ago the Indians vanished, but
prickly pears still flourish over millions of acres of land. The
prickly pear is one of the characteristic growths of the Southwest.
Strangers look at it and regard it as odd. Painters look
at it in bloom or in fruit and strive to capture the colors.
During the droughts ranchmen singe the thorns off its
leaves, using a flame-throwing machine, easily portable by a
man on foot, fed from a small gasoline tank. From Central
Texas on down into Central America prickly pear acts as
host for the infinitesimal insect called cochineal, which
supplied the famous dyes of Aztec civilization.

A long essay might be written on prickly pear. It weaves
in and out of many chronicles of the Southwest. A. J. Sowell,
one of the best chroniclers of Texas pioneer life, tells in his
life of Bigfoot Wallace how that picturesque ranger captain
once took one of his wounded men away from an army surgeon
because the surgeon would not apply prickly pear
poultices to the wound. In _Rangers and Pioneers of Texas_,
Sowell narrates how rattlesnakes were so large and numerous
in a great prickly pear flat out from the Nueces River that
rangers pursuing bandits had to turn back. Nobody has
written a better description of a prickly pear flat than
O. Henry in his story of "The Caballero's Way."

People may look at prickly pear, and it will be just prickly
pear and nothing more. Or they may look at it and find it
full of significances; the mere sight of a prickly pear may
call up a chain of incidents, facts, associations. A mind that
can thus look out on the common phenomena of life is rich,
and all of the years of the person whose mind is thus stored
will be more interesting and full.

Cabeza de Vaca's _Narrative_, the chronicles of A. J.
Sowell, and O. Henry's story are just three samples of
southwestern literature that bring in prickly pear. No active-
minded person who reads any one of these three samples will
ever again look at prickly pear in the same light that he
looked at it before he read. Yet prickly pear is just one of
hundreds of manifestations of life in the Southwest that
writers have commented on, told stories about, dignified
with significance.

Cotton no longer has the economic importance to Texas
that it once had. Still, it is mighty important. In the minds
of millions of farm people of the South, cotton and the boll
weevil are associated. The boll weevil was once a curse; then
it came to be somewhat regarded as a disguised blessing--in
limiting production.
     De first time I seen de boll weevil,
          He was a-settin' on de square.
     Next time I seen him, he had all his family dere--
          Jest a-lookin' foh a home, jest a-lookin' foh a home.

A man dependent on cotton for a living and having that
living threatened by the boll weevil will not be much interested
in ballads, but for the generality of people this boll
weevil ballad--the entirety of which is a kind of life history
of the insect--is, while delightful in itself, a veritable story-
book on the weevil. Without the ballad, the weevil's effect
on economic history would be unchanged; but as respects
mind and imagination, the ballad gives the weevil all sorts
of significances. The ballad is a part of the literature of
the Southwest.

But I am assigning too many motives of self-improvement
to reading. People read for fun, for pleasure. The literature
of the Southwest affords bully reading.

"If I had read as much as other men, I would know as
little," Thomas Hobbes is credited with having said. A student
in the presence of Bishop E. D. Mouzon was telling
about the scores and scores of books he had read. At a pause
the bishop shook his long, wise head and remarked, "My son,
when DO you get time to think?" Two of the best educated
men I have ever had the fortune of talking with were neither
schooled nor widely read. They were extraordinary observers.
One was a plainsman, Charles Goodnight; the other was a
borderer, Don Alberto Guajardo, in part educated by an old
Lipan Indian.

But here are the books. I list them not so much to give
knowledge as to direct people with intellectual curiosity and
with interest in their own land to the sources of knowledge;
not to create life directly, but to point out where it has
been created or copied. On some of the books I have made
brief observations. Those observations can never be nearly
so important to a reader as the development of his own
powers of observation. With something of an apologetic
feeling I confess that I have read, in my way, most of the
books. I should probably have been a wiser and better
informed man had I spent more time out with the grasshoppers,
horned toads, and coyotes.
November 5, 1942              J. FRANK DOBIE



_2_

Interpreters of the Land

"HE'S FOR A JIG or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps." Thought
employs ideas, but having an idea is not the same thing as
thinking. A rooster in a pen of hens has an idea. Thought
has never been so popular with mankind as horse opera, horse
play, the main idea behind sheep's eyes. Far be it from me
to feel contempt for people who cannot and do not want
to think. The human species has not yet evolved to the stage
at which thought is natural. I am far more at ease lying in
grass and gazing without thought process at clouds than in
sitting in a chair trying to be logical. Just the same, free play
of mind upon life is the essence of good writing, and intellectual
activity is synonymous with critical interpretations.

To the constant disregard of thought, Americans of the
mid-twentieth century have added positive opposition. Critical
ideas are apt to make any critic suspected of being
subversive. The Southwest, Texas especially, is more articulately
aware of its land spaces than of any other feature pertaining
to itself. Yet in the realm of government, the Southwest has
not produced a single spacious thinker. So far as the cultural
ancestry of the region goes, the South has been arid of
thought since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the much talked-
of mind of John C. Calhoun being principally casuistic; on
another side, derivatives from the Spanish Inquisition could
contribute to thought little more than tribal medicine men
have contributed.

Among historians of the Southwest the general rule has
been to be careful with facts and equally careful in avoiding
thought-provoking interpretations. In the multitudinous
studies on Spanish-American history all padres are "good"
and all conquistadores are "intrepid," and that is about as
far as interpretation goes. The one state book of the
Southwest that does not chloroform ideas is Erna Fergusson's _New
Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples_ (Knopf, New York,
1952). Essayical in form, it treats only of the consequential.
It evaluates from the point of view of good taste, good sense,
and an urbane comprehension of democracy. The subject is
provincial, but the historian transcends all provincialism. Her
sympathy does not stifle conclusions unusable in church or
chamber of commerce propaganda. In brief, a cultivated
mind can take pleasure in this interpretation of New Mexico
--and that marks it as a solitary among the histories of
neighboring states.

The outstanding historical interpreter of the Southwest
is Walter Prescott Webb, of the University of Texas. _The
Great Plains_ utilizes chronology to explain the presence of
man on the plains; it is primarily a study in cause and effect,
of water and drought, of adaptations and lack of adaptations,
of the land's growth into human imagination as well as
economic institutions. Webb uses facts to get at meanings. He
fulfils Emerson's definition of Scholar: "Man Thinking." In
_Divided We Stand_ he goes into machinery, the feudalism of
corporation-dominated economy, the economic supremacy of
the North over the South and the West. In _The Great Frontier_
(Houghton Mifilin, Boston, 1952) he considers the
Western Hemisphere as a frontier for Europe--a frontier
that brought about the rise of democracy and capitalism and
that, now vanished as a frontier, foreshadows the vanishment
of democracy and capitalism.

In _Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and
a Myth_ (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1950) Henry Nash Smith plows deep. But the tools of this
humanistic historian are of delicate finish rather than of
horsepower. To him, thinking is a joyful process and lucidity
out of complexity is natural. He compasses Parrington's
_Main Currents in American Thought_ and Beadle's Dime
Novels along with agriculture and manufacturing. Excepting
the powerful books by Walter Prescott Webb, not since
Frederick Jackson Turner, in 1893, presented his famous
thesis on "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History" has such a revealing evaluation of frontier movements
appeared As a matter of fact, Henry Nash Smith leaves
Turner's ideas on the dependence of democracy upon farmers
without more than one leg to stand upon. Not being a King
Canute, he does not take sides for or against social evolution.
With the clearest eyes imaginable, he looks into it. Turner's
_The Frontier in American History_ (1920) has been a fertile
begetter of interpretations of history.

Instead of being the usual kind of jokesmith book or
concatenation of tall tales, _Folk Laughter on the American
Frontier_ by Mody C. Boatright (Macmillan, New York,
1949) goes into the human and social significances of humor.
Of boastings, anecdotal exaggerations, hide-and-hair metaphors,
stump and pulpit parables, tenderfoot baitings, and
the like there is plenty, but thought plays upon them and
arranges them into patterns of social history.

Mary Austin (1868-1934) is an interpreter of nature,
which for her includes naturally placed human beings as
much as naturally placed antelopes and cacti. She wrote _The
American Rhythm_ on the theory that authentic poetry expresses
the rhythms of that patch of earth to which the poet
is rooted. Rhythm is experience passed into the subconscious
and is "distinct from our intellectual perception of it."
Before they can make true poetry, English-speaking Americans
will be in accord with "the run of wind in tall grass" as
were the Pueblo Indians when Europeans discovered them.
But Mary Austin's primary importance is not as a theorist.
Her spiritual depth is greater than her intellectual. She is a
translator of nature through concrete observations. She interprets
through character sketches, folk tales, novels. "Anybody
can write facts about a country," she said. She infuses
fact with understanding and imagination. In _Lost Borders_,
_The Land of Little Rain_, _The Land of Journey's Ending_, and
_The Flock_ the land itself often seems to speak, but often she
gets in its way. She sees "with an eye made quiet by the power
of harmony." _Earth Horizons_, a stubborn book, is Mary
Austin's inner autobiography. _The Beloved House_, by T. M.
Pearce (Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1940), is an understanding
biography.

Joseph Wood Krutch of Columbia University spent a
year in Arizona, near Tucson. Instead of talking about his
_The Desert Year_ (Sloane, New York, 1952), I quote a
representative paragraph:

In New England the struggle for existence is visibly the struggle of
plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the
spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned,
would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of
plant against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting
factor is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if this is, perhaps,
one of the things which makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of
peace one does not find elsewhere. The struggle of living thing against
living thing can be distressing in a way that a mere battle with the
elements is not. If some great clump of cactus dies this summer it will
be because the cactus has grown beyond the capacity of its roots to
get water, not because one green fellow creature has bested it in some
limb-to-limb struggle. In my more familiar East the crowding of the
countryside seems almost to parallel the crowding of the cities. Out
here there is, even in nature, no congestion.


_Southwest_, by Laura Adams Armer (New York, 1935,
OP) came from long living and brooding in desert land. It
says something beautiful.

_Talking to the Moon_, by John Joseph Mathews (University
of Chicago Press, 1945) is set in the blackjack country
of eastern Oklahoma. This Oxford scholar of Osage blood
built his ranch house around a fireplace, flanked by shelves
of books. His observations are of the outside, but they are
informed by reflections made beside a fire. They are not
bookish at all, but the spirits of great writers mingle with
echoes of coyote wailing and wood-thrush singing.

_Sky Determines: An Interpretation of the Southwest_, by
Ross Calvin (New York, 1934; republished by the University
of New Mexico Press) lives up to its striking title. The
introductory words suggest the essence of the book:

In New Mexico whatever is both old and peculiar appears upon examination
to have a connection with the arid climate. Peculiarities range
from the striking adaptations of the flora onward to those of fauna,
and on up to those of the human animal. Sky determines. And the
writer once having picked up the trail followed it with certainty, and
indeed almost inevitably, as it led from ecology to anthropology and
economics.


Cultivated intellect is the highest form of civilization.
It is inseparable from the arts, literature, architecture. In any
civilized land, birds, trees, flowers, animals, places, human
contributors to life out of the past, all are richer and more
significant because of representations through literature and
art. No literate person can listen to a skylark over an English
meadow without hearing in its notes the melodies of Chaucer
and Shelley. As the Southwest advances in maturity of mind
and civilization, the features of the land take on accretions
from varied interpreters.

It is not necessary for an interpreter to write a whole
book about a feature to bring out its significance. We need
more gossipy books--something in the manner of _Pinon
Country_ by Haniel Long (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New
York, 1941), in which one can get a swift slant on Billy the
Kid, smell the pinon trees, feel the deeply religious attitude
toward his corn patch of a Zuni Indian. Roy Bedichek's
chapters on the mockingbird, in _Adventures with a Texas
Naturalist_, are like rich talk under a tree on a pleasant patch
of ground staked out for his claim by an April-voiced
mockingbird. In _The Voice of the Coyote_ I tried to compass the
whole animal, and I should think that the "Father of Song-
Making" chapter might make coyote music and the night
more interesting and beautiful for any listener. Intelligent
writers often interpret without set purpose, and many books
under various categories in this _Guide_ are interpretative.



_3_

General Helps

THERE IS no chart to the Life and Literature of the Southwest.
An attempt to put it all into an alphabetically arranged
encyclopedia would be futile. All guides to knowledge are too
long or too short. This one at the outset adds to its length--
perhaps to its usefulness--by citing other general reference
works and a few anthologies.

_Books of the Southwest: A General Bibliography_, by Mary
Tucker, published by J. J. Augustin, New York, 1937, is better
on Indians and the Spanish period than on Anglo-American
culture. _Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with
Bibliography_, by Mabel Major, Rebecca W. Smith, and T. M.
Pearce, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1938,
revised 1948, takes up the written material under the time-
established heads of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, etc., with due
respect to chronological development. _A Treasury of Southern
Folklore_, 1949, and _A Treasury of Western Folklore_, 1951,
both edited by B. A. Botkin and both published by Crown, New
York, are so liberal in the extensions of folklore and so
voluminous that they amount to literary anthologies.

Of possible use in working out certain phases of life and
literature common to the Southwest as well as to the West
and Middle West are the following academic treatises: _The
Frontier in American Literature_, by Lucy Lockwood Hazard,
New York, 1927; _The Literature of the Middle Western
Frontier_, by Ralph Leslie Rusk, New York, 1925; _The Prairie
and the Making of Middle America_, by Dorothy Anne Dondore,
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1926; _The Literature of the Rocky_
Mountain West 1803-1903_, by L. J. Davidson and P. Bostwick,
Caldwell, Idaho, 1939; and _The Rediscovery of the Frontier_,
by Percy H. Boynton, Chicago, 1931. Anyone interested in
vitality in any phase of American writing will find Vernon L.
Parrington's _Main Currents in American Thought_ (three
vols.), New York, 1927-39, an opener-up of avenues.

Perhaps the best anthology of southwestern narratives is
_Golden Tales of the Southwest_, selected by Mary L. Becker,
New York, 1939. Two anthologies of southwestern writings are
_Southwesterners Write_, edited by T. M. Pearce and A. P.
Thomason, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946,
and _Roundup Time_, edited by George Sessions Perry,
Whittlesey House, New York, 1943. Themes common to the
Southwest are represented in _Western Prose and Poetry_, an
anthology put together by Rufus A. Coleman, New York, 1932,
and in _Mid Country: Writings from the Heart of America_,
edited by Lowry C. Wimberly, University of Nebraska Press,
Lincoln, 1945.

For the southern tradition that has flowed into the Southwest
Franklin J. Meine's _Tall Tales of the Southwest_, New York,
1930, OP, is the best anthology published. It is the best
anthology of any kind that I know of. _A Southern Treasury of
Life and Literature_, selected by Stark Young, New York, 1937,
brings in Texas.

Anthologies of poetry are listed under the heading of "Poetry
and Drama." The outstanding state bibliography of the region
is _A Bibliography of Texas_, by C. W. Raines, Austin, 1896.
Since this is half a century behind the times, its usefulness
is limited. At that, it is more useful than the shiftless,
hit-and-miss, ignorance-revealing _South of Forty: From the
Mississippi to the Rio Grande: A Bibliography_, by Jesse L.
Rader, Norman, Oklahoma, 1947. Henry R. Wagner's _The Plains
and the Rockies_, "a contribution to the bibliography of
original narratives of travel and adventure, 1800-1865," which
came out 1920-21, was revised and extended by Charles L. Camp
and reprinted in 1937. It is stronger on overland travel than
on anything else, only in part covers the
Southwest, and excludes a greater length of time than Raines's
_Bibliography_. Now published by Long's College Book Co.,
Columbus, Ohio.

Mary G. Boyer's _Arizona in Literature_, Glendale, California,
1934, is an anthology that runs toward six hundred pages.
_Texas Prose Writings_, by Sister M. Agatha, Dallas, 1936, OP,
is a meaty, critical survey. L. W. Payne's handbook-sized _A
Survey of Texas Literature_, Chicago, 1928, is complemented by
a chapter entitled "Literature and Art in Texas" by J. Frank
Dobie in _The Book of Texas_, New York, 1929. OP.

_A Guide to Materials Bearing on Cultural Relations in New
Mexico_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1944, is
so logical and liberal-minded that in some respects it amounts
to a bibliography of the whole Southwest; it recognizes the
overriding of political boundaries by ideas, human types, and
other forms of culture. The _New Mexico Quarterly_, published
by the University of New Mexico, furnishes periodically a
bibliographical record of contemporary literature of the
Southwest. _New Mexico's Own Chronicle_, edited by Maurice G.
Fulton and Paul Horgan (Dallas, 1937, OP), is an anthology
strong on the historical side.

In the lists that follow, the symbol OP indicates that the
book is out of print. Many old books obviously out of print
are not so tagged.



_4_

Indian Culture; Pueblos and Navajos

THE LITERATURE on the subject of Indians is so extensive and
ubiquitous that, unless a student of Americana is pursuing it,
he may find it more troublesome to avoid than to get hold of.
The average old-timer has for generations regarded Indian
scares and fights as the most important theme for
reminiscences. County-minded historians have taken the same
point of view. The Bureau of American Ethnology of the
Smithsonian Institution has buried records of Indian beliefs,
ceremonies, mythology, and other folklore in hundreds of
tomes; laborious, literal-minded scholars of other
institutions have been as assiduous. In all this lore and
tabulation of facts, the Indian folk themselves have generally
been dried out.

The Anglo-American's policy toward the Indian was to kill him
and take his land, perhaps make a razor-strop out of his hide.
The Spaniard's policy was to baptize him, take his land,
enslave him, and appropriate his women. Any English-speaking
frontiersman who took up with the Indians was dubbed "squaw
man"--a term of sinister connotations. Despite pride in
descending from Pocahontas and in the vaunted Indian blood of
such individuals as Will Rogers, crossbreeding between Anglo-
Americans and Indians has been restricted, as compared, for
instance, with the interdicted crosses between white men and
black women. The Spaniards, on the other hand, crossed in
battalions with the Indians, generating _mestizo_ (mixed-
blooded) nations, of which Mexico is the chief example.

As a result, the English-speaking occupiers of the land have
in general absorbed directly only a minimum of Indian
culture--nothing at all comparable to the Uncle Remus stories
and characters and the spiritual songs and the blues music
from the Negroes. Grandpa still tells how his own grandpa
saved or lost his scalp during a Comanche horse-stealing raid
in the light of the moon; Boy Scouts hunt for Indian
arrowheads; every section of the country has a bluff called
Lovers' Leap, where, according to legend, a pair of forlorn
Indian lovers, or perhaps only one of the pair, dived to
death; the maps all show Caddo Lake, Kiowa Peak, Squaw Creek,
Tehuacana Hills, Nacogdoches town, Cherokee County, Indian
Gap, and many another place name derived from Indian days. All
such contacts with Indian life are exterior. Three forms of
Indian culture are, however, weaving into the life patterns of
America.

(1) The Mexicans have naturally inherited and assimilated
Indian lore about plants, animals, places, all kinds of human
relationships with the land. Through the Mexican medium, with
which he is becoming more sympathetic, the gringo is getting
the ages-old Indian culture.

(2) The Pueblo and Navajo Indians in particular are impressing
their arts, crafts, and ways of life upon special groups of
Americans living near them, and these special groups are
transmitting some of their acquisitions. The special groups
incline to be arty and worshipful, but they express a salutary
revolt against machined existence and they have done much to
revive dignity in Indian life. Offsetting dilettantism, the
Museum of New Mexico and associated institutions and artists
and other individuals have fostered Indian pottery, weaving,
silversmithing, dancing, painting, and other arts and crafts.
Superior craftsmanship can now depend upon a fairly reliable
market; the taste of American buyers has been somewhat
elevated.

          O mountains, pure and holy, give me
     a song, a strong and holy song to bless
     my flock and bring the rain!

This is from "Navajo Holy Song," as rendered by Edith
Hart Mason. It expresses a spiritual content in Indian life
far removed from the We and God, Incorporated form of religion
ordained by the National Association of Manufacturers.

(3) The wild freedom, mobility, and fierce love of liberty of
the mounted Indians of the Plains will perhaps always stir
imaginations--something like the charging Cossacks, the
camping Arabs, and the migrating Tartars. There is no romance
in Indian fights east of the Mississippi. The mounted Plains
Indians always made a big hit in Buffalo Bill's Wild West
Show. Little boys still climb into their seats and cry out
when red horsemen of the Plains ride across the screen.

See "Apaches, Comanches, and Other Plains Indians," "Mountain
Men."


APPLEGATE, FRANK G. _Indian Stories from the Pueblos_,
Philadelphia, 1929. Charming. OP.

ASTROV, MARGOT (editor), _The Winged Serpent_, John Day, New
York, 1946. An anthology of prose and poetry by American
Indians. Here are singular expressions of beauty and dignity.

AUSTIN, MARY. _The Trail Book_, 1918, OP; _One-Smoke Stories_,
1934, Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Delightful folk tales, each
leading to a vista.

BANDELIER, A. F. _The Delight Makers_, 1918, Dodd, Mead, New
York. Historical fiction on ancient pueblo life.

COOLIDGE, DANE and MARY. _The Navajo Indians_, Boston, 1930.
Readable; bibliography. OP.

COOLIDGE, MARY ROBERTS. _The Rain-Makers_, Boston, 1929. OP.
This thorough treatment of the Indians of Arizona and New
Mexico contains an excellent account of the Hopi snake
ceremony for bringing rain. During any severe drought numbers
of Christians in the Southwest pray without snakes. It always
rains eventually--and the prayer-makers naturally take the
credit. The Hopis put on a more spectacular show. See Dr.
Walter Hough's _The Hopi Indians_, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1915.
OP.

CUSHING, FRANK HAMILTON. _Zuni Folk Tales_, 1901; reprinted,
1931, by Knopf, New York. _My Adventures in Zuni_, Santa Fe,
1941. _Zuni Breadstuff_, Museum of the American Indian, New
York, 1920. Cushing had rare imagination and sympathy. His
retellings of tales are far superior to verbatim recordings.
_Zuni Breadstuff_ reveals more of Indian spirituality than
any other book I can name. All OP.

DEHUFF, ELIZABETH. _Tay Tay's Tales_, 1922; _Tay Tay's
Memories_, 1924. OP.

DOUGLAS, FREDERIC H., and D HARNONCOURT, RENE. _Indian Art
of the United States_, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1941.

DYK, WALTER. _Son of Old Man Hat_, New York, 1938. OP.

FERGUSSON, ERNA. _Dancing Gods_, Knopf, New York, 1931. Erna
Fergusson is always illuminating.

FOREMAN, GRANT. _Indians and Pioneers_, 1930, and _Advancing
the Frontier_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1933.
Grant Foreman is prime authority on the so-called "Civilized
Tribes." University of Oklahoma Press has published a number
of excellent volumes in "The Civilization of the American
Indian" series.

GILLMOR, FRANCES, and WETHERILL, LOUISA WADE. _Traders to the
Navajos_, Boston, 1936; reprinted by University of New Mexico
Press, Albuquerque, 1952. An account not only of the trading
post Wetherills but of the Navajos as human beings, with
emphasis on their spiritual qualities.

GODDARD, P. E. _Indians of the Southwest_, New York, 1921.
Excellent outline of exterior facts. OP.

HAMILTON, CHARLES (editor). _Cry of the Thunderbird_,
Macmillan, New York, 1951. An anthology of writings by Indians
containing many interesting leads.

HEWETT, EDGAR L. _Ancient Life in the American Southwest_,
Indianapolis, 1930. OP. A master work in both archeology and
Indian nature. (With Bertha P. Dretton) _The Pueblo Indian
World_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1945.

HODGE, F. W. _Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico_,
Washington, D. C., 1907. Indispensable encyclopedia, by a very
great scholar and a very fine gentleman. OP.

LABARRE, WESTON. _The Peyote Cult_, Yale University Press, New
Haven, 1938.

LAFARGE, OLIVER. _Laughing Boy_, Boston, 1929. The Navajo in
fiction.

LUMMIS, C. F. _Mesa, Canon, and Pueblo_, New York, 1925;
_Pueblo Indian Folk Tales_, New York, 1910. Lummis, though
self-vaunting and opinionated, opens windows.

MATTHEWS, WASHINGTON. _Navajo Legends_, Boston, 1897; _Navajo
Myths, Prayers and Songs_, Berkeley, California, 1907.

MOONEY, JAMES. _Myths of the Cherokees_, in Nineteenth Annual
Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1902.
Outstanding writing.

NELSON, JOHN LOUW. _Rhythm for Rain_, Boston, 1937. Based on
ten years spent with the Hopi Indians, this study of their
life is a moving story of humanity. OP.

PEARCE, J. E. _Tales That Dead Men Tell_, University of Texas
Press, Austin, 1935. Eloquent, liberating to the human mind;
something rare for Texas scholarship. Pearce was professor of
anthropology at the University of Texas, an emancipator from
prejudices and ignorance. It is a pity that all the college
students who are forced by the bureaucrats of Education--
Education spelled with a capital E--"the unctuous elaboration
of the obvious"--do not take anthropology instead. Collegians
would then stand a chance of becoming educated.

PETRULLO, VICENZO. _The Diabolic Root: A Study of Peyotism,
the New Indian Religion, among the Delawares_, University of
Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1934. The use of peyote has
now spread northwest into Canada. See Milly Peacock Stenberg's
_The Peyote Culture among Wyoming Indians_, University of
Wyoming Publications, Laramie, 1946, for bibliography.

REICHARD, GLADYS A. _Spider Woman_, 1934, and _Dezba Woman of
the Desert_, 1939. Both honest, both OP.

SIMMONS, LEO W. (editor). _Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a
Hopi Indian_, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1942. The
clearest view into the mind and living ways, including sex
life, of an Indian that has been published. Few
autobiographers have been clearer; not one has been franker. A
singular human document.

{illust}



_5_

Apaches, Comanches, and Other Plains Indians

THE APACHES and the bareback Indians of the Plains were
extraordinary _hombres del campo--_men of the outdoors,
plainsmen, woodsmen, trailers, hunters, endurers. They knew
some phases of nature with an intimacy that few civilized
naturalists ever attain to. It is unfortunate that most of the
literature about them is from their enemies. Yet an enemy
often teaches a man more than his friends and makes him work
harder.

See "Indian Culture," "Texas Rangers."


BOURKE, JOHN G. _On the Border with Crook_, London, 1892.
Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. A truly
great book, on both Apaches and Arizona frontier. Bourke had
amplitude, and he knew.

BUCKELEW, F. M. _The Indian Captive_, Bandera, Texas, 1925.
Homely and realistic. OP.

CATLIN, GEORGE. _Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and
Conditions of the North American Indians, Written during Eight
Years' Travel, 1832-39_, 1841. Despite many strictures,
Catlin's two volumes remain standard. I am pleased to find
Frank Roe, in _The North American Buffalo_, standing up for
him. In _Pursuit of the Horizon: A Life of George Catlin,
Painter and Recorder of the American Indian_, New York, 1948,
Loyd Haberly fails in evaluating evidence but brings out the
man's career and character.

CLUM, WOODWORTH. _Apache Agent_, Boston, 1936. Worthy
autobiography of a noble understander of the Apache people.
OP.

COMFORT, WILL LEVINGTON. _Apache_, Dutton, New York, 1931.
Noble; vivid; semifiction.

DAVIS, BRITTON. _The Truth about Geronimo_, Yale University
Press, New Haven, 1929. Davis helped run Geronimo down.

DESHIELDS, JAMES T. _Cynthia Ann Parker_, St. Louis, 1886;
reprinted 1934. Good narrative of noted woman captive. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Mustangs_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1952.
The opening chapters of this book distil a great deal of
research by scholars on Plains Indian acquisition of horses,
riding, and raiding.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. _The Cheyenne Indians_, New Haven,
1923. This two-volume work supersedes _The Fighting
Cheyennes_, 1915. It is noble, ample, among the most select
books on Plains Indians. _Blackfoot Lodge Tales: The Story of
a Prairie People_, 1892, shows Grinnell's skill as storyteller
at its best. _Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk Tales_, 1893, is
hardly an equal but it reveals the high values of life held by
representatives of the original plainsmen. _The Story of the
Indian_, 1895, is a general survey. All OP. Grinnell's
knowledge and power as a writer on Indians and animals has not
been sufficiently recognized. He combined in a rare manner
scholarship, plainsmanship, and the worldliness of publishing.


{illust. caption =
George Catlin, in _North American Indians_ (1841)}



HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Fort Concho and the Texas Frontier_, San
Angelo Standard-Times, San Angelo, Texas, 1952. Mainly a
history of military activities against Comanches and other
tribes, laced with homilies on the free enterprise virtues of
the conquerors.

LEE, NELSON. _Three Years among the Comanches_, 1859.

LEHMAN, HERMAN. _Nine Years with the Indians_, Bandera, Texas,
1927. Best captive narrative of the Southwest.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _The Apache Indians_, Macmillan, New York,
1938. Factual history.

LONG LANCE, CHIEF BUFFALO CHILD. _Long Lance_, New York, 1928.
OP. Long Lance was a Blackfoot only by adoption, but his
imagination incorporated him into tribal life more powerfully
than blood could have. He is said to have been a North
Carolina mixture of Negro and Croatan Indian; he was a
magnificent specimen of manhood with swart Indian complexion.
He fought in the Canadian army during World War I and thus
became acquainted with the Blackfeet. No matter what the facts
of his life, he wrote a vivid and moving autobiography of a
Blackfoot Indian in whom the spirit of the tribe and the
natural life of the Plains during buffalo days were
incorporated. In 1932 in the California home of Anita Baldwin,
daughter of the spectacular "Lucky" Baldwin, he absented
himself from this harsh world by a pistol shot.

LOWIE, ROBERT H. _The Crow Indians_, New York, 1935. This
scholar and anthropologist lived with the Crow Indians to
obtain intimate knowledge and then wrote this authoritative
book. OP.

MCALLISTER, J. GILBERT. "Kiowa-Apache Tales," in _The Sky Is
My Tipi_, edited by Mody C. Boatright (Texas Folklore Society
Publication XXII), Southern Methodist University Press,
Dallas, 1949. Wise in exposition; true-to-humanity and
delightful in narrative.

MCGILLICUDDY, JULIA B. _McGillicuddy Agent_, Stanford
University Press, California, 1941. Dr. Valentine T.
McGillicuddy, Scotch in stubbornness, honesty, efficiency, and
indi-
vidualism, was U.S. Indian agent to the Sioux and knew them to
the bottom. In the end he was defeated by the army mind and
the bloodsuckers known as the "Indian Ring." The elements of
nobility that distinguish the man distinguish his wife's
biography of him.

MCLAUGHLIN, JAMES. My _Friend the Indian_, 1910, 1926. OP.
McLaughlin was U.S. Indian agent and inspector for half a
century. Despite priggishness, he had genuine sympathy for the
Indians; he knew the Sioux, Nez Perces, and Cheyennes
intimately, and few books on Indian plainsmen reveal so much
as his.

MARRIOTT, ALICE. _The Ten Grandmothers_, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1945. Narratives of the Kiowas--a
complement to James Mooney's _Calendar History of the Kiowa
Indians_, in Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of
Ethnology, Washington, 1893. Alice Marriott, author of other
books on Indians, combines ethnological science with the art
of writing.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. _Wah'Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White
Man's Road_, University of Oklahoma Press, 1932. This book of
essays on the character of and certain noble characters among
the Great Osages, including their upright agent Leban J.
Miles, has profound spiritual qualities.

NEIHARDT, JOHN G. _Black Elk Speaks_, New York, 1932. OP.
Black Elk was a holy man of the Ogalala Sioux. The story of
his life as he told it to understanding John G. Neihardt is
more of mysteries and spiritual matters than of mundane
affairs.

RICHARDSON, R. N. _The Comanche Barrier to the South Plains_,
Glendale, California, 1933. Factual history.

RISTER, CARL C. _Border Captives_, University of Oklahoma
Press, Norman, 1940.

RUXTON, GEORGE F. _Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky
Mountains_, London, 1847. Vivid on Comanche raids. See Ruxton
in "Surge of Life in the West."

SCHULTZ, J. W. _My Life as an Indian_, 1907. OP. In this
autobiographical narrative of the life of a white man with a
Blackfoot woman, facts have probably been arranged, incidents
added. Whatever his method, the author achieved a remarkable
human document. It is true not only to Indian life in general
but in particular to the life of a "squaw man" and his loved
and loving mate. Among other authentic books by Schultz is
_With the Indians of the Rockies_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,
1912.

SMITH, C. L. and J. D. _The Boy Captives_, Bandera, Texas,
1927. A kind of classic in homeliness. OP.

VESTAL, STANLEY. _Sitting Bull_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,
1932. Excellent biography. OP.

WALLACE, ERNEST, and HOEBEL, E. ADAMSON. _The Comanches: Lords
of the South Plains_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman,
1952. A wide-compassing and interesting book on a powerful and
interesting people.

WELLMAN, PAUL I. _Death on the Prairie_ (1934), _Death in the
Desert_ (1935); both reprinted in _Death on Horseback_, 1947.
All OP. Graphic history, mostly in narrative, of the struggle
of Plains and Apache Indians to hold their homelands against
the whites.

WILBARGER, J. W. _Indian Depredations in Texas_, 1889;
reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Its stirring narratives made
this a household book among Texans of the late nineteenth
century.



_6_

Spanish-Mexican Strains

THE MEXICAN Revolution that began in 1910 resulted in a rich
development of the native cultural elements of Mexico, the art
of Diego Rivera being one of the highlights of this
development. The native culture is closer to the Mexican earth
and to the indigenes than to Spain, notwithstanding modern
insistence on the Latin in Latin-American culture.

The Spaniards, through Mexico, have had an abiding influence
on the architecture and language of the Southwest. They gave
us our most distinctive occupation, ranching on the open
range. They influenced mining greatly, and our land titles and
irrigation laws still go back to Spanish and Mexican sources.
After more than a hundred years of occupation of Texas and
almost that length of time in other parts of the Southwest,
the English-speaking Americans still have the rich
accumulations of lore pertaining to coyotes, mesquites,
prickly pear, and many other plants and animals to learn from
the Mexicans, who got their lore partly from intimate living
with nature but largely through Indian ancestry.

See "Fighting Texians," "Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail."

AIKEN, RILEY. "A Pack Load of Mexican Tales," in _Puro
Mexicano_, published by Texas Folklore Society, 1935. Now
published by Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas.
Delightful.

ALEXANDER, FRANCES (and others). _Mother Goose on the Rio
Grande_, Banks Upshaw, Dallas, 1944. Charming rhymes in both
Spanish and English in charming form.

APPLEGATE, FRANK G. _Native Tales of New Mexico_,
Philadelphia, 1932. Delicious; the real thing. OP.

ATHERTON, GERTRUDE. _The Splendid Idle Forties_, New York,
1902. Romance of Mexican California.

AUSTIN, MARY. _One-Smoke Stories_, Boston, 1934. Short tales
of Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, also of Indians.

BANDELIER, A. F. _The Gilded Man_, New York, 1873. The dream
of El Dorado.

BARCA, MADAM CALDERON DE LA. _Life in Mexico_, 1843; reprinted
by Dutton about 1930. Among books on Mexican life to be ranked
first both in readability and revealing qualities.

BELL, HORACE. _On the Old West Coast_, New York, 1930. A
golden treasury of anecdotes. OP.

BENTLEY, HAROLD W. _A Dictionary of Spanish Terms in English_,
New York, 1932. In a special way this book reveals the
Spanish-Mexican influence on life in the Southwest; it also
guides to books in English that reflect this influence. OP.

BISHOP, MORRIS. _The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca_, New York,
1933. Better written than Cabeza de Vaca's own narrative. OP.

BLANCO, ANTONIO FIERRO DE. _The Journey of the Flame_, Boston,
1933. Bully and flavorsome; the Californias. OP.

BOLTON, HERBERT E. _Spanish Exploration in the Southwest_,
1916. The cream of explorer narratives, well edited. _Coronado
on the Turquoise Trail_ (originally published in New York,
1949, under the title _Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and
Plains_; now issued by University of New Mexico Press,
Albuquerque). By his own work and by directing other scholars,
Dr. Bolton has surpassed all other American
historians of his time in output on Spanish-American history.
_Coronado_ is the climax of his many volumes. Its fault is
being too worshipful of everything Spanish and too uncritical.
A little essay on Coronado in Haniel Long's _Pinon Country_
goes a good way to put this belegended figure into proper
perspective.

BRENNER, ANITA. _Idols Behind Altars_, 1929. OP. The pagan
worship that endures among Mexican Indians. _The Wind that
Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-
1942_, 1943, OP. _Your Mexican Holiday_, revised 1947. No
writer on modern Mexico has a clearer eye or clearer intellect
than Anita Brenner; she maintains good humor in her realism
and never lapses into phony romance.

CABEZA DE VACA'S _Narrative_. Any translation procurable. One
is included in _Spanish Explorers in the Southern United
States_, edited by F. W. Hodge and T. H. Lewis, now published
by Barnes & Noble, New York.

The most dramatic and important aftermath of Cabeza de Vaca's
twisted walk across the continent was Coronado's search for
the Seven Cities of Cibola. Coronado's precursor was Fray
Marcos de Niza. _The Journey of Fray Marcos de Niza_, by Cleve
Hallenbeck, with illustrations and decorations by Jose
Cisneros, is one of the most beautiful books in format
published in America. It was designed and printed by Carl
Hertzog of El Paso, printer without peer between the Atlantic
and the Pacific, and is issued by Southern Methodist
University Press, Dallas.

CASTAnEDA'S narrative of Coronado's expedition. Winship's
translation is preferred. It is included in _Spanish Explorers
in the Southern United States_, cited above.

CATHER, WILLA. _Death Comes for the Archbishop_, Knopf, New
York, 1927. Classical historical fiction on New Mexico.

CUMBERLAND, CHARLES C. _Mexican Revolution: Genesis under
Madero_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1952.
Bibliography. To know Mexico and Mexicans without knowing
anything about Mexican revolutions is like knowing the
United States in ignorance of frontiers, constitutions, and
corporations. The Madero revolution that began in 1910 is
still going on. Mr. Cumberland's solid book, independent in
itself, is to be followed by two other volumes.

DE SOTO. Hernando de Soto made his expedition from Florida
north and west at the time Coronado was exploring north and
east. _The Florida of the Inca_, by Garcilaso de la Vega,
translated by John and Jeannette Varner, University of Texas
Press, Austin, 1951, is the first complete publishing in
English of this absorbing narrative.

DIAZ, BERNAL. _History of the Conquest_. There are several
translations. A book of gusto and humanity as enduring as the
results of the Conquest itself.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _Coronado's Children_, 1930. Legendary tales
of the Southwest, many of them derived from Mexican sources.
_Tongues of the Monte_, 1935. A pattern of the soil of
northern Mexico and its folk. _Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver_,
1939. Lost mines and money in Mexico and New Mexico. Last two
books published by Little, Brown, Boston.

DOMENECH, ABBE. _Missionary Adventures in Texas and
Mexico_, London, 1858. Delightful folklore, though Domenech
would not have so designated his accounts.

FERGUSSON, HARVEY. _Blood of the Conquerors_, 1921. Fiction.
OP. _Rio Grande_, Knopf, New York, 1933. Best interpretations
yet written of upper Mexican class.

FLANDRAU, CHARLES M. _Viva Mexico!_ New York, 1909; reissued,
1951. Delicious autobiographic narrative of life in Mexico.

FULTON, MAURICE G., and HORGAN, PAUL (editors). _New Mexico's
Own Chronicle_, Dallas, 1937. OP. Selections from writers
about the New Mexico scene.

GILPATRICK, WALLACE. _The Man Who Likes Mexico_, New York,
1911. OP. Bully reading.

GONZALEZ, JOVITA. Tales about Texas-Mexican vaquero folk in
_Texas and Southwestern Lore_, in _Man, Bird, and Beast_, and
in _Mustangs and Cow Horses_, Publications VI, VIII, and XVI
of Texas Folklore Society.


{illust. caption =
Jose Cisneros: Fray Marcos, in _The Journey of Fray Marcos
de Niza_ by Cleve Hallenbeck (1949)}



GRAHAM, R. B. CUNNINGHAME. _Hernando De Soto_, London, 1912.
Biography. OP.

HARTE, BRET. _The Bell Ringer of Angels_ and other legendary
tales of California.

LAUGHLIN, RUTH. _Caballeros_. When the book was published in
1931, the author was named Ruth Laughlin Barker; after she
discarded the Barker part, it was reissued, in 1946, by
Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. Delightful picturings of Mexican--or
Spanish, as many New Mexicans prefer--life around Santa Fe.

LEA, TOM. _The Brave Bulls_. See under "Fiction."

LUMMIS, C. F. _Flowers of Our Lost Romance_, Boston, 1929.
Humanistic essays on Spanish contributions to southwestern
civilization. OP. _The Land of Poco Tiempo_, New York, 1913
(reissued by University of New Mexico Press, 1952), in an
easier style. _A New Mexico David_, 1891, 1930. Folk tales and
sketches. OP.

MERRIAM, CHARLES. _Machete_, Dallas, 1932. Plain and true to
the _gente_. OP.

NIGGLI, JOSEPHINA. _Mexican Village_, University of North
Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1945. A collection of skilfully
told stories that reveal Mexican life.

O'SHAUGHNESSY, EDITH. _A Diplomat s Wife in Mexico_, New York,
1916; _Diplomatic Days_, 1917; _Intimate Pages of Mexican
History_, 1920. Books of passion and power and high literary
merit, interpretative of revolutionary Mexico. OP.

OTERO, NINA. _Old Spain in Our Southwest_, New York, 1936.
Genuine. OP.

PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE. _Flowering Judas_. See under
"Fiction."

PRESCOTT, WILLIAM H. _Conquest of Mexico_. History that is
literature.

REMINGTON, FREDERIC W. _Pony Tracks_, New York, 1895. Includes
sketches of Mexican ranch life.

ROSS, PATRICIA FENT. _Made in Mexico: The Story of a Country's
Arts and Crafts_, Knopf, New York, 1952. Picturesquely and
instructively illustrated by Carlos Merida.

TANNENBAUM, FRANK. _Peace by Revolution_, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1933; _Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and
Bread_, Knopf, New York, 1950. Tannenbaum dodges nothing, not
even the church.

_Terry's Guide to Mexico_. It has everything.

Texas Folklore Society. Its publications are a storehouse of
Mexican folklore in the Southwest and in Mexico also.
Especially recommended are _Texas and Southwestern Lore_ (VI),
_Man, Bird, and Beast_ (VIII), _Southwestern Lore_ (IX),
_Spur-of -the-Cock_ (XI), _Puro Mexicano_ (XII), _Texian
Stomping Grounds_ (XVII), _Mexican Border Ballads and Other
Lore_ (XXI), _The Healer of Los Olmos and Other Mexican Lore_
(XXIV, 1951). All published by Southern Methodist University
Press, Dallas.

TOOR, FRANCES. A _Treasury of Mexican Folkways_, Crown, New
York, 1947. An anthology of life.

TURNER, TIMOTHY G._ Bullets, Bottles and Gardenias_, Dallas,
1935. Obscurely published but one of the best books on Mexican
life. OP.



_7_

Flavor of France

THERE IS little justification for including Louisiana as a
part of the Southwest. Despite the fact that the French flag--
tied to a pole in Louisiana--once waved over Texas, French
influence on it and other parts of the Southwest has been
minor.


ARTHUR, STANLEY CLISBY. _Jean Laffite, Gentleman Rover_ (1952)
and _Audubon: An Intimate Life of the American Woodsman_
(1937), both published by Harmanson--Publisher and Bookseller,
333 Royal St., New Orleans.

CABLE, GEORGE W. _Old Creole Days: Strange True Stories of
Louisiana_.

CHOPIN, KATE. _Bayou Folk_.

FORTIER, ALCEE. Any of his work on Louisiana.

HEARN, LAFCADIO. _Chita_. A lovely story.

JOUTEL. _Journal_ of La Salle's career in Texas.

KANE, HARNETT T. _Plantation Parade: The Grand Manner in
Louisiana_ (1945), _Natchez on the Mississippi_ (1947), _Queen
New Orleans_ (1949), all published by Morrow, New York.

KING, GRACE. _New Orleans: The Place and the People; Balcony
Stories.

_MCVOY, LIZZIE CARTER. _Louisiana in the Short Story_,
Louisiana State University Press, 1940.

SAXON, LYLE. _Fabulous New Orleans; Old Louisiana; Lafitte the
Pirate_.


_8_

Backwoods Life and Humor

THE SETTLERS who put their stamp on Texas were predominantly
from the southern states--and far more of them came to Texas
to work out of debt than came with riches in the form of
slaves. The plantation owner came too, but the go-ahead
Crockett kind of backwoodsman was typical. The southern type
never became so prominent in New Mexico, Arizona, and
California as in Texas. Nevertheless, the fact glares out that
the code of conduct--the riding and shooting tradition, the
eagerness to stand up and fight for one's rights, the
readiness to back one's judgment with a gun, a bowie knife,
money, life itself--that characterized the whole West as well
as the Southwest was southern, hardly at all New England.

The very qualities that made many of the Texas pioneers rebels
to society and forced not a few of them to quit it between sun
and sun without leaving new addresses fitted them to conquer
the wilderness--qualities of daring, bravery, reckless
abandon, heavy self-assertiveness. A lot of them were hell-
raisers, for they had a lust for life and were maddened by
tame respectability. Nobody but obsequious politicians and
priggish "Daughters" wants to make them out as models of
virtue and conformity. A smooth and settled society--a society
shockingly tame--may accept Cardinal Newman's definition, "A
gentleman is one who never gives offense." Under this
definition a shaded violet, a butterfly, and a floating summer
cloud are all gentlemen. "The art of war," said Napoleon, "is
to make offense." Conquering the hostile Texas
wilderness meant war with nature and against savages as well
as against Mexicans. Go-ahead Crockett's ideal of a gentleman
was one who looked in another direction while a visitor was
pouring himself out a horn of whiskey.

Laying aside climatic influences on occupations and manners,
certain Spanish influences, and minor Pueblo Indian touches,
the Southwest from the point of view of the bedrock Anglo-
Saxon character that has made it might well include Arkansas
and Missouri. The realism of southern folk and of a very
considerable body of indigenous literature representing them
has been too much overshadowed by a kind of _So Red the Rose_
idealization of slave-holding aristocrats.


ALLSOPP, FRED W. _Folklore of Romantic Arkansas_, 2 vols.,
Grolier Society, 1931. Allsopp assembled a rich and varied
collection of materials in the tone of "The Arkansas
Traveler." OP.

ARRINGTON, ALFRED W. _The Rangers and Regulators of the
Tanaha_, 18 56. East Texas bloodletting.

BALDWIN, JOSEPH G. _The Flush Times of Alabama and
Mississippi_, 1853.

BLAIR, WALTER. _Horse Sense in American Humor from Benjamin
Franklin to Ogden Nash_, 1942. OP. _Native American Humor_,
1937. OP. _Tall Tale America_, Coward-McCann, New York, 1944.
Orderly analyses with many concrete examples. With Franklin J.
Meine as co-author, _Mike Fink, King of Mississippi River
Keelboatmen_, 1933. Biography of a folk type against pioneer
and frontier background. OP.

BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Folk Laughter on the American Frontier_.
See under "Interpreters."

CLARK, THOMAS D. _The Rampaging Frontier_, 1939. OP.
Historical picturization and analysis, fortified by incidents
and tales of "Varmints," "Liars," "Quarter Horses,"
"Fiddlin'," "Foolin' with the Gals," etc.

CROCKETT, DAVID. _Autobiography_. Reprinted many times.
Scribner's edition in the "Modern Students' Library" includes
_Colonel Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in_
_Texas_. Crockett set the backwoods type. See treatment of him
in Parrington's _Main Currents in American Thought_. Richard
M. Dorson's _Davy Crockett, American Comic Legend_, 1939, is a
summation of the Crockett tradition.

FEATHERSTONHAUGH, G. W. _Excursion through the Slave States_,
London, 1866. Refreshing on manners and characters.

FLACK, CAPTAIN. _The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the
Backwoods_, London, 1866.

GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. _Wild Sports in the Far West_. Nothing
better on backwoods life in the Mississippi Valley.

HAMMETT, SAMUEL ADAMS (who wrote under the name of Philip
Paxton), _Piney Woods Tavern; or Sam Slick in Texas_ and _A
Stray Yankee in Texas_. Humor on the roughneck element. For
treatment of Hammett as man and writer see _Sam Slick in
Texas_, by W. Stanley Hoole, Naylor, San Antonio, 1945.

HARRIS, GEORGE W. _Sut Lovingood_, New York, 1867. Prerealism.

HOGUE, WAYMAN. _Back Yonder_. Minton, Balch, New York, 1932.
Ozark life. OP.

HOOPER, J. J. _Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs_, 1845. OP.
Downright realism. Like Longstreet, Hooper in maturity wanted
his realism forgotten. An Alabama journalist, he got into the
camp of respectable slave-holders and spent the later years of
his life shouting against the "enemies of the institution of
African slavery." His life partly explains the lack of
intellectual honesty in most southern spokesmen today. _Alias
Simon Suggs: The Life and Times of Johnson Jones Hooper_, by
W. Stanley Hoole, University of Alabama Press, 1952, is a
careful study of Hooper's career.

HUDSON, A. P. _Humor of the Old Deep South_, New York, 1936.
An anthology. OP.

LONGSTREET, A. B. _Georgia Scenes_, 1835. Numerous reprints.
Realism.

MASTERSON, JAMES R. _Tall Tales of Arkansas_, Boston, 1943.
OP. The title belies this excellent social history--by a
scholar. It has become quite scarce on account of the fact
that it contains unexpurgated versions of the notorious speech
on "Change the Name of Arkansas"--which in 1919 in officers'
barracks at Bordeaux, France, I heard a lusty individual
recite with as many variations as Roxane of _Cyrano de
Bergerac_ wanted in love-making. When Fred W. Allsopp,
newspaper publisher and pillar of Arkansas respectability,
found that this book of unexpurgations had been dedicated to
him by the author--a Harvard Ph.D. teaching in Michigan--he
almost "had a colt."

MEINE, FRANKLIN J. (editor). _Tall Tales of the Southwest_,
Knopf, New York, 1930. A superbly edited and superbly selected
anthology with appendices affording a guide to the whole field
of early southern humor and realism. No cavalier idealism. The
"Southwest" of this excellent book is South.

OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. _A Journey in the Seaboard Slave
States_, 1856. _A Journey Through Texas_, 1857. Invaluable
books on social history.

POSTL, KARL ANTON (Charles Sealsfield or Francis Hardman,
pseudonyms). _The Cabin Book; Frontier Life_. Translations all
OP.

RANDOLPH, VANCE. _We Always Lie to Strangers_, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1951. A collection of tall tales
of the adding machine variety. Fertile in invention but devoid
of any yearning for the beautiful or suggestion that the human
spirit hungers for something beyond horse play; in short,
typical of American humor.

ROURKE, CONSTANCE. _American Humor_, 1931; _Davy Crockett_,
1934; _Roots of American Culture and Other Essays_, 1942, all
published by Harcourt, Brace, New York.

THOMPSON, WILLIAM T. _Major Jones's Courtship_, Philadelphia,
1844. Realism.

THORPE, T. B. _The Hive of the Bee-Hunter_, New York, 1854.
This excellent book should be reprinted.

WATTERSON, HENRY. _Oddities in Southern Life and Character_,
Boston, 1882. An anthology with interpretative notes.

WILSON, CHARLES MORROW. _Backwoods America_. University of
North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1935. Well ordered survey
with excellent samplings.

WOOD, RAY. _The American Mother Goose_, 1940; _Fun in American
Folk Rhymes_, 1952; both published by Lippincott,
Philadelphia.



_9_

How the Early Settlers Lived

DESPITE THE FACT that the tendency of a majority of early day
rememberers has been to emphasize Indian fights, killings, and
other sensational episodes, chronicles rich in the everyday
manners and customs of the folk are plentiful. The classic of
them all is Noah Smithwick's _The Evolution of a State_,
listed below.

See also "Backwoods Life and Humor," "Pioneer Doctors," "Women
Pioneers," "Fighting Texians."


BARKER, E. C. _The Austin Papers_. Four volumes of sources for
any theme in social history connected with colonial Texans.

BATES, ED. F. _History and Reminiscences of Denton County_,
Denton, Texas, 1918. A sample of much folk life found in
county histories.

BELL, HORACE. _On the Old West Coast_, New York, 1930. Social
history by anecdote. California. OP.

BRACHT, VIKTOR. _Texas in 1848_, translated from the German by
C. F. Schmidt, San Antonio, 1931. Better on natural resources
than on human inhabitants. OP.

CARL, PRINCE OF SOLMS-BRAUNFELS. _Texas, 1844-1845_.
Translation, Houston, 1936. OP.

COX, C. C. "Reminiscences," in Vol. VI of _Southwestern
Historical Quarterly_. One of the best of many pioneer
recollections published by the Texas State Historical
Association.

CROCKETT, DAVID. Anything about him.

DICK, EVERETT. _The Sod House Frontier_ (1937) and _Vanguards
of the Frontier_ (1941). Both OP. Life on north-
ern Plains into Rocky Mountains, but applicable to life
southward.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Flavor of Texas_, 1936. OP. Considerable
social history.

FENLEY, FLORENCE. _Oldtimers: Their Own Stories_, Uvalde,
Texas, 1939. OP. Faithful reporting of realistic detail.
Southwest Texas, mostly ranch life.

FRANTZ, JOE B. _Gail Borden, Dairyman to a Nation_. University
of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. This biography of a
newspaperman and inventor brings out sides of pioneer life
that emphasis on fighting, farming, and ranching generally
overlooks.

GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. _Wild Sports in the Far West_, 1860.
Dances are among the sports.

HARRIS, MRS. DILUE. "Reminiscences," edited by Mrs. A. B.
Looscan, in Vols. IV and VII of _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_.

HART, JOHN A. _History of Pioneer Days in Texas and Oklahoma_;
no date. Extended and republished under the title of _Pioneer
Days in the Southwest_, 1909. Much on frontier ways of living.

HOFF, CAROL _Johnny Texas_, Wilcox and Follett, Chicago, 1950.
Juvenile, historical fiction. Delightful in both text and
illustrations.

HOGAN, WILLIAM R. _The Texas Republic: A Social and Economic
History_, University of Oklahoma Press, 1946. Long on facts,
short on intellectual activity; that is, on interpretations
from the perspective of time and civilization.

HOLDEN, W. C. _Alkali Trails_, Dallas, 1930. Pioneer life in
West Texas. OP.

HOLLEY, MARY AUSTIN. _Texas . . . in a Series of Letters_,
Baltimore, 1833; reprinted under the title of _Letters of an
American Traveler_, edited by Mattie Austin Hatcher, Dallas,
1933. First good book on Texas to be printed. OP.

_Lamar Papers_. Six volumes of scrappy source material on
Texas history and life, issued by Texas State Library, Austin.
OP.

LEWIS, WILLIE NEWBURY. _Between Sun and Sod_, Clarendon,
Texas, 1938. OP. Again, want of perspective.

LUBBOCK, F. R. Six _Decades in Texas_, Austin, 1900.

MCCONNELL, H. H. _Five Years a Cavalryman_, Jacksboro, Texas,
1889. Bully.

McDANIELD, H. F., and TAYLOR, NATHANIEL A. _The Coming Empire,
or 2000 Miles in Texas on Horseback_, New York, 1878;
privately reprinted, 1937. Delightful travel narrative. OP.

MCNEAL, T. A. _When Kansas Was Young_, New York, 1922.
Episodes and characters of Plains country. OP.

OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. _A Journey Through Texas_, New York,
1857. Olmsted journeyed in order to see. He saw.

READ, OPIE. _An Arkansas Planter_, 1896. Pleasant fiction.

RICHARDSON, ALBERT D. _Beyond the Mississippi_, Hartford,
1867. What a traveling journalist saw.

RISTER, CARL C. _Southern Plainsmen_, University of Oklahoma
Press, 1938. Though pedestrian in style, good social data.
Bibliography.

ROEMER, DR. FERDINAND. _Texas_, translated from the German by
Oswald Mueller, San Antonio, 1935. OP. Roemer, a geologist,
rode through Texas in the forties and made acute observations
on the land, its plants and animals, and the settlers.

SCHMITZ, JOSEPH WILLIAM. _Thus They Lived_, Naylor, San
Antonio, 1935. This would have been a good social history of
Texas had the writer devoted ten more years to the subject.
Unsatisfactory bibliography.

SHIPMAN, DANIEL. _Frontier Life, 58 Years in Texas_, n.p.,
1879. One of the pioneer reminiscences that should be
reprinted.

SMITH, HENRY. "Reminiscences," in _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_, Vol. XIV. Telling details.

SMITHWICK, NOAH. _The Evolution of a State_, Austin, 1900.
Reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1935. Best of all books dealing
with life in early Texas. Bully reading.

_Southwestern Historical Quarterly_, published since 1897 by
Texas State Historical Association, Austin. A depository of
all kinds of history; the first twenty-five or thirty volumes
are the more interesting.

SWEET, ALEXANDER E., and KNOX, J. ARMOY. _On a Mexican Mustang
Through Texas_, Hartford, 1883. Humorous satire, often
penetrating and ruddy with actuality.

WALLIS, JONNIE LOCKHART. _Sixty Years on the Brazos: The Life
and Letters of Dr. John Washington Lockhart_, privately
printed, Los Angeles, 1930. In notebook style, but as rare in
essence as it is among dealers in out-of-print books.

WAUGH, JULIA NOTT. _Castroville and Henry Castro_, San
Antonio, 1934. OP. Best-written monograph dealing with any
aspect of Texas history that I have read.

WYNN, AFTON. "Pioneer Folk Ways," in _Straight Texas_, Texas
Folklore Society Publication XIII, 1937.



_10_

Fighting Texians

THE TEXAS PEOPLE belong to a fighting tradition that the
majority of them are proud of. The footholds that the
Spaniards and Mexicans held in Texas were maintained by virtue
of fighting, irrespective of missionary baptizing. The purpose
of the Anglo-American colonizer Stephen F. Austin to "redeem
Texas from the wilderness" was accomplished only by fighting.
The Texans bought their liberty with blood and maintained it
for nine years as a republic with blood. It was fighting men
who pushed back the frontiers and blazed trails.

The fighting tradition is now giving way to the oil tradition.
The Texas myth as imagined by non-Texans is coming to embody
oil millionaires in airplanes instead of horsemen with six-
shooters and rifles. See Edna Ferber's Giant (1952 novel).
Nevertheless, many Texans who never rode a horse over three
miles at a stretch wear cowboy boots, and a lot of Texans are
under the delusion that bullets and atomic bombs can settle
complexities that demand informed intelligence and the power
to think.

As I have pointed out in _The Flavor of Texas_, the chronicles
of men who fought the Mexicans and were prisoners to them
comprise a unique unit in the personal narratives and annals
of America.

Many of the books listed under the headings of "Texas
Rangers," "How the Early Settlers Lived," and "Range Life"
specify the fighting tradition.


BEAN, PETER ELLIS. _Memoir_, published first in Vol. I of
Yoakum's _History of Texas_; in 1930 printed as a small book
by the Book Club of Texas, Dallas, now OP. A fascinating
narrative.

BECHDOLT, FREDERICK R. _Tales of the Old Timers_, New York,
1924. Forceful retelling of the story of the Mier Expedition
and of other activities of the "fighting Texans." OP.

CHABOT, FREDERICK C. _The Perote Prisoners_, San Antonio,
1934. Annotated diaries of Texas prisoners in Mexico. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Flavor of Texas_, Dallas, 1936. OP.
Chapters on Bean, Green, Duval, Kendall, and other
representers of the fighting Texans.

DUVAL, JOHN C. _Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace_, 1870; _Early
Times in Texas_, 1892. Both books are kept in print by Steck,
Austin. For biography and critical estimate, see _John C.
Duval: First Texas Man of Letters_, by J. Frank Dobie
(illustrated by Tom Lea), Dallas, 1939. OP. _Early Times in
Texas_, called "the _Robinson Crusoe_ of Texas," is Duval's
story of the Goliad Massacre and of his escape from it. Duval
served as a Texas Ranger with Bigfoot Wallace, who was in the
Mier Expedition. His narrative of Bigfoot's _Adventures_ is
the rollickiest and the most flavorsome that any American
frontiersman has yet inspired. The tiresome thumping on the
hero theme present in many biographies of frontiersmen is
entirely absent. Stanley Vestal wrote _Bigfoot Wallace_ also,
Boston, 1942. OP.

ERATH, MAJOR GEORGE G. _Memoirs_, Texas State Historical
Association, Austin, 1923. Erath understood his fellow
Texians. OP.

GILLETT, JAMES B. _Six Years with the Texas Rangers_, 1921.
OP.

GREEN, THOMAS JEFFERSON. _Journal of the Texan Expedition
against Mier_, 1845; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Green
was one of the leaders of the Mier Expedition. He lived in
wrath and wrote with fire. For information on Green see
_Recollections and Reflections_ by his son, Wharton J. Green,
1906. OP.

HOUSTON, SAM. _The Raven_, by Marquis James, 1929, is
not the only biography of the Texan general, but it is the
best, and embodies most of what has been written on Houston
excepting the multivolumed _Houston Papers_ issued by the
University of Texas Press, Austin, under the editorship of E.
C. Barker. Houston was an original character even after he
became a respectable Baptist.

KENDALL, GEORGE W. _Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe
Expedition_, 1844; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Two
volumes. Kendall, a New Orleans journalist in search of copy,
joined the Santa Fe Expedition sent by the Republic of Texas
to annex New Mexico. Lost on the Staked Plains and then
marched afoot as a prisoner to Mexico City, he found plenty of
copy and wrote a narrative that if it were not so
journalistically verbose might rank alongside Dana's _Two
Years Before the Mast_. Fayette Copeland's _Kendall of the
Picayune_, 1943 but OP, is a biography. An interesting
parallel to Kendall's _Narrative is Letters and Notes on the
Texan Santa Fe Expedition, 1841-1842_, by Thomas Falconer,
with Notes and Introduction by F. W. Hodge, New York, 1930.
OP. The route of the expedition is logged and otherwise
illuminated in _The Texan Santa Fe Trail_, by H. Bailey
Carroll, Panhandle-Plains Historical Society, Canyon, Texas,
1951.

LEACH, JOSEPH. _The Typical Texan: Biography of an American
Myth_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1952. At
the time Texas was emerging, the three main types of Americans
were Yankees, southern aristocrats, Kentucky westerners
embodied by Daniel Boone. Texas took over the Kentucky
tradition. It was enlarged by Crockett, who stayed in Texas
only long enough to get killed, Sam Houston, and Bigfoot
Wallace. Novels, plays, stories, travel books, and the Texans
themselves have kept the tradition going. This is the main
thesis of the book. Mr. Leach fails to note that the best
books concerning Texas have done little to keep the typical
Texan alive and that a great part of the present Texas Brags
spirit is as absurdly unrealistic as Mussolini's splurge at
making twentieth-century Italians imagine themselves a
{illust. caption =
John W. Thomason, in his _Lone Star Preacher_ (1941)}



reincarnation of Caesar's Roman legions. Mr. Leach dissects
the myth and then swallows it.

LINN, JOHN J. _Reminiscences of Fifty Years in Texas_, 1883;
reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Mixture of personal
narrative and historical notes, written with energy and
prejudice.

MAVERICK, MARY A. _Memoirs_, 1921. OP. Mrs. Maverick's
husband, Sam Maverick, was among the citizens of San Antonio
haled off to Mexico as prisoners in 1842.

MORRELL, Z. N. _Fruits and Flowers in the Wilderness_, 1872.
OP. Morrell, a circuit-riding Baptist preacher, fought the
Indians and the Mexicans. See other books of this kind listed
under "Circuit Riders and Missionaries."

PERRY, GEORGE SESSIONS. Texas, A _World in Itself_, McGraw-
Hill, New York, 1942. Especially good chapter on the Alamo.

SMYTHE, H. _Historical Sketch of Parker County, Texas_, 1877.
One of various good county histories of Texas replete with
fighting. For bibliography of this extensive class of
literature consult _Texas County Histories_, by H. Bailey
Carroll, Texas State Historical Association, Austin, 1943. OP.

SONNICHSEN, C. L. _I'll Die Before I'll Run: The Story of the
Great Feuds of Texas_--and of some not great. Harper, New
York, 1951.

SOWELL, A. J. _Rangers and Pioneers of Texas_, 1884; _Life of
Bigfoot Wallace_, 1899; _Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of
Southwest Texas_, 1900. All OP; all meaty with the character
of ready-to-fight but peace-seeking Texas pioneers. Sowell
will some day be recognized as an extraordinary chronicler.

STAPP, WILLIAM P. _The Prisoners of Perote_, 1845; reprinted
by Steck, Austin, 1936. Journal of one of the Mier men who
drew a white bean.

THOMASON, JOHN W. _Lone Star Preacher_, Scribner's, New York,
1941. The cream, the essence, the spirit, and the body of the
fighting tradition of Texas. Historical novel of Civil War.

WEBB, WALTER PRESCOTT. _The Texas Rangers_, Houghton Mifflin,
Boston, 1935. See under "Texas Rangers."

WILBARGER, J. W. _Indian Depredations in Texas_, 1889;
reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Narratives that have for
generations been a household heritage among Texas families who
fought for their land.



_11_

Texas Rangers

THE TEXAS RANGERS were never more than a handful in number,
but they were picked men who knew how to ride, shoot, and tell
the truth. On the Mexican border and on the Indian frontier, a
few rangers time and again proved themselves more effective
than battalions of soldiers.

     Oh, pray for the ranger, you kind-hearted stranger,
          He has roamed over the prairies for many a year;
     He has kept the Comanches from off your ranches,
          And chased them far over the Texas frontier.


BANTA, WILLIAM. _Twenty-seven Years on the Texas Frontier_,
1893; reprinted, 1933. OP.

GAY, BEATRICE GRADY. _Into the Setting Sun_, Santa Anna,
Texas, 1936. Coleman County scenes and characters, dominated
by ranger character. OP.

GILLETT, JAMES B. _Six Years with the Texas Rangers_, printed
for the author at Austin, Texas, 1921. He paid the printer
cash for either one or two thousand copies, as he told me, and
sold them personally. Edited by Milo M. Quaife, the book was
published by Yale University Press in 1925. This edition was
reprinted, 1943, by the Lakeside Press, Chicago, in its
"Lakeside Classics" series, which are given away by the
publishers at Christmas annually and are not for sale--except
through second-hand dealers. Meantime, in 1927, the narrative
had appeared under title of _The Texas Ranger_, "in
collaboration with Howard R. Driggs," a professional
neutralizer for school readers of any writing not
standardized, published by World Book Co., Yonkers-on-Hudson,
New
York. All editions OP. I regard Gillett as the strongest and
straightest of all ranger narrators. He combined in his nature
wild restlessness and loyal gentleness. He wrote in sunlight.

GREER, JAMES K. _Buck Barry_, Dallas, 1932. OP. _Colonel Jack
Hays, Texas Frontier Leader and California Builder_, Dutton,
New York, 1952. Hays achieved more vividness in reputation
than narratives about him have attained to.

JENNINGS, N. A. _The Texas Ranger_, New York, 1899; reprinted
1930, with foreword by J. Frank Dobie. OP. Good narrative.

MALTBY, W. JEFF. _Captain Jeff_, Colorado, Texas, 1906.
Amorphous. OP.

MARTIN, JACK. _Border Boss_, San Antonio, 1942. Mediocre
biography of Captain John R. Hughes. OP.

PAINE, ALBERT BIGELOW. _Captain Bill McDonald_, New York,
1909. Paine did not do so well by "Captain Bill" as he did in
his rich biography of Mark Twain. OP.

PIKE, JAMES. _Scout and Ranger_, 1865, reprinted 1932 by
Princeton University Press. Pike drew a long bow; interesting.
OP.

RAYMOND, DORA NEILL. _Captain Lee Hall of Texas_, Norman,
Oklahoma, 1940. OP.

REID, SAMUEL C. _Scouting Expeditions of the Texas Rangers_,
1859; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Texas Rangers in
Mexican War.

ROBERTS, DAN W. _Rangers and Soveretgnty_, 1914. OP. Roberts
was better as ranger than as writer.

ROBERTS, MRS. D. W. (wife of Captain Dan W. Roberts). A
_Woman's Reminiscences of Six Years in Camp with The Texas
Rangers_, Austin, 1928. OP. Mrs. Roberts was a sensible and
charming woman with a seeing eye.

SOWELL, A. J. _Rangers and Pioneers of Texas_, San Antonio,
1884. A graphic book down to bedrock. OP.

WEBB, WALTER PRESCOTT. _The Texas Rangers_, Houghton Mifflin,
Boston, 1935. The beginning, middle, and end of the subject.
Bibliography.



_12_

Women Pioneers

ONE REASON for the ebullience of life and rollicky
carelessness on the frontiers of the West was the lack--
temporary--of women. The men, mostly young, had given no
hostages to fortune. They were generally as free from family
cares as the buccaneers. This was especially true of the first
ranches on the Great Plains, of cattle trails, of mining
camps, logging camps, and of trapping expeditions. It was not
true of the colonial days in Texas, of ranch life in the
southern part of Texas, of homesteading all over the West, of
emigrant trails to California and Oregon, of backwoods life.

Various items listed under "How the Early Settlers Lived"
contain material on pioneer women.


ALDERSON, NANNIE T., and SMITH, HELENA HUNTINGTON. A _Bride
Goes West_, New York, 1942. Montana in the eighties. OP.

BAKER, D. W. C. A _Texas Scrapbook_, 1875; reprinted, 1936, by
Steck, Austin.

BROTHERS, MARY HUDSON. A _Pecos Pioneer_, 1943. OP. The best
part of this book is not about the writer's brother, who
cowboyed with Chisum's Jinglebob outfit and ran into Billy the
Kid, but is Mary Hudson's own life. Only Ross Santee has
equaled her in description of drought and rain. The last
chapters reveal a girl's inner life, amid outward experiences,
as no other woman's chronicle of ranch ways--sheep ranch here.

CALL, HUGHIE. _Golden Fleece_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1942.
Hughie Call became wife of a Montana sheepman early in this
century. OP.

CLEAVELAND, AGNES MORLEY. _No Life for a Lady_, Houghton
Mifflin, Boston, 1941. Bright, witty, penetrating; anecdotal.
Best account of frontier life from woman's point of view yet
published. New Mexico is the setting, toward turn of the
century. People who wished Mrs. Cleaveland would write another
book were disappointed when her _Satan's Paradise_ appeared in
1952.

ELLIS, ANNE. _The Life of An Ordinary Woman_, 1929, and _Plain
Anne Ellis_, 1931, both OP. Colorado country and town. Books
of disillusioned observations, wit, and wisdom by a frank
woman.

FAUNCE, HILDA. _Desert Wife_, 1934. OP. Desert loneliness at a
Navajo trading post.

HARRIS, MRS. DILUE. Reminiscences, in _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_, Vols. IV and VII.

KLEBERG, ROSA. "Early Experiences in Texas," in _Quarterly of
the Texas State Historical Association_ (initial title for
_Southwestern Historical Quarterly_), Vols. I and II.

MAGOFFIN, SUSAN SHELBY. _Down the Santa Fe Trail_, 1926. OP.
She was juicy and a bride, and all life was bright to her.

MATTHEWS, SALLIE REYNOLDS. _Interwoven_, Houston, 1936. Ranch
life in the Texas frontier as a refined and intelligent woman
saw it. OP.

MAVERICK, MARY A. _Memoirs_, San Antonio, 1921. OP. Essential.

PICKRELL, ANNIE DOOM. _Pioneer Women in Texas_, Austin, 1929.
Too much lady business but valuable. OP.

POE, SOPHIE A. _Buckboard Days_, edited by Eugene Cunningham,
Caldwell, Idaho, 1936. Mrs. Poe was there--New Mexico.

RAK, MARY KIDDER. _A Cowman's Wife_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,
1934. The external experiences of an ex-teacher on a small
Arizona ranch.

RHODES, MAY D. _The Hired Man on Horseback_, 1938. Biography
of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, but also warm-natured autobiography
of the woman who ranched with "Gene" in New Mexico. OP.

RICHARDS, CLARICE E. _A Tenderfoot Bride_, Garden City, N. Y.,
1920. OP. Charming.

STEWART, ELINOR P. _Letters of a Woman Homesteader_, Boston,
1914. OP.

WHITE, OWEN P. _A Frontier Mother_, New York, 1929. OP.
Overdone, as White overdid every subject he touched.

WILBARGER, J. W. _Indian Depredations in Texas_, 1889;
reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. A glimpse into the lives led
by families that gave many women to savages--for death or for
Cynthia Ann Parker captivity.

WYNN, AFTON. "Pioneer Folk Ways," in _Straight Texas_, Texas
Folklore Society Publication XIII, 1937. Excellent.



_13_

Circuit Riders and Missionaries

NOTWITHSTANDING both the tradition and the facts of
hardshooting, hard-riding cowboys, of bad men, of border
lawlessness, of inhabitants who had left some other place
under a cloud, of frontier towns "west of God," hard layouts
and conscienceless "courthouse crowds"--notwithstanding all
this, the Southwest has been and is religious-minded. This is
not to say that it is spiritual-natured. It belongs to H. L.
Mencken's "Bible Belt." "Pass-the-Biscuits" Pappy O'Daniel got
to be governor of Texas and then U.S. senator by advertising
his piety. A politician as "ignorant as a Mexican hog" on
foreign affairs and the complexities of political economy can
run in favor of what he and the voters call religion and leave
an informed man of intellect and sincerity in the shade. The
biggest campmeeting in the Southwest, the Bloys Campmeeting
near Fort Davis, Texas, is in the midst of an enormous range
country away from all factories and farmers.

Since about 1933 the United States Indian Service has not only
allowed but rather encouraged the Indians to revert to their
own religious ceremonies. They have always been religious. The
Spanish colonists of the Southwest, as elsewhere, were
zealously Catholic, and their descendants have generally
remained Catholic. The first English-speaking settlers of the
region--the colonists led by Stephen F. Austin to Texas--were
overwhelmingly Protestant, though in order to establish
Mexican citizenship and get titles to homestead land they had,
technically, to declare themselves Catholics. One of the
causes of the Texas Revolution as set forth by the Texans in
their Declaration of Independence was the Mexican govern-
ment's denial of "the right of worshipping the Almighty
according to the dictates of our own conscience." A history of
southwestern society that left out the Bible would be as badly
gapped as one leaving out the horse or the six-shooter.

See chapter entitled "On the Lord's Side" in Dobie's _The
Flavor of Texas_. Most of the books listed under "How the
Early Settlers Lived" contain information on religion and
preachers. Church histories are about as numerous as state
histories. Virtually all county histories take into account
church development. The books listed below are strong on
personal experiences.


ASBURY, FRANCIS. Three or more lives have been written of this
representative pioneer bishop.

BOLTON, HERBERT E. _The Padre on Horseback_, 1932. Life of the
Jesuit missionary Kino. OP.

BROWNLOW, W. G. _Portrait and Biography of Parson Brownlow,
the Tennessee Patriot_, 1862. Brownlow was a very
representative figure. Under the title of _William G Brownlow,
Fighting Parson of the Southern Highland_, E. M Coulter has
brought out a thorough life of him, published by University of
North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1937.

BURLESON, RUFUS C. _Life and Writings_, 1901. OP. The
autobiographical part of this amorphously arranged volume is a
social document of the first rank.

CARTWRIGHT, PETER. _Autobiography_, 1857. Out of Kentucky,
into Indiana and then into Illinois, where he ran against
Lincoln for Congress, Cartwright rode with saddlebags and
Bible. Sandburg characterizes him as "an enemy of whisky,
gambling, jewelry, fine clothes, and higher learning." He
seems to me more unlovely in his intolerance and sectarianism
than most circuit riders of the Southwest, but as a militant,
rough-and-ready "soldier of the Lord" he represented
southwestern frontiers as well as his own.

CRANFILL, J. B. _Chronicle, A Story of Life in Texas_, 1916.
Cranfill was a lot of things besides a Baptist preacher--trail
driver, fiddler, publisher, always an observer. OP.

DEVILBISS, JOHN WESLEY. _Reminiscences and Events_ (compiled
by H. A. Graves), 1886. The very essence of pioneering,

DOMENECH, ABBE. _Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico_
(translated from the French), London, 1858. OP. The Abbe
always had eyes open for wonders. He saw them. Delicious
narrative.

EVANS, WILL G. _Border Skylines_, published in Dallas, 1940,
for Bloys Campmeeting Association, Fort Davis, Texas.
Chronicles of the men and women--cow people--and cow country
responsible for the best known campmeeting, held annually,
Texas has ever had. OP.

GRAVIS, PETER W. _25 Years on the Outside Row of the Northwest
Texas Annual Conference_, Comanche, Texas, 1892. Another one
of those small personal records, privately printed but full of
juice. OP.

LIDE, ANNA A. _Robert Alexander and the Early Methodist Church
in Texas_, La Grange, Texas, 1935. OP.

MORRELL, Z. N. _Fruits and Flowers in the Wilderness_, 1872.
Though reprinted three times, last in 1886, long OP. In many
ways the best circuit rider's chronicle of the Southwest that
has been published. Morrell fought Indians and Mexicans in
Texas and was rich in other experiences.

MORRIS, T. A. _Miscellany_, 1 8 S 4. The "Notes of Travel"--
particularly to Texas in 1841--are what makes this book
interesting.

PARISOT, P. F. _Reminiscences of a Texas Missionary_, 1899.
Mostly the Texas-Mexican border.

POTTER, ANDREW JACKSON, commonly called the Fighting Parson."
_Life_ of him by H. A. Graves, 1890, not nearly so good as
Potter was himself.

THOMASON, JOHN W. _Lone Star Preacher_, Scribner's, New York,
1941. Fiction, true to humanity. The moving story of a Texas
chaplain who carried a Bible in one hand and a captain's sword
in the other through the Civil War.



_14_

Lawyers, Politicians, J. P.'s

STEPHEN F. AUSTIN wanted to exclude lawyers, along with roving
frontiersmen, from his colonies in Texas, and hoped thus to
promote a utopian society. The lawyers got in, however. Their
wit, the anecdotes of which they were both subject and author,
and the political stories they made traditional from the
stump, have not been adequately set down. As criminal lawyers
they stood as high in society as corporation lawyers stand now
and were a good deal more popular, though less wealthy. The
code of independence that fostered personal violence and
justified killings--in contradistinction to murders--and that
ran to excess in outlaws naturally fostered the criminal
lawyer. His type is now virtually obsolete.

Keen observers, richly stored in experience and delightful in
talk, as many lawyers of the Southwest have been and are, very
few of them have written on other than legal subjects. James
D. Lynch's _The Bench and the Bar of Texas_ (1885) is confined
to the eminence of "eminent jurists" and to the mastery of
"masters of jurisprudence." What we want is the flavor of life
as represented by such characters as witty Three-Legged Willie
(Judge R. M. Williamson) and mysterious Jonas Harrison. It
takes a self-lover to write good autobiography. Lawyers are
certainly as good at self-loving as preachers, but we have far
better autobiographic records of circuit riders than of early-
day lawyers.

Like them, the pioneer justice of peace resides more in folk
anecdotes than in chroniclings. Horace Bell's expansive _On
the Old West Coast_ so represents him. A continent away, David
Crockett, in his _Autobiography_, confessed, "I was afraid
some one would ask me what the judiciary was. If I
knowed I wish I may be shot." Before this, however, Crockett
had been a J. P. "I gave my decisions on the principles of
common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on
natural born sense, and not on law learning to guide me; for I
had never read a page in a law book in all my life."


COOMBES, CHARLES E. _The Prairie Dog Lawyer_, Dallas, 1945.
OP. Experiences and anecdotes by a lawyer better read in
rough-and-ready humanity than in law. The prairie dogs have
all been poisoned out from the West Texas country over which
he ranged from court to court.

HAWKINS, WALACE. _The Case of John C. Watrous, United States
Judge for Texas: A Political Story of High Crimes and
Misdemeanors_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas,
1950. More technical than social.

KITTRELL, NORMAN G. _Governors Who Have Been and Other Public
Men of Texas_, Houston, 1921. OP. Best collection of lawyer
anecdotes of the Southwest.

ROBINSON, DUNCAN W. _Judge Robert McAlpin Williamson, Texas'
Three-Legged Willie_, Texas State Historical Association,
Austin, 1948. This was the Republic of Texas judge who laid a
Colt revolver across a Bowie knife and said: "Here is the
constitution that overrides the law."

SONNICHSEN, C. L. _Roy Bean, Law West of the Pecos_,
Macmillan, New York, 1943. Roy Bean (1830-1903), justice of
peace at Langtry, Texas, advertised himself as "Law West of
the Pecos." He was more picaresque than picturesque; folk
imagination gave him notoriety. The Texas State Highway
Department maintains for popular edification the beer joint
wherein he held court. Three books have been written about
him, besides scores of newspaper and magazine articles. The
only biography of validity is Sonnichsen's.

SLOAN, RICHARD E. _Memories of an Arizona Judge_, Stanford,
California, 1932. Full of humanity. OP.

SMITH, E. F. _A Saga of Texas Law: A Factual Story of Texas
Law, Lawyers, Judges and Famous Lawsuits_, Naylor, San
Antonio, 1940. Interesting.



_15_

Pioneer Doctors

BEFORE the family doctors came, frontiersmen sawed off legs
with handsaws, tied up arteries with horsetail hair,
cauterized them with branding irons. Before homemade surgery
with steel tools was practiced, Mexican _curanderas_ (herb
women) supplied _remedios_, and they still know the medicinal
properties of every weed and bush. Herb stores in San Antonio,
Brownsville, and El Paso do a thriving business. Behind the
_curanderas_ were the medicine men of the tribes. Not all
their lore was superstition, as any one who reads the
delectable autobiography of Gideon Lincecum, published by the
Mississippi Historical Society in 1904, will agree. Lincecum,
learned in botany, a sharply-edged individual who later moved
to Texas, went out to live with a Choctaw medicine man and
wrote down all his lore about the virtues of native plants.
The treatise has never been printed.

The extraordinary life of Lincecum has, however, been
interestingly delineated in Samuel Wood Geiser's _Naturalists
of the Frontier_, Southern Methodist University Press, 1937,
1948, and in Pat Ireland Nixon's _The Medical Story of Early
Texas_, listed below. No historical novelist could ask for a
richer theme than Gideon Lincecum or Edmund Montgomery, the
subject of I. K. Stephens' biography listed below.

BUSH, I. J. _Gringo Doctor_, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939. OP. Dr.
Bush represented frontier medicine and surgery on both
sides of the Rio Grande. Living at El Paso, he was for a time
with the Maderistas in the revolution against Diaz.

COE, URLING C. _Frontier Doctor_, New York, 1939. OP.
Not of the Southwest but representing other frontier doctors.
Lusty autobiography full of characters and anecdotes.

DODSON, RUTH. "Don Pedrito Jaramillo: The Curandero of Los
Olmos," in _The Healer of Los Olmos and Other Mexican Lore_
(Publication of the Texas Folklore Society XXIV), edited by
Wilson M. Hudson, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas,
1951. Don Pedrito was no more of a fraud than many an
accredited psychiatrist, and he was the opposite of offensive.

NIXON, PAT IRELAND. _A Century of Medicine in San Antonio_,
published by the author, San Antonio, 1936. Rich in
information, diverting in anecdote, and tonic in philosophy.
Bibliography. _The Medical Story of Early Texas, 1528-1835_
[San Antonio], 1946. Lightness of life with scholarly
thoroughness; many character sketches.

RED, MRS. GEORGE P. _The Medicine Man in Texas_, Houston,
1930. Biographical. OP.

STEPHENS, I. K. _The Hermit Philosother of Liendo_, Southern
Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1951. Well-conceived and
well-written biography of Edmund Montgomery--illegitimate son
of a Scottish lord, husband of the sculptress Elisabet Ney--
who, after being educated in Germany and becoming a member of
the Royal College of Physicians of London, came to Texas with
his wife and sons and settled on Liendo Plantation, near
Hempstead, once known as Sixshooter Junction. Here, in utter
isolation from people of cultivated minds, he conducted
scientific experiments in his inadequate laboratory and
thought out a philosophy said to be half a century ahead of
his time. He died in 1911. His life was the drama of an
elevated soul of complexities, far more tragic than any life
associated with the lurid "killings" around him.

WOODHULL, FROST. "Ranch Remedios," in _Man, Bird, and Beast_,
Texas Folklore Society Publication VIII, 1930. The richest and
most readable collection of pioneer remedies yet published.



_16_

Mountain Men

AS USED HERE, the term "Mountain Men" applies to those
trappers and traders who went into the Rocky Mountains
before emigrants had even sought a pass through them to
the west or cattle had beat out a trail on the plains east of
them. Beaver fur was the lodestar for the Mountain Men.
Their span of activity was brief, their number insignificant.
Yet hardly any other distinct class of men, irrespective of
number or permanence, has called forth so many excellent
books as the Mountain Men. The books are not nearly so
numerous as those connected with range life, but when one
considers the writings of Stanley Vestal, Sabin, Ruxton, Fer
gusson, Chittenden, Favour, Garrard, Inman, Irving, Reid,
and White in this Seld, one doubts whether any other form
of American life at all has been so well covered in ballad,
fiction, biography, history.

See James Hobbs, James O. Pattie, and Reuben Gold
Thwaites under "Surge of Life in the West," also "Santa Fe
and the Santa Fe Trail."


ALTER, J. CECIL. _James Bridger_, Salt Lake City, 1925. A
hogshead of life. Bibliography. OP. Republished by Long's
College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio.

BONNER, T. D. _The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth,
1856_; reprinted in 1931, with an illuminating introduction by
Bernard DeVoto. OP. Beckwourth was the champion of all western
liars.

BREWERTON, G. D. _Overland with Kit Carson_, New York, 1930.
Good narrative. OP.

CHITTENDEN, _H. M. The American Fur Trade of the_
_Far West_, New York, 1902. OP. Basic work. Bibliography.

CLELAND, ROBERT GLASS. _This Reckless Breed of Men: The
Trappers and Fur Traders of the Southwest_, Knopf, New York,
1950. Fresh emphasis on the California-Arizona-New Mexico
region by a knowing scholar. Economical in style without loss
of either humanity or history. Bibliography.

CONRAD, HOWARD L. _Uncle Dick Wootton_, 1890. Primary source.
OP.

COYNER, D. H. _The Lost Trappers_, 1847.

DAVIDSON, L. J., and BOSTWICK, P. _The Literature of the Rocky
Mountain West 1803-1903_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939.
Davidson and Forrester Blake, editors. _Rocky Mountain Tales_,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1947.

DEVOTO, BERNARD. _Across the Wide Missouri_, Houghton Mifflin,
Boston, 1947. Superbly illustrated by reproductions of Alfred
Jacob Miller. DeVoto has amplitude and is a master of his
subject as well as of the craft of writing.

FAVOUR, ALPHEUS H. _Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man_,
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1936. Flavor
and facts both. Full bibliography.

FERGUSSON, HARVEY. _Rio Grande_, 1933, republished by Tudor,
New York. The drama and evolution of human life in New Mexico,
written out of knowledge and with power. _Wolf Song_, New
York, 1927. OP. Graphic historical novel of Mountain Men. It
sings with life.

GARRARD, LEWIS H. _Wah-toyah and the Taos Trail_, 1850. One of
the basic works.

GRANT, BLANCHE C. _When Old Trails Were New--The Story of
Taos_, New York, 1934. OP. Taos was rendezvous town for the
free trappers.

GUTHRIE, A. B., JR. _The Big Sky_, Sloane, New York, 1947 (now
published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston). "An unusually original
novel, superb as historical fiction."--Bernard DeVoto. I still
prefer Harvey Fergusson's _Wolf Song_.

HAMILTON, W. T. _My Sixty Years on the Plains_, New York,
1905. Now published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus,
Ohio.

INMAN, HENRY. _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, 1897.

IRVING, WASHINGTON. _The Adventures of Captain Bonneville_ and
_Astoria_. The latter book was founded on Robert Stuart's
Narratives. In 1935 these were prepared for the press, with
much illuminative material, by Philip Ashton Rollins and
issued under the title of _The Discovery of the Oregon Trail_.

LARPENTEUR, CHARLES. _Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper
Missouri_, edited by Elliott Coues, New York, 1898. As Milo
Milton Quaife shows in an edition of the narrative issued by
the Lakeside Press, Chicago, 1933, the indefatigable Coues
just about rewrote the old fur trader's narrative. It is
immediate and vigorous.

LAUT, A. C. _The Story of the Trapper_, New York, 1902. A
popular survey, emphasizing types and characters.

LEONARD, ZENAS. _Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas
Leonard_, Clearfield, Pa., 1839. In 1833 the Leonard trappers
reached San Francisco Bay, boarded a Boston ship anchored near
shore, and for the first time in two years varied their meat
diet by eating bread and drinking "Coneac." One of the
trappers had a gun named Knock-him-stiff. Such earthy details
abound in this narrative of adventures in a brand new world.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _Arizona Characters_, Los Angeles, 1928.
Very readable biographic sketches. OP.

MILLER, ALFRED JACOB. _The West of Alfred Jacob Miller_, with
an account of the artist by Marvin C. Ross, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1950. Although Miller painted the West
during 1837-38, only now is he being discovered by the public.
This is mainly a picture book, in the top rank.

PATTIE, JAMES OHIO. _The Personal Narrative of James
O. Pattie of Kentucky_, Cincinnati, 1831. Pattie and his small
party went west in 1824. For grizzlies, thirst, and other
features of primitive adventure the narrative is primary.

REID, MAYNE. _The Scalp Hunters_. An antiquated novel, but it
has some deep-dyed pictures of Mountain Men.

ROSS, ALEXANDER. _Adventures of the First Settlers on the
Oregon or Columbia River_ (1849) and _The Fur Hunters of the
Far West_ (1855). The trappers of the Southwest can no more be
divorced from the trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company than
can Texas cowboys from those of Montana.

RUSSELL, OSBORNE. _Journal of a Trapper_, Boise, Idaho, 1921.
In the winter of 1839, at Fort Hall on Snake River, Russell
and three other trappers "had some few books to read, such as
Byron, Shakespeare and Scott's works, the Bible and Clark's
Commentary on it, and some small works on geology, chemistry
and philosophy." Russell was wont to speculate on Life and
Nature. In perspective he approaches Ruxton.

RUXTON, GEORGE F. _Life in the Far West_, 1848; reprinted by
the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951, edited by
LeRoy R. Hafen. No other contemporary of the Mountain Men has
been so much quoted as Ruxton. He remains supremely readable.

SABIN, EDWIN L. _Kit Carson Days_, 1914. A work long standard,
rich on rendezvous, bears, and many other associated subjects.
Bibliography. Republished in rewritten form, 1935. OP.

VESTAL, STANLEY (pseudonym for Walter S. Campbell). _Kit
Carson_, 1928. As a clean-running biographic narrative, it is
not likely to be superseded. _Mountain Men_, 1937, OP; _The
Old Santa Fe Trail_, 1939. Vestal's "Fandango," a tale of the
Mountain Men in Taos, is among the most spirited ballads
America has produced. It and a few other Mountain Men ballads
are contained in the slight collection, _Fandango_, 1927.
Houghton Mifflin, Boston, published the aforementioned titles.
_James Bridger, Mountain Man_, Morrow, New York, 1946, is
smoother than J. Cecil Alter's biography but not so savory.
_Joe Meek, the Merry Mountain Man_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho,
1952.

WHITE, STEWART EDWARD. _The Long Rifle_, 1932, and _Ranchero_,
1933, Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, N. Y. Historical fiction.



_17_

Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail

THERE WAS Independence on the Missouri River, then eight
hundred miles of twisting trail across hills, plains, and
mountains, all uninhabited save by a few wandering Indians and
uncountable buffaloes. Then there was Santa Fe. On west of it
lay nearly a thousand miles of wild broken lands before one
came to the village of Los Angeles. But there was no trail to
Los Angeles. At Santa Fe the trail turned south and after
crawling over the Jornada del Muerto--Journey of the Dead
Man--threading the great Pass of the North (El Paso) and
crossing a vast desert, reached Chihuahua City.

Looked at in one way, Santa Fe was a mud village. In another
way, it was the solitary oasis of human picturesqueness in a
continent of vacancy. Like that of Athens, though of an
entirely different quality, its fame was out of all proportion
to its size. In a strong chapter, entitled "A Caravan Enters
Santa Fe," R. L. Duffus _(The Santa Fe Trail)_ elaborates on
how for all travelers the town always had "the lure of
adventure." Josiah Gregg doubted whether "the first sight of
the walls of Jerusalem were beheld with much more tumultuous
and soul-enrapturing joy" than Santa Fe was by a caravan
topping the last rise and, eight hundred miles of solitude
behind it, looking down on the town's shining walls and
cottonwoods.

No other town of its size in America has been the subject of
and focus for as much good literature as Santa Fe. Pittsburgh
and dozens of other big cities all put together have not
inspired one tenth of the imaginative play that Santa Fe has
inspired. Some of the transcontinental railroads probably
carry as much freight in a day as went over the Santa Fe Trail
in all the wagons in all the years they pulled over the Santa
Fe Trail. But the Santa Fe Trail is one of the three great
trails of America that, though plowed under, fenced across,
and cemented over, seem destined for perennial travel--by
those happily able to go without tourist guides. To quote
Robert Louis Stevenson, "The greatest adventures are not those
we go to seek." The other two trails comparable to the Santa
Fe are also of the West--the Oregon Trail for emigrants and
the Chisholm Trail for cattle.

For additional literature see "Mountain Men," "Stagecoaches,
Freighting," "Surge of Life in the West."

CATHER, WILLA. _Death Comes for the Archbishop_, Knopf, New
York, 1927. Historical novel.

CONNELLEY, W. E. (editor). _Donithan's Expedition_, 1907. Saga
of the Mexican War. OP.

DAVIS, W. W. H. _El Gringo, or New Mexico and Her People_,
1856; reprinted by Rydal, Santa Fe, 1938. OP. Excellent on
manners and customs.

DUFFUS, R. L. _The Santa Fe Trail_, New York, 1930. OP.
Bibliography. Best book of this century on the subject.

DUNBAR, SEYMOUR. _History of Travel in America_, 1915; revised
edition issued by Tudor, New York, 1937.

GREGG, JOSIAH. _Commerce of the Prairies_, two vols., 1844.
Reprinted, but all OP. Gregg wrote as a man of experience and
not as a professional writer. He wrote not only the classic of
the Santa Fe trade and trail but one of the classics of
bedrock Americana. It is a commentary on civilization in the
Southwest that his work is not kept in print. Harvey
Fergusson, in _Rio Grande_, has written a penetrating
criticism of the man and his subject. In 1941 and 1944 the
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, issued two volumes of
the _Diary and Letters of Josiah Gregg_, edited by Maurice G.
Fulton with Introductions by Paul Horgan. These volumes,
interesting in themselves, are a valuable complement to
Gregg's major work.

INMAN, HENRY. _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, 1897. A mine of lore.

LAUGHLIN, RUTH (formerly Ruth Laughlin Barker). _Caballeros_,
New York, 1931; republished by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1946.
Essayical goings into the life of things. Especially
delightful on burros. A book to be starred. _The Wind Leaves
No Shadow_, New York, 1948; Caxton, 1951. A novel around
Dona Tules Barcelo, the powerful, beautiful, and
silvered mistress of Santa Fe's gambling _sala_ in the 1830's
and '40's.

MAGOFFIN, SUSAN SHELBY. _Down the Santa Fe Trail_, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1926. Delectable diary.

PILLSBURY, DOROTHY L. _No High Adobe_, University of New
Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950. Sketches, pleasant to read,
that make the _gente_ very real.

RUXTON, GEORGE FREDERICK. _Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky
Mountains_, London, 1847. In 1924 the second half of this book
was reprinted under title of _Wild Life in the Rocky
Mountains_. In 1950, with additional Ruxton writings
discovered by Clyde and Mae Reed Porter, the book, edited by
LeRoy R. Hafen, was reissued under title of _Ruxton of the
Rockies_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Santa Fe is
only one incident in it. Ruxton illuminates whatever he
touches. He was in love with the wilderness and had a fire in
his belly. Other writers add details, but Ruxton and Gregg
embodied the whole Santa Fe world.

VESTAL, STANLEY. _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, Houghton Mifflin,
Boston, 1939.



_18_

Stagecoaches, Freighting

A GOOD INTRODUCTION to a treatment of the stagecoach of the
West would be Thomas De Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach."
The proper place to read about the coaches would be in Doctor
Lyon's Pony Express Museum, out from Pasadena, California. May
it never perish! Old Monte drives up now and then in Alfred
Henry Lewis' _Wolfville_ tales, and Bret Harte made Yuba Bill
crack the Whip; but, somehow, considering all the excellent
expositions and reminiscing of stage-coaching in western
America, the proud, insolent, glorious figure of the driver
has not been adequately pictured.

Literature on "Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail" is pertinent.
See also under "Pony Express."


BANNING, WILLIAM, and BANNING, GEORGE HUGH. _Six Horses_, New
York, 1930. A combination of history and autobiography. Routes
to and in California; much of Texas. Enjoyable reading.
Excellent on drivers, travelers, stations, "pass the mustard,
please." Bibliography. OP.

CONKLING, ROSCOE P. and MARGARET B. _The Butterfield Overland
Trail, 1857-1869_, Arthur H. Clark Co., Glendage, California.
Three volumes replete with facts from politics in Washington
over mail contracts to Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos River.

DOBBIE, J. FRANK. Chapter entitled "Pistols, Poker and the
Petit Mademoiselle in a Stagecoach," in _The Flavor of Texas_
1936. OP.

DUFFUS, R. L. _The Santa Fe Trail_ New York, 1930. Swift
reading. Well selected bibliography. OP.

FREDERICK, J. V. _Ben Holladay, the Stage Coach King_, Clark,
Glendale, California, 1940. Bibliography.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. Chapter v, "The Stage-Coach Mail," in _Fort
Concho and the Texas Frontier_, illustrated by Harold Bugbee,
San Angelo Standard-Times, San Angelo, Texas, 1952. Strong on
frontier crossed by stage line.

HUNGERFORD, EDWARD. _Wells Fargo: Advancing the Frontier_,
Random House, New York, 1949. Written without regard for the
human beings that the all-swallowing corporation crushed.
Facts on highwaymen.

INMAN, HENRY. _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, New York, 1897. OP.
_The Great Salt Lake Trail_, 1898. OP. Many first-hand
incidents and characters.

MAJORS, ALEXANDER. _Seventy Years on the Frontier_, Chicago,
1893. Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio.
Majors was the lead steer of all freighters.

ORMSBY, W. L. _The Butterfield Overland Mail_, edited by Lyle
H. Wright and Josephine M. Bynum, Huntington Library, San
Marino, California, 1942. Ormsby rode the stage from St. Louis
to San Francisco in 1858 and contributed to the New York
_Herald_ the lively articles now made into this book.

ROOT, FRANK A., and CONNELLEY, W. E. _The Overland Stage to
California_, Topeka, Kansas, 1901. Reprinted by Long's College
Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. A full storehouse. Basic.

SANTLEBEN, AUGUST. _A Texas Pioneer_, edited by I. D. Affleck,
New York, 1910. OP. Best treatise available on freighting on
Chihuahua Trail.

TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_, 1871. Mark Twain went west by
stage.

WINTHER, O. O. _Express and Stagecoach Days in California_,
Stanford University Press, 1926. Compact, with bibliography.
OP.




_19_

Pony Express

"PRESENTLY the driver exclaims, `Here he comes!'

"Every neck is stretched and every eye strained. Away across
the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears
against the sky. In a second or two it becomes a horse and
rider, rising and falling, rising and falling sweeping towards
us nearer and nearer--growing more and more distinct, more and
more sharply defined--nearer and still nearer, and the flutter
of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear--another instant a whoop
and a hurrah from our upper deck [of the stagecoach], a wave
of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst
past our excited faces, and go swinging away like a belated
fragment of a storm."--Mark Twain, _Roughing It_.

A word cannot be defined in its own terms; nor can a region,
or a feature of that region. Analogy and perspective are
necessary for comprehension. The sense of horseback motion has
never been better realized than by Kipling in "The Ballad of
East and West." See "Horses."


BRADLEY, GLENN D._ The Story of the Pony Express_, Chicago,
1913. Nothing extra. OP.

BREWERTON, G. D. _Overland with Kit Carson_, New York, 1930.
Bibliography on West in general.

CHAPMAN, ARTHUR. _The Pony Express_, Putnam's, New York, 1932.
Good reading and bibliography.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. Chapter on "Rides and Riders," in _On the
Open Range_, published in 1931; reprinted by Banks Up
shaw, Dallas. Chapter on "Under the Saddle" in _The Mustangs_.

HAPEN, LEROY. _The Overland Mail_, Cleveland, 1926. Factual,
bibliography. OP.

ROOT, FRANK A., and CONNELLEY, W. E. _The Overland Stage to
California_, Topeka, Kansas, 1901. Reprinted by Long's College
Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Basic work.

VISSCHER, FRANK J. _A Thrilling and Truthful History of the
Pony Express_, Chicago, 1908. OP. Not excessively "thrilling."



_20_

Surge of Life in the West

THE WANDERINGS of Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, De Soto, and La
Salle had long been chronicled, although the chronicles had
not been popularized in English, when in 1804 Captain
Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark set out to explore
not only the Louisiana Territory, which had just been
purchased for the United States by President Thomas Jefferson,
but on west to the Pacific. Their _Journals_, published in
1814, initiated a series of chronicles comparable in scope,
vitality, and manhood adventure to the great collection known
as _Hakluyt's Voyages_.

Between 1904 and 1907 Reuben Gold Thwaites, one of the
outstanding editors of the English-speaking world, brought out
in thirty-two volumes his epic _Early Western Travels_. This
work includes the Lewis and Clark _Journals_, every student of
the West, whether Northwest or Southwest, goes to the
collection sooner or later. It is a commentary on the values
of life held by big rich boasters of patriotism in the West
that virtually all the chronicles in the collection remain out
of print.

An important addendum to the Thwaites collection of _Early
Western Travels_ is "The Southwest Historical Series," edited
by Ralph P. Bieber--twelve volumes, published 1931-43, by
Clark, Glendale, California.

The stampede to California that began in 1849 climaxed all
migration orgies of the world in its lust for gold; but the
lust for gold was merely one manifestation of a mighty
population's lust for life. Railroads raced each other to
cross the continent. Ten million Longhorns were going up the
trails;
from Texas while the last of a hundred million buffaloes,
killed in herds--the greatest slaughter in history--were being
skinned. Dodge City was the Cowboy Capital of the world,
and Chicago was becoming "hog butcher of the world."
Miller and Lux were expanding their ranges so that, as others
boasted, their herds could trail from Oregon to Baja
California and bed down every night on Miller and Lux's own
grass.

Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) was massing in San
Francisco at his own expense the greatest assemblage of
historical documents any one individual ever assembled. While
his interviewers and note-takers sorted down tons of
manuscript, he was employing a corps of historians to write
what,
at first designed as a history of the Pacific states, grew in
twenty-eight volumes to embrace also Alaska, British Columbia,
Texas, Mexico, and Central America, aside from five
volumes on the Native Races and six volumes of essays.
Meantime he was printing these volumes in sets of thousands
and
selling them through an army of agents that covered America.

Collis P. Huntington (1821-1900) was building the
Southern Pacific Railroad into a network, interlocked with
other systems and steamship lines, not only enveloping
California land but also the whole economic and political life
of
that and other states, with headquarters in the U.S. Congress.
Then his nephew, Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927), taking over
his wealth and power, was building gardens at San Marino,
California, collecting art, books, and manuscripts to
make, without benefit of any institution of learning and in
defiance of all the slow processes of tradition found at
Oxford and Harvard, a Huntington Library and a Huntington Art
Gallery that, set down amid the most costly botanical
profusion imaginable, now rival the world's finest.

The dreams were of empire. Old men and young toiled as
"terribly" as mighty Raleigh. The "spacious times" of Queen
Elizabeth seemed, indeed, to be translated to another sphere,
though here the elements that went into the mixture were
less diverse. Boom methods of Gargantuan scale were applied
to cultural factors as well as to the physical. Few men
stopped to reflect that while objects of art may be bought by
the wholesale, the development of genuine culture is too
intimately personal and too chemically blended with the
spiritual to be bartered for. The Huntingtons paid a quarter
of a million dollars for Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy." It is
very beautiful. Meanwhile the mustang grapevine waits for some
artist to paint the strong and lovely grace of its drapery and
thereby to enrich for land-dwellers every valley where it
hangs over elm or oak.

Most of the books in this section could be placed in other
sections. Many have been. They represent the vigor, vitality,
energy, and daring characteristic of our frontiers. To quote
Harvey Fergusson's phrase, the adventures of mettle have
always had "a tension that would not let them rest."


BARKER, EUGENE C. _The Life of Stephen F. Austin_, Dallas,
1925. Republished by Texas State Historical Association,
Austin. Iron-wrought biography of the leader in making Texas
Anglo-American.

BELL, HORACE. _Reminiscences of a Ranger, or Early Times in
California_, Los Angeles, 1881; reprinted, but OP. In this
book and in _On the Old West Coast_, Bell caught the lift and
spiritedness of life-hungry men.

BIDWELL, JOHN (1819-1900). _Echoes of the Past_, Chico,
California (about 1900). Bidwell got to California several
years before gold was discovered. He became foremost citizen
and entertained scientists, writers, scholars, and artists at
his ranch home. His brief accounts of the trip across the
plains and of pioneer society in California are graphic,
charming, telling. The book goes in and out of print but is
not likely to die.

BILLINGTON, RAY ALLEN. _Westward Expansion: A History of the
American Frontier_, Macmillan, New York, 1949. This Alpha to
Omega treatise concludes with a seventy-five-page, double-
column, fine-print bibliography which not only
lists but comments upon most books and articles of any
consequence that have been published on frontier history.

BOURKE, JOHN G. _On the Border with Crook_, New York, 1891.
Now published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio.
Bourke had an eager, disciplined mind, at once scientific and
humanistic; he had imagination and loyalty to truth and
justice; he had a strong body and joyed in frontier exploring.
He was a captain in the army but had nothing of the littleness
of the army mind exhibited by Generals Nelson Miles and O. O.
Howard in their egocentric reminiscences. I rank his book as
the meatiest and richest of all books dealing with campaigns
against Indians. In its amplitude it includes the whole
frontier. General George Crook was a wise, generous, and noble
man, but his _Autobiography_ (edited by Martin F. Schmitt;
University of Oklahoma Press) lacks that power in writing
necessary to turn the best subject on earth into a good book
and capable also, as Darwin demonstrated, of turning
earthworms into a classic.

BURNHAM, FREDERICK RUSSELL. _Scouting on Two Continents_, New
York, 1926; reprinted, Los Angeles, 1942. A brave book of
enthralling interest. The technique of scouting in the Apache
Country is illuminated by that of South Africa in the Boer
War. Hunting for life, Major Burnham carried it with him. OP.

DEVOTO, BERNARD. _The Year of Decision 1846_, Houghton
Mifflin, Boston, 1943. Critical interpretation as well as
depiction. The Mexican War, New Mexico, California, Mountain
Men, etc. DeVoto's _Across the Wide Missouri_ is wider in
spirit, less bound to political complexities. See under
"Mountain Men."

EMORY, LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM H. _Notes of a Military
Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San
Diego, in California, including Part of the Arkansas, Del
Norte, and Gila Rivers_, Washington, 1848. Emory's own vivid
report is only one item in _Executive Document No. 41_, 30th
Congress, 1st Session, with which it is bound. Lieutenant J.
W. Albert's _Journal_ and additional
_Report on New Mexico_, St. George Cooke's Odyssey of his
march from Santa Fe to San Diego, another _Journal_ by Captain
A. R. Johnson, the Torrey-Englemann report on botany,
illustrated with engravings, all go to make this one of the
meatiest of a number of meaty government publications. The
Emory part of it has been reprinted by the University of New
Mexico Press, under title of _Lieutenant Emory Reports_,
Introduction and Notes by Ross Calvin, Albuquerque, 1951.

Emory's great two-volume _Report on United States and Mexican
Boundary Survey_, Washington 1857 and 1859, is, aside from
descriptions of borderlands and their inhabitants, a veritable
encyclopedia, wonderfully illustrated, on western flora and
fauna. United States Commissioner on this Boundary Survey
(following the Mexican War) was John Russell Bartlett. While
exploring from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific and far down
into Mexico, he wrote _Personal Narrative of Explorations and
Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora and
Chihuahua_. published in two volumes, New York, 1854. For me
very little rewritten history has the freshness and
fascination of these strong, firsthand personal narratives,
though I recognize many of them as being the stuff of
literature rather than literature itself.

FOWLER, JACOB. _The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 1821-1822_,
edited by Elliott Coues, New York, 1898. Hardly another
chronicle of the West is so Defoe-like in homemade realism,
whether on Indians and Indian horses or Negro Paul's
experience with the Mexican "Lady" at San Fernando de Taos.
Should be reprinted.

GAMBRELL, HERBERT. _Anson Jones: The Last President of Texas_,
Garden City, New York, 1948; now distributed by Southern
Methodist University Press, Dallas, Texas. Anson Jones was
more surged over than surgent. Infused with a larger
comprehension than that behind many a world figure, this
biography of a provincial figure is perhaps the most artfully
written that Texas has produced. It goes into the soul of the
man.

HOBBS, JAMES. _Wild Life in the Far West_, Hartford,
1872. Hobbs saw just about all the elephants and heard just
about all the owls to be seen and heard in the Far West
including western Mexico. Should be reprinted.

HULBERT, ARCHER BUTLER. _Forty-Niners: The Chronicle of the
California Trail_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1931. Hulbert read
exhaustively in the exhausting literature by and about the
gold hunters rushing to California. Then he wove into a
synthetic diary the most interesting and illuminating records
on happenings, characters, ambitions, talk, singing, the whole
life of the emigrants.

IRVING, WASHINGTON. Irving made his ride into what is now
Oklahoma in 1832. He had recently returned from a seventeen-
year stay in Europe and was a mature literary man--as mature
as a conforming romanticist could become Prairie life
refreshed him. A _Tour on the Prairies_, published in 1835,
remains refreshing. It is illuminated by _Washington Irving on
the Prairie; or, A Narrative of the Southwest in the Year
1832_, by Henry Leavitt Ellsworth (who accompanied Irving),
edited by Stanley T. Williams and Barbara D. Simison, New
York, 1937; by _The Western Journals of Washington Irving_,
excellently edited by John Francis McDermott, Norman,
Oklahoma, 1944; and by Charles J. Latrobe's _The Rambler in
North America, 1832-1833_, New York, 1835.

JAMES, MARQUIS. _The Raven_, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis,
1929. Graphic life of Sam Houston.

KURZ, RUDOLPH FRIEDERICH. _Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz:
. . . His Experiences among Fur Traders and American Indians
on the Mississippi and Upper Missouri Rivers, during the Years
of 1846-1852_, U.S. Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 115,
Washington, 1937. The public has not had a chance at this
book, which was printed rather than published. Kurz both saw
and recorded with remarkable vitality. He was an artist and
the volume contains many reproductions of his paintings and
drawings. One of the most readable and illuminating of western
journals.

LEWIS, OSCAR. _The Big Four_, New York, 1938. Railroad
magnates.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _Arizona Characters_, Los Angeles,
California, 1928. Fresh sketches of representative men. The
book deserves to be better known than it is. OP.

LYMAN, GEORGE D. _John Marsh Pioneer_, New York, 1930. Prime
biography and prime romance. Laid mostly in California. This
book almost heads the list of all biographies of western men.
OP.

PARKMAN, FRANCIS. _The Oregon Trail_, 1849. Parkman knew how
to write but some other penetrators of the West put down about
as much. School assignments have made his book a recognized
classic.

PATTIE, JAMES O. _Personal Narrative_, Cincinnati, 1831;
reprinted, but OP. Positively gripping chronicle of life in
New Mexico and the Californias during Mexican days.

PIKE, ZEBULON M. _The Southwestern Expedition of Zebulon M.
Pike_, Philadelphia, 1810. The 1895 edition edited by Elliott
Coues is the most useful to students. No edition is in print.
Pike's explorations of the Southwest (1806-7) began while the
great Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-6) was ending. His
journal is nothing like so informative as theirs but is just
as readable. _The Lost Pathfinder_ is a biography of Pike by
W. Eugene Hollon, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949.

TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_, 1872. Mark Twain was a man who
wrote and not merely a writer in man-form. He was frontier
American in all his fibers. He was drunk with western life at
a time when both he and it were standing on tiptoe watching
the sun rise over the misty mountain tops, and he wrote of
what he had seen and lived before he became too sober.
_Roughing It_ comes nearer catching the energy, the
youthfulness, the blooming optimism, the recklessness, the
lust for the illimitable in western life than any other book.
It deals largely with mining life, but the surging vitality of
this life as reflected by Mark Twain has been the chief common
denominator of all American frontiers and was as
characteristic of Texas "cattle kings" when grass was free as
of Virginia City "nabobs" in bonanza.



_21_

Range Life: Cowboys, Cattle, Sheep

THE COWBOY ORIGINATED in Texas. The Texas cowboy, along with
the Texas cowman, was an evolvement from and a blend of the
riding, shooting, frontier-formed southerner, the Mexican-
Indian horseback worker with livestock (the vaquero), and the
Spanish open-range rancher. The blend was not in blood, but in
occupational techniques. I have traced this genesis with more
detail in _The Longhorns_. Compared with evolution in species,
evolution in human affairs is meteor-swift. The driving of
millions of cattle and horses from Texas to stock the whole
plains area of North America while, following the Civil War,
it was being denuded of buffaloes and secured from Indian
domination, enabled the Texas cowboy to set his impress upon
the whole ranching industry. The cowboy became the best-known
occupational type that America has given the world. He exists
still and will long exist, though much changed from the
original. His fame derives from the past.

Romance, both genuine and spurious, has obscured the realities
of range and trail. The realities themselves have, however,
been such that few riders really belonging to the range wished
to lead any other existence. Only by force of circumstances
have they changed "the grass beneath and the sky above" for a
more settled, more confining, and more materially remunerative
way of life. Some of the old-time cowboys were little more
adaptable to change than the Plains Indians; few were less
reluctant to plow or work in houses. Heaven in their dreams
was a range better watered than the one they knew, with grass
never stricken by drought,
plenty of fat cattle, the best horses and comrades of their
experience, more of women than they talked about in public,
and nothing at all of golden streets, golden harps, angel
wings, and thrones; it was a mere extension, somewhat
improved, of the present. Bankers, manufacturers, merchants,
and mechanics seldom so idealize their own occupations; they
work fifty weeks a year to go free the other two.

For every hired man on horseback there have been hundreds of
plowmen in America, and tens of millions of acres of
rangelands have been plowed under, but who can cite a single
autobiography of a laborer in the fields of cotton, of corn,
of wheat? Or do coal miners, steelmongers, workers in oil
refineries, factory hands of any kind of factory, the
employees of chain stores and department stores ever write
autobiographies? Many scores of autobiographies have been
written by range men, perhaps half of them by cowboys who
never became owners at all. A high percentage of the
autobiographies are in pamphlet form; many that were written
have not been published. The trail drivers of open range days,
nearly all dead now, felt the urge to record experiences more
strongly than their successors. They realized that they had
been a part of an epic life.

The fact that the hired man on horseback has been as good a
man as the owner and, on the average, has been a more spirited
and eager man than the hand on foot may afford some
explanation of the validity and vitality of his chroniclings,
no matter how crude they be. On the other hand, the fact that
the rich owner and the college-educated aspirant to be a
cowboy soon learned, if they stayed on the range, that _a
man's a man for a' that_ may to some extent account for a
certain generous amplitude of character inherent in their most
representative reminiscences. Sympathy for the life biases my
judgment; that judgment, nevertheless, is that some of the
strongest and raciest autobiographic writing produced by
America has been by range men.

This is not to say that these chronicles are of a high
literary order. Their writers have generally lacked the
maturity


{illust. caption =
Tom Lea, in _The Longhorns_ by J. Frank Dobie (1941)}


of mind, the reflective wisdom, and the power of observation
found in personal narratives of the highest order. No man who
camped with a chuck wagon has written anything remotely
comparable to Charles M. Doughty's _Arabia Deserta_, a
chronicle at once personal and impersonal, restrainedly
subjective and widely objective, of his life with nomadic
Bedouins. Perspective is a concomitant of civilization. The
chronicles of the range that show perspective have come mostly
from educated New Englanders, Englishmen, and Scots. The great
majority of the chronicles are limited in subject matter to
physical activities. They make few concessions to "the desire
of the moth for the star"; they hardly enter the complexities
of life, including those of sex. In one section of the West at
one time the outstanding differences among range men were
between owners of sheep and owners of cattle, the ambition of
both being to hog the whole country. On another area of the
range at another time, the outstanding difference was between
little ranchers, many of whom were stealing, and big ranchers,
plenty of whom had stolen. Such differences are not exponents
of the kind of individualism that burns itself into great
human documents.

Seldom deeper than the chronicles does range fiction go below
physical surface into reflection, broodings, hungers-- the
smolderings deep down in a cowman oppressed by drought and
mortgage sitting in a rocking chair on a ranch gallery looking
at the dust devils and hoping for a cloud; the goings-on
inside a silent cowboy riding away alone from an empty pen to
which he will never return; the streams of consciousness in a
silent man and a silent woman bedded together in a wind-lashed
frame house away out on the lone prairie. The wide range of
human interests leaves ample room for downright, straightaway
narratives of the careers of strong men. If the literature of
the range ever matures, however, it will include keener
searchings for meanings and harder struggles for human truths
by writers who strive in "the craft so long to lerne." For
three-quarters of a century the output of fiction on the
cowboy has been tremendous, and
it shows little diminution. Mass production inundating the
masses of readers has made it difficult for serious
fictionists writing about range people to get a hearing.

The code of the West was concentrated into the code of the
range--and not all of it by any means depended upon the six-
shooter. No one can comprehend this code without knowing
something about the code of the Old South, whence the Texas
cowboy came.

Mexican goats make the best eating in Mexico and mohair has
made good money for many ranchers of the Southwest. Goats,
goat herders, goatskins, and wine in goatskins figure in the
literature of Spain as prominently as six-shooters in Blazing
Frontier fiction--and far more pleasantly. Read George
Borrow's _The Bible in Spain_, one of the most delectable of
travel books. Beyond a few notices of Mexican goat herders,
there is on the subject of goats next to nothing readable in
American writings. Where there is no competition, supremacy is
small distinction; so I should offend no taste by saying that
"The Man of Goats" in my own _Tongues of the Monte_ is about
the best there is so far as goats go.

Although sheep are among the most salient facts of range life,
they have, as compared with cattle and horses, been a dim item
in the range tradition. Yet, of less than a dozen books on
sheep and sheepmen, more than half of them are better written
than hundreds of books concerning cowboy life. Mary Austin's
_The Flock_ is subtle and beautiful; Archer B. Gilfillan's
_Sheep_ is literature in addition to having much information;
Hughie Call's _Golden Fleece_ is delightful; Winifred Kupper's
_The Golden Hoof_ and _Texas Sheepman_ have charm--a rare
quality in most books on cows and cow people. Among
furnishings in the cabin of Robert Maudslay, "the Texas
Sheepman," were a set of Sir Walter Scott's works,
Shakespeare, and a file of the _Illustrated London News_. "A
man who read Shakespeare and the _Illustrated London News_ had
little to contribute to
     Come a ti yi yoopee
     Ti yi ya!"

O. Henry's ranch experiences in Texas were largely confined to
a sheep ranch. The setting of his "Last of the Troubadours" is
a sheep ranch. I nominate it as the best range story in
American fiction.

"Cowboy Songs" and "Horses" are separate chapters following
this. The literature cited in them is mostly range literature,
although precious little in all the songs rises to the status
of poetry. A considerable part of the literature listed under
"Texas Rangers" and "The Bad Man Tradition" bears on range
life.


ABBOTT, E. C., and SMITH, HELENA HUNTINGTON. We _Pointed Them
North_, New York, 1939. Abbott, better known as Teddy Blue,
used to give his address as Three Duce Ranch, Gilt Edge,
Montana. Helena Huntington Smith, who actually wrote and
arranged his reminiscences, instead of currying him down and
putting a checkrein on him, spurred him in the flanks and told
him to swaller his head. He did. This book is franker about
the women a rollicky cowboy was likely to meet in town than
all the other range books put together. The fact that Teddy
Blue's wife was a half-breed Indian, daughter of Granville
Stuart, and that Indian women do not object to the truth about
sex life may account in part for his frankness. The book is
mighty good reading. OP.

ADAMS, ANDY. _The Log of a Cowboy_ (1903). In 1882, at the age
of twenty-three, Andy Adams came to Texas from Indiana. For
about ten years he traded horses and drove them up the trail.
He knew cattle people and their ranges from Brownsville to
Caldwell, Kansas. After mining for another decade, he began to
write. If all other books on trail driving were destroyed, a
reader could still get a just and authentic conception of
trail men, trail work, range cattle, cow horses, and the cow
country in general from _The Log of a Cowboy_. It is a novel
without a plot, a woman, character development, or sustained
dramatic incidents; yet it is the classic of the occupation.
It is a simple, straightaway narrative that takes a trail herd
from the Rio Grande to the Canadian line,
the hands talking as naturally as cows chew cuds, every page
illuminated by an easy intimacy with the life. Adams wrote six
other books. _The Outlet, A Texas Matchmaker, Cattle Brands_,
and _Reed Anthony, Cowman_ all make good reading. _Wells
Brothers_ and _The Ranch on the Beaver_ are stories for boys.
I read them with pleasure long after I was grown. All but _The
Log of a Cowboy_ are OP, published by Houghton Mifflin,
Boston.

ADAMS, RAMON F. _Cowboy Lingo_, Boston, 1936. A dictionary of
cowboy words, figures of speech, picturesque phraseology,
slang, etc., with explanations of many factors peculiar to
range life. OP. _Western Words_, University of Oklahoma Press,
1944. A companion book. _Come an' Get It_, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1952. Informal exposition of chuck
wagon cooks.

ALDRIDGE, REGINALD. _Ranch Notes_, London, 1884. Aldridge, an
educated Englishman, got into the cattle business before, in
the late eighties, it boomed itself flat. His book is not
important, but it is maybe a shade better than _Ranch Life in
Southern Kansas and the Indian Territory_ by Benjamin S.
Miller, New York, 1896. Aldridge and Miller were partners, and
each writes kindly about the other.

ALLEN, JOHN HOUGHTON. _Southwest_, Lippincott, Philadelphia,
1952. A chemical compound of highly impressionistic
autobiographic nonfiction and highly romantic fiction and folk
tales. The setting is a ranch of Mexican tradition in the
lower border country of Texas, also saloons and bawdy houses
of border towns. Vaqueros and their work in the brush are
intensely vivid. The author has a passion for superlatives and
for "a joyous cruelty, a good cruelty, a young cruelty."

ARNOLD, OREN, and HALE, J. P. _Hot Irons_, Macmillan, New
York, 1940. Technique and lore of cattle brands. OP.

AUSTIN, MARY. _The Flock_, Boston, 1906, OP. Mary Austin saw
the meanings of things; she was a creator. Very quietly she
sublimated life into the literature of pictures and
emotions.

Australian ranching is not foreign to American ranching.
The best book on the subject that I have found is _Pastures
New_, by R. V. Billis and A. S. Kenyon, London, 1930.

BARNARD, EVAN G. ("Parson"). _A Rider of the Cherokee Strip_,
Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1936. Savory with little incidents
and cowboy humor. OP.

BARNES, WILL C. _Tales from the X-Bar Horse Camp_, Chicago,
1920. OP. Good simple narratives. _Apaches and Longhorns_, Los
Angeles, 1941. Autobiography. OP. _Western Grazing Grounds and
Forest Ranges_, Chicago, 1913. OP. Governmentally factual.
Barnes was in the U.S. Forest Service and was informed.

BARROWS, JOHN R. _Ubet_, Caldwell, Idaho, 1934. Excellent on
Northwest; autobiographical. OP.

BECHDOLT, FREDERICK R. _Tales of the Old Timers_, New York,
1924. Vivid, economical stories of "The Warriors of the Pecos"
(Billy the Kid and the troubles on John Chisum's ranch-
empire), of Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch in their Wyoming
hide-outs, of the way frontier Texans fought Mexicans and
Comanches over the open ranges. Research clogs the style of
many historians; perhaps it is just as well that Bechdolt did
not search more extensively into the arcana of footnotes. OP.

BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Tall Tales from Texas Cow Camps_, Dallas,
1934. The tales are tall all right and true to cows that never
saw a milk bucket. OP. Reprinted 1946 by Haldeman-Julius,
Girard, Kansas.

BOREIN, EDWARD. _Etchings of the West_, edited by Edward S.
Spaulding, Santa Barbara, California, 1950. OP. A very
handsome folio; primarily a reproduction of sketches, many of
which are on range subjects. Ed Borein tells more in them than
hundreds of windbags have told in tens of thousands of pages.
They are beautiful and authentic, even if they are what post-
impressionists call "documentary." Believers in the True Faith
say now that Leonardo da Vinci is documentary in his painting
of the Lord's Supper. Ed Borein was a great friend of Charlie
Russell's but not an imitator. _Etchings of the West_ will
soon be among the rarities of Western books.

BOWER, B. M. _Chip of the Flying U_, New York, 1904. Charles
Russell illustrated this and three other Bower novels.
Contrary to his denial, he is supposed to have been the
prototype for Chip. A long time ago I read _Chit of the Flying
U_ and _The Lure of the Dim Trails_ and thought them as good
as Eugene Manlove Rhodes's stories. That they have faded
almost completely out of memory is a commentary on my memory;
just the same, a character as well named as Chip should, if he
have substance beyond his name, leave an impression even on
weak memories. B. M. Bower was a woman, Bower being the name
of her first husband. A Montana cowpuncher named "Fiddle Back"
Sinclair was her second, and Robert Ellsworth Cowan became the
third. Under the name of Bud Cowan he published a book of
reminiscences entitled _Range Rider_ (Garden City, N. Y.,
1930). B. M. Bower wrote a slight introduction to it; neither
he nor she says anything about being married to the other. In
the best of her fiction she is truer to life than he is in a
good part of his nonfiction. Her chaste English is partly
explained in an autobiographic note contributed to _Adventure_
magazine, December 10, 1924. Her restless father had moved the
family from Minnesota to Montana. There, she wrote, he "taught
me music and how to draw plans of houses (he was an architect
among other things) and to read _Paradise Lost_ and Dante and
H. Rider Haggard and the Bible and the Constitution--and my
taste has been extremely catholic ever since."

BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. _The Cowboy and His Interpreters_, New
York, 1926. Useful bibliography on range matters, and
excellent criticism of two kinds of fiction writers. OP.

BRATT, JOHN. _Trails of Yesterday_, Chicago, 1921. John Bratt,
twenty-two years old, came to America from England in 1864,
went west, and by 1870 was ranching on the Platte.
He became a big operator, but his reminiscences, beautifully
printed, are stronger on camp cooks and other hired hands than
on cattle "kings." Nobody ever heard a cowman call himself or
another cowman a king. "Cattle king" is journalese.

BRISBIN, GENERAL JAMES S. _The Beef Bonanza; or, How to Get
Rich on the Plains_, Philadelphia, 1881. One of several books
of its decade designed to appeal to eastern and European
interest in ranching as an investment. Figureless and with
more human interest is _Prairie Experiences in Handling Cattle
and Sheep_, by Major W. Shepherd (of England), London? 1884.

BRONSON, EDGAR BEECHER. _Cowboy Life on the Western Plains_,
Chicago, 1910. _The Red Blooded_, Chicago, 1910. Freewheeling
nonfiction.

BROOKS, BRYANT B. _Memoirs_, Gardendale, California, 1939. The
book never was published; it was merely printed to satisfy the
senescent vanity of a property-worshiping, cliche-parroting
reactionary who made money ranching before he became governor
of Wyoming. He tells a few good anecdotes of range days.
Numerous better books pertaining to the range are NOT
listed here; this mediocrity represents a particular type.

BROTHERS, MARY HUDSON. A _Pecos Pioneer_, University of New
Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943. Superior to numerous better-
known books. See comment under "Women Pioneers."

BROWN, DEE, and SCHMITT, MARTIN F. _Trail Driving Days_,
Scribner's, New York, 1952. Primarily a pictorial record, more
on the side of action than of realism, except for post-trailing period.
Excellent bibliography.

BURTON, HARLEY TRUE. A _History of the J A Ranch_, Austin,
1928. Facts about one of the greatest ranches of Texas and its
founder, Charles Goodnight. OP.

CALL, HUGHIE. _Golden Fleece_, Boston, 1942. Hughie married a
sheepman, and after mothering the range as well as children
with him for a quarter of a century, concluded that Montana is
still rather masculine. Especially good on domestic life and
on sheepherders. OP.

CANTON, FRANK M. _Frontier Trails_, edited by E. E. Dale,
Boston, 1930. OP. Good on tough hombres.

CLAY, JOHN. My _Life on the Range_, privately printed,
Chicago, 1924. OP. John Clay, an educated Scot, came to Canada
in 1879 and in time managed some of the largest British-owned
ranches of North America. His book is the best of all sources
on British-owned ranches. It is just as good on cowboys and
sheepherders. Clay was a fine gentleman in addition to being a
canny businessman in the realm of cattle and land. He
appreciated the beautiful and had a sense of style.

CLELAND, ROBERT GLASS. _The Cattle on a Thousand Hills_,
Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1941 (revised,
1951). Scholarly work on Spanish-Mexican ranching in
California.

CLEAVELAND, AGNES MORLEY. _No Life for a Lady_, Houghton
Mifflin, Boston, 1941. Best book on range life from a woman's
point of view ever published. The setting is New Mexico; humor
and humanity prevail.

COLLINGS, ELLSWORTH. _The 101 Ranch_, University of Oklahoma
Press, Norman, 1937. The 101 Ranch was far more than a ranch;
it was a unique institution. The 101 Ranch Wild West Show is
emphasized in this book. OP.

COLLINS, DENNIS. _The Indians' Last Fight or the Dull Knife
Raid_, Press of the Appeal to Reason, Girard, Kansas, n.d.
Nearly half of this very scarce book deals autobiographically
with frontier range life. Realistic, strong, written from the
perspective of a man who "wanted something to read" in camp.

COLLINS, HUBERT E. _Warpath and Cattle Trail_, New York, 1928.
The pageant of trail life as it passed by a stage stand in
Oklahoma; autobiographical. Beautifully printed and
illustrated. Far better than numerous other out-of-print books
that bring much higher prices in the second-hand market.

CONN, WILLIAM (translator). _Cow-Boys and Colonels: Narrative
of a Journey across the Prairie and over the Black Hills of
Dakota_, London, 1887; New York (1888?). More of a curiosity
than an illuminator, the book is a sparsely annotated
translation of _Dans les Montagnes Rocheuses_, by Le Baron E.
de Mandat-Grancey, Paris, October, 1884. (The
only copy I have examined is of 1889 printing.) It is a
gossipy account of an excursion made in 1883-84; cowboys and
ranching are viewed pretty much as a sophisticated Parisian
views a zoo. The author must have felt more at home with the
fantastic Marquis de Mores of Medora, North Dakota. The book
appeared at a time when European capital was being invested in
western ranches. It was followed by _La Breche aux Buffles:
Un Ranch Francais dans le Dakota_, Paris, 1889. Not
translated so far as I know.

COOK, JAMES H. _Fifty Years on the Old Frontier_, 1923. Cook
came to Texas soon after the close of the Civil War and became
a brush popper on the Frio River. Nothing better on cow work
in the brush country and trail driving in the seventies has
appeared. OP. A good deal of the same material was put into
Cook's _Longhorn Cowboy_ (Putnam's, 1942), to which the
pushing Mr. Howard R. Driggs attached his name.

COOLIDGE, DANE. _Texas Cowboys_, 1937. Thin, but genuine.
_Arizona Cowboys_, 1938. _Old California Cowboys_, 1939. All
well illustrated by photographs and all OP.

Cox, JAMES. _The Cattle Industry of Texas and Adjacent
Territory_, St. Louis, 1895. Contains many important
biographies and much good history. In 1928 I traded a pair of
store-bought boots to my uncle Neville Dobie for his copy of
this book. A man would have to throw in a young Santa
Gertrudis bull now to get a copy.

CRAIG, JOHN R. _Ranching with lords and Commons_, Toronto,
1903. During the great boom of the early 1880'S in the range
business, Craig promoted a cattle company in London and then
managed a ranch in western Canada. His book is good on
mismanaged range business and it is good on people, especially
lords, and the land. He attributes to De Quincey a Latin
quotation that properly, I think, belongs to Thackeray. He
quotes Hamlin Garland: "The trail is poetry; a wagon road is
prose; the railroad, arithmetic." He was probably not so good
at ranching as at writing. His book supplements _From Home to
Home_, by Alex. Staveley Hill, New York, 1885. Hill was a
major investor in the Oxley
Ranch, and was, I judge, the pompous cheat and scoundrel that
Craig said he was.

CRAWFORD, LEWIS F. _Rekindling Camp Fires: The Exploits of Ben
Arnold (Connor)_, Bismarck, North Dakota, 1926. OP. The skill
of Lewis F. Crawford of the North Dakota Historical Society
made this a richer autobiography than if Arnold had been
unaided. He was squaw man, scout, trapper, soldier, deserter,
prospector, and actor in other occupations as well as cowboy.
He had a fierce sense of justice that extended to Indians. His
outlook was wider than that of the average ranch hand.
_Badlands and Broncho Trails_, Bismarck, 1922, is a slight
book of simple narratives that catches the tune of the
Badlands life. OP. _Ranching Days in Dakota_, Wirth Brothers,
Baltimore, 1950, is good on horse-raising and the terrible
winter of 1886-87.

CULLEY, JOHN. _Cattle, Horses, and Men_, Los Angeles, 1940.
Much about the noted Bell Ranch of New Mexico. Especially good
on horses. Culley was educated at Oxford. When I visited him
in California, he had on his table a presentation copy of a
book by Walter Pater. His book has the luminosity that comes
from cultivated intelligence. OP.

DACY, GEORGE F. _Four Centuries of Florida Ranching_, St.
Louis, 1940. OP. In _Crooked Trails_, Frederic Remington has a
chapter (illustrated) on "Cracker Cowboys of Florida," and
_Lake Okeechobee_, by A. J. Hanna and Kathryn Abbey,
Indianapolis, 1948, treats of modern ranching in Florida, but
the range people of that state have been too lethargic-minded
to write about themselves and no Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has
settled in their midst to interpret them.

DALE, E. E. _The Range Cattle Industry_, Norman, Oklahoma,
1930. Economic aspects. Bibliography. _Cow Country,_ Norman,
Oklahoma, 1942. Bully tales and easy history. Both books are
OP.

DANA, RICHARD HENRY. _Two Years Before the Mast_, 1841. This
transcript of reality has been reprinted many times. It is the
classic of the hide and tallow trade of California.

DAVID, ROBERT D. _Malcolm Campbell, Sheriff_, Casper, Wyoming,
1932. Much of the "Johnson County War" between cowmen and
thieving nesters. OP.

DAYTON, EDSON C. _Dakota Days_. Privately printed by the
author at Clifton Springs, New York, 1937--three hundred
copies only. Dayton was more sheepman than cowman. He had a
spiritual content. His very use of the word _intellectual_ on
the second page of his book; his estimate of Milton and
Gladstone, adjacent to talk about a frontier saloon; his
consciousness of his own inner growth--something no extravert
cowboy ever noticed, usually because he did not have it; his
quotation to express harmony with nature:

          I have some kinship to the bee,
          I am boon brother with the tree;
          The breathing earth is part of me--

all indicate a refinement that any gambler could safely bet
originated in the East and not in Texas or the South.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _A Vaquero of the Brush Country_, 1929. Much
on border troubles over cattle, the "skinning war," running
wild cattle in the brush, mustanging, trail driving; John
Young's narrative, told in the first person, against range
backgrounds. _The Longhorns_, illustrated by Tom Lea, 1941.
History of the Longhorn breed, psychology of stampedes; days
of maverickers and mavericks; stories of individual lead
steers and outlaws of the range; stories about rawhide and
many other related subjects. The book attempts to reveal the
blend made by man, beast, and range. Both books published by
Little, Brown, Boston. _The Mustangs_, 1952. See under
"Horses."

FORD, GUS L. _Texas Cattle Brands_, Dallas, 1936. A catalogue
of brands. OP.

FRENCH, WILLIAM. _Some Recollections of a Western Ranchman_,
London, 1927. A civilized Englishman remembers. OP.

GANN, WALTER. _The Trail Boss_, Boston, 1937. Faithful
fiction, with a steer that Charlie Russell should have
painted. OP.

GARD, WAYNE. _Frontier Justice_, University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman, 1949. This book could be classified under "The Bad Man
Tradition," but it has authentic chapters on fence-cutting,
the so-called "Johnson County Cattlemen's War" of Wyoming, and
other range "difficulties." Clearly written from an equable
point of view. Useful bibliography of range books.

GIBSON, J. W. (Watt). _Recollections of a Pioneer_, St.
Joseph, Missouri (about 1912). Like many another book
concerned only incidentally with range life, this contains
essential information on the subject. Here it is trailing
cattle from Missouri to California in the 1840's and 1850's.
Cattle driving from the East to California was not
economically important. The outstanding account on the subject
is _A Log of the Texas-California Cattle Trail, 1854_, by
James G. Bell, edited


{illust. caption =
Tom Lea, in _The Longhorns_ by J. Frank Dobie (1941)}


by J. Evetts Haley, published in the _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_, 1932 (Vols. XXXV and XXXVI). Also reprinted as a
separate.

GILFILLAN, ARCHER B. _Sheep_, Boston, 1929. With humor and
grace, this sheepherder, who collected books on Samuel Pepys,
tells more about sheep dogs, sheep nature, and sheepherder
life than any other writer I know. OP.

GIPSON, FRED. _Fabulous Empire_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,
1946. Biography of Zack Miller of the 101 Ranch and 101 Wild
West Show.

GOODWYN, FRANK. _Life on the King Ranch_, Crowell, New York,
1951. The author was reared on the King Ranch. He is
especially refreshing on the vaqueros, their techniques and
tales.

GRAY, FRANK S. _Pioneer Adventures_, 1948, and _Pioneering in
Southwest Texas_, 1949, both printed by the author, Copperas
Cove, Texas. These books are listed because the author has the
perspective of a civilized gentleman and integrates home life
on frontier ranches with range work.

GREER, JAMES K. _Bois d'Arc to Barbed Wire_, Dallas, 1936.
Outstanding horse lore. OP.

HAGEDORN, HERMANN. _Roosevelt in the Bad Lands_, Boston, 1921.
A better book than Roosevelt's own _Ranch Life and the Hunting
Trail_. OP.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. _The XIT Ranch of Texas_, Chicago, 1929. As
county and town afford the basis for historical treatment of
many areas, ranches have afforded bases for various range
country histories. Of such this is tops. A lawsuit for libel
brought by one or more individuals mentioned in the book put a
stop to the selling of copies by the publishers and made it
very "rare." _Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman_,
Boston, 1936, reissued by University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman, 1949. Goodnight, powerful individual and extraordinary
observer, summed up in himself the whole life of range and
trail. Haley's book, packed with realities of incident and
character, paints him against a mighty background. _George W.
Littlefield, Texan_, University of Oklahoma Presss
Norman, Okla., 1943, is a lesser biography of a lesser man.

HAMILTON, W. H. _Autobiography of a Cowman_, in _South Dakota
Historical Collections_, XIX (1938), 475-637. A first-rate
narrative of life on the Dakota range.

HAMNER, LAURA V. _Short Grass and Longhorns_, Norman,
Oklahoma, 1943. Sketches of Panhandle ranches and ranch
people. OP.

HARRIS, FRANK. _My Reminiscences as a Cowboy_, 1930. A blatant
farrago of lies, included in this list because of its supreme
worthlessness. However, some judges might regard the
debilitated and puerile lying in _The Autobiography of Frank
Tarbeaux_, as told to Donald H. Clarke, New York, 1930, as
equally worthless.

HART, JOHN A., and Others. _History of Pioneer Days in Texas
and Oklahoma_. No date or place of publication; no table of
contents. This slight book was enlarged into _Pioneer Days in
the Southwest from 1850 to 1879_, "Contributions by Charles
Goodnight, Emanuel Dubbs, John A. Hart and Others," Guthrie,
Oklahoma, 1909. Good on the way frontier ranch families lived.
The writers show no sense of humor and no idea of being
literary.

HASTINGS, FRANK S. _A Ranchman's Recollections_, Chicago,
1921. OP. Hastings was urbane, which means he had perspective;
"Old Gran'pa" is the most pulling cowhorse story I know.

HENRY, O. _Heart of the West_. Interpretative stories of Texas
range life, which O. Henry for a time lived. His range stories
are scattered through several volumes. "The Last of the
Troubadours" is a classic.

HENRY, STUART. _Our Great American Plains_, New York, 1930.
OP. An unworshipful, anti-Philistinic picture of Abilene,
Kansas, when it was at the end of the Chisholm Trail. While
not a primary range book, this is absolutely unique in its
analysis of cow-town society, both citizens and drovers.
Stuart Henry came to Abilene as a boy in 1868. His brother was
the first mayor of the town. After graduating from the
University of Kansas in 1881, he in time acquired "the habit
of authorship." He had written a book on London and _French
Essays and Profiles_ and _Hours with Famous Parisians_ before
he returned to Kansas for a subject. Some of his non-complimentary
characterizations of westerners aroused a mighty
roar among panegyrists of the West. They did not try to refute
his anecdote about the sign of the Bull Head Saloon. This sign
showed the whole of a great red bull. The citizens of Abilene
were used to seeing bulls driven through town and they could
go out any day and see bulls with cows on the prairie. Nature
might be good, but any art suggesting nature's virility was
indecent. There was such an uprising of Victorian taste that
what distinguishes a bull from a cow had to be painted out. A
similar artistic operation had to be performed on the bull
signifying Bull Durham tobacco--once the range favorite for
making cigarettes.

HILL, J. L. _The End of the Cattle Trail_, Long Beach,
California [May, 1924]. Rare and meaty pamphlet.

HOLDEN, W. C. _Rollie Burns_, Dallas, 1932. Biography of a
Plains cowman. OP. _The Spur Ranch_, Boston, 1934. History of
a great Texas ranch. OP.

HORN, TOM. _Life of Tom Horn . . . Written by Himself,
together with His Letters and Statements by His Friends, A
Vindication_. Published (for John C. Coble) by the Louthan
Book Company, Denver, 1904. Who wrote the book has been
somewhat in debate. John C. Coble's name is signed to the
preface attributing full authorship to Horn. Of Pennsylvania
background, wealthy and educated, he had employed Horn as a
stock detective on his Wyoming ranch. He had the means and
ability to see the book through the press. A letter from his
wife to me, from Cheyenne, June 21,1926, says that Horn wrote
the book. Charles H. Coe, who succeeded Horn as stock
detective in Wyoming, says in _Juggling a Rope_ (Pendleton,
Oregon, 1927, P. 108), that Horn wrote it. I have a copy,
bought from Fred Rosenstock of the Bargain Book Store in
Denver, who got it from Hattie Horner Louthan, of Denver also.
For years she taught English in the University of Denver,
College of Commerce, and is the author of more than one
textbook. The Louthan Book Company of Denver was owned by her
family. This copy of _Tom Horn_ contains her bookplate. On top
of the first page of the preface is written in pencil: "I
wrote this--`Ghost wrote.' H. H. L." Then, penciled at the top
of the first page of "Closing Word," is "I wrote this."

Glendolene Myrtle Kimmell was a schoolteacher in the country
where Tom Horn operated. As her picture shows, she was lush
and beautiful. Pages 287-309 print "Miss Kimmell's Statement."
She did her best to keep Tom Horn from hanging. She frankly
admired him and, it seems to me, loved him. Jay Monaghan, _The
Legend of Tom Horn, Last of the Bad Men_, Indianapolis and New
York, 1946, says (p. 267), without discussion or proof, that
after Horn was hanged and buried Miss Kimmell was "writing a
long manuscript about a Sir Galahad horseman who was `crushed
between the grinding stones of two civilizations,' but she
never found a publisher who thought her book would sell. It
was entitled _The True Life of Tom Horn_."

The main debate has been over Horn himself. The books about
him are not highly important, but they contribute to a
spectacular and highly controversial phase of range history,
the so-called Johnson County War of Wyoming. Mercer's
_Banditti of the Plains_, Mokler's _History of Natrona County,
Wyoming_, Canton's _Frontier Trails_, and David's _Malcolm
Campbell, Sheriff_ (all listed in this chapter) are primary
sources on the subject.

HOUGH, EMERSON. _The Story of the Cowboy_, New York, 1897.
Exposition not nearly so good as Philip Ashton Rollins' _The
Cowboy. North of 36_, New York, 1923. Historical novel of the
Chisholm Trail. The best character in it is Old Alamo, lead
steer. A young woman owner of the herd trails with it. The
success of the romance caused Emerson Hough to advise his
friend Andy Adams to put a woman in a novel about trail
driving--so Andy Adams told me. Adams replied that a woman
with a trail herd would be as useless as a fifth wheel on a
wagon and that he would not violate reality by
having her. For a devastation of Hough's use of history in
_North of 36_ see the Appendix in Stuart Henry's _Conquering
Our Great American Plains_. Yet the novel does have the right
temper.

HOYT, HENRY F. _A Frontier Doctor_, Boston, 1929. Texas
Panhandle and New Mexico during Billy the Kid days.
Reminiscences.

HUNT, FRAZIER. _Cat Mossman: Last of the Great Cowmen_,
illustrated by Ross Santee, Hastings House, New York, 1951.
Few full-length biographies of big operators among cowmen have
been written. This reveals not only Cap Mossman's operations
on enormous ranges, but the man.

HUNTER, J. MARVIN (compiler). _The Trail Drivers of Texas_,
two volumes, Bandera, Texas, 1920, 1923. Reprinted in one
volume, 1925. All OP. George W. Saunders, founder of the Old
Time Trail Drivers Association and for many years president,
prevailed on hundreds of old-time range and trail men to write
autobiographic sketches. He used to refer to Volume II as the
"second edition"; just the same, he was not ignorant, and he
had a passion for the history of his people. The chronicles,
though chaotic in arrangement, comprise basic source material.
An index to the one-volume edition of _The Trail Drivers of
Texas_ is printed as an appendix to _The Chisholm Trail and
Other Routes_, by T. U. Taylor, San Antonio, 1936--a
hodgepodge.

JAMES, WILL. _Cowboys North and South_, New York, 1924. _The
Drifting Cowboy_, 1925. _Smoky_--a cowhorse story--1930.
Several other books, mostly repetitious. Will James knew his
frijoles, but burned them up before he died, in 1942. He
illustrated all his books. The best one is his first, written
before he became sophisticated with life--without becoming in
the right way more sophisticated in the arts of drawing and
writing. _Lone Cowboy: My Life Story_ (1930) is without a date
or a geographical location less generalized than the space
between Canada and Mexico.

JAMES, W. S. _Cowboy Life in Texas_, Chicago, 1893. A genuine
cowboy who became a genuine preacher and wrote a
book of validity. This is the best of several books of
reminiscences by cowboy preachers, some of whom are as lacking
in the real thing as certain cowboy artists. Next to _Cowboy
Life in Texas_, in its genre, might come _From the Plains to
the Pulpit_, by J. W. Anderson, Houston, 1907. The second
edition (reset) has six added chapters. The third, and final,
edition, Goose Creek, Texas, 1922, again reset, has another
added chapter. J. B. Cranfill was a trail driver from a rough
range before he became a Baptist preacher and publisher. His
bulky _Chronicle, A Story of Life in Texas_, 1916, is
downright and concrete.

KELEHER, WILLIAM A. _Maxwell Land Grant: A New Mexico Item_,
Santa Fe, 1942. The Maxwell grant of 1,714,764 acres on the
Cimarron River was at one time perhaps the most famous tract
of land in the West. This history brings in ranching only
incidentally; it focuses on the land business, including grabs
by Catron, Dorsey, and other affluent politicians. Perhaps
stronger on characters involved during long litigation over
the land, and containing more documentary evidence, is _The
Grant That Maxwell Bought_, by F. Stanley, The World Press,
Denver, 1952 (a folio of 256 pages in an edition of 250 copies
at $15.00). Keleher is a lawyer; Stanley is a priest. Harvey
Fergusson in his historical novel _Grant of Kingdom_, New
York, 1950, vividly supplements both. Keleher's second book,
_The Fabulous Frontier_, Rydal, Santa Fe, 1945, illuminates
connections between ranch lands and politicians; principally
it sketches the careers of A. B. Fall, John Chisum, Pat
Garrett, Oliver Lee, Jack Thorp, Gene Rhodes, and other New
Mexico notables.

KENT, WILLIAM. _Reminiscences of Outdoor Life_, San Francisco,
1929. OP. This is far from being a straight-out range book. It
is the easy talk of an urbane man associated with ranches and
ranch people who was equally at home in a Chicago office and
among fellow congressmen. He had a country-going nature and
gusto for character.

KING, FRANK M. _Wranglin' the Past_, Los Angeles, 1935. King
went all the way from Texas to California, listening and
looking. OP. His second book, _Longhorn Trail Drivers_ (1940),
is worthless. His _Pioneer Western Empire Builders_ (1946) and
_Mavericks_ (1947) are no better. Most of the contents of
these books appeared in _Western Livestock Journal_, Los
Angeles.

KUPPER, WINIFRED. _The Golden Hoof_, New York, 1945. Story of
the sheep and sheep people of the Southwest. Facts, but, above
that, truth that comes only through imagination and sympathy.
OP. _Texas Sheepman_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1951.
The edited reminiscences of Robert Maudslay. He drove sheep
all over the West, and lived up to the ideals of an honest
Englishman in writing as well as in ranching. He had a sense
of humor.

LAMPMAN, CLINTON PARKS. _The Great Western Trail_, New York,
1939. OP. In the upper bracket of autobiographic chronicles,
by a sensitive man who never had the provincial point of view.
Lampman contemplated as well as observed He felt the pathos of
human destiny.

LANG, LINCOLN A. _Ranching with Roosevelt_, Philadelphia,
1926. Civilized. OP.

LEWIS, ALFRED HENRY. _Wolfville_ (1897) and other Wolfville
books. All OP. Sketches and rambling stories faithful to
cattle backgrounds; flavor and humanity through fictionized
anecdote. "The Old Cattleman," who tells all the Wolfville
stories, is a substantial and flavorsome creation.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _Arizona Characters_, Los Angeles, 1928.
Skilfully written biographies. OP.

MCCARTY, JOHN L. _Maverick Town_, University of Oklahoma
Press, 1946. Tascosa, Texas, on the Canadian River, with
emphasis on the guns.

MCCAULEY, JAMES EMMIT. _A Stove-up Cowboy's Story_, with
Introduction by John A. Lomas and Illustrations by Tom Lea,
Austin, 1943. OP. "My parents be poor like Job's turkey,"
McCauley wrote. He was a common cowhand with uncommon
saltiness of speech. He wrote as he talked. "God pity the
wight for whom this vivid, honest story has no interest," John
Lomax pronounced. It is one of several brief books
of reminiscences brought out in small editions in the "Range
Life Series," under the editorship of J. Frank Dobie, by the
Texas Folklore Society. The two others worth having are _A
Tenderfoot Kid on Gyp Water_, by Carl Peters Benedict (1943)
and _Ed Nichols Rode a Horse_, as told to Ruby Nichols
Cutbirth (1943).

MCCOY, JOSEPH G. _Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the
West and Southwest_, Kansas City, 1874. In 1867, McCoy
established at Abilene, Kansas, terminus of the Chisholm
Trail, the first market upon which Texas drovers could depend.
He went broke and thereupon put his sense, information, and
vinegar into the first of all range histories. It is a
landmark. Of the several reprinted editions, the one preferred
is that edited by Ralph P. Bieber, with an information-packed
introduction and many illuminating notes, Glendale,
California, 1940. This is Volume VIII in the "Southwest
Historical Series," edited by Bieber, and the index to it is
included in the general index to the whole series. Available
is an edition published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus,
Ohio. About the best of original sources on McCoy is _Twenty
Years of Kansas City's Live Stock and Traders_, by Cuthbert
Powell, Kansas City, 1893--one of the rarities.

MACKAY, MALCOLM S. _Cow Range and Hunting Trail_, New York,
1925. Among the best of civilized range books. Fresh
observations and something besides ordinary narrative. OP.
Illustrations by Russell.

MANDAT-GRANCEY, BARON E. DE. See Conn, William.

MERCER, A. S. _Banditti of the Plains, or The Cattlemen's
Invasion of Wyoming in 1892_, Cheyenne, 1894; reprinted at
Chicago in 1923 under title of _Powder River Invasion, War on
the Rustlers in 1892_, "Rewritten by John Mercer Boots."
Reprinted 1935, with Foreword by James Mitchell Clarke, by the
Grabhorn Press, San Francisco. All editions OP. Bloody
troubles between cowmen and nesters in Wyoming, the "Johnson
County War." For more literature on the subject, consult the
entry under Tom Horn in this chapter.

MILLER, LEWIS B. _Saddles and Lariats_, Boston, 1912. A
fictional chronicle, based almost entirely on facts, of a
trail herd that tried to get to California in the fifties. The
author was a Texan. OP.

MOKLER, ALFRED JAMES. _History of Natrona County, Wyoming,
1888-1922_, Chicago, 1923. Contains some good material on the
"Johnson County War." This book is listed as an illustration
of many county histories of western states containing concrete
information on ranching. Other examples of such county
histories are S. D. Butcher's _Pioneer History of Custer
County_ (Nebraska), Broken Bow, Nebraska, 1901; _History of
Jack County_ (Texas), Jacksboro, Texas (about 1935);
_Historical Sketch of Parker County and Weatherford, Texas_,
St. Louis, 1877.

MORA, JO. _Trail Dust and Saddle Leather_, Scribner's, New
York, 1946. No better exposition anywhere, and here tellingly
illustrated, of reatas, spurs, bits, saddles, and other gear.
_Californios_, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1949. Profusely
illustrated. Largely on vaquero techniques. Jo Mora knew the
California vaquero, but did not know the range history of
other regions and, therefore, judged as unique what was
widespread.

NIMMO, JOSEPH, JR. _The Range and Ranch Cattle Traffic in the
Western States and Territories_, Executive Document No. 267,
House of Representatives, 48th Congress, 2nd Session,
Washington, D. C., 1885. Printed also in one or more other
government documents. A statistical record concerning grazing
lands, trail driving, railroad shipping of cattle, markets,
foreign investments in ranches, etc. This document is the
outstanding example of factual material to be found in various
government publications, Volume III of the _Tenth Census of
the United States_ (1880) being another. _The Western Range:
Letter from the Secretary of Agriculture_, etc (a "letter" 620
pages long), United States Government Printing Office,
Washington, 1936, lists many government publications both
state and national.

NORDYKE, LEWIS. _Cattle Empire_, Morrow, New York, 1949.
History, largely political, of the XIT Ranch. Not so careful
in documentation as Haley's _XIT Ranch of Texas_, and not so
detailed on ranch operations, but thoroughly illuminative on
the not-heroic side of big businessmen in big land deals. The
two histories complement each other.

O'NEIL, JAMES B. _They Die But Once_, New York, 1935. The
biographical narrative of a Tejano who vigorously swings a
very big loop; fine illustration of the fact that a man can
lie authentically. OP.

OSGOOD, E. S. _The Day of the Cattleman_, Minneapolis, 1929.
Excellent history and excellent bibliography. Northwest. OP.

PEAKE, ORA BROOKS. _The Colorado Range Cattle Industry_,
Clark, Glendale, California, 1937. Dry on facts, but sound in
scholarship. Bibliography.

PELZER, LOUIS. _The Cattlemen's Frontier_, Clark, Glendale,
California, 1936. Economic treatment, faithful but static.
Bibliography.

PENDER, ROSE. A _Lady's Experiences in the Wild West in 1883_,
London (1883?); second printing with a new preface, 1888. Rose
Pender and two fellow-Englishmen went through Wyoming ranch
country, stopping on ranches, and she, a very intelligent,
spirited woman, saw realities that few other chroniclers
suggest. This is a valuable bit of social history.

PERKINS, CHARLES E. _The Pinto Horse_, Santa Barbara,
California, 1927. _The Phantom Bull_, Boston, 1932. Fictional
narratives of veracity; literature. OP.

PILGRIM, THOMAS (under pseudonym of Arthur Morecamp). _Live
Boys; or Charley and Nasho in Texas_, Boston, 1878. The
chronicle, little fictionized, of a trail drive to Kansas. So
far as I know, this is the first narrative printed on cattle
trailing or cowboy life that is to be accounted authentic. The
book is dated from Kerrville, Texas.

PONTING, TOM CANDY. _The Life of Tom Candy Ponting_, Decatur,
Illinois [1907], reprinted, with Notes and Introduction by
Herbert O. Brayer, by Branding Iron Press,
Evanston, Illinois, 1952. An account of buying cattle in Texas
in 1853, driving them to Illinois, and later shipping some to
New York. Accounts of trail driving before about 1870 have
been few and obscurely printed. The stark diary kept by George
C. Duffield of a drive from San Saba County, Texas, to
southern Iowa in 1866 is as realistic--often agonizing--as
anything extant on this much romanticized subject. It is
published in _Annals of Iowa_, Des Moines, IV (April, 1924),
243-62.

POTTER, JACK. Born in 1864, son of the noted fighting parson,"
Andrew Jackson Potter, Jack became a far-known trail boss and
ranch manager. His first published piece, "Coming Down the
Trail," appeared in _The Trail Drivers of Texas_, compiled by
J. Marvin Hunter, and is about the livest thing in that
monumental collection. Jack Potter wrote for various Western
magazines and newspapers. He was more interested in cow nature
than in gun fights; he had humor and imagination as well as
mastery of facts and a tangy language, though small command
over form. His privately printed booklets are: _Lead Steer_
(with Introduction by J. Frank Dobie), Clayton, N. M., 1939;
_Cattle Trails of the Old West_ (with map), Clayton, N.M.,
1935; _Cattle Trails of the Old West_ (virtually a new
booklet), Clayton, N. M., 1939. All OP.

_Prose and Poetry of the Live Stock Industry of the United
States_, Denver, 1905. Biographies of big cowmen and history
based on genuine research. The richest in matter of all the
hundred-dollar-and-up rare books in its field.

RAINE, WILLIAM MCLEOD, and BARNES, WILL C. _Cattle_, Garden
City, N. Y., 1930. A succinct and vivid focusing of much
scattered history. OP.

RAK, MARY KIDDER. _A Cowman s Wife_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,
1934. Unglossed, impersonal realism about life on a small
modern Arizona ranch. _Mountain Cattle_, 1936, and OP, is an
extension of the first book.

REMINGTON, FREDERIC. _Pony Tracks_, New York, 1895 (now
published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus,
Ohio); _Crooked Trails_, New York, 1898. Sketches and
pictures.

RHODES, EUGENE MANLOVE. _West Is West, Once in the Saddle,
Good Men and True, Stepsons of Light_, and other novels.
"Gene" Rhodes had the "right tune." He achieved a style that
can be called literary. _The Hired Man on Horseback_, by May
D. Rhodes, is a biography of the writer. Perhaps "Paso Por
Aqui" will endure as his masterpiece. Rhodes had an intense
loyalty to his land and people; he was as gay, gallant, and
witty as he was earnest. More than most Western writers,
Rhodes was conscious of art. He had the common touch and also
he was a writer for writing men. The elements of simplicity
and the right kind of sophistication, always with generosity
and with an unflagging zeal for the rights of human beings,
were mixed in him. The reach of any ample-natured man exceeds
his grasp. Rhodes was ample-natured, but he cannot be classed
as great because his grasp was too often disproportionately
short of the long reach. His fiction becomes increasingly
dated.

_The Best Novels and, Stories of Eugene Manlove Rhodes_,
edited by Frank V. Dearing, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1949,
contains an introduction, with plenty of anecdotes and too
much enthusiasm, by J. Frank Dobie.

RICHARDS, CLARICE E. A _Tenderfoot Bride_, Garden City, N. Y.,
1920. The experiences of a ranchman's wife in Colorado. The
telling has charm, warmth, and flexibility. In the way that
art is always truer than a literal report, _A Tenderfoot
Bride_ brings out truths of life that the literalistic _A
Cowman's Wife_ by Mary Kidder Rak misses.

RICHTER, CONRAD. _The Sea of Grass_, Knopf, New York, 1937. A
poetic portrait in fiction, with psychological values, of a
big cowman and his wife.

RICKETTS, W. P. _50 Years in the Saddle_, Sheridan, Wyoming,
1942. OP. A natural book with much interesting information. It
contains the best account of trailing cattle from Oregon to
Wyoming that I have seen.

RIDINGS, SAM P. _The Chisholm Trail_, 1926. Sam P. Ridings, a
lawyer, published this book himself from Medford, Oklahoma. He
had gone over the land, lived with range men, studied history.
A noble book, rich in anecdote and character. The subtitle
reads: "A History of the World's Greatest Cattle Trail,
together with a Description of the Persons, a Narrative of the
Events, and Reminiscences associated with the Same." OP.

ROBINSON, FRANK C. _A Ram in a Thicket_, Abelard Press, New
York, 1950. Robinson is the author of many Westerns, none of
which I have read. This is an autobiography, here noted
because it reveals a maturity of mind and an awareness of
political economy and social evolution hardly suggested by
other writers of Western fiction.

ROLLINS, ALICE WELLINGTON. _The Story of a Ranch_, New York,
1885. Philip Ashton Rollins (no relation that I know of to
Alice Wellington Rollins) went into Charlie Everitt's
bookstore in New York one day and said, "I want every book
with the word _cowboy_ printed in it." _The Story of a Ranch_
is listed here to illustrate how titles often have nothing to
do with subject. It is without either story or ranch; it is
about some dilettanteish people who go out to a Kansas sheep
farm, talk Chopin, and wash their fingers in finger bowls.

ROLLINS, PHILIP ASHTON. _The Cowboy_, Scribner's, New York,
1924. Revised, 1936. A scientific exposition; full. Rollins
wrote two Western novels, not important. A wealthy man with
ranch experience, he collected one of the finest libraries of
Western books ever assembled by any individual and presented
it to Princeton University.

ROLLINSON, JOHN K. _Pony Trails in Wyoming_, Caldwell, Idaho,
1941. Not inspired and not indispensable, but honest
autobiography. OP. _Wyoming Cattle Trails_, Caxton, Caldwell,
Idaho, 1948. A more significant book than the autobiography.
Good on trailing cattle from Oregon.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail_, New
York, 1888. Roosevelt understood the West. He
became the peg upon which several range books were hung,
Hagedorn's _Roosevelt in the Bad Lands_ and Lang's _Ranching
with Roosevelt_ in particular. A good summing up, with
bibliography, is _Roosevelt and the Stockman's Association_,
by Ray H. Mattison, pamphlet issued by the State Historical
Society of North Dakota, Bismarck, 1950.

RUSH, OSCAR. _The Open Range_, Salt Lake City, 1930. Reprinted
1936 by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. A sensitive range man's
response to natural things. The subtitle, _Bunk House
Philosophy_, characterizes the book.

RUSSELL, CHARLES M. _Trails Plowed Under_, 1927, with
introduction by Will Rogers. Russell was the greatest painter
that ever painted a range man, a range cow, a range horse or a
Plains Indian. He savvied the cow, the grass, the blizzard,
the drought, the wolf, the young puncher in love with his own
shadow, the old waddie remembering rides and thirsts of far
away and long ago. He was a wonderful storyteller, and most of
his pictures tell stories. He never generalized, painting "a
man," "a horse," "a buffalo" in the abstract. His subjects are
warm with life, whether awake or asleep, at a particular
instant, under particular conditions. _Trails Plowed Under_,
prodigally illustrated, is a collection of yarns and anecdotes
saturated with humor and humanity. It incorporates the
materials in two Rawhide Rawlins pamphlets. _Good Medicine_,
published posthumously, is a collection of Russell's letters,
illustrations saying more than written words.

Russell's illustrations have enriched numerous range books, B.
M. Bower's novels, Malcolm S. Mackay's _Cow Range and Hunting
Trail_, and Patrick T. Tucker's _Riding the High Country_
being outstanding among them. Tucker's book, autobiography,
has a bully chapter on Charlie Russell. _Charles M. Russell,
the Cowboy Artist: A Bibliography_, by Karl Yost, Pasadena,
California, 1948, is better composed than its companion
biography, _Charles M. Russell the Cowboy Artist_, by Ramon F.
Adams and Homer E. Britzman. (Both OP.) One of the most
concrete pieces of writing on Russell is a chapter in _In the
Land of Chinook_, by Al. J.
Noyes, Helena, Montana, 1917. "Memories of Charlie Russell,"
in _Memories of Old Montana_, by Con Price, Hollywood, 1945,
is also good. All right as far as it goes, about a rock's
throw away, is "The Conservatism of Charles M. Russell," by J.
Frank Dobie, in a portfolio reproduction of _Seven Drawings by
Charles M. Russell, with an Additional Drawing by Tom Lea_,
printed by Carl Hertzog, El Paso [1950].

SANTEE, ROSS. _Cowboy_, 1928. OP. The plotless narrative,
reading like autobiography, of a kid who ran away from a farm
in East Texas to be a cowboy in Arizona. His cowpuncher
teachers are the kind "who know what a cow is thinking of
before she knows herself." Passages in _Cowboy_ combine
reality and elemental melody in a way that almost no other
range writer excepting Charles M. Russell has achieved. Santee
is a pen-and-ink artist also. Among his other books, _Men and
Horses_ is about the best.

SHAW, JAMES C. _North from Texas: Incidents in the Early Life
of a Range Man in Texas, Dakota and Wyoming, 1852-1883_,
edited by Herbert O. Brayer. Branding Iron Press, Evanston,
Illinois, 1952. Edition limited to 750 copies. I first met
this honest autobiography by long quotations from it in
Virginia Cole Trenholm's _Footprints on the Frontier_
(Douglas, Wyoming, 1945), wherein I learned that Shaw's
narrative had been privately printed in Cheyenne in 1931, in
pamphlet form, for gifts to a few friends and members of the
author's family. I tried to buy a copy but could find none for
sale at any price. This reprint is in a format suitable to the
economical prose, replete with telling incidents and homely
details. It will soon be only a little less scarce than the
original.

SHEEDY, DENNIS. _The Autobiography of Dennis Sheedy_.
Privately printed in Denver, 1922 or 1923. Sixty pages bound
in leather and as scarce as psalm-singing in "fancy houses."
The item is not very important in the realm of range
literature but it exemplifies the successful businessman that
the judicious cowman of open range days frequently became.

SHEFFY, L. F. _The Life and Times of Timothy Dwight Hobart,
1855-1935_, Panhandle-Plains Historical Society, Canyon,
Texas, 1950. Hobart was manager for the large J A Ranch,
established by Charles Goodnight. He had a sense of history.
This mature biography treats of important developments
pertaining to ranching in the Texas Panhandle.

SIRINGO, CHARLES A. A _Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the
Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Cow Pony_, 1885. The first in time
of all cowboy autobiographies and first, also, in plain
rollickiness. Siringo later told the same story with additions
under the titles of _A Lone Star Cowboy, A Cowboy Detective_,
etc., all out of print. Finally, there appeared his _Riata and
Spurs_, Boston, 1927, a summation and extension of previous
autobiographies. Because of a threatened lawsuit, half of it
had to be cut and additional material provided for a "Revised
Edition." No other cowboy ever talked about himself so much in
print; few had more to talk about. I have said my full say on
him in an introduction, which includes a bibliography, to _A
Texas Cowboy_, published with Tom Lea illustrations by Sloane,
New York, 1950. OP.

SMITH, ERWIN E., and HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Life on the Texas
Range_, photographs by Smith and text by Haley, University of
Texas Press, Austin, 1952. Erwin Smith yearned and studied to
be a sculptor. Early in this century he went with camera to
photograph the life of land, cattle, horses, and men on the
big ranches of West Texas. In him feeling and perspective of
artist were fused with technical mastership. "I don't mean,"
wrote Tom Lea, "that he made just the best photographs I ever
saw on the subject. I mean the best pictures. That includes
paintings, drawings, prints." On 9 by 12 pages of 100-pound
antique finish paper, the photographs are superbly reproduced.
Evetts Haley's introduction interprets as well as chronicles
the life of a strange and tragic man. The book is easily the
finest range book in the realm of the pictorial ever
published.

SMITH, WALLACE. _Garden of the Sun_, Los Angeles, 1939. OP.
Despite the banal title, this is a scholarly work with first-
rate chapters on California horses and ranching in the San
Joaquin Valley.

SNYDER, A. B., as told to Nellie Snyder Yost. _Pinnacle Jake_,
Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1951. The setting is Nebraska,
Wyoming, and Montana from the 1880's on. Had Pinnacle Jake
kept a diary, his accounts of range characters, especially
camp cooks and range horses, with emphasis on night horses and
outlaws, could not have been fresher or more precise in
detail. Reading this book will not give a new interpretation
of open range work with big outfits, but the aliveness of it
in both narrative and sketch makes it among the best of old-
time cowboy reminiscences.

SONNICHSEN, C. L. _Cowboys and Cattle Kings: Life on the Range
Today_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1950. An
interviewer's findings without the historical criticism
exemplified by Bernard DeVoto on the subject of federal-owned
ranges (in essays in _Harper's Magazine_ during the late
1940'S).

STANLEY, CLARK, "better known as the Rattlesnake King." _The
Life and Adventures of the American Cow-Boy_, published by the
author at Providence, Rhode Island, 1897. This pamphlet of
forty-one pages, plus about twenty pages of Snake Oil Liniment
advertisements, is one of the curiosities of cowboy
literature. It includes a collection of cowboy songs, the
earliest I know of in time of printing, antedating by eleven
years Jack Thorp's booklet of cowboy songs printed at
Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908. Clark Stanley no doubt used the
contents of his pamphlet in medicine show harangues, thus
adding to the cowboy myth. As time went on, he added scraps of
anecdotes and western history, along with testimonials, to the
pamphlet, the latest edition I have seen being about 1906,
printed in Worcester, Massachusetts.

STEEDMAN, CHARLES J. _Bucking the Sagebrush_, New York, 1904.
OP. Charming; much of nature. Illustrated by Russell.


{illust. caption =
Charles M. Russell, in _The Virginian_ by Owen Wister}



STEVENS, MONTAGUE. _Meet Mr. Grizzly_, University of New
Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943. Stevens, a Cambridge
Englishman, ranched, hunted, and made deductions. See
characterization under "Bears and Bear Hunters."

STREETER, FLOYD B. _Prairie Trails and Cow Towns_, Boston,
1936. OP. This brings together considerable information on
Kansas cow towns. Primary books on the subject, besides those
by Stuart Henry, McCoy, Vestal, and Wright herewith listed,
are _The Oklahoma Scout_, by Theodore Baughman, Chicago, 1886;
_Midnight and Noonday_, by G. D. Freeman, Caldwell, Kansas,
1892; biographies of Wild Bill Hickok, town marshal; Stuart N.
Lake's biography of Wyatt Earp, another noted marshal; _Hard
Knocks_, by Harry Young, Chicago, 1915, not too prudish to
notice dance hall girls but too Victorian to say much. Many
Texas trail drivers had trouble as well as fun in the cow
towns. _Life and Adventures of Ben Thompson_, by W. M. Walton,
1884, reprinted at Bandera, Texas, 1926, gives samples.
Thompson was more gambler than cowboy; various other men who
rode from cow camps into town and found themselves in their
element were gamblers and gunmen first and cowboys only in
passing.

STUART, GRANVILLE. _Forty Years on the Frontier_, two volumes,
Cleveland, 1925. Nothing better on the cowboy has
ever been written than the chapter entitled "Cattle Business"
in Volume II. A prime work throughout. OP.

THORP, JACK (N. Howard) has a secure place in range literature
because of his contribution in cowboy songs. (See entry under
"Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads.") In 1926 he had printed at
Santa Fe a paper-backed book of 123 pages entitled _Tales of
the Chuck Wagon_, but "didn't sell more than two or three
million copies." Some of the tales are in his posthumously
published reminiscences, _Pardner of the Wind_ (as told to
Neil McCullough Clark, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945) . This
book is richest on range horses, and will be found listed in
the section on "Horses."

TOWNE, CHARLES WAYLAND, and WENTWORTH, EDWARD NORRIS.
_Shepherd's Empire_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman,
1945. Not firsthand in the manner of Gilfillan's _Sheep_, nor
charming and light in the manner of Kupper's _The Golden
Hoof_, but an essayical history, based on research. The
deference paid to Mary Austin's _The Flock_ marks the author
as civilized. Towne wrote the book; Wentworth supplied the
information. Wentworth's own book, _America's Sheep Trails_,
Iowa State College Press, Ames, 1948, is ponderous, amorphous,
and in part, only a eulogistic "mugbook."

TOWNSHEND, R. B. _A Tenderfoot in Colorado_, London, 1923;
_The Tenderfoot in New Mexico_, 1924. Delightful as well as
faithful. Literature by an Englishman who translated Tacitus
under the spires of Oxford after he retired from the range.

TREADWELL, EDWARD F. _The Cattle King_, New York, 1931;
reissued by Christopher, Boston. A strong biography of a very
strong man--Henry Miller of California.

TRENHOLM, VIRGINIA COLE. _Footprints on the Frontier_,
Douglas, Wyoming, 1945. OP. The best range material in this
book is a reprint of parts of James C. Shaw's _Pioneering in
Texas and Wyoming_, privately printed at Cheyenne in 1931.

TRUETT, VELMA STEVENS. _On the Hoof in Nevada_,
Gehrett-Truett-Hall, Los Angeles, 1950. A 613-page album of
cattle brands--priced at $10.00. The introduction is one of
the sparse items on Nevada ranching.

TUCKER, PATRICK T. _Riding the High Country_, Caldwell, Idaho,
1933. A brave book with much of Charlie Russell in it. OP.

VESTAL, STANLEY (pen name for Walter S. Campbell). _Queen of
Cow Towns, Dodge City_, Harper, New York, 1952. "Bibulous
Babylon," "Killing of Dora Hand," and "Marshals for Breakfast"
are chapter titles suggesting the tenor of the book.

_Vocabulario y Refranero Criollo_, text and illustrations by
Tito Saudibet, Guillermo Kraft Ltda., Buenos Aires, 1945.
North American ranges have called forth nothing to compare
with this fully illustrated, thorough, magnificent history-
dictionary of the gaucho world. It stands out in contrast to
American slapdash, puerile-minded pretenses at dictionary
treatises on cowboy life.

"He who knows only the history of his own country does not
know it." The cowboy is not a singular type. He was no better
rider than the Cossack of Asia. His counterpart in South
America, developed also from Spanish cattle, Spanish horses,
and Spanish techniques, is the gaucho. Literature on the
gaucho is extensive, some of it of a high order. Primary is
_Martin Fierro_, the epic by Jose Hernandez (published
1872-79). A translation by Walter Owen was published in the
United States in 1936. No combination of knowledge, sympathy,
imagination, and craftsmanship has produced stories and
sketches about the cowboy equal to those on the gaucho by W.
H. Hudson, especially in _Tales of the Pampas_ and _Far Away
and Long Ago_, and by R. B. Cunninghame Graham, whose writings
are dispersed and difficult to come by.

WEBB, WALTER PRESCOTT. _The Great Plains_, Ginn, Boston, 1931.
While this landmark in historical interpretation of the West
is by no means limited to the subject of grazing, it contains
a long and penetrating chapter entitled "The Cattle
Kingdom." The book is an analysis of land, climate, barbed
wire, dry farming, wells and windmills, native animal life,
etc. No other work on the plains country goes so meatily into
causes and effects.

WELLMAN, PAUL I. _The Trampling Herd_, Doubleday, Garden City,
N. Y., 1939; reissued, 1951. An attempt to sum up the story of
the cattle range in America.

WHITE, STEWART EDWARD. _Arizona Nights_, 1902. "Rawhide," one
of the stories in this excellent collection, utilizes folk
motifs about rawhide with much skill.

WILLIAMS, J. R. _Cowboys Out Our Way_, with an Introduction by
J. Frank Dobie, Scribner's, New York, 1951. An album
reproducing about two hundred of the realistic, humorous, and
human J. R. Williams syndicated cartoons. This book was
preceded by _Out Our Way_, New York, 1943, and includes
numerous cartoons therein printed. There was an earlier and
less extensive collection. Modest Jim Williams has been
progressively dissatisfied with all his cartoon books--and
with cartoons not in books. I like them and in my Introduction
say why.

WISTER, OWEN. _The Virginian_, 1902. Wister was an outsider
looking in. His hero, "The Virginian," is a cowboy without
cows--like the cowboys of Eugene Manlove Rhodes; but this hero
does not even smell of cows, whereas Rhodes's men do.
Nevertheless, the novel authentically realizes the code of the
range, and it makes such absorbing reading that in fifty years
(1902-52) it sold over 1,600,000 copies, not counting foreign
translations and paper reprints.

Wister was an urbane Harvard man, of clubs and travels. In
1952 the University of Wyoming celebrated the fiftieth
anniversary of the publication of _The Virginian_. To mark the
event, Frances K. W. Stokes wrote _My Father Owen Wister_, a
biographical pamphlet including "ten letters written to his
mother during his trip to Wyoming in 1885"--a trip that
prepared him to write the novel. The pamphlet is published at
Laramie, Wyoming, name of publisher not printed on it.

WRIGHT, PETER. _A Three-Foot Stool_, New York and
London, 1909. Like several other Englishmen who went west,
Wright had the perspective that enabled him to comprehend some
aspects of ranch life more fully than many range men who knew
nothing but their own environment and times. He compares the
cowboy to the cowherd described by Queen Elizabeth's Spenser.
Into exposition of ranching on the Gila, he interweaves talk
on Arabian afreets, Stevenson's philosophy of adventure, and
German imperialism.

WRIGHT, ROBERT M. _Dodge City, Cowboy Capital_, Wichita,
Kansas, 1913; reprinted. Good on the most cowboyish of all the
cow towns.


PAMPHLETS


Pamphlets are an important source of knowledge in all fields.
No first-class library is without them. Most of them become
difficult to obtain, and some bring higher prices than whole
sets of books. Of numerous pamphlets pertaining to the range,
only a few are listed here. _History of the Chisum War, or
Life of Ike Fridge_, by Ike Fridge, Electra, Texas (undated),
is as compact as jerked beef and as laconic as conversation in
alkali dust. James F. Hinkle, in his _Early Days of a Cowboy
on the Pecos_, Roswell, New Mexico, 1937, says: "One
noticeable characteristic of the cowpunchers was that they did
not talk much." Some people don't have to talk to say plenty.
Hinkle was one of them. At a reunion of trail drivers in San
Antonio in October, 1928, Fred S. Millard showed me his
laboriously written reminiscences. He wanted them printed. I
introduced him to J. Marvin Hunter of Bandera, Texas,
publisher of _Frontier Times_. I told Hunter not to ruin the
English by trying to correct it, as he had processed many of
the earth-born reminiscences in _The Trail Drivers of Texas_.
He printed Millard's _A Cowpuncher of the Pecos_ in pamphlet
form shortly thereafter. It begins: "This is a piece I wrote
for the Trail Drivers." They would understand some things on
which he was not explicit.

About 1940, as he told me, Bob Beverly of Lovington, New
Mexico, made a contract with the proprietor of the town's
weekly newspaper to print his reminiscences. By the time the
contractor had set eighty-seven pages of type he saw that he
would lose money if he set any more. He gave Bob Beverly back
more manuscript than he had used and stapled a pamphlet
entitled _Hobo of the Rangeland_. The philosophy in it is more
interesting to me than the incidents. "The cowboy of the old
West worked in a land that seemed to be grieving over
something--a kind of sadness, loneliness in a deathly quiet.
One not acquainted with the plains could not understand what
effect it had on the mind. It produced a heartache and a sense
of exile."

Crudely printed, but printed as the author talked, is _The End
of the Long Horn Trail_, by A. P. (Ott) Black, Selfridge,
North Dakota (August, 1939) . As I know from a letter from his
_compadre_, Black was blind and sixty-nine years old when he
dictated his memoirs to a college graduate who had sense
enough to retain the flavor. Black's history is badly botched,
but reading him is like listening. "It took two coons and an
alligator to spend the summer on that cotton plantation. . . .
Cowpunchers were superstitious about owls. One who rode into
my camp one night had killed a man somewhere and was on the
dodge. He was lying down by the side of the campfire when an
owl flew over into some hackberry trees close by and started
hooting. He got up from there right now, got his horse in,
saddled up and rode off into the night."

John Alley is--or was--a teacher. His _Memories of Roundup
Days_, University of Oklahoma Press, 1934 (just twenty small
pages), is an appraisal of range men, a criticism of life
seldom found in old-timers who look back. On the other hand,
some pamphlets prized by collectors had as well not have been
written. Here is the full title of an example: _An Aged
Wanderer, A Life Sketch of J. M. Parker, A Cowboy of the
Western Plains in the Early Days_. "Price 40 cents.
Headquarters, Elkhorn Wagon Yard, San Angelo, Texas." It was
printed about 1923. When Parker wrote it he was
senile, and there is no evidence that he was ever possessed of
intelligence. The itching to get into print does not guarantee
that the itcher has anything worth printing.

Some of the best reminiscences have been pried out of range
men. In 1914 the Wyoming Stock Growers Association resolved a
Historical Commission into existence. A committee was
appointed and, naturally, one man did the work. In 1923 a
fifty-five-page pamphlet entitled _Letters from Old Friends
and Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association_ was
printed at Cheyenne. It is made up of unusually informing and
pungent recollections by intelligent cowmen.



_22_

Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads

{illust.  Lyrics =
Kind friends, if you will listen, A story I will tell  A-
bout a final bust-up, That happened down in Dell.}


COWBOY SONGS and ballads are generally ranked alongside Negro
spirituals as being the most important of America's
contributions to folk song. As compared with the old English
and Scottish ballads, the cowboy and all other ballads of the
American frontiers generally sound cheap and shoddy. Since
John A. Lomax brought out his collection in 1910, cowboy songs
have found their way into scores of songbooks, have been
recorded on hundreds of records, and have been popularized,
often--and naturally--without any semblance to cowboy style,
by thousands of radio singers. Two general anthologies are
recommended especially for the cowboy songs they contain:
_American Ballads and Folk Songs_, by John A. and Alan Lomax,
Macmillan, New York, 1934; _The American Songbag_, by Carl
Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927.


LARRIN, MARGARET. _Singing Cowboy_ (with music), New York,
1931. OP.

LOMAX, JOHN A., and LOMAX, ALAN. _Cowboy Songs and Other
Frontier Ballads_, Macmillan, New York, 1938. This is a much
added-to and revised form of Lomax's 1910 collec-
tion, under the same title. It is the most complete of all
anthologies. More than any other man, John A. Lomax is
responsible for having made cowboy songs a part of the common
heritage of America. His autobiographic _Adventures of a
Ballad Hunter_ (Macmillan, 1947) is in quality far above the
jingles that most cowboy songs are.

Missouri, as no other state, gave to the West and Southwest.
Much of Missouri is still more southwestern in character than
much of Oklahoma. For a full collection, with full treatment,
of the ballads and songs, including bad-man and cowboy songs,
sung in the Southwest there is nothing better than _Ozark
Folksongs_, collected and edited by Vance Randolph, State
Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, 1946-50. An
unsurpassed work in four handsome volumes.

OWENS, WILLIAM A. _Texas Folk Songs_, Southern Methodist
University Press, Dallas, 1950. A miscellany of British
ballads, American ballads, "songs of doleful love," etc.
collected in Texas mostly from country people of Anglo-
American stock. Musical scores for all the songs.

The Texas Folklore Society has published many cowboy songs.
Its publications _Texas and Southwestern Lore_ (1927) and
_Follow de Drinkin' Gou'd_ (1928) contain scores, with music
and anecdotal interpretations. Other volumes contain other
kinds of songs, including Mexican.

THORP, JACK (N. Howard). _Songs of the Cowboys_, Boston, 1921.
OP. Good, though limited, anthology, without music and with
illuminating comments. A pamphlet collection that Thorp
privately printed at Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908, was one of
the first to be published. Thorp had the perspective of both
range and civilization. He was a kind of troubadour himself.
The opening chapter, "Banjo in the Cow Camps," of his
posthumous reminiscences, _Pardner of the Wind, is_ delicious.



_23_

Horses: Mustangs and Cow Ponies

THE WEST WAS DISCOVERED, battled over, and won by men on
horseback. Spanish conquistadores saddled their horses in Vera
Cruz and rode until they had mapped the continents from the
Horn to Montana and from the Floridas to the harbors of the
Californias. The padres with them rode on horseback, too, and
made every mission a horse ranch. The national dance of
Mexico, the Jarabe, is an interpretation of the clicking of
hoofs and the pawing and prancing of spirited horses that the
Aztecs noted when the Spaniards came. Likewise, the chief
contribution made by white men of America to the folk songs of
the world--the cowboy songs--are rhythmed to the walk of
horses.

Astride horses introduced by the conquistadores to the
Americas, the Plains Indians became almost a separate race
from the foot-moving tribes of the East and the stationary
Pueblos of the Rockies. The men that later conquered and
corralled these wild-riding Plains Indians were plainsmen on
horses and cavalrymen. The earliest American explorers and
trappers of both Plains and Rocky Mountains went out in the
saddle. The first industrial link between the East and the
West was a mounted pack train beating out the Santa Fe Trail.
On west beyond the end of this trail, in Spanish California,
even the drivers of oxen rode horseback. The first
transcontinental express was the Pony Express.

Outlaws and bad men were called "long riders." The Texas
Ranger who followed them was, according to his own proverb,
"no better than his horse." Booted sheriffs from Brownsville
on the Rio Grande to the Hole in the Wall in
the Big Horn Mountains lived in the saddle. Climactic of all
the riders rode the cowboy, who lived with horse and herd.

In the Old West the phrase "left afoot" meant nothing short of
being left flat on your back. "A man on foot is no man at
all," the saying went. If an enemy could not take a man's
life, the next best thing was to take his horse. Where cow
thieves went scot free, horse thieves were hanged, and to say
that a man was "as common as a horse thief" was to express the
nadir of commonness. The pillow of the frontiersmen who slept
with a six-shooter under it was a saddle, and hitched to the
horn was the loose end of a stake rope. Just as "Colonel Colt"
made all men equal in a fight, the horse made all men equal in
swiftness and mobility.

The proudest names of civilized languages when literally
translated mean "horseman": eques, caballero, chevalier,
cavalier. Until just yesterday the Man on Horseback had been
for centuries the symbol of power and pride. The advent of the
horse, from Spanish sources, so changed the ways and
psychology of the Plains Indians that they entered into what
historians call the Age of Horse Culture. Almost until the
automobile came, the whole West and Southwest were dominated
by a Horse Culture.

Material on range horses is scattered through the books listed
under "Range Life," "Stagecoaches, Freighting," "Pony
Express."

No thorough comprehension of the Spanish horse of the Americas
is possible without consideration of this horse's antecedents,
and that involves a good deal of the horse history of the
world.

BROWN, WILLIAM ROBINSON. _The Horse of the Desert_ (no
publisher or place on title page), 1936; reprinted by
Macmillan, New York. A noble, beautiful, and informing book.

CABRERA, ANGEL. _Caballos de America_, Buenos Aires, 1945. The
authority on Argentine horses.

CARTER, WILLIAM H. _The Horses of the World_, National
Geographic Society, Washington, D. C., 1923. A concentrated
survey.

_Cattleman_. Published at Fort Worth, this monthly magazine of
the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association began in
1939 to issue, for September, a horse number. It has published
a vast amount of material both scientific and popular on range
horses. Another monthly magazine worth knowing about is the
_Western Horseman_, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

DENHARDT, ROBERT MOORMAN. _The Horse of the Americas_,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1947. This historical
treatment of the Spanish horse could be better ordered; some
sections of the book are little more than miscellanies.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Mustangs_, illustrated by Charles Banks
Wilson, Little, Brown, Boston, 1952. Before this handsome book
arrives at the wild horses of North America, a third of it has
been spent on the Arabian progenitors of the Spanish horse,
the acquisition of the Spanish horse by western Indians, and
the nature of Indian horses. There are many narratives of
mustangs and mustangers and of Spanish-blooded horses under
the saddle. The author has tried to compass the natural
history of the animal and to blend vividness with learning.
The book incorporates his _Tales of the Mustang_, a slight
volume published in an edition of only three hundred copies in
1936. It also incorporates a large part of _Mustangs and Cow
Horses_, edited by Dobie, Boatright, and Ransom, and issued by
the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1940--a volume that went
out of print not long after it was published.

DODGE, THEODORE A. _Riders of Many Lands_, New York, 1893.
Illustrations by Remington. Wide and informed views.

GRAHAM, R. B. CUNNINGHAME. _The Horses of the Conquest_,
London, 1930. Graham was both historian and horseman, as much
at home on the pampas as in his ancient Scottish home. This
excellent book on the Spanish horses intro-



{illust. caption =
Charles Banks Wilson, in _The Mustangs_
by J. Frank Dobie (1952)}


duced to the Western Hemisphere is in a pasture to itself.
Reprinted in 1949 by the University of Oklahoma Press, with
introduction and notes by Robert Moorman Denhardt.

GREER, JAMES K. _Bois d'Arc to Barbed Wire_, Dallas, 1936. OP.

HASTINGS, FRANK. _A Ranchman's Recollections_, Chicago, 1921.
"Old Gran'pa" is close to the best American horse story I have
ever read. OP.

HAYES, M. HORACE. _Points of the Horse_, London, 1904. This
and subsequent editions are superior in treatment and
illustrations to earlier editions. Hayes was a far traveler
and scholar as well as horseman. One of the less than a dozen
best books on the horse.

JAMES, WILL. _Smoky_, Scribner's, New York, 1930. Perhaps the
best of several books that Will James--always with
illustrations--has woven around horse heroes.

LEIGH, WILLIAM R. _The Western Pony_, New York, 1933. One of
the most beautifully printed books on the West; beautiful
illustrations; illuminating text. OP.

MULLER, DAN. _Horses_, Reilly and Lee, Chicago, 1936.
Interesting illustrations.

PATTULLO, GEORGE. _The Untamed_, New York, 1911. A collection
of short stories, among which "Corazon" and "Neutria" are
excellent on horses. OP.

PERKINS, CHARLES ELLIOTT. _The Pinto Horse_, Santa Barbara,
California, 1927. A fine narrative, illustrated by Edward
Borein. OP.

RIDGEWAY, W. _The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred
Horse_, Cambridge, England, 1905. A standard work, though many
of its conclusions are disputed, especially by Lady Wentworth
in her _Thoroughbred Racing Stock and Its Ancestors_, London,
1938.

SANTEE, ROSS. _Men and Horses_, New York, 1926. Three chapters
of this book, "A Fool About a Horse," "The Horse Wrangler,"
and "The Rough String," are especially recommended. _Cowboy_,
New York, 1928, reveals in a fine way the rapport between the
cowboy and his horse. _Sleepy Black,_
New York, 1933, is a story of a horse designed for younger
readers; being good on the subject, it is good for any reader.
All OP.

SIMPSON, GEORGE GAYLOR. _Horses: The Story of the Horse Family
in the Modern World and through Sixty Million Years of
History_, Oxford University Press, New York, 1951. In the
realm of paleontology this work supplants all predecessors.
Bibliography.

STEELE, RUFUS. _Mustangs of the Mesas_, Hollywood, California,
1941. OP. Modern mustanging in Nevada; excellently written
narratives of outstanding mustangs.

STONG, PHIL. _Horses and Americans_, New York, 1939. A survey
and a miscellany combined. OP.


{illust. caption =
Charles M. Russell, in _The Untamed_
by George Pattullo (1911)}



THORP, JACK (N. Howard) as told to Neil McCullough Clark.
_Pardner of the Wind_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. Two
chapters in this book make the "Spanish thunderbolts," as Jack
Thorp called the mustangs and Spanish cow horses, graze, run,
pitch, and go gentle ways as free as the wind. "Five Hundred
Mile Horse Race" is a great story. No other range man
excepting Ross Santee has put down so much everyday horse lore
in such a fresh way.

TWEEDIE, MAJOR GENERAL W. _The Arabian Horse: His Country and
People_, Edinburgh and London, 1894. One of the few horse
books to be classified as literature. Wise in the blend of
horse, land, and people.

WENTWORTH, LADY. _The Authentic Arabian Horse and His
Descendants_, London, 1945. Rich in knowledge and both
magnificent and munificent in illustrations. Almost
immediately after publication, this noble volume entered the
rare book class.

WYMAN, WALKER D. _The Wild Horse of the West_, Caxton,
Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. A scholarly sifting of virtually all
available material on mustangs. Readable. Only thorough
bibliography on subject so far published.



_24_

The Bad Man Tradition

PLENTY of six-shooter play is to be found in most of the books
about old-time cowboys; yet hardly one of the professional bad
men was a representative cowboy. Bad men of the West and
cowboys alike wore six-shooters and spurs; they drank each
other's coffee; they had a fanatical passion for liberty--for
themselves. But the representative cowboy was a reliable hand,
hanging through drought, blizzard, and high water to his herd,
whereas the bona fide bad man lived on the dodge. Between the
killer and the cowboy standing up for his rights or merely
shooting out the lights for fun, there was as much difference
as between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. Of course, the
elements were mixed in the worst of the bad men, as they are
in the best of all good men. No matter what deductions
analysis may lead to, the fact remains that the western bad
men of open range days have become a part of the American
tradition. They represent six-shooter culture at its zenith--
the wild and woolly side of the West--a stage between receding
bowie knife individualism of the backwoods and blackguard,
machine-gun gangsterism of the city.

The songs about Sam Bass, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid
reflect popular attitude toward the hard-riding outlaws. Sam
Bass, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the Daltons, Cole Younger,
Joaquin Murrieta, John Wesley Hardin, Al Jennings, Belle
Starr, and other "long riders" with their guns in their hands
have had their biographies written over and over. They were
not nearly as immoral as certain newspaper columnists lying
under the cloak of piety. As time goes on, they, like antique


{illust. caption =
Tom Lea: Pancho Villa, in _Southwest Review_ (1951)}


Robin Hood and the late Pancho Villa, recede from all
realistic judgment. If the picture show finds in them models
for generosity, gallantry, and fidelity to a code of liberty,
and if the public finds them picturesque, then philosophers
may well be thankful that they lived, rode, and shot.

"The long-tailed heroes of the revolver," to pick a phrase
from Mark Twain's unreverential treatment of them in _Roughing
It_, often did society a service in shooting each other--aside
from providing entertainment to future generations. As "The
Old Cattleman" of Alfred Henry Lewis' _Wolfville_ stories
says, "A heap of people need a heap of killing." Nor can the
bad men be logically segregated from the long-haired killers
on the side of the law like Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp.
W. H. Hudson once advanced the theory that bloodshed and
morality go together. If American civilization proceeds, the
rage for collecting books on bad men will probably subside
until a copy of Miguel Antonio Otero's _The Real Billy the
Kid_ will bring no higher price than a first edition of A.
Edward Newton's _The Amenities of Book-Collecting_.

See "Fighting Texians," "Texas Rangers," "Range Life," "Cowboy
Songs and Other Ballads."


AIKMAN, DUNCAN. _Calamity Jane and the Lady Wildcats_, 1927.
OP. Patronizing in the H. L. Mencken style.

BILLY THE KID. We ve got to take him seriously, not so much
for what he was--

     There are twenty-one men I have put bullets through,
     And Sheriff Pat Garrett must make twenty-two--

as for his provocations. Popular imagination, represented by
writers of all degrees, goes on playing on him with cumulative
effect. As a figure in literature the Kid has come to lead the
whole field of western bad men. The _Saturday Review_, for
October 11, 1952, features a philosophical essay entitled
"Billy the Kid: Faust in America--The Making of a Legend." The
growth of this legend is minutely traced through a period
of seventy-one years (1881-1952) by J. C. Dykes in _Billy the
Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend_, University of New Mexico
Press, Albuquerque, 1952 (186 pages). It lists 437 titles,
including magazine pieces, mimeographed plays, motion
pictures, verses, pamphlets, fiction. In a blend of casualness
and scholarship, it gives the substance and character of each
item. Indeed, this bibliography reads like a continued story,
with constant references to both antecedent and subsequent
action. Pat Garrett, John Chisum, and other related characters
weave all through it. A first-class bibliography that is also
readable is almost a new genre.

Pat F. Garrett, sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, killed
the Kid about midnight, July 14, 1881. The next spring his
_Authentic Life of Billy the Kid_ was published at Santa Fe,
at least partly written, according to good evidence, by a
newspaperman named Ash Upton. This biography is one of the
rarities in Western Americana. In 1927 it was republished by
Macmillan, New York, under title of _Pat F. Garrett's
Authentic Life of Billy the Kid_, edited by Maurice G. Fulton.
This is now OP but remains basic. The most widely circulated
biography has been _The Saga of Billy the Kid_ by Walter Noble
Burns, New York, 1926. It contains a deal of fictional
conversation and it has no doubt contributed to the Robin-
Hoodizing of the lethal character baptized as William H.
Bonney, who was born in New York in 1859 and now lives with
undiminished vigor as Billy the Kid. Walter Noble Burns was
not so successful with _The Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga
of Joaquin Murrieta_ (1932), or, despite hogsheads of blood,
with _Tombstone_ (1927).

CANTON, FRANK M. _Frontier Trails_, Boston, 1930.

COE, GEORGE W. _Frontier Fighter_, Boston, 1934; reprinted by
University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. The autobiography
of one of Billy the Kid's men as recorded by Nan Hillary
Harrison.

COOLIDGE, DANE. _Fighting Men of the West_, New York, 1932.
Biographical sketches. OP.

CUNNINGHAM, EUGENE. _Triggernometry_, 1934; reprinted by
Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. Excellent survey of codes and
characters. Written by a man of intelligence and knowledge.
Bibliography.

FORREST, E. R. _Arizona's Dark and Bloody Ground_, Caxton,
Caldwell, Idaho, 1936.

GARD, WAYNE. _Sam Bass_, Boston, 1936. Most of the whole
truth. OP.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Jeff Milton--A Good Man with a Gun_,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Jeff Milton the
whole man as well as the queller of bad men.

HENDRICKS, GEORGE. _The Bad Man of the West_, Naylor, San
Antonio, 1941. Analyses and classifications go far toward
making this treatment of old subjects original. Excellent
bibliographical guide.

HOUGH, EMERSON. _The Story of the Outlaw_, 1907. OP. An
omnibus carelessly put together with many holes in it.

LAKE, STUART. _Wyatt Earp_, Boston, 1931. Best written of all
gunmen biographies. Earp happened to be on the side of the
law.

LANKFORD, N. P. _Vigilante Days and Ways_, 1890, 1912. OP.
Full treatment of lawlessness in the Northwest.

LOVE, ROBERTUS. _The Rise and Fall of Jesse James_, New York,
1926. Excellently written. OP.

RAINE, WILLIAM MCLEOD. _Famous s and Western Outlaws_,
Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1929. A rogues' gallery. _Guns
of the Frontier_, Boston, 1940. Another miscellany. OP.

RASCOE, BURTON. _Belle Starr_, New York, 1941. OP.

RIPLEY, THOMAS. _They Died with Their Boots On_, 1935. Mostly
about John Wesley Hardin. OP.

SABIN, EDWIN L. _Wild Men of the Wild West_, New York, 1929.
Biographic survey of killers from the Mississippi to the
Pacific. OP.

WILD BILL HICKOK. The subject of various biographies, among
them those by Frank J. Wilstach (1926) and William
E. Connelley (1933). The _Nebraska History Magazine_ (Volume
X) for April-June 1927 is devoted to Wild Bill and contains a
"descriptive bibliography" on him by Addison E. Sheldon.

WOODHULL, FROST. Folk-Lore Shooting, in _Southwestern Lore_,
Publication IX of the Texas Folklore Society, 1931. Rich.
Humor.



_25_

Mining and Oil

DURING the twentieth century oil has brought so much money to
the Southwest that the proceeds from cattle have come to look
like tips. This statement is not based on statistics, though
statistics no doubt exist--even on the cost of catching sun
perch. Geological, legal, and economic writings on oil are
mountainous in quantity, but the human drama of oil yet
remains, for the most part, to be written. It is odd to find
such a modern book as Erna Fergusson's _Our Southwest_ not
mentioning oil. It is odd that no book of national reputation
comes off the presses about any aspect of oil. The nearest to
national notice on oil is the daily report of transactions on
the New York Stock Exchange. Oil companies subsidize histories
of themselves, endow universities with money to train
technicians they want, control state legislatures and senates,
and dictate to Congress what they want for themselves in
income tax laws; but so far they have not been able to hire
anybody to write a book about oil that anybody but the hirers
themselves wants to read. Probably they don't read them. The
first thing an oilman does after amassing a few millions is
buy a ranch on which he can get away from oil--and on which he
can spend some of his oil money.

People live a good deal by tradition and fight a good deal by
tradition also, voting more by prejudice. When one considers
the stream of cow country books and the romance of mining
living on in legends of lost mines and, then, the desert of
oil books, one realizes that it takes something more than
money to make the mare of romance run. Geology and economics
are beyond the aim of this _Guide_, but if oil money
keeps on buying up ranch land, the history of modern ranching
will be resolved into the biographies of a comparatively few
oilmen.


BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Gib Morgan: Minstrel of the Oil Fields_.
Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1945. Folk tales about Gib
rather than minstrelsy. OP.

BOONE, LALIA PHIPPS. _The Petroleum Dictionary_, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1952. "More than 6,000 entries:
definitions of technical terms and everyday expressions, a
comprehensive guide to the language of the oil industry."

CAUGHEY, JOHN WALTON. _Gold Is the Cornerstone_ (1948).
Adequate treatment of the discovery of California gold and of
the miners. _Rushing for Gold_ (1949). Twelve essays by twelve
writers, with emphasis on travel to California. Both books
published by University of California Press, Berkeley and Los
Angeles.

CENDRARS, BLAISE. _Sutter's Gold_, London, 1926. OP.

CLARK, JAMES A., and HALBOUTY, MICHEL T. _Spindletop_, Random
House, New York, 1952. On January 10, 1901, the Spindletop
gusher, near Beaumont, Texas, roared in the oil age. This
book, while it presumes to record what Pat Higgins was
thinking as he sat in front of a country store, seems to be
"the true story." The bare facts in it make drama.

DE QUILLE, DAN (pseudonym for William Wright) . _The Big
Bonanza_, Hartford, 1876. Reprinted, 1947. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _Coronado's Children_, Dallas, 1930;
reprinted by Grosset and Dunlap, New York. Legendary tales of
lost mines and buried treasures of the Southwest. _Apache Gold
and Yaqui Silver_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1939. More of the
same thing.

EMRICH, DUNCAN, editor. _Comstock Bonanza_, Vanguard, New
York, 1950. A collection of writings, garnered mostly from
West Coast magazines and newspapers, bearing on mining in
Nevada during the boom days of Mark Twain's



{illust. caption =
Tom Lea, in _Santa Rita_ by Martin W. Schwettmann
(1943)}


_Roughing It_. James G. Gally's writing is a major discovery
in a minor field.

FORBES, GERALD. _Flush Production: The Epic of Oil in the
Gulf-Southwest_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942.

GILLIS, WILLIAM R. _Goldrush Days with Mark Twain_, New York,
1930. OP.

GLASSCOCK, LUCILLE. _A Texas Wildcatter_, Naylor, San
Antonio, 1952. The wildcatter is Mrs. Glasscock's husband. She
chronicles this player's main moves in the game and gives an
insight into his energy-driven ambition.

HOUSE, BOYCE. _Oil Boom_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. With
Boyce House's earlier _Were You in Ranger?_, this book gives a
contemporary picture of the gushing days of oil, money, and
humanity.

LYMAN, GEORGE T. _The Saga of the Comstock Lode_, 1934, and
_Ralston's Ring_, 1937. Both published by Scribner's, New
York.

MCKENNA, JAMES _A. Black Range Tales_, New York, 1936.
Reminiscences of prospecting life. OP.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. _Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career
of E. W. Marland_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951.
Mature in style and in interpretative power, John Joseph
Mathews goes into the very life of an oilman who was something
else.

RISTER, C. C. _Oil! Titan of the Southwest_, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Facts in factual form. Plenty of
oil wealth and taxes; nothing on oil government.

SHINN, CHARLES H. _Mining Camps_, 1885, reprinted by Knopf,
New York, 1948. Perhaps the most competent analysis extant on
the behavior of the gold hunters, with emphasis on their self-
government. _The Story of the Mine as Illustrated by the Great
Comstock Lode of Nevada_, New York, 1896. OP. Shinn knew and
he knew also how to combine into form.

STUART, GRANVILLE. _Forty Years on the Frontier_, Cleveland,
1925. Superb on California and Montana hunger for precious
metals. OP.

TAIT, SAMUEL W. _Wildcatters: An Informal History of Oil-
Hunting in America_, Princeton University Press, 1946. OP.

TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_. The mining boom itself.



_26_

Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists

"NO MAN," says Mary Austin, "has ever really entered into the
heart of any country until he has adopted or made up myths
about its familiar objects." A man might reject the myths but
he would have to know many facts about its natural life and
have imagination as well as knowledge before entering into a
country's heart. The history of any land begins with nature,
and all histories must end with nature.

"The character of a country is the destiny of its people,"
wrote Harvey Fergusson in _Rio Grande_. Ross Calvin, also of
New Mexico, had the same idea in mind when he entitled his
book _Sky Determines_. "Culture mocks at the boundaries set up
by politics," Clark Wissler said. "It approaches geographical
boundaries with its hat in its hand." The engineering of water
across mountains, electric translation of sounds,
refrigeration of air and foods, and other technical
developments carry human beings a certain distance across some
of nature's boundaries, but no cleverness of science can
escape nature. The inhabitants of Yuma, Arizona, are destined
forever to face a desert devoid of graciousness. Technology
does not create matter; it merely uses matter in a skilful
way--uses it up.

Man advances by learning the secrets of nature and taking
advantage of his knowledge. He is deeply happy only when in
harmony with his work and environments. The backwoodsman,
early settler, pioneer plainsman, mountain man were all like
some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at
its own vitals. Driven by an irrational energy, they seemed
intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the
power of the soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear
killer, was "wrathy to kill a bear," and as respects bears and
other wild life, one may search the chronicles of his kind in
vain for anything beyond the incidents of chase and slaughter.
To quote T. B. Thorpe's blusterous bear hunter, the whole
matter may be summed up in one sentence: "A bear is started
and he is killed." For the average American of the soil,
whether wearing out a farm, shotgunning with a headlight the
last doe of a woodland, shooting the last buffalo on the
range, trapping the last howling lobo, winging the last
prairie chicken, running down in an automobile the last
antelope, making a killer's target of any hooting owl or
flying heron that comes within range, poisoning the last eagle
to fly over a sheep pasture for him the circumstances of the
killing have expressed his chief intellectual interest in
nature.

A sure sign of advancing civilization has been the rapidly
changing popular attitude toward nature during recent years.
People are becoming increasingly interested not merely in
conserving game for sportsmen to shoot, but in preserving all
wild life, in observing animals, in cultivating native flora,
in building houses that harmonize with climate and landscape.
Roger Tory Peterson's _Field Guide to the Birds_ has become
one of the popular standard works of America.

The story of the American Indian is--despite taboos and
squalor--a story of harmonizations with nature. "Wolf
Brother," in _Long Lance_, by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance,
is a poetic concretion of this harmony. As much at ease with
the wilderness as any Blackfoot Indian was George Frederick
Ruxton, educated English officer and gentleman, who rode
horseback from Vera Cruz to the Missouri River and wrote
_Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains_. In this book
he tells how a lobo followed him for days from camp to camp,
waiting each evening for his share of fresh meat and sometimes
coming close to the fire at night. Any orthodox American would
have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton had the
civilized perspective on nature represented by Thoreau
and Saint Francis of Assisi. Primitive harmony was run over by
frontier wrath to kill, a wrath no less barbaric than
primitive superstitions.

But the coyote's howl is more tonic than all theories about
nature; the buck's whistle more invigorating; the bull's
bellow in the canyon more musical; the call of the bobwhite
more serene; the rattling of the rattlesnake more logical; the
scream of the panther more arousing to the imagination; the
odor from the skunk more lingering; the sweep of the buzzard
in the air more majestical; the wariness of the wild turkey
brighter; the bark of the prairie dog lighter; the guesses of
the armadillo more comical; the upward dartings and dippings
of the scissortail more lovely; the flight of the sandhill
cranes more fraught with mystery.

There is an abundance of printed information on the animal
life of America, to the west as well as to the east. Much of
it cannot be segregated; the earthworm, on which Darwin wrote
a book, knows nothing of regionalism. The best books on nature
come from and lead to the Grasshopper's Library, which is free
to all consultants. I advise the consultant to listen to the
owl's hoot for wisdom, plant nine bean rows for peace, and,
with Wordsworth, sit on an old gray stone listening for
"authentic tidings of invisible things." Studies are only to
"perfect nature." In the words of Mary Austin, "They that make
the sun noise shall not fail of the sun's full recompense."

Like knowledge in any other department of life, that on nature
never comes to a stand so long as it has vitality. A
continuing interest in natural history is nurtured by _Natural
History_, published by the American Museum of Natural History,
New York; _Nature_, published in Washington, D. C.; _The
Living Wilderness_, also from Washington; _Journal of
Mammalogy_, a quarterly, Baltimore, Maryland; _Audubon
Magazine_ (formerly _Bird Lore_), published by the National
Audubon Society, New York; _American Forests_, Washington, D.
C., and various other publications.

In addition to books of natural history interest listed below,
others are listed under "Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters,"
"Bears and Bear Hunters," "Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers,"
"Birds and Wild Flowers," and "Interpreters." Perhaps a
majority of worthy books pertaining to the western half of
America look on the outdoors.


ADAMS, W. H. DAVENPORT (from the French of Benedict Revoil).
_The Hunter and the Trapper of North America_, London, 1875. A
strange book.

ARNOLD, OREN. _Wild Life in the Southwest_, Dallas, 1936.
Helpful chapters on various characteristic animals and plants.
OP.

BAILEY, VERNON. _Mammals of New Mexico_, United States
Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Biological Survey,
Washington, D. C., 1931. _Biological Survey of Texas_, 1905.
OP. The "North American Fauna Series," to which these two
books belong, contains or points to the basic facts covering
most of the mammals of the Southwest.

BAILLIE-GROHMAN, WILLIAM A. _Camps in the Rockies_, 1882. A
true sportsman, Baillie-Grohman was more interested in living
animals than in just killing. OP.

BEDICHEK, ROY. _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_,
Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1947. To be personal, Roy
Bedichek has the most richly stored mind I have ever met; it
is as active as it is full. Liberal in the true sense of the
word, it frees other minds. Here, using facts as a means, it
gives meanings to the hackberry tree, limestone, mockingbird,
Inca dove, Mexican primrose, golden eagle, the Davis
Mountains, cedar cutters, and many another natural phenomenon.
_Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_ is regarded by some good
judges as the wisest book in the realm of natural history
produced in America since Thoreau wrote.

The title of Bedichek's second book, _Karankaway Country_
(Garden City, 1950), is misleading. The Karankawa Indians
start it off, but it goes to coon inquisitiveness, prairie
chicken dances, the extinction of species to which the
whooping crane is approaching, browsing goats, dignified
skunks, swifts in love flight, a camp in the brush, dust,
erosion, silt--always with thinking added to seeing. The
foremost naturalist of the Southwest, Bedichek constantly
relates nature to civilization and human values.

BROWNING, MESHACH. _Forty-Four Years of the Life of a Hunter_,
1859; reprinted, Philadelphia, 1928. Prodigal on bear and
deer.

CAHALANE, VICTOR H. _Mammals of North America_, Macmillan, New
York, 1947. The author is a scientist with an open mind on the
relationships between predators and game animals. His thick,
delightfully illustrated book is the best dragnet on American
mammals extant. It contains excellent lists of references.

CATON, JUDGE JOHN DEAN. _Antelope and Deer of America_, 1877.
Standard work. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Longhorns_ (1941) and _The Mustangs_
(1952), while hardly to be catalogued as natural history
books, go farther into natural history than most books on
cattle and horses go. _On the Open Range_ (1931; reprinted by
Banks Upshaw, Dallas) contains a number of animal stories more
or less true. Ben Lilly of _The Ben Lilly Legend_ (Boston,
1950) thought that God had called him to hunt. He spent his
life, therefore, in hunting. He saw some things in nature
beyond targets.

DODGE, RICHARD I. _The Hunting Grounds of the Great West_,
London, 1877. Published in New York the same year under title
of _The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants_.
Outstanding survey of outstanding wild creatures.

DUNRAVEN, EARL OF. _The Great Divide_, London, 1876; reprinted
under title of _Hunting in the Yellowstone_, 1925. OP.

ELLIOTT, CHARLES (editor). _Fading Trails_, New York, 1942.
Humanistic review of characteristic American wild life. OP.

FLACK, CAPTAIN. _The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the
Backwoods_, 1866; another form of _A Hunter's Experience in
the Southern States of America_, by Captain Flack, "The
Ranger," London, 1866.

GANSON, EVE. _Desert Mavericks_, Santa Barbara, California,
1928. Illustrated; delightful. OP.

GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. _Naturalists of the Frontier_, Southern
Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1937; revised and enlarged
edition, 1948. Biographies of men who were characters as well
as scientists, generally in environments alien to their
interests.

GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. _Wild Sports in the Far West_, 1854. A
translation from the German. Delightful reading and revealing
picture of how backwoodsmen of the Mississippi Valley "lived
off the country."

GRAHAM, GID. _Animal Outlaws_, Collinsville, Oklahoma, 1938.
OP. A remarkable collection of animal stories. Privately
printed.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Between 1893 and 1913, Grinnell, partly
in collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt, edited five volumes
for The Boone and Crockett Club that contain an extraordinary
amount of information, written mostly by men of civilized
perspective, on bears, deer, mountain sheep, buffaloes,
cougars, elk, wolves, moose, mountains, and forests. The
series, long out of print, is a storehouse of knowledge not to
be overlooked by any student of wild life in the West. The
titles are: _American Big-Game Hunting_, 1893; _Hunting in
Many Lands_, 1895; _Trail and Camp-Fire_, 1897; _American Big
Game in Its Haunts_, 1904; _Hunting at High Altitudes_, 1913.

GRINNELL, JOSEPH; DIXON, JOSEPH S.; and LINSDALE, JEAN M.
_Fur-Bearing Mammals of California: Their Natural History,
Systematic Status, and Relation to Man_, two volumes,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1937. The king, so
far, of all state natural histories.

HALL, E. RAYMOND. _Mammals of Nevada_, University of
California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946. So far as
my knowledge goes, this is the only respect-worthy book extant
pertaining to the state whose economy is based on fees from
divorces and gambling and whose best-known citizen is Senator
Pat McCarran.

HARTMAN, CARL G. _Possum_, University of Texas Press, Austin,
1952. This richly illustrated book comprehends


{illust. caption =
Charles M. Russell, in _The Blazed Trail of the
Old Frontier_ by Agnes C. Laut (1926)}


everything pertaining to the subject from prehistoric
marsupium to baking with sweet potatoes in a Negro cabin. It
is the outcome of a lifetime's scientific investigation not
only of possums but of libraries and popular talk. Thus, in
addition to its biographical and natural history aspects, it
is a study in the evolution of man's knowledge about one of
the world's folkiest creatures.

HORNADAY, WILLIAM T. _Camp Fires on Desert and Lava_, London,
n.d. OP. Dr. Hornaday, who died in 1937, was the first
director of the New York Zoological Park. He was a great
conservationist and an authority on the wild life of America.

HUDSON, W. H. _The Naturalist in La Plata_, New York, 1892.
Not about the Southwest or even North America, but
Hudson's chapters on "The Puma," "Some Curious Animal
Weapons," "The Mephitic Skunk," "Humming Birds," "The Strange
Instincts of Cattle," "Horse and Man," etc. come home to the
Southwest. Few writers tend to make readers so aware; no other
has written so delightfully of the lands of grass.

INGERSOLL, ERNEST. _Wild Neighbors_, New York, 1897. OP. A
superior work. Chapter II, "The Father of Game," is on the
cougar; Chapter IV, "The Hound of the Plains," is on the
coyote; there is an excellent essay on the badger. Each
chapter is provided with a list of books affording more
extended treatment of the subject.

JAEGER, EDMUND C. _Denizens of the Desert_, Boston, 1922. OP.
"Don Coyote," the roadrunner, and other characteristic
animals. _Our Desert Neighbors_, Stanford University Press,
California, 1950.

LOCKE, LUCIE H. _Naturally Yours, Texas_, Naylor, San Antonio,
1949. Charm must never be discounted; it is far rarer than
facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book
is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable
black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo,
sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens
of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list
to which it is akin is Eve Ganson's _Desert Mavericks_.

LUMHOLTZ, CARL. _Unknown Mexico_, New York, 1902. Nearly
anything about animals as well as about Indians and mountains
of Mexico may be found in this extraordinary two-volume work.
OP.

MCILHENNY, EDWARD A. _The Alligator s Life History_, Boston,
1935. OP. The alligator got farther west than is generally
known--at least within reach of Laredo and Eagle Pass on the
Rio Grande. McIlhenny's book treats--engagingly, intimately,
and with precision--of the animal in Louisiana. Hungerers for
anatomical biology are referred to _The Alligator and Its
Allies_ by A. M. Reese, New York, 1915. I have more to say
about McIlhenny in Chapter 30.

MARCY, COLONEL R. B. _Thirty Years of Army Life on the
Border_, New York, 1866. Marcy had a scientific mind and a
high sense of values. He knew how to write and what he wrote
remains informing and pleasant.

MARTIN, HORACE T. _Castorologia, or The History and Traditions
of the Canadian Beaver_, London, 1892. OP. The beaver is a
beaver, whether on Hudson's Bay or the Mexican side of the Rio
Grande. Much has been written on this animal, the propeller of
the trappers of the West, but this famous book remains the
most comprehensive on facts and the amplest in conception. The
author was humorist as well as scientist.

MENGER, RUDOLPH. _Texas Nature Observations and
Reminiscences_, San Antonio, 1913. OP. Being of an educated
German family, Dr. Menger found many things in nature more
interesting than two-headed calves.

MILLS, ENOS. _The Rocky Mountain Wonderland, Wild Life on the
Rockies, Waiting in the Wilderness_, and other books. Some
naturalists have taken exception to some observations recorded
by Mills; nevertheless, he enlarges and freshens mountain
life.

MUIR, JOHN. _The Mountains of California, Our National Parks_,
and other books. Muir, a great naturalist, had the power to
convey his wise sympathies and brooded-over knowledge.

MURPHY, JOHN MORTIMER. _Sporting Adventures in the Far West_,
London, 1879. One of the earliest roundups of game animals of
the West.

NEWSOME, WILLIAM M. _The Whitetailed Deer_, New York, 1926.
OP. Standard work.

PALLISER, JOHN. _The Solitary Hunter; or Storting Adventures
in the Prairies_, London, 1857.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter_,
with a chapter entitled "Books on Big Game"; _Hunting
Adventures in the West; The Wilderness Hunter; Ranch Life and
the Hunting Trail; A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open; The
Deer Family_ (in collaboration).

SEARS, PAUL B. _Deserts on the March_, University of Oklahoma
Press, Norman, 1935. Dramatic picturization of the forces of
nature operating in what droughts of the 1930's caused to be
called "the Dust Bowl." "Drought and Wind and Man" might be
another title.

SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. _Wild Animals I Have Known; Lives of
the Hunted_. Probably no other writer of America has aroused
so many people, young people especially, to an interest in our
wild animals. Natural history encyclopedias he has authored
are _Life Histories of Northern Animals_, New York, 1920, and
_Lives of Game Animals_, New York, 1929. Seton's final
testament, _Trail of an Artist Naturalist_ (Scribner's, New
York, 1941), has a deal on wild life of the Southwest.

THORPE, T. B. _The Hive of the Bee-Hunter_, New York, 1854.
OP. Juicy.

WARREN, EDWARD ROYAL. _The Mammals of Colorado_, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942. OP.



_27_

Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters

THE LITERATURE on the American bison, more popularly called
buffalo, is enormous. Nearly everything of consequence
pertaining to the Plains Indians touches the animal. The
relationship of the Indian to the buffalo has nowhere been
better stated than in Note 49 to the Benavides _Memorial_,
edited by Hodge and Lummis. "The Great Buffalo Hunt at
Standing Rock," a chapter in _My Friend the Indian_ by James
McLaughlin, sums up the hunting procedure; other outstanding
treatments of the buffalo in Indian books are to be found in
_Long Lance_ by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance; _Letters and
Notes on . . . the North American Indians_ by George Catlin;
_Forty Years a Fur Trader_ by Charles Larpenteur. Floyd B.
Streeter's chapter on "The Buffalo Range" in _Prairie Trails
and Cow Towns_ lists twenty-five sources of information.

The bibliography that supersedes all other bibliographies is
in the book that supersedes all other books on the subject--
Frank Gilbert Roe's _The North American Buffalo_. More about
it in the list that follows.

Nearly all men who got out on the plains were "wrathy to kill"
buffaloes above all else. The Indians killed in great numbers
but seldom wastefully. The Spaniards were restrained by Indian
hostility. Mountain men, emigrants crossing the plains, Santa
Fe traders, railroad builders, Indian fighters, settlers on
the edge of the plains, European sportsmen, all slaughtered
and slew. Some observed, but the average American hunter's
observations on game animals are about as illuminating as the
trophy-stuffed den of a rich oilman or the


{illust. caption = Harold D. Bugbee: Buffaloes


lockers of a packing house. Lawrence of Arabia won his name
through knowledge and understanding of Arabian life and
through power to lead and to write. Buffalo Bill won his name
through power to exterminate buffaloes. He was a buffalo man
in the way that Hitler was a Polish Jew man.

It is a pleasure to note the writings of sportsmen with
inquiring minds and of scientists and artists who hunted.
Three examples are: _The English Sportsman in the Western
Prairies_, by the Hon. Grantley F. Berkeley, London, 1861;
_Travels in the Interior of North America, 1833-1834_, by
Maximilian, Prince of Wied (original edition, 1843), included
in that "incomparable storehouse of buffalo lore from early
eye-witnesses," _Early Western Travels_, edited by Reuben Gold
Thwaites; George Catlin's _Letters and Notes on the Manners,
Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians_, London,
1841.

Three aspects of the buffalo stand out: the natural history of
the great American animal; the interrelationship between
Indian and buffalo; the white hunter--and exterminator.


ALLEN, J. A. _The American Bison, Living and Extinct_,
Cambridge, Mass., 1876. Reprinted in 9th Annual Report of the
United States Geological and Geographical Survey, Washington,
1877. Basic and rich work, much of it appropriated by
Hornaday.

BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. _The Hunting of the Buffalo_, New York,
1925. Interpretative as well as factual. OP.

COOK, JOHN R. _The Border and the Buffalo_. Topeka, Kansas,
1907. Personal narrative.

DIXON, OLIVE. _Billy Dixon_, Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1914;
reprinted, Dallas, 1927. Bully autobiography; excellent on the
buffalo hunter as a type. OP.

DODGE, R. I. _The Plains of the Great West and Their
Inhabitants_, New York, 1877. One of the best chapters of this
source book is on the buffalo.

GARRETSON, MARTIN S. _The American Bison_, New York Zoological
Society, New York, 1938. Not thorough, but informing. Limited
bibliography. OP.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD (1849-1938) may be classed next to J. A.
Allen and W. T. Hornaday as historian of the buffalo. His
primary sources were the buffaloed plains and the Plains
Indians, whom he knew intimately. "In Buffalo Days" is a long
and excellent essay by him in _American Big-Game Hunting_,
edited by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, New
York, 1893. He has another long essay, "The Bison," in _Musk-
Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat_ by Caspar
Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen Wister, New York,
1904. His noble and beautifully simple _When Buffalo Ran_, New
Haven, 1920, is specific on work from a buffalo horse. Again
in his noble two-volume work on _The Cheyenne Indians_ (1923)
Grinnell is rich not only on the animal but on the Plains
Indian relationship to it. All OP.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman_,
1936. Goodnight killed and also helped save the buffalo. Haley
has preserved his observations.

HORNADAY, W. T. _Extermination of the American Bison_
(Smithsonian Reports for 1887, published in 1889, Part II).
Hornaday was a good zoologist but inferior in research.

INMAN, HENRY. _Buffalo Jones Forty Years of Adventure_,
Topeka, Kansas, 1899. A book rich in observations as well as
experience, though Jones was a poser. OP.

LAKE, STUART N. _Wyatt Earp_, Boston, 1931. Early chapters
excellent on buffalo hunting.

MCCREIGHT, M. I. _Buffalo Bone Days_, Sykesville, Pa., 1939.
OP. A pamphlet strong on buffalo bones, for fertilizer.

PALLISER, JOHN (and others). _Journals, Detailed Reports, and
Observations, relative to Palliser's Exploration of British
North America, 1857-1860_, London, 1863. According to Frank
Gilbert Roe, "a mine of inestimable information" on the
buffalo.

_Panhandle-Plains Historical Review_, Canyon, Texas. Articles
and reminiscences, _passim_.

PARKMAN, FRANCIS. _The Oregon Trail_, 1847. Available in
various editions, this book contains superb descriptions of
buffaloes and prairies.

POE, SOPHIE A. _Buckboard Days_ (edited by Eugene Cunningham),
Caldwell, Idaho, 1936. Early chapters. OP.

ROE, FRANK GILBERT. _The North American Buffalo_, University
of Toronto Press, 1951. A monumental work comprising and
critically reviewing virtually all that has been written on
the subject and supplanting much of it. No other scholar
dealing with the buffalo has gone so fully into the subject or
viewed it from so many angles, brought out so
many aspects of natural history and human history. In a field
where ignorance has often prevailed, Roe has to be
iconoclastic in order to be constructive. If his words are
sometimes sharp, his mind is sharper. The one indispensable
book on the subject.

RYE, EDGAR. _The Quirt and the Spur_, Chicago, 1909. Rye was
in the Fort Griffin, Texas, country when buffalo hunters
dominated it. OP.

SCHULTZ, JAMES WILLARD. _Apauk, Caller of Buffalo_, New York,
1916. OP. Whether fiction or nonfiction, as claimed by the
author, this book realizes the relationships between Plains
Indian and buffalo.

WEEKES, MARY. _The Last Buffalo Hunter_ (as told by Norbert
Welsh), New York, 1939. OP. The old days recalled with
upspringing sympathy. Canada--but buffaloes and buffalo
hunters were pretty much the same everywhere.

West Texas Historical Association (Abilene, Texas) _Year
Books_. Reminiscences and articles, _passim_.

WILLIAMS, O. W. A privately printed letter of eight unnumbered
pages, dated from Fort Stockton, Texas, June 30, 1930,
containing the best description of a buffalo stampede that I
have encountered. It is reproduced in Dobie's _On the Open
Range_.



_25_

Bears and Bear Hunters

THE BEAR, whether black or grizzly, is a great American
citizen. Think of how many children have been put to sleep
with bear stories! Facts about the animal are fascinating; the
effect he has had on the minds of human beings associated with
him transcends naturalistic facts. The tree on which Daniel
Boone carved the naked fact that here he "Killed A. Bar In the
YEAR 1760" will never die. Davy Crockett killed 105 bars in
one season, and his reputation as a bar hunter, plus ability
to tell about his exploits, sent him to Congress. He had no
other reason for going. The grizzly was the hero of western
tribes of Indians from Alaska on down into the Sierra Madre.
Among western white men who met him, occasionally in death,
the grizzly inspired a mighty saga, the cantos of which lie
dispersed in homely chronicles and unrecorded memories as well
as in certain vivid narratives by Ernest Thompson Seton,
Hittell's John Capen Adams, John G. Neihardt, and others.

For all that, neither the black bear nor the grizzly has been
amply conceived of as an American character. The conception
must include a vast amount of folklore. In a chapter on "Bars
and Bar Hunters" in _On the Open Range_ and in "Juan Oso" and
"Under the Sign of Ursa Major," chapters of _Tongues of the
Monte_, I have indicated the nature of this dispersed epic in
folk tales.

In many of the books listed under "Nature; Wild Life;
Naturalists" and "Mountain Men" the bear "walks like a man."


ALTER, J. CECIL. _James Bridger_, Salt Lake City, 1922
reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Contains
several versions of the famous Hugh Glass bear story.

HITTELL, THEODORE H. _The Adventures of John Capen Adams_,
1860; reprinted 1911, New York. OP. Perhaps no man has lived
who knew grizzlies better than Adams. A rare personal
narrative.

MILLER, JOAQUIN. _True Bear Stories_, Chicago, 1900. OP. Truth
questionable in places; interest guaranteed.

MILLER, LEWIS B. _Saddles and Lariats_, Boston, 1909. OP. The
chapter "In a Grizzly's Jaws" is a wonderful bear story.

MILLS, ENOS A. _The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal_,
Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1919. Some naturalists have accused
Mills of having too much imagination. He saw much and wrote
vividly.

NEIHARDT, JOHN G. _The Song of Hugh Glass_, New York, 1915. An
epic in vigorous verse of the West's most famous man-and-bear
story. This imagination-rousing story has been told over and
over, by J. Cecil Alter in _James Bridger_, by Stanley Vestal
in _Mountain Men_, and by other writers.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Hunting Adventures in the_


{illust. caption =
Charles M. Russell, in _Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage_
by Carrie Adell Strahorn (1915 )


_West_ (1885) and _The Wilderness Hunter_ (1893)--books
reprinted in parts or wholly under varying titles. Several
narratives of hunts intermixed with baldfaced facts.

SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. _The Biography of a Grizzly_, 1900;
now published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York. _Monarch,
the Big Bear of Tallac_, 1904. Graphic narratives.

SKINNER, M. P. _Bears in the Yellowstone_, Chicago, 1925. OP.
A naturalist's rounded knowledge, pleasantly told.

STEVENS, MONTAGUE. _Meet Mr. Grizzly_, University of New
Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943. Montague Stevens graduated
from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1881 and came to New
Mexico to ranch. As respects deductions on observed data, his
book is about the most mature yet published by a ranchman.
Goodnight experienced more, had a more ample nature, but he
lacked the perspective, the mental training, to know what to
make of his observations. Another English rancher, R. B.
Townshend, had perspective and charm but was not a scientific
observer. So far as sense of smell goes, _Meet Mr. Grizzly_ is
as good as W. H. Hudson's _A Hind in Richmond Park_. On the
nature and habits of grizzly bears, it is better than _The
Grizzly_ by Enos Mills.

WRIGHT, WILLIAM H. _The Grizzly Bear: The Narrative of a
Hunter-Naturalist, Historical, Scientific and Adventurous_,
New York, 1928. OP. This is not only the richest and justest
book published on the grizzly; it is among the best books of
the language on specific mammals. Wright had a passion for
bears, for their preservation, and for arousing informed
sympathy in other people. Yet he did not descend to
propaganda. _His The Black Bear_, London, n.d., is good but no
peer to his work on the grizzly. Also OP.



_29_

Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers

I SEPARATE COYOTES, lobos, and panthers from the mass of
animals because they, along with bears, have made such an
imprint on human imagination. White-tailed deer are far more
common and more widely dispersed. Men, women also, by the tens
of thousands go out with rifles every fall in efforts to get
near them; but the night-piercing howl and the cunning ways of
the coyote, the panther's track and the rumor of his scream
have inspired more folk tales than all the deer.

Lore and facts about these animals are dispersed in many books
not classifiable under natural history. Lewis and Clark and
nearly all the other chroniclers of Trans-Mississippi America
set down much on wild life. James Pike's _Scout and Ranger_
details the manner in which, he says, a panther covered him up
alive, duplicating a fanciful and delightful tale in
Gerstaecker's _Wild Sports in the Far West_. James B. O'Neil
concludes _They Die but Once_ with some "Bedtime Stories"
that--almost necessarily--bring in a man-hungry panther.


COYOTES AND LOBOS


The two full-length books on Brother Coyote listed below
specify most of the printed literature on the animal. (He is
"Brother" in Mexican tales and I feel much more brotherly
toward him than I feel toward character assassins in political
power.) It would require another book to catalogue in detail
all the writings that include folk tales about Don Coyote.
Ethnologists and scientific folklorists recognize what they
call "the Coyote Circle" in the folklore of many tribes of
Indians.
Morris Edward Opler in _Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache
Indians_, 1940, and in _Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua
Apache Indians_, 1942 (both issued by the American Folklore
Society, New York) treats fully of this cycle. Numerous tales
that belong to the cycle are included by J. Gilbert
McAllister, an anthropologist who writes as a humanist, in his
extended collection, "Kiowa-Apache Tales," in _The Sky Is My
Tipi_, edited by Mody C. Boatright for the Texas Folklore
Society (Publication XXII), Southern Methodist University
Press, Dallas, 1949.

Literary retellers of Indian coyote folk tales have been many.
The majority of retellers from western Indians include Coyote.
One of the very best is Frank B. Linderman, in _Indian Why
Stories_ and _Indian Old-Man Stories_. These titles are
substantive: _Old Man Coyote_ by Clara Kern Bayliss (New York,
1908, OP), _Coyote Stories_ by Mourning Dove (Caldwell, Idaho,
1934, OP); _Don Coyote_ by Leigh Peck (Boston, 1941) gets
farther away from the Indian, is more juvenile. The _Journal
of American Folklore_ and numerous Mexican books have
published hundreds of coyote folk tales from Mexico. Among the
most pleasingly told are _Picture Tales frown Mexico_ by Dan
Storm, 1941 (Lippincott, Philadelphia). The first two writers
listed below bring in folklore.


CUSHING, FRANK HAMILTON. _Zuni Breadstuff_, Museum of the
American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, 1920. This
extraordinary book, one of the most extraordinary ever written
on a particular people, is not made up of coyote lore alone.
In it the coyote becomes a character of dignity and destiny,
and the telling is epic in dignity as well as in prolongation.
Frank Hamilton Cushing was a genius; his sympathy, insight,
knowledge, and mastery of the art of writing enabled him to
reveal the spirit of the Zuni Indians as almost no other
writer has revealed the spirit of any other tribe. Their
attitude toward Coyote is beautifully developed. Cushing's
_Zuni Folk Tales_ (Knopf, New York, 1901, 1931) is
climactic on "tellings" about Coyote.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Voice of the Coyote_, Little, Brown,
Boston, 1949. Not only the coyote but his effect on human
imagination and ecological relationships. Natural history and
folklore; many tales from factual trappers as well as from
Mexican and Indian folk. This is a strange book in some ways.
If the author had quit at the end of the first chapter, which
is on coyote voicings and their meaning to varied listeners,
he would still have said something. The book includes some,
but by no means all, of the material on the subject in _Coyote
Wisdom_ (Publication XIV of the Texas Folklore Society, 1938)
edited by J. Frank Dobie and now distributed by Southern
Methodist University Press, Dallas.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Wolves and Wolf Nature, in _Trail and
Camp-Fire_, New York, 1897. This long chapter is richer in
facts about the coyote than anything published prior to _The
Voice of the Coyote_, which borrows from it extensively.

LOFBERG, LILA, and MALCOLMSON, DAVID. _Sierra Outpost_, Duell,
Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1941. An extraordinary detailment
of the friendship between two people, isolated by snow high in
the California Sierras, and three coyotes. Written with fine
sympathy, minute in observations.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. _Talking to the Moon_, University of
Chicago Press, 1945. A wise and spiritual interpretation of
the black-jack country of eastern Oklahoma, close to the
Osages, in which John Joseph Mathews lives. Not primarily
about coyotes, the book illuminates them more than numerous
books on particular animals illuminate their subjects.

MURIE, ADOLPH. _Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone_,
United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C.,
1940. An example of strict science informed by civilized
humanity. _The Wolves of Mount McKinley_, United States
Government Printing Of ice, Washington, D. C., 1944. Murie's
combination of prolonged patience, science, and sympathy
behind the observations has never been common. His ecological
point of view is steady. Highly interesting reading.

YOUNG, STANLEY PAUL (with Edward A. Goldman). _The Wolves of
North America_, American Wildlife Institute, Washington, D.
C., 1944. Full information, full bibliography, without
narrative power. _Sketches of American Wildlife_, Monumental
Press, Baltimore, 1946. This slight book contains pleasant
chapters on the Puma, Wolf, Coyote, Antelope and other animals
characteristic of the West. (With Hartley H. T. Jackson) _The
Clever Coyote_, Stackpole, Harrisburg, Pa., and Wildlife
Management Institute, Washington, D. C., 1951. Emphasis upon
the economic status and control of the species, an extended
classification of subspecies, and a full bibliography make
this book and Dobie's _The Voice of the Coyote_ complemental
to each other rather than duplicative.


PANTHERS


Anybody who so wishes may call them mountain lions. Where
there were Negro mammies, white children were likely to be
haunted in the night by fear of ghosts. Otherwise, for some
children of the South and West, no imagined terror of the
night equaled the panther's scream. The Anglo-American lore
pertaining to the panther is replete with stories of attacks
on human beings. Indian and Spanish lore, clear down to where
W. H. Hudson of the pampas heard it, views the animal as _un
amigo de los cristianos_--a friend of man. The panther is
another animal as interesting for what people associated with
him have taken to be facts as for the facts themselves.


BARKER, ELLIOTT S. _When the Dogs Barked `Treed'_, University
of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946. Mainly on mountain
lions, but firsthand observations on other predatory animals
also. Before he became state game warden, the author was for
years with the United States Forest Service.

HIBBEN, FRANK C. _Hunting American Lions_, New York, 1948;
reprinted by University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Mr.
Hibben considers hunting panthers and bears a terribly
dangerous business that only intrepid heroes like him-
self would undertake. Sometimes in this book, but more
awesomely in _Hunting American Bears_, he manages to out-zane
Zane Grey, who had to warn his boy scout readers and puerile-
minded readers of added years that _Roping Lions in the Grand
Canyon_ is true in contrast to the fictional _Young Lion
Hunter_, which uses some of the same material.

HUDSON, W. H. _The Naturalist in La Plata_, New York, 1892. A
chapter in this book entitled "The Puma, or Lion of America"
provoked an attack from Theodore Roosevelt (in _Outdoor
Pastimes of an American Hunter_); but it remains the most
delightful narrative-essay yet written on the subject.

YOUNG, STANLEY PAUL, and GOLDMAN, EDWARD A. _The Puma,
Mysterious American Cat_, American Wildlife Institute,
Washington, D. C., 1946. Scientific, liberal with information
of human interest, bibliography. We get an analysis of the
panther's scream but it does not curdle the blood.


{illust}



_30_

Birds and Wild Flowers

NEARLY EVERYBODY ENJOYS to an extent the singing of birds and
the colors of flowers; to the majority, however, the enjoyment
is casual, generalized, vague, in the same category as that
derived from a short spell of prattling by a healthy baby.
Individuals who study birds and native flora experience an
almost daily refreshment of the spirit and growth of the
intellect. For them the world is an unending Garden of Delight
and a hundred-yard walk down a creek that runs through town or
pasture is an exploration. Hardly anything beyond good books,
good pictures and music, and good talk is so contributory to
the enrichment of life as a sympathetic knowledge of the
birds, wild flowers, and other native fauna and flora around
us.

The books listed are dominantly scientific. Some include keys
to identification. Once a person has learned to use the key
for identifying botanical or ornithological species, he can
spend the remainder of his life adding to his stature.


BIRDS


BAILEY, FLORENCE MERRIAM. _Birds of New Mexico_, 1928. OP.
Said by those who know to be at the top of all state bird
books. Much on habits.

BEDICHEK, ROY. _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_ (1947) and
_Karankaway Country_ (1950), Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y.
These are books of essays on various aspects of nature, but
nowhere else can one find an equal amount of penetrating
observation on chimney swifts, Inca doves, swallows, golden
eagles, mockingbirds, herons, prairie chickens,
whooping cranes, swifts, scissortails, and some other birds.
As Bedichek writes of them they become integrated with all
life.

BRANDT, HERBERT. _Arizona and Its Bird Life_, Bird Research
Foundation, Cleveland, 1951. This beautiful, richly
illustrated volume of 525 pages lives up to its title; the
birds belong to the Arizona country, and with them we get
pines, mesquites, cottonwoods, John Slaughter's ranch, the
northward-flowing San Pedro, and many other features of the
land. Herbert Brandt's _Texas Bird Adventures_, illustrated by
George Miksch Sutton (Cleveland, 1940), is more on the Big
Bend country and ranch country to the north than on birds,
though birds are here.

DAWSON, WILLIAM LEON. _The Birds of California_, San Diego,
etc., California, 1923. OP. Four magnificent volumes, full in
illustrations, special observations on birds, and scientific
data.

DOBIE, J. FRANK, who is no more of an ornithologist than he is
a geologist, specialized on an especially characteristic bird
of the Southwest and gathered its history, habits, and
folklore into a long article: "The Roadrunner in Fact and
Folklore," in _In the Shadow of History_, Publication XV of
the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1939. OP. "Bob More: Man
and Bird Man," _Southwest Review_, Dallas, Vol. XXVII, No. 1
(Autumn, 1941).

NICE, MARGARET MORSE. _The Birds of Oklahoma_, Norman, 1931.
OP. United States Biological Survey publication.

OBERHOLSER, HARRY CHURCH. The Birds of Texas in manuscript
form. "A stupendous work, the greatest of its genre, by the
nation's outstanding ornithologist, who has been fifty years
making it." The quotation is condensed from an essay by Roy
Bedichek in the _Southwest Review_, Dallas, Vol. XXXVIII, No.
1 (Winter, 1953). Maybe some day some man or woman with means
will see the light of civilized patriotism and underwrite the
publication of these great volumes. Patriotism that does not
act to promote the beautiful, the true, and the good had
better pipe down.

PETERSON, ROGER TORY. _A Field Guide to Western Birds_ (1941)
and _A Field Guide to the Birds_ (birds of the eastern United
States, revised 1947), Houghton Mifflin, Boston. These are
standard guides for identification. The range, habits, and
characteristics of each bird are summarized.

SIMMONS, GEORGE FINLEY. _Birds of the Austin Region_,
University of Texas Press, Austin, 1925. A very thorough work,
including migratory as well as nesting species.

SUTTON, GEORGE MIKSCH. _Mexican Birds_, illustrated with
water-color and pen-and-ink drawings by the author, University
of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. The main part of this
handsome book is a personal narrative--pleasant to read even
by one who is not a bird man--of discovery in Mexico. To it is
appended a resume of Mexican bird life for the use of other
seekers. Sutton's _Birds in the Wilderness: Adventures of an
Ornithologist_ (Macmillan, New York, 1936) contains essays on
pet roadrunners, screech owls, and other congenial folk of the
Big Bend of Texas. _The Birds of Brewster County, Texas_, in
collaboration with Josselyn Van Tyne, is a publication of the
Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan, University of
Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1937.

_Wild Turkey_. Literature on this national bird is enormous.
Among books I name first _The Wild Turkey and Its Hunting_, by
Edward A. McIlhenny, New York, 1914. OP. McIlhenny was a
singular man. His family settled on Avery Island, Louisiana,
in 1832; he made it into a famous refuge for wild fowls. The
memories of individuals of a family long established on a
country estate go back several lifetimes. In two books of
Negro folklore and in _The Alligator's Life History_,
McIlhenny wrote as an inheritor. Initially, he was a hunter-
naturalist, but scientific enough to publish in the _Auk_ and
the _Journal of Heredity_. Age, desire for knowledge, and
practice in the art of living dimmed his lust for hunting and
sharpened his interest in natural history. His book on the
wild turkey, an extension into publishable form of a
manuscript
from a civilized Alabama hunter, is delightful and
illuminative reading.

_The Wild Turkey of Virginia_, by Henry S. Mosby and
Charles O. Handley, published by the Commission of Game
and Inland Fisheries of Virginia, Richmond, 1943, is written
from the point of view of wild life management. It contains
an extensive bibliography. Less technical is _The American
Wild Turkey_, by Henry E. Davis, Small Arms Technical
Company, Georgetown, South Carolina, 1949. No strain, or
subspecies, of the wild turkey is foreign to any other, but
human blends in J. Stokley Ligon, naturalist, are unique. The
title of his much-in-little book is _History and Management
of Merriam's Wild Turkey_, New Mexico Game and Fish
Commission, through the University of New Mexico Press,
Albuquerque, 1946.


WILD FLOWERS AND GRASSES


The scientific literature on botany of western America is
extensive. The list that follows is for laymen as much as for
botanists.


BENSON, LYMAN, and DARROW, ROBERT A. _A Manual of
Southwestern Desert Trees and Shrubs_, Biological Science
Bulletin No. 6, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1944. A
thorough work of 411 pages, richly illustrated, with general
information added to scientific description.

CARR, WILLIAM HENRY. _Desert Parade: A Guide to
Southwestern Desert Plants and Wildlife_, Viking, New York,
1947.

CLEMENTS, FREDERIC E. and EDITH S. _Rocky Mountain
Flowers_, H. W. Wilson, New York, 1928. Scientific
description, with glossary of terms and key for
identification.

COULTER, JOHN M. _Botany of Western Texas_, United
States Department of Agriculture, Washington, 1891-94.
OP. Nothing has appeared during the past sixty years to take
the place of this master opus.

GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. _Horticulture and Horticultur-
ists in Early Texas_, Southern Methodist University Press,
Dallas, 1945. Historical-scientific, more technical than the
author's _Naturalists of the Frontier_.

JAEGER, EDMUND C. _Desert Wild Flowers_, Stanford University
Press, California, 1940, revised 1947. Scientific but designed
for use by any intelligent inquirer.

LUNDELL, CYRUS L., and collaborators. _Flora of Texas_,
Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1942-   . A
"monumental" work, highly technical, being published part by
part.

MCKELVEY, SUSAN DELANO. _Yuccas of the Southwestern United
States_, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1938. Definitive
work in two volumes.

_Range Plant Handbook_, prepared by the Forest Service of the
United States Department of Agriculture. United States
Government Printing Office, Washington, 1937. A veritable
encyclopedia, illustrated.

SCHULZ, ELLEN D. _Texas Wild Flowers_, Chicago, 1928. Good as
a botanical guide and also for human uses; includes lore on
many plants. OP. _Cactus Culture_, Orange Judd, New York,
1932. Now in revised edition.

SILVIUS, W. A. _Texas Grasses_, published by the author, San
Antonio, 1933. A monument, of 782 illustrated pages, to a
lifetime's disinterested following of knowledge "like a star."

STEVENS, WILLIAM CHASE. _Kansas Wild Flowers_, University of
Kansas Press, Lawrence, 1948. This is more than a state book,
and the integration of knowledge, wisdom, and appreciation of
flower life with botanical science makes it appeal to layman
as well as to botanist. 463 pages, 774 illustrations.
Applicable to the whole plains area.

STOCKWELL, WILLIAM PALMER, and BREAZEALE, LUCRETIA. _Arizona
Cacti_, Biological Science Bulletin No. 1, University of
Arizona, Tucson, 1933. Beautifully illustrated.

THORNBER, JOHN JAMES, and BONKER, FRANCES. _The Fantastic
Clan: The Cactus Family_, New York, 1932. OP.

THORP, BENJAMIN CARROLL. _Texas Range Grasses_, Uni-
versity of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. A survey of 168 species
of grasses, their adaptability to soils and regions, and their
values for grazing. Beautifully illustrated and printed, but
no index.

WHITEHOUSE, EULA. _Texas Wild Flowers in Natural Colors_,
1936; republished 1948 in Dallas. OP. Toward 200 flowers are
pictured in colors, each in conjunction with descriptive
material. The finding lists are designed to enable novices to
identify flowers. A charming book.


{illust. caption =
Paisano (roadrunner) means
fellow-countryman}



_31_

Negro Folk Songs and Tales

WEST OF A WAVERING line along the western edge of the central
parts of Texas and Oklahoma the Negro is not an important
social or cultural element of the Southwest, just as the
modern Indian hardly enters into Texas life at all and the
Mexican recedes to the east. Negro folk songs and tales of the
Southwest have in treatment been blended with those of the
South. Dorothy Scarborough's _On the Trail of Negro Folk-
Songs_ (1925, OP) derives mainly from Texas, but in making up
the body of a Negro song, Miss Scarborough says, "You may find
one bone in Texas, one in Virginia and one in Mississippi."
Leadbelly, a guitar player equally at home in the
penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana, furnished John A. and
Alan Lomax with _Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly_, New
York, 1936 (OP). The Lomax anthologies, _American Ballads and
Folk Songs_, 1934, and _Our Singing Country_, 1941 (Macmillan,
New York) and Carl Sandburg's _American Songbag_ (Harcourt,
Brace, New York, 1927) all give the Negro of the Southwest
full representation.

Three books of loveliness by R. Emmett Kennedy, _Black Cameos_
(1924), _Mellows_ (1925), and _More Mellows_ (1931) represent
Louisiana Negroes. All are OP. An excellent all-American
collection is James Weldon Johnson's _Book of American Negro
Spirituals_, Viking, New York, 1940. Bibliographies and lists
of other books will be found in _The Negro and His Songs_
(1925, OP) and _Negro Workaday Songs_, by Howard W. Odum and
Guy B. Johnson, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel
Hill, 1926, and in _American Negro Folk-Songs_, by Newman I.
White, Cambridge, 1928.

A succinct guide to Negro lore is _American Folk Song and Folk
Lore: A Regional Bibliography_, by Alan Lomax and Sidney R.
Crowell, New York, 1942. OP.

Narrowing the field down to Texas, J. Mason Brewer's
"Juneteenth," in _Tone the Bell Easy_, Publication X of the
Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1932, is outstanding as a
collection of tales. In volume after volume the Texas Folklore
Society has published collections of Negro songs and tales A.
W. Eddins, Martha Emmons, Gates Thomas, and H. B. Parks being
principal contributors.



_32_

Fiction--Including Folk Tales

FROM THE DAYS of the first innocent sensations in Beadle's
Dime Novel series, on through Zane Grey's mass production and
up to any present-day newsstand's crowded shelf of _Ace High_
and _Flaming Guns_ magazines, the Southwest, along with all
the rest of the West, has been represented in a fictional
output quantitatively stupendous. Most of it has betrayed
rather than revealed life, though not with the contemptible
contempt for both audience and subject that characterizes most
of Hollywood's pictures on the same times, people, and places.
Certain historical aspects of the fictional betrayal of the
West may be found in E. Douglas Branch's _The Cowboy and His
Interpreters_, in _The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime
and Nickel Novels_, by Albert Johannsen in two magnificent
volumes, and in Jay Monaghan's _The Great Rascal: The Life and
Adventures of Ned Buntline_ Buntline having been perhaps the
most prolific of all Wild West fictionists.

Some "Westerns" have a kind of validity. If a serious reader
went through the hundreds of titles produced by William McLeod
Raine, Dane Coolidge, Eugene Cunningham,. B. M. Bower, the
late Ernest Haycox, and other manufacturers of range novels
who have known their West at firsthand, he would find,
spottedly, a surprising amount of truth about land and men, a
fluency in genuine cowboy lingo, and a respect for the code of
conduct. Yet even these novels have added to the difficulty
that serious writing in the Western field has in getting a
hearing on literary, rather than merely Western, grounds. Any
writer of Westerns must, like all
other creators, be judged on his own intellectual development.
"The Western and Ernest Haycox," by James Fargo, in _Prairie
Schooner_, XXVI (Summer, 1952) has something on this subject.

Actualities in the Southwest seem to have stifled fictional
creation. No historical novel dealing with Texas history has
achieved the drama of the fall of the Alamo or the drawing of
the black beans, has presented a character with half the
reality of Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, or Sallie Skull, or has
captured the flavor inherent in the talk on many a ranch
gallery.

Historical fiction dealing with early day Texas is, however,
distinctly maturing. As a dramatization of Jim Bowie and the
bowie knife, _The Iron Mistress_, by Paul Wellman (Doubleday,
Garden City, New York, 1951), is the best novel published so
far dealing with a figure of the Texas revolution. In _Divine
Average_ (Little, Brown, Boston, 1952), Elithe Hamilton
Kirkland weaves from her seasoned knowledge of life and from
"realities of those violent years in Texas history between
1838 and 1858" a story of human destiny. She reveals the
essential nature of Range Templeton more distinctly, more
mordantly, than history has revealed the essential nature of
Sam Houston or any of his contemporaries. The wife and
daughter of Range Templeton are the most plausible women in
any historical novel of Texas that I have read. The created
world here is more real than the actual.

Among the early tale-tellers of the Southwest are Jeremiah
Clemens, who wrote _Mustang Gray_, Mollie E. Moore Davis, of
plantation tradition, Mayne Reid, who dared convey real
information in his romances, Charles W. Webber, a naturalist,
and T. B. Thorpe, creator of "The Big Bear of Arkansas."

Fiction that appeared before World War I can hardly be called
modern. No fiction is likely to appear, however, that will do
better by certain types of western character and certain
stages of development in western society than that
produced by Bret Harte, with his gamblers; stage drivers, and
mining camps; O. Henry with his "Heart of the West" types;
Alfred Henry Lewis with his "Wolfville" anecdotes and
characters; Owen Wister, whose _Virginian_ remains the classic
of cowboy novels without cows; and Andy Adams, whose _Log of a
Cowboy_ will be read as long as people want a narrative of
cowboys sweating with herds.

The authors listed below are in alphabetical order. Those who
seem to me to have a chance to survive are not exactly in that
order.


FRANK APPLEGATE (died 1932) wrote only two books, _Native
Tales of New Mexico_ and _Indian Stories from the Pueblos_,
but as a delighted and delightful teller of folk tales his
place is secure.

MARY AUSTIN seems to be settling down as primarily an
expositor. Her novels are no longer read, but the simple tales
in _One-Smoke Stories_ (her last book, 1934) and in some
nonfiction collections, notably _Lost Borders_ and _The
Flock_, do not recede with time.

While the Southwest can hardly claim Willa Cather, of
Nebraska, her _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ (1927), which
is made out of New Mexican life, is not only the best-known
novel concerned with the Southwest but one of the finest of
America.

Despite the fact that it is not on the literary map, Will
Levington Comfort's _Apache_ (1931) remains for me the most
moving and incisive piece of writing on Indians of the
Southwest that I have found.

If a teller of folk tales and plotless narratives belongs in
this chapter, then J. Frank Dobie should be mentioned for the
folk tales in _Coronado's Children, Apache Gold and Yaqui
Silver_, and _Tongues of the Monte_, also for some of his
animal tales in _The Voice of the Coyote_, outlaw and maverick
narratives in _The Longhorns_, and "The Pacing White Steed of
the Prairies" and other horse stories in _The Mustangs_.

The characters in Harvey Fergusson's _Wolf Song_ (1927) are
the Mountain Men of Kit Carson's time, and the city of their
soul is rollicky Taos. It is a lusty, swift song of the
pristine earth. Fergusson's _The Blood of the Conquerors_
(1931) tackles the juxtaposition of Spanish-Mexican and Anglo-
American elements in New Mexico, of which state he is a
native. _Grant of Kingdom_ (1850) is strong in wisdom
life, vitality of character, and historical values.

FRED GIPSON'S _Hound-Dog Man_ and _The Home Place_ lack the
critical attitude toward life present in great fiction but
they are as honest and tonic as creek bottom soil and the
people in them are genuine.

FRANK GOODWYN'S _The Magic of Limping John_ (New York, 1944,
OP) is a coherence of Mexican characters, folk tales, beliefs,
and ways in the ranch country of South Texas. There is
something of magic in the telling, but Frank Goodwyn has not
achieved objective control over imagination or sufficiently
stressed the art of writing.

PAUL HORGAN of New Mexico has in _The Return of the Weed_
(short stories), _Far from Cibola_, and other fiction coped
with modern life in the past-haunted New Mexico.

OLIVER LAFARGE'S _Laughing Boy_ (1929) grew out of the
author's ethnological knowledge of the Navajo Indians. He
achieves character.

TOM LEA'S _The Brave Bulls_ (1949) has, although it is a
sublimation of the Mexican bullfighting world, Death and Fear
of Death for its dominant theme. It may be compared in theme
with Stephen Crane's _The Red Badge of Courage_. It is written
with the utmost of economy, and is beautiful in its power.
_The Wonderful Country_ (1952), a historical novel of the
frontier, but emphatically not a "Western," recognizes more
complexities of society. Its economy and directness parallel
the style of Tom Lea's drawings and paintings, with which both
books are illustrated

_Sundown_, by John Joseph Mathews (1934), goes more profoundly
than _Laughing Boy_ into the soul of a young Indian (an Osage)
and his people. Its translation of the "long,
long thoughts" of the boy and then of "shades of the prison
house" closing down upon him is superb writing. The "shades of
the prison house" come from oil, with all of the world's
coarse thumbs that go with oil.

GEORGE SESSIONS PERRY'S _Hold Autumn in Your Hand_ (1941)
incarnates a Texas farm hand too poor "to flag a gut-wagon,"
but with the good nature, dignity, and independence of the
earth itself. _Walls Rise Up_ (1939) is a kind of _Crock of
Gold_, both whimsical and earthy, laid on the Brazos River.

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER is as dedicated to artistic perfection
as was A. E. Housman. Her output has, therefore, been limited:
_Flowering Judas_ (1930, enlarged 1935); _Pale Horse, Pale
Rider_ (1939), _The Leaning Tower_ (1944). Her stories
penetrate psychology, especially the psychology of a Mexican
hacienda, with rare finesse. Her small canvases sublimate the
inner realities of men and women. She appeals only to
cultivated taste, and to some tastes no other fiction writer
in America today is her peer in subtlety.

EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES died in 1934. Most of his novels--
distinguished by intricate plots and bright dialogue--had
appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_. His finest story is
"Paso Por Aqui," published in the volume entitled _Once
in the Saddle_ (1927). Gene Rhodes, who has a canyon--on which
he ranched--named for him in New Mexico, was an artist; at the
same time, he was a man akin to his land and its men. He is
the only writer of the range country who has been accorded a
biography--_The Hired Man on Horseback_, by May D. Rhodes, his
wife. See under "Range Life."

CONRAD RICHTER'S _The Sea of Grass_ (1937) is a kind of prose
poem, beautiful and tragic. Lutie, wife of the owner of the
grass, is perhaps the most successful creation of a ranch
woman that fiction has so far achieved.

DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH'S _The Wind_ (1925) excited the wrath of
chambers of commerce and other boosters in West Texas--a
tribute to its realism.

_The Grapes of Wrath_, by John Steinbeck (1939), made Okies a
word in the American language. Although dated by
the Great Depression, its humanity and realism are beyond
date. It is among the few good novels produced by America in
the first half of the twentieth century.

JOHN W. THOMASON, after fighting as a marine in World War I,
wrote _Fix Bayonets_ (1926), followed by _Jeb Stuart_ (1930).
A native Texan, he followed the southern tradition rather than
the western. _Lone Star Preacher_ (1941) is a strong and
sympathetic characterization of Confederate fighting men woven
into fictional form.

In _High John the Conqueror_ (Macmillan, 1948) John W. Wilson
conveys real feeling for the tragic life of Negro
sharecroppers in the Brazos bottoms. He represents the
critical awareness of life that has come to modern fiction of
the Southwest, in contrast to the sterile action, without
creation of character, in most older fiction of the region.



_33_

Poetry and Drama

"KNOWLEDGE itself is power," Sir Francis Bacon wrote in
classical Latin, and in abbreviated form the proverb became a
familiar in households and universities alike. But knowledge
of what? There is no power in knowledge of mediocre verse.

     I had rather flunk my Wasserman test
     Than read a poem by Edgar A. Guest.

The power of great poetry lies not in knowledge of it but in
assimilation of it. Most talk about poetry is vacuous. Poetry
can pass no power into any human being unless it itself has
power--power of beauty, truth, wit, humor, pathos, satire,
worship, and other attributes, always through form. No poor
poetry is worth reading. Taste for the best makes the other
kind insipid.

Compared with America's best poetry, most poetry of the
Southwest is as mediocre as American poetry in the mass is as
compared with the great body of English poetry between Chaucer
and Masefield. Yet mediocre poetry is not so bad as mediocre
sculpture. The mediocre in poetry is merely fatuous; in
sculpture, it is ugly. Generations to come will have to look
at Coppini's monstrosity in front of the Alamo; it can't rot
down or burn up. Volumes of worthless verse, most of it
printed at the expense of the versifiers, hardly come to
sight, and before long they disappear from existence except
for copies religiously preserved in public libraries.

Weak fiction goes the same way. But a good deal of very bad
prose in the nonfiction field has some value. In an otherwise
dull book there may be a solitary anecdote, an isolated
observation on a skunk, a single gesture of some human being
otherwise highly unimportant, one salty phrase, a side glimpse
into the human comedy. If poetry is not good, it is positively
nothing.

The earliest poet of historical consequence the only form of
his poetical consequence--of the Southwest was Mirabeau
Buonaparte Lamar. He led the Texas cavalry at San Jacinto,
became president of the Republic of Texas, organized the
futile Santa Fe Expedition, gathered up six volumes of notes
and letters for a history of Texas that might have been as
raw-meat realistic as anything in Zola or Tolstoy. Then as a
poet he reached his climax in "The Daughter of Mendoza"--a
graceful but moonshiny imitation of Tom Moore and Lord Byron.
Perhaps it is better for the weak to imitate than to try to be
original.

It would not take one more than an hour to read aloud all the
poetry of the Southwest that could stand rereading. At the top
of all I should place Fay Yauger's "Planter's Charm,"
published in a volume of the same title. With it belongs "The
Hired Man on Horseback," by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a long poem
of passionate fidelity to his own decent kind of men, with
power to ennoble the reader, and with the form necessary to
all beautiful composition. This is the sole and solitary piece
of poetry to be found in all the myriads of rhymes classed as
"cowboy poetry." I'd want Stanley Vestal's "Fandango," in a
volume of the same title. Margaret Bell Houston's "Song from
the Traffic," which takes one to the feathered mesquites and
the bluebonnets, might come next. Begging pardon of the
perpetually palpitating New Mexico lyricists, I would skip
most of them, except for bits of Mary Austin, Witter Bynner,
Haniel Long, and maybe somebody I don't know, and go to George
Sterling's "Father Coyote"--in California. Probably I would
come back to gallant Phil LeNoir's "Finger of Billy the Kid,"
written while he was dying of tuberculosis in New Mexico. I
wouldn't leave without the swift, brilliantly economical
stanzas that open the
ballad of "Sam Bass," and a single line, "He came of a
solitary race," in the ballad of "Jesse James."

Several other poets have, of course, achieved something for
mortals to enjoy and be lifted by. Their work has been sifted
into various anthologies. The best one is_ Signature of the
Sun: Southwest Verse, 1900-1950_, selected and edited by Mabel
Major and T. M. Pearce, University of New Mexico Press,
Albuquerque, 1950. Two other anthologies are _Songs of the
Cattle Trail and Cow Camp_, by John A. Lomax, 1919, reprinted
in 1950 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York; _The Road to
Texas_, by Whitney Montgomery, Kaleidograph, Dallas, 1940.
Montgomery's Kaleidograph Press has published many volumes by
southwestern poets. Somebody who has read them all and has
read all the poets represented, without enough of
distillation, in _Signature of the Sun_ could no doubt be
juster on the subject than I am.

Like historical fiction, drama of the Southwest has been less
dramatic than actuality and less realistic than real
characters. Lynn Riggs of Oklahoma, author of _Green Grow the
Lilacs_, has so far been the most successful dramatist.



_34_

Miscellaneous Interpreters and Institutions


ARTISTS

ART MAY BE SUBSTANTIVE, but more than being its own excuse for
being, it lights up the land it depicts, shows people what is
significant, cherishable in their own lives and environments.
Thus Peter Hurd of New Mexico has revealed windmills, Thomas
Hart Benton of Missouri has elevated mules. Nature may not
literally follow art, but human eyes follow art and literature
in recognizing nature.

The history of art in the Southwest, if it is ever rightly
written, will not bother with the Italian "Holy Families"
imported by agent-guided millionaires trying to buy
exclusiveness. It will begin with clay (Indian pottery), horse
hair (vaquero weaving), hide (vaquero plaiting), and horn
(backwoods carving). It will note Navajo sand painting and
designs in blankets.

Charles M. Russell's art has been characterized in the chapter
on "Range Life." He had to paint, and the Old West was his
life. More versatile was his contemporary Frederic Remington,
author of _Pony Tracks, Crooked Trails_, and other books, and
prolific illustrator of Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt,
Alfred Henry Lewis, and numerous other writers of the West.
Not so well known as these two, but rising in estimation, was
Charles Schreyvogle. He did not write; his best-known pictures
are reproduced in a folio entitled _My Bunkie and Others_.
Remington, Russell, and Schreyvogle all did superb sculptoring
in bronze. One of the
finest pieces of sculpture in the Southwest is "The Seven
Mustangs" by A. Phimister Proctor, in front of the Texas
Memorial Museum at Austin.

Among contemporary artists, Ross Santee and Will James (died,
1942) have illustrated their own cow country books, some of
which are listed under "Range Life" and "Horses." William R.
Leigh, author of _The Western Pony_, is a significant painter
of the range. Edward Borein of Santa Barbara, California, has
in scores of etchings and a limited amount of book
illustrations "documented" many phases of western life. Buck
Dunton of Taos illustrated also. His lithographs and paintings
of wild animals, trappers, cowboys, and Indians seem secure.

I cannot name and evaluate modern artists of the Southwest.
They are many, and the excellence of numbers of them is
nationally recognized. Many articles have been written about
the artists who during this century have lived around Taos and
painted that region of the Southwest. Some of the better-known
names are Ernest L. Blumenschein, Oscar Berninghaus, Ward
Lockwood, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ila McAfee,
Barbara Latham Cook, Howard Cook. Artists thrive in Arizona,
Oklahoma, and Texas as well as in New Mexico. Tom Lea, of El
Paso, may be quitting painting and drawing to spend the
remainder of his life in writing. Perhaps he himself does not
know. Jerry Bywaters, who is at work on the history of art in
the Southwest, has about quit producing to direct the Dallas
Museum of Fine Arts. Alexandre Hogue gives his strength to
teaching art in Tulsa University. Exhibitions, not
commentators, are the revealers of art.

A few books, all expensive, reproduce the art of certain
depicters of the West and Southwest. _Etchings of the West_,
by Edward Borein, and _The West of Alfred Jacob Miller_ have
been noted in other chapters (consult Index). Other recent art
works are: _Peter Hurd: Portfolio of Landscapes and
Portraits_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950;
_Gallery of Western Paintings_, edited by Raymond Carlson,
McGraw-Hill, New York, 1951 (unsatisfactory reproduction);
_Frederic Remington, Artist of the Old West_, by Harold
McCracken, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1947 (biography and check
list with many reproductions); _Portrait of the Old West_, by
Harold McCracken, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1952 (samplings of
numerous artists).

In February, 1946, Robert Taft of the University of Kansas
began publishing in the _Kansas Historical Quarterly_
chapters, richly illustrated in black and white, in "The
Pictorial Record of the Old West." The book to be made from
these chapters will have a historical validity missing in most
picture books.


MAGAZINES


The leading literary magazine of the region is the _Southwest
Review_, published quarterly at Southern Methodist University,
Dallas. The _New Mexico Quarterly_, published by the
University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, the _Arizona
Quarterly_, published by the University of Arizona at Tucson
the _Colorado Quarterly_, published by the University of
Colorado at Boulder, and _Prairie Schooner_, University of
Nebraska Press, Lincoln, are excellent exponents of current
writing in the Southwest and West. All these magazines are
liberated from provincialism.


HISTORICAL SOCIETIES


Every state in the Southwest has a state historical
organization that publishes. The oldest and most productive of
these, outside of California, is the Texas State Historical
Association, with headquarters at Austin.


HISTORIES


A majority of the state histories of the Southwest have been
written with the hope of securing an adoption for school use.
It would require a blacksnake whip to make most juve-
niles, or adults either, read these productions, as devoid of
picturesqueness, life-blood, and intellectual content as so
many concrete slabs. No genuinely humanistic history of the
Southwest has ever been printed. There are good factual
histories--and a history not based on facts can't possibly be
good--but the lack of synthesis, of intelligent evaluations,
of imagination, of the seeing eye and portraying hand is too
evident. The stuff out of which history is woven--diaries,
personal narratives, county histories, chronicles of ranches
and trails, etc.--has been better done than history itself.


FOLKLORE


Considered scientifically, folklore belongs to science and not
to the humanities. When folk and fun are not scienced out of
it, it is song and story and in literature is mingled with
other ingredients of life and art, as exampled by the folklore
in _Hamlet_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. In "Indian
Culture," "Spanish-Mexican Strains," "Backwoods Life and
Humor," "Cowboy Songs," "The Bad Man Tradition," "Bears,"
"Coyotes," "Negro Folk Songs and Tales," and other chapters of
this _Guide_ numerous books charged with folklore have been
listed.

The most active state society of its kind in America has been
the Texas Folklore Society, with headquarters at the
University of Texas, Austin. Volume XXIV of its Publications
appeared in 1951, and it has published and distributed other
books. Its Publications are now distributed by Southern
Methodist University Press in Dallas. J. Frank Dobie, with
constant help, was editor from 1922 to 1943, when he resigned.
Since 1943 Mody C. Boatright has been editor.

In 1947 the New Mexico Folklore Society began publishing
yearly the _New Mexico Folklore Record_. It is printed by the
University of New Mexico Press. The University of Arizona,
Tucson, has published several folklore bulletins. The
California Folklore Society publishes, through the University
of California Press, Berkeley, _Western Folklore_, a
quarterly.
In co-operation with the Southeastern Folklore Society, the
University of Florida, Gainesville, publishes the _Southern
Folklore Quarterly_. Levette J. Davidson of the University of
Denver, author of _A Guide to American Folklore_, University
of Denver Press, 1951, directs the Western Folklore
Conference. The _Journal of American Folklore_ has published a
good deal from the Southwest and Mexico. The Sociedad
Folklorica de Mexico publishes its own _Anurio_. Between 1929
and 1932, B. A. Botkin, editor of _A Treasury of Southern
Folklore_, 1949, and A _Treasury of Western Folklore_, 1951
(Crown, New York), brought out four volumes entitled _Folk-
Say_, University of Oklahoma Press. OP. The volumes are
significant for literary utilizations of folklore and
interpretations of folks.


MUSEUMS


Museums do not belong to the DAR. Their perspective on the
past is constructive. The growing museums in Santa Fe, Tucson,
Phoenix, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas,
Austin, Denver, and on west into California represent the art,
fauna, flora, geology, archeology, occupations,
transportation, architecture, and other phases of the
Southwest in a way that may be more informing than many
printed volumes.



_35_

Subjects for Themes

THE OBJECT OF THEME-WRITING is to make a student observe, to
become aware, to evaluate, to enrich himself. Any phase of
life or literature named or suggested in the foregoing
chapters could be taken as a subject for an essay. The most
immature essay must be more than a summary; a mere summary is
never an essay. The writer must synthesize, make his own
combination of thoughts, facts, incidents, characteristics,
anecdotes, interpretations, illustrations, according to his
own pattern. A writer is a weaver, weaving various threads of
various hues and textures into a design that is his own.

"Look into thy heart and write." "Write what you know about."
All this is good advice in a way--but students have to write
themes whether they have anything to write or not. The way to
get full of a subject, to generate a conveyable interest, is
to fill up on the subject. As clouds are but transient forms
of matter that "change but cannot die," so most writing, even
the best, is but a variation in form of experiences, ideas,
observations, emotions that have been recorded over and over.

In general, the materials a student weaves are derived from
three sources: what he has read, what he has heard, what he
has observed and experienced himself. If he chooses to sketch
an interesting character, he will make his sketch richer and
more interesting if he reads all he can find that illuminates
his subject's background. If he sets out to tell a legend or a
series of related folk tales or anecdotes, he will improve his
telling by reading what he can on the subjects that his
proposed narratives treat of and by reading similar
narratives already written by others. If he wishes to tell
what he knows about rattlesnakes, buzzards, pet coyotes,
Brahma cattle, prickly pear, cottonwoods, Caddo Lake, the
Brazos River, Santa Fe adobes, or other features of the land,
let him bolster and put into perspective his own knowledge by
reading what others have said on the matter. Knowledge fosters
originality. Reading gives ideas.

The list of subjects that follows is meant to be suggestive,
and must not be regarded as inclusive. The best subject for
any writer is one that he is interested in. A single name or
category may afford scores of subjects. For example, take Andy
Adams, the writer about cowboys and range life. His campfire
yarns, the attitude of his cowboys toward their horses, what
he has to say about cows, the metaphor of the range as he has
recorded it, the placidity of his cowboys as opposed to Zane
Grey sensationalism, etc., are a few of the subjects to be
derived from a study of his books. Or take a category like
"How the Early Settlers Lived." Pioneer food, transportation,
sociables, houses, neighborliness, loneliness, living on game
meat, etc., make subjects. Almost every subject listed below
will suggest either variations or associated subjects.

The Humor of the Southwest
Similes from Nature (Crockett is rich in them)
The Code of Individualism
The Code of the Range
Six-shooter Ethics
The Right to Kill
The Tradition of Cowboy Gallantry
 (read Owen Wister's _The
 Virginian_ and _A Journey in Search
 of Christmas;_ also novels by
 Eugene Manlove Rhodes)
Frontier Hospitality
Amusements (shooting matches,
 tournaments, play parties, dances,
 poker, horse races, quiltings,
 house-raisings)
The Western Gambler (Bret Harte
 and Alfred Henry Lewis have
 idealized him in fiction; he might
 be contrasted with the Mississippi
 River gambler)
Indian Captives
The Age of Horse Culture (Spanish,
 Indian, Anglo-American; the
 horse was important enough to
 any one of these classes to
 warrant extended study)
The Cowboy's Horse
The Cowboy Myth (Mody Boat-
 right is writing a book on the subject)
Evolution of the Frontier Criminal Lawyer
The Frontier Intellect in the Atomic Age
British Chroniclers of the West
Civilized Perspective in Writings on the Old West
The Indian in Fiction
Fictional Betrayal of the West
The West in Reality and the West on the Screen
Around the Chuck Wagon: Cowboy Yarns
Stretching the Blanket
Authentic Liars
Recent Fiction of the Southwest
 (any writer worth writing about)
Literary Magazines of the Southwest
Ranch Women
Mexican Labor (on ranch, farm,
 or in town)
Mexican Folk Tales
Backwoods Life in Frederick Gerstaecker
"The Old Catdeman" in Alfred
 Henry Lewis' _Wolfville_ Books
Mayne Reid as an Exponent of the
 Southwest (see estimate of him
 in _Mesa, Canon and Pueblo_,
 by Charles F. Lummis)
The Gunman in Fiction and Reality
 (O. Henry, Bret Harte, Alfred
 Henry Lewis; _The Saga of Billy
 the Kid_, by Walter Noble Burns;
 Gillett's _Six Years with the Texas
 Rangers;_ Webb's _The Texas
 Rangers;_ Lake's _Wyatt Earp)_
Character of the Trail Drivers
Cowboy's Life as Reflected in His Songs
"Wrathy to Kill a Bear" (the
 frontiersman as a destroyer of wild life)
"I Thought I Might See Something to Shoot at"
Anecdotes of the Stump Speaker
Exempla of Revivalists and Campmeeting Preachers
The Campmeeting
Stagecoaching
Life on the Santa Fe Trail
The Rendezvous of the Mountain Men
In the Covered Wagon
Squatter Life
No Shade
From Grass to Wheat
From Wheat to Dust
Brush (a special study of prickly
 pear, the mesquite, or some other
 form of flora could be made)
Cotton (whole books are suggested
 here, the tenant farmer being one
 of the subjects)
Oil Booms
Longhorns
Coyote Stories
Deer Nature, or Whitetails and
 Their Hunters
Rattlesnakes, or Rattlesnake Stories
Panther Stories
Tarantula Lore
Grasshopper Plagues
The Javelina in Fact and in Folk Tale
The Roadrunner (Paisano)
Wild Turkeys
The Poisoned-Out Prairie Dog
Sheep
Vanishing Sheep Herders
The Bee Hunter
Pot Hunters
Buffalo Hunters
The Bar Hunter and Bar Stories
Indian Fighter
Indian Hater
Scalps
Squaw Men
Mountain Men and Grizzlies
Scouts and Guides
Stage Drivers
Fiddlers and Fiddle Tunes
Frontier Justices of the Peace
 (Roy Bean set the example)
Horse Traders
Horse Racers
Newspapermen
Frontier Schoolteacher
Circuit Rider
Pony Express Rider
Folk Tales of My Community
Flavorsome Characters of My Community
Stanley Vestal
Harvey Fergusson
Kansas Cow Towns
Drought and Thirst
Washington Irving on the West
Witty Repartee in Eugene Manlove Rhodes
Bigfoot Wallace's Humor
Charles M. Russell as Artist of the
 West (or any other western artist)
Learning to See Life Around Me
Features of My Own Cultural
 Inheritance
I Heard It Back Home
Family Traditions
My Family's Interesting Character
Doodlebugs in the Sand
Bobwhites
Blue Quail
Coachwhips and Other Good Snakes
Mockingbird Habits
Jack Rabbit Lore
Catfish Lore
Herb Remedies
"Criticism of Life" in Southwestern
 Fiction
Intellectual Integrity in________________
 (Name of writer or writers or
 some locally prominent newspaper
 to be supplied)

{pages 197 - 222 are an Index -- these were not OCR'd}




End of Etext of Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest