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Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, with a Few Observations

by J. Frank Dobie · English · Gutenberg #314 · 350,488 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, with a Few Observations

Author: J. Frank Dobie


        
Release date: August 1, 1995 [eBook #314]
                Most recently updated: November 10, 2009

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/314

Credits: Produced by Charles Keller, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GUIDE TO LIFE AND LITERATURE OF THE SOUTHWEST, WITH A FEW OBSERVATIONS ***




Produced by Charles Keller





GUIDE TO LIFE AND LITERATURE OF THE SOUTHWEST

Revised And Enlarged In Both Knowledge And Wisdom

By 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 nineteenth-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 individualism, 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.

McDANFIELD, 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 Sovereignty_, 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 government'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_, 1884. 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 Philosopher 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.

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

This is not to say that these chronicles are of a high literary order.
Their writers have generally lacked the maturity 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
by J. Evetts Haley, published in the _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_, 1932 (Vols. XXXV and XXXVI). Also reprinted as a separate.

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


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 wen

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