J. Frank Dobie ..........................................................................................................................................1

A Preface With Some Revised Ideas.......................................................................................................2

1. A Declaration .......................................................................................................................................6

2. Interpreters of the Land ......................................................................................................................10

3. General Helps .....................................................................................................................................13

4. Indian Culture; Pueblos and Navajos .................................................................................................14

5. Apaches, Comanches, and Other Plains Indians ................................................................................17

6. SpanishMexican Strains..................................................................................................................19

7. Flavor of France .................................................................................................................................22

8. Backwoods Life and Humor..............................................................................................................23

9. How the Early Settlers Lived .............................................................................................................25

10. Fighting Texians..............................................................................................................................27

11. Texas Rangers ..................................................................................................................................30

12. Women Pioneers..............................................................................................................................31

13. Circuit Riders and Missionaries .......................................................................................................32

14. Lawyers, Politicians, J. P.'s ..............................................................................................................34

15. Pioneer Doctors ................................................................................................................................35

16. Mountain Men ..................................................................................................................................36

17. Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail.......................................................................................................38

18. Stagecoaches, Freighting.................................................................................................................39

19. Pony Express ....................................................................................................................................40

20. Surge of Life in the West .................................................................................................................41

21. Range Life: Cowboys, Cattle, Sheep...............................................................................................44

22. Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads...................................................................................................63

23. Horses: Mustangs and Cow Ponies ..................................................................................................64

24. The Bad Man Tradition ....................................................................................................................67

25. Mining and Oil .................................................................................................................................69

26. Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists.........................................................................................................71

27. Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters........................................................................................................76

28. Bears and Bear Hunters...................................................................................................................78

29. Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers ..........................................................................................................79

30. Birds and Wild Flowers...................................................................................................................81

31. Negro Folk Songs and Tales ............................................................................................................84

32. FictionIncluding Folk Tales........................................................................................................85

33. Poetry and Drama............................................................................................................................87

34. Miscellaneous Interpreters and Institutions.....................................................................................89

35. Subjects for Themes .........................................................................................................................91

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

I have heard so much silly bragging by Texans that I now think it would be a blessing to themselvesand a

relief to othersif 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

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

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,

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

I'd like to make a book on Emancipators of the Human MindEmerson, 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

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

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

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 hatwhich 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,

A writera regional writer, if that term means anythingwill 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

In using that word INTELLECTUAL, one lays himself liable to the accusation of having forsaken

democracy. For all that, "fundamental brainwork" is behind every respectworthy piece of writing, whether it

be a lightsome lyric that seems as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal epic, an impressionistic essay or a

great novel that measures the depth of human destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as education

without mental discipline, or as "character building" in a school that is slovenly in scholarship. Billboards

along the highways of Texas advertise certain towns and cities as "cultural centers." Yet no chamber of

commerce would consider advertising an intellectual center. The culture of a nine teenthcentury 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 highsounding ideal, discourages criticism and dissent, and puts a premium on acquiescence and

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 coordinate

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,

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

Whoopee! Raised in a canebrake and suckled by a shebear! The click of a sixshooter 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

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 islandersislanders, 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

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

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

wordswords honest and preciseas 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 provincialminded toward it. Being provincialminded 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

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 saidthe 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

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

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 additionsthough 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

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 naturea philosophy that has illuminated for me the mesquite flats and

oak studded hills of Texason 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;

Here I am living on a soil that my people have been living and working and dying on for more than a hundred

yearsthe 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 sweetsmelling 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

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 BookoftheMonth 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

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

A great deal of chronicle writing that makes no pretense at being belleslettres 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

stealhas more of the juice of reality in it and, therefore, more of literary virtue than some of James

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 himselfbeing natural, being alive. The priests of literary conformity never had a chance at the

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 Englishspeaking 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 latecoming 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 is often an impediment to the acquiring of useful knowledge. I am not nearly so much interested

in what happened in Abilene, Kansas, in 1867the year that the first herds of Texas Longhorns over the

Chisholm Trail found a market at that placeas 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

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

imaginationinfluencing 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 airminded 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 definitionnot the

only oneof 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

"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 treeor bushand 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 flamethrowing 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

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

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

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

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 blessingin limiting production.

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 balladthe entirety of which is a kind

of life history of the insectis, 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 selfimprovement to reading. People read for fun, for pleasure. The

"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,

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

"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,

To the constant disregard of thought, Americans of the midtwentieth 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 thoughtprovoking interpretations. In the multitudinous studies on SpanishAmerican 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

corporationdominated 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

Europea frontier that brought about the rise of democracy and capitalism and that, now vanished as a

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

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, hideandhair metaphors, stump and pulpit

parables, tenderfoot baitings, and the like there is plenty, but thought plays upon them and arranges them into

Mary Austin (18681934) 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, Englishspeaking 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

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 limbtolimb struggle. In my more

familiar East the crowding of the countryside seems almost to parallel the crowding of the cities. Out here

Southwest, by Laura Adams Armer (New York, 1935, OP) came from long living and brooding in desert

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

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

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

It is not necessary for an interpreter to write a whole book about a feature to bring out its significance. We

need more gossipy bookssomething 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 Aprilvoiced 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

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 usefulnessby citing other general reference works and a few

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 AngloAmerican 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

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 18031903, 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

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

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, hitandmiss,

ignorancerevealing 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, 18001865," which came out 192021, 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

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 handbooksized 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 liberalminded 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

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

oldtimer has for generations regarded Indian scares and fights as the most important theme for

reminiscences. Countyminded 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, literalminded 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 AngloAmerican's policy toward the Indian was to kill him and take his land, perhaps make a

razorstrop out of his hide. The Spaniard's policy was to baptize him, take his land, enslave him, and

appropriate his women. Any Englishspeaking 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

As a result, the Englishspeaking occupiers of the land have in general absorbed directly only a minimum of

Indian culturenothing 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 horsestealing 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,

(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

(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.

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

(3) The wild freedom, mobility, and fierce love of liberty of the mounted Indians of the Plains will perhaps

always stir imaginationssomething 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

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; OneSmoke Stories, 1934, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

BANDELIER, A. F. The Delight Makers, 1918, Dodd, Mead, New York. Historical fiction on ancient pueblo

COOLIDGE, DANE and MARY. The Navajo Indians, Boston, 1930. Readable; bibliography. OP.

COOLIDGE, MARY ROBERTS. The RainMakers, 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

eventuallyand the prayermakers naturally take the credit. The Hopis put on a more spectacular show. See

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.

DOUGLAS, FREDERIC H., and D HARNONCOURT, RENE. Indian Art of the United States, Simon and

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 socalled "Civilized Tribes." University of

Oklahoma Press has published a number of excellent volumes in "The Civilization of the American Indian"

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

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

HODGE, F. W. Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Washington, D. C., 1907. Indispensable

LUMMIS, C. F. Mesa, Canon, and Pueblo, New York, 1925; Pueblo Indian Folk Tales, New York, 1910.

MATTHEWS, WASHINGTON. Navajo Legends, Boston, 1897; Navajo Myths, Prayers and Songs,

MOONEY, JAMES. Myths of the Cherokees, in Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology,

NELSON, JOHN LOUW. Rhythm for Rain, Boston, 1937. Based on ten years spent with the Hopi Indians,

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

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,

REICHARD, GLADYS A. Spider Woman, 1934, and Dezba Woman of the Desert, 1939. Both honest, both

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.

THE APACHES and the bareback Indians of the Plains were extraordinary hombres del campomen 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.

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

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, 183239, 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

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

DESHIELDS, JAMES T. Cynthia Ann Parker, St. Louis, 1886; reprinted 1934. Good narrative of noted

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 twovolume 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.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. Fort Concho and the Texas Frontier, San Angelo StandardTimes, San Angelo, Texas,

1952. Mainly a history of military activities against Comanches and other tribes, laced with homilies on the

LEHMAN, HERMAN. Nine Years with the Indians, Bandera, Texas, 1927. Best captive narrative of the

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. "KiowaApache 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

MCGILLICUDDY, JULIA B. McGillicuddy Agent, Stanford University Press, California, 1941. Dr.

Valentine T. McGillicuddy, Scotch in stubbornness, honesty, efficiency, and indi vidualism, was U.S.

Indian agent to the Sioux and knew them to the bottom. In the end he was defeated by the army mind and the

bloodsuckers known as the "Indian Ring." The elements of nobility that distinguish the man distinguish his

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 Kiowasa 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

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. Wah'KonTah: 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

RICHARDSON, R. N. The Comanche Barrier to the South Plains, Glendale, California, 1933. Factual

RUXTON, GEORGE F. Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, London, 1847. Vivid on Comanche

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

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 widecompassing and interesting book on a powerful and

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

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.

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

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 Englishspeaking 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

AIKEN, RILEY. "A Pack Load of Mexican Tales," in Puro Mexicano, published by Texas Folklore Society,

ALEXANDER, FRANCES (and others). Mother Goose on the Rio Grande, Banks Upshaw, Dallas, 1944.

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. OneSmoke Stories, Boston, 1934. Short tales of Spanishspeaking New Mexicans, also

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 SpanishMexican influence on life in the Southwest; it also guides to books in English that

BISHOP, MORRIS. The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca, New York, 1933. Better written than Cabeza de Vaca's

BLANCO, ANTONIO FIERRO DE. The Journey of the Flame, Boston, 1933. Bully and flavorsome; the

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 SpanishAmerican 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

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

CASTAnEDA'S narrative of Coronado's expedition. Winship's translation is preferred. It is included in

CATHER, WILLA. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Knopf, New York, 1927. Classical historical fiction on

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

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

DIAZ, BERNAL. History of the Conquest. There are several translations. A book of gusto and humanity as

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

DOMENECH, ABBE. Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico, London, 1858. Delightful folklore,

FERGUSSON, HARVEY. Blood of the Conquerors, 1921. Fiction. OP. Rio Grande, Knopf, New York,

FLANDRAU, CHARLES M. Viva Mexico! New York, 1909; reissued, 1951. Delicious autobiographic

FULTON, MAURICE G., and HORGAN, PAUL (editors). New Mexico's Own Chronicle, Dallas, 1937. OP.

GILPATRICK, WALLACE. The Man Who Likes Mexico, New York, 1911. OP. Bully reading.

GONZALEZ, JOVITA. Tales about TexasMexican 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

{illust. caption = Jose Cisneros: Fray Marcos, in The Journey of Fray Marcos de Niza by Cleve Hallenbeck

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 Mexicanor Spanish, as many New Mexicans preferlife around Santa Fe.

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.

NIGGLI, JOSEPHINA. Mexican Village, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1945. A collection

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

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,

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.

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), Spurof theCock (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,

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

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 Louisianaonce waved over Texas, French influence on it and other parts of

ARTHUR, STANLEY CLISBY. Jean Laffite, Gentleman Rover (1952) and Audubon: An Intimate Life of the

American Woodsman (1937), both published by HarmansonPublisher and Bookseller, 333 Royal St., New

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.

MCVOY, LIZZIE CARTER. Louisiana in the Short Story, Louisiana State University Press, 1940.

THE SETTLERS who put their stamp on Texas were predominantly from the southern statesand 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 goahead 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 conductthe 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 itselfthat characterized the whole

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 wildernessqualities

of daring, bravery, reckless abandon, heavy selfassertiveness. 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 societya

society shockingly tamemay 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. Goahead 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

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.

BLAIR, WALTER. Horse Sense in American Humor from Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash, 1942. OP.

Native American Humor, 1937. OP. Tall Tale America, CowardMcCann, New York, 1944. Orderly analyses

with many concrete examples. With Franklin J. Meine as coauthor, 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,

FEATHERSTONHAUGH, G. W. Excursion through the Slave States, London, 1866. Refreshing on manners

GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. Wild Sports in the Far West. Nothing better on backwoods life in the

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.

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

slaveholders 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

MASTERSON, JAMES R. Tall Tales of Arkansas, Boston, 1943. OP. The title belies this excellent social

historyby 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 lovemaking. When Fred W. Allsopp, newspaper publisher and pillar of Arkansas

respectability, found that this book of unexpurgations had been dedicated to him by the authora Harvard

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

OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 1856. A Journey Through Texas,

POSTL, KARL ANTON (Charles Sealsfield or Francis Hardman, pseudonyms). The Cabin Book; Frontier

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

ROURKE, CONSTANCE. American Humor, 1931; Davy Crockett, 1934; Roots of American Culture and

THORPE, T. B. The Hive of the BeeHunter, New York, 1854. This excellent book should be reprinted.

WATTERSON, HENRY. Oddities in Southern Life and Character, Boston, 1882. An anthology with

WILSON, CHARLES MORROW. Backwoods America. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,

WOOD, RAY. The American Mother Goose, 1940; Fun in American Folk Rhymes, 1952; both published by

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

BATES, ED. F. History and Reminiscences of Denton County, Denton, Texas, 1918. A sample of much folk

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

CARL, PRINCE OF SOLMSBRAUNFELS. Texas, 18441845. Translation, Houston, 1936. OP.

COX, C. C. "Reminiscences," in Vol. VI of Southwestern Historical Quarterly. One of the best of many

DICK, EVERETT. The Sod House Frontier (1937) and Vanguards of the Frontier (1941). Both OP. Life on

FENLEY, FLORENCE. Oldtimers: Their Own Stories, Uvalde, Texas, 1939. OP. Faithful reporting of

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,

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

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

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

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

Lamar Papers. Six volumes of scrappy source material on Texas history and life, issued by Texas State

LEWIS, WILLIE NEWBURY. Between Sun and Sod, Clarendon, Texas, 1938. OP. Again, want of

McDANIELD, H. F., and TAYLOR, NATHANIEL A. The Coming Empire, or 2000 Miles in Texas on

Horseback, New York, 1878; privately reprinted, 1937. Delightful travel narrative. OP.

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

OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. A Journey Through Texas, New York, 1857. Olmsted journeyed in order to

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,

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

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

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

Southwestern Historical Quarterly, published since 1897 by Texas State Historical Association, Austin. A

depository of all kinds of history; the first twentyfive or thirty volumes are the more interesting.

SWEET, ALEXANDER E., and KNOX, J. ARMOY. On a Mexican Mustang Through Texas, Hartford,

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

WAUGH, JULIA NOTT. Castroville and Henry Castro, San Antonio, 1934. OP. Bestwritten monograph

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

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 AngloAmerican 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

The fighting tradition is now giving way to the oil tradition. The Texas myth as imagined by nonTexans 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

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

BEAN, PETER ELLIS. Memoir, published first in Vol. I of Yoakum's History of Texas; in 1930 printed as a

BECHDOLT, FREDERICK R. Tales of the Old Timers, New York, 1924. Forceful retelling of the story of

CHABOT, FREDERICK C. The Perote Prisoners, San Antonio, 1934. Annotated diaries of Texas prisoners

DOBIE, J. FRANK. The Flavor of Texas, Dallas, 1936. OP. Chapters on Bean, Green, Duval, Kendall, and

DUVAL, JOHN C. Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace, 1870; Early Times in Texas, 1892. Both books are kept in

print by Steck, 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

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

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, 18411842, 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, PanhandlePlains 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 twentiethcentury Italians imagine themselves a {illust. caption

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

MAVERICK, MARY A. Memoirs, 1921. OP. Mrs. Maverick's husband, Sam Maverick, was among the

MORRELL, Z. N. Fruits and Flowers in the Wilderness, 1872. OP. Morrell, a circuitriding Baptist

preacher, fought the Indians and the Mexicans. See other books of this kind listed under "Circuit Riders and

PERRY, GEORGE SESSIONS. Texas, A World in Itself, McGraw Hill, New York, 1942. Especially good

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 Texasand of some not great.

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 readytofight but

peaceseeking 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

THOMASON, JOHN W. Lone Star Preacher, Scribner's, New York, 1941. The cream, the essence, the spirit,

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

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.

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

BANTA, WILLIAM. Twentyseven Years on the Texas Frontier, 1893; reprinted, 1933. OP.

GAY, BEATRICE GRADY. Into the Setting Sun, Santa Anna, Texas, 1936. Coleman County scenes and

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 saleexcept through secondhand 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.,

YonkersonHudson, 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

JENNINGS, N. A. The Texas Ranger, New York, 1899; reprinted 1930, with foreword by J. Frank Dobie.

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

PIKE, JAMES. Scout and Ranger, 1865, reprinted 1932 by Princeton University Press. Pike drew a long

REID, SAMUEL C. Scouting Expeditions of the Texas Rangers, 1859; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936.

ROBERTS, DAN W. Rangers and Soveretgnty, 1914. OP. Roberts was better as ranger than as writer.

ROBERTS, MRS. D. W. (wife of Captain Dan W. Roberts). A Woman's Reminiscences of Six Years in Camp

with The Texas Rangers, Austin, 1928. OP. Mrs. Roberts was a sensible and charming woman with a seeing

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,

ONE REASON for the ebullience of life and rollicky carelessness on the frontiers of the West was the lack

temporaryof 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

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.

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 wayssheep

CALL, HUGHIE. Golden Fleece, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1942. Hughie Call became wife of a Montana

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

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

MATTHEWS, SALLIE REYNOLDS. Interwoven, Houston, 1936. Ranch life in the Texas frontier as a

PICKRELL, ANNIE DOOM. Pioneer Women in Texas, Austin, 1929. Too much lady business but valuable.

POE, SOPHIE A. Buckboard Days, edited by Eugene Cunningham, Caldwell, Idaho, 1936. Mrs. Poe was

RAK, MARY KIDDER. A Cowman's Wife, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1934. The external experiences of an

RHODES, MAY D. The Hired Man on Horseback, 1938. Biography of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, but also

warmnatured 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.

WHITE, OWEN P. A Frontier Mother, New York, 1929. OP. Overdone, as White overdid every subject he

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 savagesfor death or for Cynthia Ann Parker captivity.

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

NOTWITHSTANDING both the tradition and the facts of hardshooting, hardriding 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 religiousminded. This is not to say that it is spiritualnatured. It belongs to H. L. Mencken's

"Bible Belt." "PasstheBiscuits" 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 Englishspeaking settlers of the regionthe colonists led by Stephen F. Austin to Texaswere

overwhelmingly Protestant, though in order to establish Mexican citizenship and get titles to homestead land

they had, technically, to declare themselves Catholics. One of the causes of the Texas Revolution as set forth

by the Texans in their Declaration of Independence was the Mexican govern ment's denial of "the right of

worshipping the Almighty according to the dictates of our own conscience." A history of southwestern

society that left out the Bible would be as badly gapped as one leaving out the horse or the sixshooter.

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

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

BURLESON, RUFUS C. Life and Writings, 1901. OP. The autobiographical part of this amorphously

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,

roughandready "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

DEVILBISS, JOHN WESLEY. Reminiscences and Events (compiled by H. A. Graves), 1886. The very

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 womencow peopleand cow country responsible for the best

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

MORRIS, T. A. Miscellany, 1 8 S 4. The "Notes of Travel" particularly to Texas in 1841are what

PARISOT, P. F. Reminiscences of a Texas Missionary, 1899. Mostly the TexasMexican border.

POTTER, ANDREW JACKSON, commonly called the Fighting Parson." Life of him by H. A. Graves, 1890,

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

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 killingsin contradistinction to murdersand that ran to excess in outlaws

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 ThreeLegged

Willie (Judge R. M. Williamson) and mysterious Jonas Harrison. It takes a selflover to write good

autobiography. Lawyers are certainly as good at selfloving as preachers, but we have far better

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

COOMBES, CHARLES E. The Prairie Dog Lawyer, Dallas, 1945. OP. Experiences and anecdotes by a

lawyer better read in roughandready humanity than in law. The prairie dogs have all been poisoned out

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

KITTRELL, NORMAN G. Governors Who Have Been and Other Public Men of Texas, Houston, 1921. OP.

ROBINSON, DUNCAN W. Judge Robert McAlpin Williamson, Texas' ThreeLegged Willie, Texas State

Historical Association, Austin, 1948. This was the Republic of Texas judge who laid a Colt revolver across a

SONNICHSEN, C. L. Roy Bean, Law West of the Pecos, Macmillan, New York, 1943. Roy Bean

(18301903), 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

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,

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 sharplyedged 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

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

COE, URLING C. Frontier Doctor, New York, 1939. OP. Not of the Southwest but representing other

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

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, 15281835 [San Antonio], 1946. Lightness of life with scholarly thoroughness; many character

STEPHENS, I. K. The Hermit Philosother of Liendo, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1951.

Wellconceived and wellwritten biography of Edmund Montgomeryillegitimate 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.

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

ALTER, J. CECIL. James Bridger, Salt Lake City, 1925. A hogshead of life. Bibliography. OP. Republished

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.

CHITTENDEN, H. M. The American Fur Trade of the Far West, New York, 1902. OP. Basic work.

CLELAND, ROBERT GLASS. This Reckless Breed of Men: The Trappers and Fur Traders of the

Southwest, Knopf, New York, 1950. Fresh emphasis on the CaliforniaArizonaNew Mexico region by a

knowing scholar. Economical in style without loss of either humanity or history. Bibliography.

DAVIDSON, L. J., and BOSTWICK, P. The Literature of the Rocky Mountain West 18031903, Caxton,

Caldwell, Idaho, 1939. Davidson and Forrester Blake, editors. Rocky Mountain Tales, University of

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

FAVOUR, ALPHEUS H. Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,

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.

GRANT, BLANCHE C. When Old Trails Were NewThe Story of Taos, New York, 1934. OP. Taos was

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

HAMILTON, W. T. My Sixty Years on the Plains, New York, 1905. Now published by Long's College Book

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

LAUT, A. C. The Story of the Trapper, New York, 1902. A popular survey, emphasizing types and

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 Knockhimstiff. 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 183738, 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

REID, MAYNE. The Scalp Hunters. An antiquated novel, but it has some deepdyed pictures of Mountain

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

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

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 cleanrunning

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

WHITE, STEWART EDWARD. The Long Rifle, 1932, and Ranchero, 1933, Doubleday, Doran, Garden

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 MuertoJourney of the Dead Manthreading the great Pass of the North (El

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 soulenrapturing 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 travelby 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 Westthe Oregon Trail for emigrants and the Chisholm Trail for

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.

DUFFUS, R. L. The Santa Fe Trail, New York, 1930. OP. Bibliography. Best book of this century on the

DUNBAR, SEYMOUR. History of Travel in America, 1915; revised edition issued by Tudor, New York,

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,

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.

PILLSBURY, DOROTHY L. No High Adobe, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950.

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.

A GOOD INTRODUCTION to a treatment of the stagecoach of the West would be Thomas De Quincey's

"The English MailCoach." 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 stagecoaching in western America, the proud,

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

CONKLING, ROSCOE P. and MARGARET B. The Butterfield Overland Trail, 18571869, Arthur H.

Clark Co., Glendage, California. Three volumes replete with facts from politics in Washington over mail

DOBBIE, J. FRANK. Chapter entitled "Pistols, Poker and the Petit Mademoiselle in a Stagecoach," in The

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 StageCoach Mail," in Fort Concho and the Texas Frontier,

illustrated by Harold Bugbee, San Angelo StandardTimes, San Angelo, Texas, 1952. Strong on frontier

HUNGERFORD, EDWARD. Wells Fargo: Advancing the Frontier, Random House, New York, 1949.

Written without regard for the human beings that the allswallowing corporation crushed. Facts on

INMAN, HENRY. The Old Santa Fe Trail, New York, 1897. OP. The Great Salt Lake Trail, 1898. OP.

MAJORS, ALEXANDER. Seventy Years on the Frontier, Chicago, 1893. Reprinted by Long's College Book

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.

SANTLEBEN, AUGUST. A Texas Pioneer, edited by I. D. Affleck, New York, 1910. OP. Best treatise

WINTHER, O. O. Express and Stagecoach Days in California, Stanford University Press, 1926. Compact,

"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 nearergrowing more and more distinct, more and more sharply

definednearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the earanother 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

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

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

ROOT, FRANK A., and CONNELLEY, W. E. The Overland Stage to California, Topeka, Kansas, 1901.

VISSCHER, FRANK J. A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express, Chicago, 1908. OP. Not

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

Between 1904 and 1907 Reuben Gold Thwaites, one of the outstanding editors of the Englishspeaking

world, brought out in thirtytwo 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

An important addendum to the Thwaites collection of Early Western Travels is "The Southwest Historical

Series," edited by Ralph P. Biebertwelve volumes, published 193143, 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 herdsthe greatest slaughter in historywere 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

Hubert Howe Bancroft (18321918) was massing in San Francisco at his own expense the greatest

assemblage of historical documents any one individual ever assembled. While his interviewers and

notetakers 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 twentyeight 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

Collis P. Huntington (18211900) 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 (18501927), 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 landdwellers 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

BARKER, EUGENE C. The Life of Stephen F. Austin, Dallas, 1925. Republished by Texas State Historical

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 lifehungry men.

BIDWELL, JOHN (18191900). 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 seventyfivepage, double column, fineprint

bibliography which not only lists but comments upon most books and articles of any consequence that have

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

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.

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 TorreyEnglemann 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

Emory's great twovolume 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

FOWLER, JACOB. The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 18211822, edited by Elliott Coues, New York, 1898.

Hardly another chronicle of the West is so Defoelike 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

HULBERT, ARCHER BUTLER. FortyNiners: 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,

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 manas 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,

JAMES, MARQUIS. The Raven, BobbsMerrill, 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

18461852, 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

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. Arizona Characters, Los Angeles, California, 1928. Fresh sketches of

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

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 (18067) began while the great Lewis and Clark expedition (18046) 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.

TWAIN, MARK. Roughing It, 1872. Mark Twain was a man who wrote and not merely a writer in

manform. 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

THE COWBOY ORIGINATED in Texas. The Texas cowboy, along with the Texas cowman, was an

evolvement from and a blend of the riding, shooting, frontierformed southerner, the Mexican Indian

horseback worker with livestock (the vaquero), and the Spanish openrange 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 meteorswift. 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 bestknown occupational type that

America has given the world. He exists still and will long exist, though much changed from the original. His

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 oldtime 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

collegeeducated aspirant to be a cowboy soon learned, if they stayed on the range, that a man's a man for a'

that may to some extent account for a certain generous amplitude of character inherent in their most

representative reminiscences. Sympathy for the life biases my judgment; that judgment, nevertheless, is that

some of the strongest and raciest autobiographic writing produced by America has been by range men.

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

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

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 goingson 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 windlashed 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

threequarters 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

The code of the West was concentrated into the code of the rangeand 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

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 sixshooters in Blazing Frontier fictionand 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

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 charma

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

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 halfbreed 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

ADAMS, ANDY. The Log of a Cowboy (1903). In 1882, at the age of twentythree, 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

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

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

ARNOLD, OREN, and HALE, J. P. Hot Irons, Macmillan, New York, 1940. Technique and lore of cattle

AUSTIN, MARY. The Flock, Boston, 1906, OP. Mary Austin saw the meanings of things; she was a creator.

Australian ranching is not foreign to American ranching. The best book on the subject that I have found is

BARNARD, EVAN G. ("Parson"). A Rider of the Cherokee Strip, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1936. Savory

BARNES, WILL C. Tales from the XBar 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

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 hideouts, 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

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 HaldemanJulius, 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

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 Constitutionand my taste has been extremely catholic

BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. The Cowboy and His Interpreters, New York, 1926. Useful bibliography on range

BRATT, JOHN. Trails of Yesterday, Chicago, 1921. John Bratt, twentytwo 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,

BRONSON, EDGAR BEECHER. Cowboy Life on the Western Plains, Chicago, 1910. The Red Blooded,

BROOKS, BRYANT B. Memoirs, Gardendale, California, 1939. The book never was published; it was

merely printed to satisfy the senescent vanity of a propertyworshiping, clicheparroting 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

BROTHERS, MARY HUDSON. A Pecos Pioneer, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943.

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 posttrailing period. Excellent

BURTON, HARLEY TRUE. A History of the J A Ranch, Austin, 1928. Facts about one of the greatest

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.

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 Britishowned ranches of North America.

His book is the best of all sources on Britishowned 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

CLELAND, ROBERT GLASS. The Cattle on a Thousand Hills, Huntington Library, San Marino, 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

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

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

CONN, WILLIAM (translator). CowBoys 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

MandatGrancey, Paris, October, 1884. (The only copy I have examined is of 1889 printing.) It is a gossipy

account of an excursion made in 188384; 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

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

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 storebought 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

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 horseraising and the terrible winter of 188687.

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

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 lethargicminded to write about themselves and no Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has

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

DAVID, ROBERT D. Malcolm Campbell, Sheriff, Casper, Wyoming, 1932. Much of the "Johnson County

DAYTON, EDSON C. Dakota Days. Privately printed by the author at Clifton Springs, New York,

1937three 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 growthsomething no extravert

cowboy ever noticed, usually because he did not have it; his quotation to express harmony with nature:

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

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

FRENCH, WILLIAM. Some Recollections of a Western Ranchman, London, 1927. A civilized Englishman

GANN, WALTER. The Trail Boss, Boston, 1937. Faithful fiction, with a steer that Charlie Russell should

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 fencecutting, the socalled

"Johnson County Cattlemen's War" of Wyoming, and other range "difficulties." Clearly written from an

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 TexasCalifornia

by J. Evetts Haley, published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 1932 (Vols. XXXV and XXXVI).

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

GIPSON, FRED. Fabulous Empire, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1946. Biography of Zack Miller of the 101

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

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

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),

HAMNER, LAURA V. Short Grass and Longhorns, Norman, Oklahoma, 1943. Sketches of Panhandle

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

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, antiPhilistinic

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 cowtown 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 noncomplimentary 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

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,

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

Glendolene Myrtle Kimmell was a schoolteacher in the country where Tom Horn operated. As her picture

shows, she was lush and beautiful. Pages 287309 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 socalled 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

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

drivingso 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

HOYT, HENRY F. A Frontier Doctor, Boston, 1929. Texas Panhandle and New Mexico during Billy the Kid

HUNT, FRAZIER. Cat Mossman: Last of the Great Cowmen, illustrated by Ross Santee, Hastings House,

New York, 1951. Few fulllength biographies of big operators among cowmen have been written. This

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 oldtime 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 onevolume 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, 1936a

JAMES, WILL. Cowboys North and South, New York, 1924. The Drifting Cowboy, 1925. Smokya

cowhorse story1930. 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 lifewithout 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

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

straightout 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 countrygoing nature and

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

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.

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

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

MCCAULEY, JAMES EMMIT. A Stoveup 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 informationpacked 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, 1893one 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.

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, 18881922, 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

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

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 notheroic side of big businessmen in big land deals. The two histories

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.

PEAKE, ORA BROOKS. The Colorado Range Cattle Industry, Clark, Glendale, California, 1937. Dry on

PELZER, LOUIS. The Cattlemen's Frontier, Clark, Glendale, California, 1936. Economic treatment, faithful

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 fellowEnglishmen went through Wyoming ranch country, stopping

on ranches, and she, a very intelligent, spirited woman, saw realities that few other chroniclers suggest. This

PERKINS, CHARLES E. The Pinto Horse, Santa Barbara, California, 1927. The Phantom Bull, Boston,

PILGRIM, THOMAS (under pseudonym of Arthur Morecamp). Live Boys; or Charley and Nasho in Texas,

Boston, 1878. The chronicle, little fictionized, of a trail drive to Kansas. So far as I know, this is the first

narrative printed on cattle trailing or cowboy life that is to be accounted authentic. The book is dated from

PONTING, TOM CANDY. The Life of Tom Candy Ponting, Decatur, Illinois [1907], reprinted, with Notes

and Introduction by Herbert O. Brayer, by Branding Iron Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1952. An account of

buying cattle in Texas in 1853, driving them to Illinois, and later shipping some to New York. Accounts of

trail driving before about 1870 have been few and obscurely printed. The stark diary kept by George C.

Duffield of a drive from San Saba County, Texas, to southern Iowa in 1866 is as realisticoften

agonizingas anything extant on this much romanticized subject. It is published in Annals of Iowa, Des

POTTER, JACK. Born in 1864, son of the noted fighting parson," Andrew Jackson Potter, Jack became a

farknown trail boss and ranch manager. His first published piece, "Coming Down the Trail," appeared in

The Trail Drivers of Texas, compiled by J. Marvin Hunter, and is about the livest thing in that monumental

collection. Jack Potter wrote for various Western magazines and newspapers. He was more interested in cow

nature than in gun fights; he had humor and imagination as well as mastery of facts and a tangy language,

though small command over form. His privately printed booklets are: Lead Steer (with Introduction by J.

Frank Dobie), Clayton, N. M., 1939; Cattle Trails of the Old West (with map), Clayton, N.M., 1935; Cattle

Prose and Poetry of the Live Stock Industry of the United States, Denver, 1905. Biographies of big cowmen

and history based on genuine research. The richest in matter of all the hundreddollarandup rare books in

RAINE, WILLIAM MCLEOD, and BARNES, WILL C. Cattle, Garden City, N. Y., 1930. A succinct and

RAK, MARY KIDDER. A Cowman s Wife, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1934. Unglossed, impersonal realism

about life on a small modern Arizona ranch. Mountain Cattle, 1936, and OP, is an extension of the first book.

REMINGTON, FREDERIC. Pony Tracks, New York, 1895 (now published by Long's College Book Co.,

RHODES, EUGENE MANLOVE. West Is West, Once in the Saddle, Good Men and True, Stepsons of Light,

and other novels. "Gene" Rhodes had the "right tune." He achieved a style that can be called literary. The

Hired Man on Horseback, by May D. Rhodes, is a biography of the writer. Perhaps "Paso Por Aqui" will

endure as his masterpiece. Rhodes had an intense loyalty to his land and people; he was as gay, gallant, and

witty as he was earnest. More than most Western writers, Rhodes was conscious of art. He had the common

touch and also he was a writer for writing men. The elements of simplicity and the right kind of

sophistication, always with generosity and with an unflagging zeal for the rights of human beings, were

mixed in him. The reach of any amplenatured man exceeds his grasp. Rhodes was amplenatured, but he

cannot be classed as great because his grasp was too often disproportionately short of the long reach. His

The Best Novels and, Stories of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, edited by Frank V. Dearing, Houghton Mifflin,

Boston, 1949, contains an introduction, with plenty of anecdotes and too much enthusiasm, by J. Frank

RICHARDS, CLARICE E. A Tenderfoot Bride, Garden City, N. Y., 1920. The experiences of a ranchman's

wife in Colorado. The telling has charm, warmth, and flexibility. In the way that art is always truer than a

literal report, A Tenderfoot Bride brings out truths of life that the literalistic A Cowman's Wife by Mary

RICHTER, CONRAD. The Sea of Grass, Knopf, New York, 1937. A poetic portrait in fiction, with

RICKETTS, W. P. 50 Years in the Saddle, Sheridan, Wyoming, 1942. OP. A natural book with much

interesting information. It contains the best account of trailing cattle from Oregon to Wyoming that I have

RIDINGS, SAM P. The Chisholm Trail, 1926. Sam P. Ridings, a lawyer, published this book himself from

Medford, Oklahoma. He had gone over the land, lived with range men, studied history. A noble book, rich in

anecdote and character. The subtitle reads: "A History of the World's Greatest Cattle Trail, together with a

Description of the Persons, a Narrative of the Events, and Reminiscences associated with the Same." OP.

ROBINSON, FRANK C. A Ram in a Thicket, Abelard Press, New York, 1950. Robinson is the author of

many Westerns, none of which I have read. This is an autobiography, here noted because it reveals a maturity

of mind and an awareness of political economy and social evolution hardly suggested by other writers of

ROLLINS, ALICE WELLINGTON. The Story of a Ranch, New York, 1885. Philip Ashton Rollins (no

relation that I know of to Alice Wellington Rollins) went into Charlie Everitt's bookstore in New York one

day and said, "I want every book with the word cowboy printed in it." The Story of a Ranch is listed here to

illustrate how titles often have nothing to do with subject. It is without either story or ranch; it is about some

dilettanteish people who go out to a Kansas sheep farm, talk Chopin, and wash their fingers in finger bowls.

ROLLINS, PHILIP ASHTON. The Cowboy, Scribner's, New York, 1924. Revised, 1936. A scientific

exposition; full. Rollins wrote two Western novels, not important. A wealthy man with ranch experience, he

collected one of the finest libraries of Western books ever assembled by any individual and presented it to

ROLLINSON, JOHN K. Pony Trails in Wyoming, Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. Not inspired and not indispensable,

but honest autobiography. OP. Wyoming Cattle Trails, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1948. A more significant

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, New York, 1888. Roosevelt understood the

West. He became the peg upon which several range books were hung, Hagedorn's Roosevelt in the Bad

Lands and Lang's Ranching with Roosevelt in particular. A good summing up, with bibliography, is Roosevelt

and the Stockman's Association, by Ray H. Mattison, pamphlet issued by the State Historical Society of

RUSH, OSCAR. The Open Range, Salt Lake City, 1930. Reprinted 1936 by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. A

sensitive range man's response to natural things. The subtitle, Bunk House Philosophy, characterizes the

RUSSELL, CHARLES M. Trails Plowed Under, 1927, with introduction by Will Rogers. Russell was the

greatest painter that ever painted a range man, a range cow, a range horse or a Plains Indian. He savvied the

cow, the grass, the blizzard, the drought, the wolf, the young puncher in love with his own shadow, the old

waddie remembering rides and thirsts of far away and long ago. He was a wonderful storyteller, and most of

his pictures tell stories. He never generalized, painting "a man," "a horse," "a buffalo" in the abstract. His

subjects are warm with life, whether awake or asleep, at a particular instant, under particular conditions.

Trails Plowed Under, prodigally illustrated, is a collection of yarns and anecdotes saturated with humor and

humanity. It incorporates the materials in two Rawhide Rawlins pamphlets. Good Medicine, published

posthumously, is a collection of Russell's letters, illustrations saying more than written words.

Russell's illustrations have enriched numerous range books, B. M. Bower's novels, Malcolm S. Mackay's

Cow Range and Hunting Trail, and Patrick T. Tucker's Riding the High Country being outstanding among

them. Tucker's book, autobiography, has a bully chapter on Charlie Russell. Charles M. Russell, the Cowboy

Artist: A Bibliography, by Karl Yost, Pasadena, California, 1948, is better composed than its companion

biography, Charles M. Russell the Cowboy Artist, by Ramon F. Adams and Homer E. Britzman. (Both OP.)

One of the most concrete pieces of writing on Russell is a chapter in In the Land of Chinook, by Al. J. Noyes,

Helena, Montana, 1917. "Memories of Charlie Russell," in Memories of Old Montana, by Con Price,

Hollywood, 1945, is also good. All right as far as it goes, about a rock's throw away, is "The Conservatism of

Charles M. Russell," by J. Frank Dobie, in a portfolio reproduction of Seven Drawings by Charles M. Russell,

SANTEE, ROSS. Cowboy, 1928. OP. The plotless narrative, reading like autobiography, of a kid who ran

away from a farm in East Texas to be a cowboy in Arizona. His cowpuncher teachers are the kind "who know

what a cow is thinking of before she knows herself." Passages in Cowboy combine reality and elemental

melody in a way that almost no other range writer excepting Charles M. Russell has achieved. Santee is a

SHAW, JAMES C. North from Texas: Incidents in the Early Life of a Range Man in Texas, Dakota and

Wyoming, 18521883, edited by Herbert O. Brayer. Branding Iron Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1952. Edition

limited to 750 copies. I first met this honest autobiography by long quotations from it in Virginia Cole

Trenholm's Footprints on the Frontier (Douglas, Wyoming, 1945), wherein I learned that Shaw's narrative

had been privately printed in Cheyenne in 1931, in pamphlet form, for gifts to a few friends and members of

the author's family. I tried to buy a copy but could find none for sale at any price. This reprint is in a format

suitable to the economical prose, replete with telling incidents and homely details. It will soon be only a little

SHEEDY, DENNIS. The Autobiography of Dennis Sheedy. Privately printed in Denver, 1922 or 1923. Sixty

pages bound in leather and as scarce as psalmsinging in "fancy houses." The item is not very important in

the realm of range literature but it exemplifies the successful businessman that the judicious cowman of open

SHEFFY, L. F. The Life and Times of Timothy Dwight Hobart, 18551935, PanhandlePlains Historical

Society, Canyon, Texas, 1950. Hobart was manager for the large J A Ranch, established by Charles

Goodnight. He had a sense of history. This mature biography treats of important developments pertaining to

SIRINGO, CHARLES A. A Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Cow Pony,

1885. The first in time of all cowboy autobiographies and first, also, in plain rollickiness. Siringo later told

the same story with additions under the titles of A Lone Star Cowboy, A Cowboy Detective, etc., all out of

print. Finally, there appeared his Riata and Spurs, Boston, 1927, a summation and extension of previous

autobiographies. Because of a threatened lawsuit, half of it had to be cut and additional material provided for

a "Revised Edition." No other cowboy ever talked about himself so much in print; few had more to talk

about. I have said my full say on him in an introduction, which includes a bibliography, to A Texas Cowboy,

SMITH, ERWIN E., and HALEY, J. EVETTS. Life on the Texas Range, photographs by Smith and text by

Haley, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. Erwin Smith yearned and studied to be a sculptor. Early in

this century he went with camera to photograph the life of land, cattle, horses, and men on the big ranches of

West Texas. In him feeling and perspective of artist were fused with technical mastership. "I don't mean,"

wrote Tom Lea, "that he made just the best photographs I ever saw on the subject. I mean the best pictures.

That includes paintings, drawings, prints." On 9 by 12 pages of 100pound antique finish paper, the

photographs are superbly reproduced. Evetts Haley's introduction interprets as well as chronicles the life of a

strange and tragic man. The book is easily the finest range book in the realm of the pictorial ever published.

SMITH, WALLACE. Garden of the Sun, Los Angeles, 1939. OP. Despite the banal title, this is a scholarly

work with first rate chapters on California horses and ranching in the San Joaquin Valley.

SNYDER, A. B., as told to Nellie Snyder Yost. Pinnacle Jake, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1951. The setting is

Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana from the 1880's on. Had Pinnacle Jake kept a diary, his accounts of range

characters, especially camp cooks and range horses, with emphasis on night horses and outlaws, could not

have been fresher or more precise in detail. Reading this book will not give a new interpretation of open

range work with big outfits, but the aliveness of it in both narrative and sketch makes it among the best of

SONNICHSEN, C. L. Cowboys and Cattle Kings: Life on the Range Today, University of Oklahoma Press,

Norman, 1950. An interviewer's findings without the historical criticism exemplified by Bernard DeVoto on

the subject of federalowned ranges (in essays in Harper's Magazine during the late 1940'S).

STANLEY, CLARK, "better known as the Rattlesnake King." The Life and Adventures of the American

CowBoy, published by the author at Providence, Rhode Island, 1897. This pamphlet of fortyone pages,

plus about twenty pages of Snake Oil Liniment advertisements, is one of the curiosities of cowboy literature.

It includes a collection of cowboy songs, the earliest I know of in time of printing, antedating by eleven years

Jack Thorp's booklet of cowboy songs printed at Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908. Clark Stanley no doubt

used the contents of his pamphlet in medicine show harangues, thus adding to the cowboy myth. As time

went on, he added scraps of anecdotes and western history, along with testimonials, to the pamphlet, the latest

STEEDMAN, CHARLES J. Bucking the Sagebrush, New York, 1904. OP. Charming; much of nature.

STEVENS, MONTAGUE. Meet Mr. Grizzly, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943. Stevens,

a Cambridge Englishman, ranched, hunted, and made deductions. See characterization under "Bears and Bear

STREETER, FLOYD B. Prairie Trails and Cow Towns, Boston, 1936. OP. This brings together considerable

information on Kansas cow towns. Primary books on the subject, besides those by Stuart Henry, McCoy,

Vestal, and Wright herewith listed, are The Oklahoma Scout, by Theodore Baughman, Chicago, 1886;

Midnight and Noonday, by G. D. Freeman, Caldwell, Kansas, 1892; biographies of Wild Bill Hickok, town

marshal; Stuart N. Lake's biography of Wyatt Earp, another noted marshal; Hard Knocks, by Harry Young,

Chicago, 1915, not too prudish to notice dance hall girls but too Victorian to say much. Many Texas trail

drivers had trouble as well as fun in the cow towns. Life and Adventures of Ben Thompson, by W. M. Walton,

1884, reprinted at Bandera, Texas, 1926, gives samples. Thompson was more gambler than cowboy; various

other men who rode from cow camps into town and found themselves in their element were gamblers and

STUART, GRANVILLE. Forty Years on the Frontier, two volumes, Cleveland, 1925. Nothing better on the

cowboy has ever been written than the chapter entitled "Cattle Business" in Volume II. A prime work

THORP, JACK (N. Howard) has a secure place in range literature because of his contribution in cowboy

songs. (See entry under "Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads.") In 1926 he had printed at Santa Fe a

paperbacked book of 123 pages entitled Tales of the Chuck Wagon, but "didn't sell more than two or three

million copies." Some of the tales are in his posthumously published reminiscences, Pardner of the Wind (as

told to Neil McCullough Clark, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945) . This book is richest on range horses, and

University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1945. Not firsthand in the manner of Gilfillan's Sheep, nor charming

and light in the manner of Kupper's The Golden Hoof, but an essayical history, based on research. The

deference paid to Mary Austin's The Flock marks the author as civilized. Towne wrote the book; Wentworth

supplied the information. Wentworth's own book, America's Sheep Trails, Iowa State College Press, Ames,

TOWNSHEND, R. B. A Tenderfoot in Colorado, London, 1923; The Tenderfoot in New Mexico, 1924.

Delightful as well as faithful. Literature by an Englishman who translated Tacitus under the spires of Oxford

TREADWELL, EDWARD F. The Cattle King, New York, 1931; reissued by Christopher, Boston. A strong

TRENHOLM, VIRGINIA COLE. Footprints on the Frontier, Douglas, Wyoming, 1945. OP. The best range

material in this book is a reprint of parts of James C. Shaw's Pioneering in Texas and Wyoming, privately

TRUETT, VELMA STEVENS. On the Hoof in Nevada, GehrettTruettHall, Los Angeles, 1950. A

613page album of cattle brandspriced at $10.00. The introduction is one of the sparse items on Nevada

TUCKER, PATRICK T. Riding the High Country, Caldwell, Idaho, 1933. A brave book with much of

VESTAL, STANLEY (pen name for Walter S. Campbell). Queen of Cow Towns, Dodge City, Harper, New

York, 1952. "Bibulous Babylon," "Killing of Dora Hand," and "Marshals for Breakfast" are chapter titles

Vocabulario y Refranero Criollo, text and illustrations by Tito Saudibet, Guillermo Kraft Ltda., Buenos

Aires, 1945. North American ranges have called forth nothing to compare with this fully illustrated, thorough,

magnificent history dictionary of the gaucho world. It stands out in contrast to American slapdash,

"He who knows only the history of his own country does not know it." The cowboy is not a singular type. He

was no better rider than the Cossack of Asia. His counterpart in South America, developed also from Spanish

cattle, Spanish horses, and Spanish techniques, is the gaucho. Literature on the gaucho is extensive, some of

it of a high order. Primary is Martin Fierro, the epic by Jose Hernandez (published 187279). A translation

by Walter Owen was published in the United States in 1936. No combination of knowledge, sympathy,

imagination, and craftsmanship has produced stories and sketches about the cowboy equal to those on the

gaucho by W. H. Hudson, especially in Tales of the Pampas and Far Away and Long Ago, and by R. B.

WEBB, WALTER PRESCOTT. The Great Plains, Ginn, Boston, 1931. While this landmark in historical

interpretation of the West is by no means limited to the subject of grazing, it contains a long and penetrating

chapter entitled "The Cattle Kingdom." The book is an analysis of land, climate, barbed wire, dry farming,

wells and windmills, native animal life, etc. No other work on the plains country goes so meatily into causes

WELLMAN, PAUL I. The Trampling Herd, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1939; reissued, 1951. An

WHITE, STEWART EDWARD. Arizona Nights, 1902. "Rawhide," one of the stories in this excellent

WILLIAMS, J. R. Cowboys Out Our Way, with an Introduction by J. Frank Dobie, Scribner's, New York,

1951. An album reproducing about two hundred of the realistic, humorous, and human J. R. Williams

syndicated cartoons. This book was preceded by Out Our Way, New York, 1943, and includes numerous

cartoons therein printed. There was an earlier and less extensive collection. Modest Jim Williams has been

progressively dissatisfied with all his cartoon booksand with cartoons not in books. I like them and in my

WISTER, OWEN. The Virginian, 1902. Wister was an outsider looking in. His hero, "The Virginian," is a

cowboy without cowslike the cowboys of Eugene Manlove Rhodes; but this hero does not even smell of

cows, whereas Rhodes's men do. Nevertheless, the novel authentically realizes the code of the range, and it

makes such absorbing reading that in fifty years (190252) it sold over 1,600,000 copies, not counting

Wister was an urbane Harvard man, of clubs and travels. In 1952 the University of Wyoming celebrated the

fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Virginian. To mark the event, Frances K. W. Stokes wrote My

Father Owen Wister, a biographical pamphlet including "ten letters written to his mother during his trip to

Wyoming in 1885"a trip that prepared him to write the novel. The pamphlet is published at Laramie,

WRIGHT, PETER. A ThreeFoot Stool, New York and London, 1909. Like several other Englishmen who

went west, Wright had the perspective that enabled him to comprehend some aspects of ranch life more fully

than many range men who knew nothing but their own environment and times. He compares the cowboy to

the cowherd described by Queen Elizabeth's Spenser. Into exposition of ranching on the Gila, he interweaves

talk on Arabian afreets, Stevenson's philosophy of adventure, and German imperialism.

WRIGHT, ROBERT M. Dodge City, Cowboy Capital, Wichita, Kansas, 1913; reprinted. Good on the most

Pamphlets are an important source of knowledge in all fields. No firstclass library is without them. Most of

them become difficult to obtain, and some bring higher prices than whole sets of books. Of numerous

pamphlets pertaining to the range, only a few are listed here. History of the Chisum War, or Life of Ike

Fridge, by Ike Fridge, Electra, Texas (undated), is as compact as jerked beef and as laconic as conversation in

alkali dust. James F. Hinkle, in his Early Days of a Cowboy on the Pecos, Roswell, New Mexico, 1937, says:

"One noticeable characteristic of the cowpunchers was that they did not talk much." Some people don't have

to talk to say plenty. Hinkle was one of them. At a reunion of trail drivers in San Antonio in October, 1928,

Fred S. Millard showed me his laboriously written reminiscences. He wanted them printed. I introduced him

to J. Marvin Hunter of Bandera, Texas, publisher of Frontier Times. I told Hunter not to ruin the English by

trying to correct it, as he had processed many of the earthborn reminiscences in The Trail Drivers of Texas.

He printed Millard's A Cowpuncher of the Pecos in pamphlet form shortly thereafter. It begins: "This is a

piece I wrote for the Trail Drivers." They would understand some things on which he was not explicit.

About 1940, as he told me, Bob Beverly of Lovington, New Mexico, made a contract with the proprietor of

the town's weekly newspaper to print his reminiscences. By the time the contractor had set eightyseven

pages of type he saw that he would lose money if he set any more. He gave Bob Beverly back more

manuscript than he had used and stapled a pamphlet entitled Hobo of the Rangeland. The philosophy in it is

more interesting to me than the incidents. "The cowboy of the old West worked in a land that seemed to be

grieving over somethinga kind of sadness, loneliness in a deathly quiet. One not acquainted with the plains

could not understand what effect it had on the mind. It produced a heartache and a sense of exile."

Crudely printed, but printed as the author talked, is The End of the Long Horn Trail, by A. P. (Ott) Black,

Selfridge, North Dakota (August, 1939) . As I know from a letter from his compadre, Black was blind and

sixtynine years old when he dictated his memoirs to a college graduate who had sense enough to retain the

flavor. Black's history is badly botched, but reading him is like listening. "It took two coons and an alligator

to spend the summer on that cotton plantation. . . . Cowpunchers were superstitious about owls. One who

rode into my camp one night had killed a man somewhere and was on the dodge. He was lying down by the

side of the campfire when an owl flew over into some hackberry trees close by and started hooting. He got up

from there right now, got his horse in, saddled up and rode off into the night."

John Alley isor wasa teacher. His Memories of Roundup Days, University of Oklahoma Press, 1934

(just twenty small pages), is an appraisal of range men, a criticism of life seldom found in oldtimers who

look back. On the other hand, some pamphlets prized by collectors had as well not have been written. Here is

the full title of an example: An Aged Wanderer, A Life Sketch of J. M. Parker, A Cowboy of the Western

Plains in the Early Days. "Price 40 cents. Headquarters, Elkhorn Wagon Yard, San Angelo, Texas." It was

printed about 1923. When Parker wrote it he was senile, and there is no evidence that he was ever possessed

of intelligence. The itching to get into print does not guarantee that the itcher has anything worth printing.

Some of the best reminiscences have been pried out of range men. In 1914 the Wyoming Stock Growers

Association resolved a Historical Commission into existence. A committee was appointed and, naturally, one

man did the work. In 1923 a fiftyfivepage pamphlet entitled Letters from Old Friends and Members of the

Wyoming Stock Growers Association was printed at Cheyenne. It is made up of unusually informing and

COWBOY SONGS and ballads are generally ranked alongside Negro spirituals as being the most important

of America's contributions to folk song. As compared with the old English and Scottish ballads, the cowboy

and all other ballads of the American frontiers generally sound cheap and shoddy. Since John A. Lomax

brought out his collection in 1910, cowboy songs have found their way into scores of songbooks, have been

recorded on hundreds of records, and have been popularized, oftenand naturallywithout any semblance

to cowboy style, by thousands of radio singers. Two general anthologies are recommended especially for the

cowboy songs they contain: American Ballads and Folk Songs, by John A. and Alan Lomax, Macmillan,

New York, 1934; The American Songbag, by Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927.

LOMAX, JOHN A., and LOMAX, ALAN. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, Macmillan, New

York, 1938. This is a much addedto and revised form of Lomax's 1910 collec tion, under the same title. It

is the most complete of all anthologies. More than any other man, John A. Lomax is responsible for having

made cowboy songs a part of the common heritage of America. His autobiographic Adventures of a Ballad

Hunter (Macmillan, 1947) is in quality far above the jingles that most cowboy songs are.

Missouri, as no other state, gave to the West and Southwest. Much of Missouri is still more southwestern in

character than much of Oklahoma. For a full collection, with full treatment, of the ballads and songs,

including badman and cowboy songs, sung in the Southwest there is nothing better than Ozark Folksongs,

collected and edited by Vance Randolph, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, 194650. An

OWENS, WILLIAM A. Texas Folk Songs, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1950. A miscellany

of British ballads, American ballads, "songs of doleful love," etc. collected in Texas mostly from country

The Texas Folklore Society has published many cowboy songs. Its publications Texas and Southwestern

Lore (1927) and Follow de Drinkin' Gou'd (1928) contain scores, with music and anecdotal interpretations.

THORP, JACK (N. Howard). Songs of the Cowboys, Boston, 1921. OP. Good, though limited, anthology,

without music and with illuminating comments. A pamphlet collection that Thorp privately printed at

Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908, was one of the first to be published. Thorp had the perspective of both range

and civilization. He was a kind of troubadour himself. The opening chapter, "Banjo in the Cow Camps," of

THE WEST WAS DISCOVERED, battled over, and won by men on horseback. Spanish conquistadores

saddled their horses in Vera Cruz and rode until they had mapped the continents from the Horn to Montana

and from the Floridas to the harbors of the Californias. The padres with them rode on horseback, too, and

made every mission a horse ranch. The national dance of Mexico, the Jarabe, is an interpretation of the

clicking of hoofs and the pawing and prancing of spirited horses that the Aztecs noted when the Spaniards

came. Likewise, the chief contribution made by white men of America to the folk songs of the worldthe

Astride horses introduced by the conquistadores to the Americas, the Plains Indians became almost a separate

race from the footmoving tribes of the East and the stationary Pueblos of the Rockies. The men that later

conquered and corralled these wildriding Plains Indians were plainsmen on horses and cavalrymen. The

earliest American explorers and trappers of both Plains and Rocky Mountains went out in the saddle. The

first industrial link between the East and the West was a mounted pack train beating out the Santa Fe Trail.

On west beyond the end of this trail, in Spanish California, even the drivers of oxen rode horseback. The first

Outlaws and bad men were called "long riders." The Texas Ranger who followed them was, according to his

own proverb, "no better than his horse." Booted sheriffs from Brownsville on the Rio Grande to the Hole in

the Wall in the Big Horn Mountains lived in the saddle. Climactic of all the riders rode the cowboy, who

In the Old West the phrase "left afoot" meant nothing short of being left flat on your back. "A man on foot is

no man at all," the saying went. If an enemy could not take a man's life, the next best thing was to take his

horse. Where cow thieves went scot free, horse thieves were hanged, and to say that a man was "as common

as a horse thief" was to express the nadir of commonness. The pillow of the frontiersmen who slept with a

sixshooter under it was a saddle, and hitched to the horn was the loose end of a stake rope. Just as "Colonel

Colt" made all men equal in a fight, the horse made all men equal in swiftness and mobility.

The proudest names of civilized languages when literally translated mean "horseman": eques, caballero,

chevalier, cavalier. Until just yesterday the Man on Horseback had been for centuries the symbol of power

and pride. The advent of the horse, from Spanish sources, so changed the ways and psychology of the Plains

Indians that they entered into what historians call the Age of Horse Culture. Almost until the automobile

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

No thorough comprehension of the Spanish horse of the Americas is possible without consideration of this

horse's antecedents, and that involves a good deal of the horse history of the world.

BROWN, WILLIAM ROBINSON. The Horse of the Desert (no publisher or place on title page), 1936;

CABRERA, ANGEL. Caballos de America, Buenos Aires, 1945. The authority on Argentine horses.

CARTER, WILLIAM H. The Horses of the World, National Geographic Society, Washington, D. C., 1923. A

Cattleman. Published at Fort Worth, this monthly magazine of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers

Association began in 1939 to issue, for September, a horse number. It has published a vast amount of material

both scientific and popular on range horses. Another monthly magazine worth knowing about is the Western

DENHARDT, ROBERT MOORMAN. The Horse of the Americas, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman,

1947. This historical treatment of the Spanish horse could be better ordered; some sections of the book are

DOBIE, J. FRANK. The Mustangs, illustrated by Charles Banks Wilson, Little, Brown, Boston, 1952. Before

this handsome book arrives at the wild horses of North America, a third of it has been spent on the Arabian

progenitors of the Spanish horse, the acquisition of the Spanish horse by western Indians, and mustangs and

mustangers and of Spanishblooded horses under the saddle. The author has tried to compass the natural

history of the animal and to blend vividness with learning. The book incorporates his Tales of the Mustang, a

slight volume published in an edition of only three hundred copies in 1936. It also incorporates a large part of

Mustangs and Cow Horses, edited by Dobie, Boatright, and Ransom, and issued by the Texas Folklore

Society, Austin, 1940a volume that went out of print not long after it was published.

DODGE, THEODORE A. Riders of Many Lands, New York, 1893. Illustrations by Remington. Wide and

GRAHAM, R. B. CUNNINGHAME. The Horses of the Conquest, London, 1930. Graham was both historian

and horseman, as much at home on the pampas as in his ancient Scottish home. This excellent book on the

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

duced to the Western Hemisphere is in a pasture to itself. Reprinted in 1949 by the University of Oklahoma

HASTINGS, FRANK. A Ranchman's Recollections, Chicago, 1921. "Old Gran'pa" is close to the best

HAYES, M. HORACE. Points of the Horse, London, 1904. This and subsequent editions are superior in

treatment and illustrations to earlier editions. Hayes was a far traveler and scholar as well as horseman. One

JAMES, WILL. Smoky, Scribner's, New York, 1930. Perhaps the best of several books that Will

LEIGH, WILLIAM R. The Western Pony, New York, 1933. One of the most beautifully printed books on the

PATTULLO, GEORGE. The Untamed, New York, 1911. A collection of short stories, among which

PERKINS, CHARLES ELLIOTT. The Pinto Horse, Santa Barbara, California, 1927. A fine narrative,

RIDGEWAY, W. The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse, Cambridge, England, 1905. A

standard work, though many of its conclusions are disputed, especially by Lady Wentworth in her

SANTEE, ROSS. Men and Horses, New York, 1926. Three chapters of this book, "A Fool About a Horse,"

"The Horse Wrangler," and "The Rough String," are especially recommended. Cowboy, New York, 1928,

reveals in a fine way the rapport between the cowboy and his horse. Sleepy Black, New York, 1933, is a story

of a horse designed for younger readers; being good on the subject, it is good for any reader. All OP.

SIMPSON, GEORGE GAYLOR. Horses: The Story of the Horse Family in the Modern World and through

Sixty Million Years of History, Oxford University Press, New York, 1951. In the realm of paleontology this

STEELE, RUFUS. Mustangs of the Mesas, Hollywood, California, 1941. OP. Modern mustanging in

STONG, PHIL. Horses and Americans, New York, 1939. A survey and a miscellany combined. OP.

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

THORP, JACK (N. Howard) as told to Neil McCullough Clark. Pardner of the Wind, Caxton, Caldwell,

Idaho, 1945. Two chapters in this book make the "Spanish thunderbolts," as Jack Thorp called the mustangs

and Spanish cow horses, graze, run, pitch, and go gentle ways as free as the wind. "Five Hundred Mile Horse

Race" is a great story. No other range man excepting Ross Santee has put down so much everyday horse lore

TWEEDIE, MAJOR GENERAL W. The Arabian Horse: His Country and People, Edinburgh and London,

1894. One of the few horse books to be classified as literature. Wise in the blend of horse, land, and people.

WENTWORTH, LADY. The Authentic Arabian Horse and His Descendants, London, 1945. Rich in

knowledge and both magnificent and munificent in illustrations. Almost immediately after publication, this

WYMAN, WALKER D. The Wild Horse of the West, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. A scholarly sifting of

virtually all available material on mustangs. Readable. Only thorough bibliography on subject so far

PLENTY of sixshooter play is to be found in most of the books about oldtime cowboys; yet hardly one of

the professional bad men was a representative cowboy. Bad men of the West and cowboys alike wore

sixshooters and spurs; they drank each other's coffee; they had a fanatical passion for libertyfor

themselves. But the representative cowboy was a reliable hand, hanging through drought, blizzard, and high

water to his herd, whereas the bona fide bad man lived on the dodge. Between the killer and the cowboy

standing up for his rights or merely shooting out the lights for fun, there was as much difference as between

Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. Of course, the elements were mixed in the worst of the bad men, as they

are in the best of all good men. No matter what deductions analysis may lead to, the fact remains that the

western bad men of open range days have become a part of the American tradition. They represent

sixshooter culture at its zenith the wild and woolly side of the Westa stage between receding bowie

knife individualism of the backwoods and blackguard, machinegun gangsterism of the city.

The songs about Sam Bass, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid reflect popular attitude toward the hardriding

outlaws. Sam Bass, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the Daltons, Cole Younger, Joaquin Murrieta, John Wesley

Hardin, Al Jennings, Belle Starr, and other "long riders" with their guns in their hands have had their

biographies written over and over. They were not nearly as immoral as certain newspaper columnists lying

Robin Hood and the late Pancho Villa, recede from all realistic judgment. If the picture show finds in them

models for generosity, gallantry, and fidelity to a code of liberty, and if the public finds them picturesque,

"The longtailed heroes of the revolver," to pick a phrase from Mark Twain's unreverential treatment of them

in Roughing It, often did society a service in shooting each otheraside from providing entertainment to

future generations. As "The Old Cattleman" of Alfred Henry Lewis' Wolfville stories says, "A heap of people

need a heap of killing." Nor can the bad men be logically segregated from the longhaired killers on the side

of the law like Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp. W. H. Hudson once advanced the theory that bloodshed and

morality go together. If American civilization proceeds, the rage for collecting books on bad men will

probably subside until a copy of Miguel Antonio Otero's The Real Billy the Kid will bring no higher price

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

AIKMAN, DUNCAN. Calamity Jane and the Lady Wildcats, 1927. OP. Patronizing in the H. L. Mencken

as for his provocations. Popular imagination, represented by writers of all degrees, goes on playing on him

with cumulative effect. As a figure in literature the Kid has come to lead the whole field of western bad men.

The Saturday Review, for October 11, 1952, features a philosophical essay entitled "Billy the Kid: Faust in

AmericaThe Making of a Legend." The growth of this legend is minutely traced through a period of

seventyone years (18811952) by J. C. Dykes in Billy the Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend, University of

New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1952 (186 pages). It lists 437 titles, including magazine pieces,

mimeographed plays, motion pictures, verses, pamphlets, fiction. In a blend of casualness and scholarship, it

gives the substance and character of each item. Indeed, this bibliography reads like a continued story, with

constant references to both antecedent and subsequent action. Pat Garrett, John Chisum, and other related

characters weave all through it. A firstclass bibliography that is also readable is almost a new genre.

Pat F. Garrett, sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, killed the Kid about midnight, July 14, 1881. The

next spring his Authentic Life of Billy the Kid was published at Santa Fe, at least partly written, according to

good evidence, by a newspaperman named Ash Upton. This biography is one of the rarities in Western

Americana. In 1927 it was republished by Macmillan, New York, under title of Pat F. Garrett's Authentic

Life of Billy the Kid, edited by Maurice G. Fulton. This is now OP but remains basic. The most widely

circulated biography has been The Saga of Billy the Kid by Walter Noble Burns, New York, 1926. It contains

a deal of fictional conversation and it has no doubt contributed to the Robin Hoodizing of the lethal

character baptized as William H. Bonney, who was born in New York in 1859 and now lives with

undiminished vigor as Billy the Kid. Walter Noble Burns was not so successful with The Robin Hood of El

Dorado: The Saga of Joaquin Murrieta (1932), or, despite hogsheads of blood, with Tombstone (1927).

COE, GEORGE W. Frontier Fighter, Boston, 1934; reprinted by University of New Mexico Press,

Albuquerque. The autobiography of one of Billy the Kid's men as recorded by Nan Hillary Harrison.

COOLIDGE, DANE. Fighting Men of the West, New York, 1932. Biographical sketches. OP.

CUNNINGHAM, EUGENE. Triggernometry, 1934; reprinted by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. Excellent survey

of codes and characters. Written by a man of intelligence and knowledge. Bibliography.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. Jeff MiltonA Good Man with a Gun, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949.

HENDRICKS, GEORGE. The Bad Man of the West, Naylor, San Antonio, 1941. Analyses and classifications

go far toward making this treatment of old subjects original. Excellent bibliographical guide.

HOUGH, EMERSON. The Story of the Outlaw, 1907. OP. An omnibus carelessly put together with many

LAKE, STUART. Wyatt Earp, Boston, 1931. Best written of all gunmen biographies. Earp happened to be on

LANKFORD, N. P. Vigilante Days and Ways, 1890, 1912. OP. Full treatment of lawlessness in the

LOVE, ROBERTUS. The Rise and Fall of Jesse James, New York, 1926. Excellently written. OP.

RAINE, WILLIAM MCLEOD. Famous s and Western Outlaws, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1929. A

RIPLEY, THOMAS. They Died with Their Boots On, 1935. Mostly about John Wesley Hardin. OP.

SABIN, EDWIN L. Wild Men of the Wild West, New York, 1929. Biographic survey of killers from the

WILD BILL HICKOK. The subject of various biographies, among them those by Frank J. Wilstach (1926)

and William E. Connelley (1933). The Nebraska History Magazine (Volume X) for AprilJune 1927 is

devoted to Wild Bill and contains a "descriptive bibliography" on him by Addison E. Sheldon.

WOODHULL, FROST. FolkLore Shooting, in Southwestern Lore, Publication IX of the Texas Folklore

DURING the twentieth century oil has brought so much money to the Southwest that the proceeds from cattle

have come to look like tips. This statement is not based on statistics, though statistics no doubt existeven

on the cost of catching sun perch. Geological, legal, and economic writings on oil are mountainous in

quantity, but the human drama of oil yet remains, for the most part, to be written. It is odd to find such a

modern book as Erna Fergusson's Our Southwest not mentioning oil. It is odd that no book of national

reputation comes off the presses about any aspect of oil. The nearest to national notice on oil is the daily

report of transactions on the New York Stock Exchange. Oil companies subsidize histories of themselves,

endow universities with money to train technicians they want, control state legislatures and senates, and

dictate to Congress what they want for themselves in income tax laws; but so far they have not been able to

hire anybody to write a book about oil that anybody but the hirers themselves wants to read. Probably they

don't read them. The first thing an oilman does after amassing a few millions is buy a ranch on which he can

People live a good deal by tradition and fight a good deal by tradition also, voting more by prejudice. When

one considers the stream of cow country books and the romance of mining living on in legends of lost mines

and, then, the desert of oil books, one realizes that it takes something more than money to make the mare of

romance run. Geology and economics are beyond the aim of this Guide, but if oil money keeps on buying up

ranch land, the history of modern ranching will be resolved into the biographies of a comparatively few

BOATRIGHT, MODY C. Gib Morgan: Minstrel of the Oil Fields. Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1945.

BOONE, LALIA PHIPPS. The Petroleum Dictionary, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1952. "More

than 6,000 entries: definitions of technical terms and everyday expressions, a comprehensive guide to the

CAUGHEY, JOHN WALTON. Gold Is the Cornerstone (1948). Adequate treatment of the discovery of

California gold and of the miners. Rushing for Gold (1949). Twelve essays by twelve writers, with emphasis

on travel to California. Both books published by University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

CLARK, JAMES A., and HALBOUTY, MICHEL T. Spindletop, Random House, New York, 1952. On

January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher, near Beaumont, Texas, roared in the oil age. This book, while it

presumes to record what Pat Higgins was thinking as he sat in front of a country store, seems to be "the true

DE QUILLE, DAN (pseudonym for William Wright) . The Big Bonanza, Hartford, 1876. Reprinted, 1947.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. Coronado's Children, Dallas, 1930; reprinted by Grosset and Dunlap, New York.

Legendary tales of lost mines and buried treasures of the Southwest. Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, Little,

EMRICH, DUNCAN, editor. Comstock Bonanza, Vanguard, New York, 1950. A collection of writings,

garnered mostly from West Coast magazines and newspapers, bearing on mining in Nevada during the boom

FORBES, GERALD. Flush Production: The Epic of Oil in the GulfSouthwest, University of Oklahoma

GLASSCOCK, LUCILLE. A Texas Wildcatter, Naylor, San Antonio, 1952. The wildcatter is Mrs.

Glasscock's husband. She chronicles this player's main moves in the game and gives an insight into his

HOUSE, BOYCE. Oil Boom, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. With Boyce House's earlier Were You in

Ranger?, this book gives a contemporary picture of the gushing days of oil, money, and humanity.

LYMAN, GEORGE T. The Saga of the Comstock Lode, 1934, and Ralston's Ring, 1937. Both published by

MCKENNA, JAMES A. Black Range Tales, New York, 1936. Reminiscences of prospecting life. OP.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E. W. Marland, University of

Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. Mature in style and in interpretative power, John Joseph Mathews goes into

RISTER, C. C. Oil! Titan of the Southwest, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Facts in factual

SHINN, CHARLES H. Mining Camps, 1885, reprinted by Knopf, New York, 1948. Perhaps the most

competent analysis extant on the behavior of the gold hunters, with emphasis on their self government. The

Story of the Mine as Illustrated by the Great Comstock Lode of Nevada, New York, 1896. OP. Shinn knew

STUART, GRANVILLE. Forty Years on the Frontier, Cleveland, 1925. Superb on California and Montana

TAIT, SAMUEL W. Wildcatters: An Informal History of Oil Hunting in America, Princeton University

"NO MAN," says Mary Austin, "has ever really entered into the heart of any country until he has adopted or

made up myths about its familiar objects." A man might reject the myths but he would have to know many

facts about its natural life and have imagination as well as knowledge before entering into a country's heart.

The history of any land begins with nature, and all histories must end with nature.

"The character of a country is the destiny of its people," wrote Harvey Fergusson in Rio Grande. Ross Calvin,

also of New Mexico, had the same idea in mind when he entitled his book Sky Determines. "Culture mocks at

the boundaries set up by politics," Clark Wissler said. "It approaches geographical boundaries with its hat in

its hand." The engineering of water across mountains, electric translation of sounds, refrigeration of air and

foods, and other technical developments carry human beings a certain distance across some of nature's

boundaries, but no cleverness of science can escape nature. The inhabitants of Yuma, Arizona, are destined

forever to face a desert devoid of graciousness. Technology does not create matter; it merely uses matter in a

Man advances by learning the secrets of nature and taking advantage of his knowledge. He is deeply happy

only when in harmony with his work and environments. The backwoodsman, early settler, pioneer plainsman,

mountain man were all like some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at its own vitals. Driven

by an irrational energy, they seemed intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the power of the

soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear killer, was "wrathy to kill a bear," and as respects bears and

other wild life, one may search the chronicles of his kind in vain for anything beyond the incidents of chase

and slaughter. To quote T. B. Thorpe's blusterous bear hunter, the whole matter may be summed up in one

sentence: "A bear is started and he is killed." For the average American of the soil, whether wearing out a

farm, shotgunning with a headlight the last doe of a woodland, shooting the last buffalo on the range,

trapping the last howling lobo, winging the last prairie chicken, running down in an automobile the last

antelope, making a killer's target of any hooting owl or flying heron that comes within range, poisoning the

last eagle to fly over a sheep pasture for him the circumstances of the killing have expressed his chief

A sure sign of advancing civilization has been the rapidly changing popular attitude toward nature during

recent years. People are becoming increasingly interested not merely in conserving game for sportsmen to

shoot, but in preserving all wild life, in observing animals, in cultivating native flora, in building houses that

harmonize with climate and landscape. Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds has become one of the

The story of the American Indian isdespite taboos and squalora story of harmonizations with nature.

"Wolf Brother," in Long Lance, by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, is a poetic concretion of this harmony.

As much at ease with the wilderness as any Blackfoot Indian was George Frederick Ruxton, educated English

officer and gentleman, who rode horseback from Vera Cruz to the Missouri River and wrote Adventures in

Mexico and the Rocky Mountains. In this book he tells how a lobo followed him for days from camp to camp,

waiting each evening for his share of fresh meat and sometimes coming close to the fire at night. Any

orthodox American would have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton had the civilized perspective on

nature represented by Thoreau and Saint Francis of Assisi. Primitive harmony was run over by frontier wrath

But the coyote's howl is more tonic than all theories about nature; the buck's whistle more invigorating; the

bull's bellow in the canyon more musical; the call of the bobwhite more serene; the rattling of the rattlesnake

more logical; the scream of the panther more arousing to the imagination; the odor from the skunk more

lingering; the sweep of the buzzard in the air more majestical; the wariness of the wild turkey brighter; the

bark of the prairie dog lighter; the guesses of the armadillo more comical; the upward dartings and dippings

of the scissortail more lovely; the flight of the sandhill cranes more fraught with mystery.

There is an abundance of printed information on the animal life of America, to the west as well as to the east.

Much of it cannot be segregated; the earthworm, on which Darwin wrote a book, knows nothing of

regionalism. The best books on nature come from and lead to the Grasshopper's Library, which is free to all

consultants. I advise the consultant to listen to the owl's hoot for wisdom, plant nine bean rows for peace,

and, with Wordsworth, sit on an old gray stone listening for "authentic tidings of invisible things." Studies are

only to "perfect nature." In the words of Mary Austin, "They that make the sun noise shall not fail of the sun's

Like knowledge in any other department of life, that on nature never comes to a stand so long as it has

vitality. A continuing interest in natural history is nurtured by Natural History, published by the American

Museum of Natural History, New York; Nature, published in Washington, D. C.; The Living Wilderness, also

from Washington; Journal of Mammalogy, a quarterly, Baltimore, Maryland; Audubon Magazine (formerly

Bird Lore), published by the National Audubon Society, New York; American Forests, Washington, D. C.,

In addition to books of natural history interest listed below, others are listed under "Buffaloes and Buffalo

Hunters," "Bears and Bear Hunters," "Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers," "Birds and Wild Flowers," and

"Interpreters." Perhaps a majority of worthy books pertaining to the western half of America look on the

ADAMS, W. H. DAVENPORT (from the French of Benedict Revoil). The Hunter and the Trapper of North

ARNOLD, OREN. Wild Life in the Southwest, Dallas, 1936. Helpful chapters on various characteristic

BAILEY, VERNON. Mammals of New Mexico, United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of

Biological Survey, Washington, D. C., 1931. Biological Survey of Texas, 1905. OP. The "North American

Fauna Series," to which these two books belong, contains or points to the basic facts covering most of the

BAILLIEGROHMAN, WILLIAM A. Camps in the Rockies, 1882. A true sportsman, BaillieGrohman was

BEDICHEK, ROY. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1947. To be

personal, Roy Bedichek has the most richly stored mind I have ever met; it is as active as it is full. Liberal in

the true sense of the word, it frees other minds. Here, using facts as a means, it gives meanings to the

hackberry tree, limestone, mockingbird, Inca dove, Mexican primrose, golden eagle, the Davis Mountains,

cedar cutters, and many another natural phenomenon. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist is regarded by

some good judges as the wisest book in the realm of natural history produced in America since Thoreau

The title of Bedichek's second book, Karankaway Country (Garden City, 1950), is misleading. The

Karankawa Indians start it off, but it goes to coon inquisitiveness, prairie chicken dances, the extinction of

species to which the whooping crane is approaching, browsing goats, dignified skunks, swifts in love flight, a

camp in the brush, dust, erosion, siltalways with thinking added to seeing. The foremost naturalist of the

BROWNING, MESHACH. FortyFour Years of the Life of a Hunter, 1859; reprinted, Philadelphia, 1928.

CAHALANE, VICTOR H. Mammals of North America, Macmillan, New York, 1947. The author is a

scientist with an open mind on the relationships between predators and game animals. His thick, delightfully

illustrated book is the best dragnet on American mammals extant. It contains excellent lists of references.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. The Longhorns (1941) and The Mustangs (1952), while hardly to be catalogued as

natural history books, go farther into natural history than most books on cattle and horses go. On the Open

Range (1931; reprinted by Banks Upshaw, Dallas) contains a number of animal stories more or less true. Ben

Lilly of The Ben Lilly Legend (Boston, 1950) thought that God had called him to hunt. He spent his life,

DODGE, RICHARD I. The Hunting Grounds of the Great West, London, 1877. Published in New York the

same year under title of The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants. Outstanding survey of

DUNRAVEN, EARL OF. The Great Divide, London, 1876; reprinted under title of Hunting in the

ELLIOTT, CHARLES (editor). Fading Trails, New York, 1942. Humanistic review of characteristic

FLACK, CAPTAIN. The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the Backwoods, 1866; another form of A Hunter's

Experience in the Southern States of America, by Captain Flack, "The Ranger," London, 1866.

GANSON, EVE. Desert Mavericks, Santa Barbara, California, 1928. Illustrated; delightful. OP.

GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. Naturalists of the Frontier, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1937;

revised and enlarged edition, 1948. Biographies of men who were characters as well as scientists, generally in

GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. Wild Sports in the Far West, 1854. A translation from the German.

Delightful reading and revealing picture of how backwoodsmen of the Mississippi Valley "lived off the

GRAHAM, GID. Animal Outlaws, Collinsville, Oklahoma, 1938. OP. A remarkable collection of animal

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Between 1893 and 1913, Grinnell, partly in collaboration with Theodore

Roosevelt, edited five volumes for The Boone and Crockett Club that contain an extraordinary amount of

information, written mostly by men of civilized perspective, on bears, deer, mountain sheep, buffaloes,

cougars, elk, wolves, moose, mountains, and forests. The series, long out of print, is a storehouse of

knowledge not to be overlooked by any student of wild life in the West. The titles are: American BigGame

Hunting, 1893; Hunting in Many Lands, 1895; Trail and CampFire, 1897; American Big Game in Its

California: Their Natural History, Systematic Status, and Relation to Man, two volumes, University of

California Press, Berkeley, 1937. The king, so far, of all state natural histories.

HALL, E. RAYMOND. Mammals of Nevada, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles,

1946. So far as my knowledge goes, this is the only respectworthy book extant pertaining to the state whose

economy is based on fees from divorces and gambling and whose bestknown citizen is Senator Pat

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

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

everything pertaining to the subject from prehistoric marsupium to baking with sweet potatoes in a Negro

cabin. It is the outcome of a lifetime's scientific investigation not only of possums but of libraries and popular

talk. Thus, in addition to its biographical and natural history aspects, it is a study in the evolution of man's

HORNADAY, WILLIAM T. Camp Fires on Desert and Lava, London, n.d. OP. Dr. Hornaday, who died in

1937, was the first director of the New York Zoological Park. He was a great conservationist and an authority

HUDSON, W. H. The Naturalist in La Plata, New York, 1892. Not about the Southwest or even North

America, but Hudson's chapters on "The Puma," "Some Curious Animal Weapons," "The Mephitic Skunk,"

"Humming Birds," "The Strange Instincts of Cattle," "Horse and Man," etc. come home to the Southwest.

Few writers tend to make readers so aware; no other has written so delightfully of the lands of grass.

INGERSOLL, ERNEST. Wild Neighbors, New York, 1897. OP. A superior work. Chapter II, "The Father of

Game," is on the cougar; Chapter IV, "The Hound of the Plains," is on the coyote; there is an excellent essay

on the badger. Each chapter is provided with a list of books affording more extended treatment of the subject.

JAEGER, EDMUND C. Denizens of the Desert, Boston, 1922. OP. "Don Coyote," the roadrunner, and other

characteristic animals. Our Desert Neighbors, Stanford University Press, California, 1950.

LOCKE, LUCIE H. Naturally Yours, Texas, Naylor, San Antonio, 1949. Charm must never be discounted; it

is far rarer than facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book is in verse and drawings, type

integrated with delectable blackandwhite representations of the prairie dog, armadillo, sanderling,

mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this

LUMHOLTZ, CARL. Unknown Mexico, New York, 1902. Nearly anything about animals as well as about

Indians and mountains of Mexico may be found in this extraordinary twovolume work. OP.

MCILHENNY, EDWARD A. The Alligator s Life History, Boston, 1935. OP. The alligator got farther west

than is generally knownat least within reach of Laredo and Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. McIlhenny's

book treatsengagingly, intimately, and with precisionof the animal in Louisiana. Hungerers for

anatomical biology are referred to The Alligator and Its Allies by A. M. Reese, New York, 1915. I have more

MARCY, COLONEL R. B. Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border, New York, 1866. Marcy had a

scientific mind and a high sense of values. He knew how to write and what he wrote remains informing and

MARTIN, HORACE T. Castorologia, or The History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver, London, 1892.

OP. The beaver is a beaver, whether on Hudson's Bay or the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. Much has been

written on this animal, the propeller of the trappers of the West, but this famous book remains the most

comprehensive on facts and the amplest in conception. The author was humorist as well as scientist.

MENGER, RUDOLPH. Texas Nature Observations and Reminiscences, San Antonio, 1913. OP. Being of an

educated German family, Dr. Menger found many things in nature more interesting than twoheaded calves.

MILLS, ENOS. The Rocky Mountain Wonderland, Wild Life on the Rockies, Waiting in the Wilderness, and

other books. Some naturalists have taken exception to some observations recorded by Mills; nevertheless, he

MUIR, JOHN. The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, and other books. Muir, a great naturalist,

MURPHY, JOHN MORTIMER. Sporting Adventures in the Far West, London, 1879. One of the earliest

PALLISER, JOHN. The Solitary Hunter; or Storting Adventures in the Prairies, London, 1857.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, with a chapter entitled "Books on

Big Game"; Hunting Adventures in the West; The Wilderness Hunter; Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail; A

SEARS, PAUL B. Deserts on the March, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1935. Dramatic

picturization of the forces of nature operating in what droughts of the 1930's caused to be called "the Dust

SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. Wild Animals I Have Known; Lives of the Hunted. Probably no other writer

of America has aroused so many people, young people especially, to an interest in our wild animals. Natural

history encyclopedias he has authored are Life Histories of Northern Animals, New York, 1920, and Lives of

Game Animals, New York, 1929. Seton's final testament, Trail of an Artist Naturalist (Scribner's, New York,

WARREN, EDWARD ROYAL. The Mammals of Colorado, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942.

THE LITERATURE on the American bison, more popularly called buffalo, is enormous. Nearly everything

of consequence pertaining to the Plains Indians touches the animal. The relationship of the Indian to the

buffalo has nowhere been better stated than in Note 49 to the Benavides Memorial, edited by Hodge and

Lummis. "The Great Buffalo Hunt at Standing Rock," a chapter in My Friend the Indian by James

McLaughlin, sums up the hunting procedure; other outstanding treatments of the buffalo in Indian books are

to be found in Long Lance by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance; Letters and Notes on . . . the North American

Indians by George Catlin; Forty Years a Fur Trader by Charles Larpenteur. Floyd B. Streeter's chapter on

"The Buffalo Range" in Prairie Trails and Cow Towns lists twentyfive sources of information.

The bibliography that supersedes all other bibliographies is in the book that supersedes all other books on the

subject Frank Gilbert Roe's The North American Buffalo. More about it in the list that follows.

Nearly all men who got out on the plains were "wrathy to kill" buffaloes above all else. The Indians killed in

great numbers but seldom wastefully. The Spaniards were restrained by Indian hostility. Mountain men,

emigrants crossing the plains, Santa Fe traders, railroad builders, Indian fighters, settlers on the edge of the

plains, European sportsmen, all slaughtered and slew. Some observed, but the average American hunter's

observations on game animals are about as illuminating as the trophystuffed den of a rich oilman or the

lockers of a packing house. Lawrence of Arabia won his name through knowledge and understanding of

Arabian life and through power to lead and to write. Buffalo Bill won his name through power to exterminate

It is a pleasure to note the writings of sportsmen with inquiring minds and of scientists and artists who

hunted. Three examples are: The English Sportsman in the Western Prairies, by the Hon. Grantley F.

Berkeley, London, 1861; Travels in the Interior of North America, 18331834, by Maximilian, Prince of

Wied (original edition, 1843), included in that "incomparable storehouse of buffalo lore from early

eyewitnesses," Early Western Travels, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites; George Catlin's Letters and Notes

on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians, London, 1841.

Three aspects of the buffalo stand out: the natural history of the great American animal; the interrelationship

ALLEN, J. A. The American Bison, Living and Extinct, Cambridge, Mass., 1876. Reprinted in 9th Annual

Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, Washington, 1877. Basic and rich work,

BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. The Hunting of the Buffalo, New York, 1925. Interpretative as well as factual. OP.

COOK, JOHN R. The Border and the Buffalo. Topeka, Kansas, 1907. Personal narrative.

DIXON, OLIVE. Billy Dixon, Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1914; reprinted, Dallas, 1927. Bully autobiography;

DODGE, R. I. The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants, New York, 1877. One of the best chapters

GARRETSON, MARTIN S. The American Bison, New York Zoological Society, New York, 1938. Not

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD (18491938) may be classed next to J. A. Allen and W. T. Hornaday as

historian of the buffalo. His primary sources were the buffaloed plains and the Plains Indians, whom he knew

intimately. "In Buffalo Days" is a long and excellent essay by him in American BigGame Hunting, edited

by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, New York, 1893. He has another long essay, "The Bison,"

in Musk Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat by Caspar Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen Wister, New

York, 1904. His noble and beautifully simple When Buffalo Ran, New Haven, 1920, is specific on work from

a buffalo horse. Again in his noble twovolume work on The Cheyenne Indians (1923) Grinnell is rich not

HALEY, J. EVETTS. Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman, 1936. Goodnight killed and also helped

HORNADAY, W. T. Extermination of the American Bison (Smithsonian Reports for 1887, published in

INMAN, HENRY. Buffalo Jones Forty Years of Adventure, Topeka, Kansas, 1899. A book rich in

LAKE, STUART N. Wyatt Earp, Boston, 1931. Early chapters excellent on buffalo hunting.

MCCREIGHT, M. I. Buffalo Bone Days, Sykesville, Pa., 1939. OP. A pamphlet strong on buffalo bones, for

PALLISER, JOHN (and others). Journals, Detailed Reports, and Observations, relative to Palliser's

Exploration of British North America, 18571860, London, 1863. According to Frank Gilbert Roe, "a mine

PanhandlePlains Historical Review, Canyon, Texas. Articles and reminiscences, passim.

PARKMAN, FRANCIS. The Oregon Trail, 1847. Available in various editions, this book contains superb

POE, SOPHIE A. Buckboard Days (edited by Eugene Cunningham), Caldwell, Idaho, 1936. Early chapters.

ROE, FRANK GILBERT. The North American Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 1951. A monumental

work comprising and critically reviewing virtually all that has been written on the subject and supplanting

much of it. No other scholar dealing with the buffalo has gone so fully into the subject or viewed it from so

many angles, brought out so many aspects of natural history and human history. In a field where ignorance

has often prevailed, Roe has to be iconoclastic in order to be constructive. If his words are sometimes sharp,

RYE, EDGAR. The Quirt and the Spur, Chicago, 1909. Rye was in the Fort Griffin, Texas, country when

SCHULTZ, JAMES WILLARD. Apauk, Caller of Buffalo, New York, 1916. OP. Whether fiction or

nonfiction, as claimed by the author, this book realizes the relationships between Plains Indian and buffalo.

WEEKES, MARY. The Last Buffalo Hunter (as told by Norbert Welsh), New York, 1939. OP. The old days

recalled with upspringing sympathy. Canadabut buffaloes and buffalo hunters were pretty much the same

West Texas Historical Association (Abilene, Texas) Year Books. Reminiscences and articles, passim.

WILLIAMS, O. W. A privately printed letter of eight unnumbered pages, dated from Fort Stockton, Texas,

June 30, 1930, containing the best description of a buffalo stampede that I have encountered. It is reproduced

THE BEAR, whether black or grizzly, is a great American citizen. Think of how many children have been

put to sleep with bear stories! Facts about the animal are fascinating; the effect he has had on the minds of

human beings associated with him transcends naturalistic facts. The tree on which Daniel Boone carved the

naked fact that here he "Killed A. Bar In the YEAR 1760" will never die. Davy Crockett killed 105 bars in

one season, and his reputation as a bar hunter, plus ability to tell about his exploits, sent him to Congress. He

had no other reason for going. The grizzly was the hero of western tribes of Indians from Alaska on down

into the Sierra Madre. Among western white men who met him, occasionally in death, the grizzly inspired a

mighty saga, the cantos of which lie dispersed in homely chronicles and unrecorded memories as well as in

certain vivid narratives by Ernest Thompson Seton, Hittell's John Capen Adams, John G. Neihardt, and

For all that, neither the black bear nor the grizzly has been amply conceived of as an American character. The

conception must include a vast amount of folklore. In a chapter on "Bars and Bar Hunters" in On the Open

Range and in "Juan Oso" and "Under the Sign of Ursa Major," chapters of Tongues of the Monte, I have

In many of the books listed under "Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists" and "Mountain Men" the bear "walks like

ALTER, J. CECIL. James Bridger, Salt Lake City, 1922 reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus,

HITTELL, THEODORE H. The Adventures of John Capen Adams, 1860; reprinted 1911, New York. OP.

Perhaps no man has lived who knew grizzlies better than Adams. A rare personal narrative.

MILLER, JOAQUIN. True Bear Stories, Chicago, 1900. OP. Truth questionable in places; interest

MILLER, LEWIS B. Saddles and Lariats, Boston, 1909. OP. The chapter "In a Grizzly's Jaws" is a

MILLS, ENOS A. The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1919. Some naturalists

have accused Mills of having too much imagination. He saw much and wrote vividly.

NEIHARDT, JOHN G. The Song of Hugh Glass, New York, 1915. An epic in vigorous verse of the West's

most famous manandbear story. This imaginationrousing story has been told over and over, by J. Cecil

Alter in James Bridger, by Stanley Vestal in Mountain Men, and by other writers.

{illust. caption = Charles M. Russell, in Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage by Carrie Adell Strahorn (1915 )

West (1885) and The Wilderness Hunter (1893)books reprinted in parts or wholly under varying titles.

AppletonCenturyCrofts, New York. Monarch, the Big Bear of Tallac, 1904. Graphic narratives.

SKINNER, M. P. Bears in the Yellowstone, Chicago, 1925. OP. A naturalist's rounded knowledge, pleasantly

STEVENS, MONTAGUE. Meet Mr. Grizzly, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943.

Montague Stevens graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1881 and came to New Mexico to ranch.

As respects deductions on observed data, his book is about the most mature yet published by a ranchman.

Goodnight experienced more, had a more ample nature, but he lacked the perspective, the mental training, to

know what to make of his observations. Another English rancher, R. B. Townshend, had perspective and

charm but was not a scientific observer. So far as sense of smell goes, Meet Mr. Grizzly is as good as W. H.

Hudson's A Hind in Richmond Park. On the nature and habits of grizzly bears, it is better than The Grizzly by

WRIGHT, WILLIAM H. The Grizzly Bear: The Narrative of a HunterNaturalist, Historical, Scientific and

Adventurous, New York, 1928. OP. This is not only the richest and justest book published on the grizzly; it is

among the best books of the language on specific mammals. Wright had a passion for bears, for their

preservation, and for arousing informed sympathy in other people. Yet he did not descend to propaganda. His

The Black Bear, London, n.d., is good but no peer to his work on the grizzly. Also OP.

I SEPARATE COYOTES, lobos, and panthers from the mass of animals because they, along with bears, have

made such an imprint on human imagination. Whitetailed deer are far more common and more widely

dispersed. Men, women also, by the tens of thousands go out with rifles every fall in efforts to get near them;

but the nightpiercing howl and the cunning ways of the coyote, the panther's track and the rumor of his

Lore and facts about these animals are dispersed in many books not classifiable under natural history. Lewis

and Clark and nearly all the other chroniclers of TransMississippi America set down much on wild life.

James Pike's Scout and Ranger details the manner in which, he says, a panther covered him up alive,

duplicating a fanciful and delightful tale in Gerstaecker's Wild Sports in the Far West. James B. O'Neil

concludes They Die but Once with some "Bedtime Stories" thatalmost necessarilybring in a

The two fulllength books on Brother Coyote listed below specify most of the printed literature on the

animal. (He is "Brother" in Mexican tales and I feel much more brotherly toward him than I feel toward

character assassins in political power.) It would require another book to catalogue in detail all the writings

that include folk tales about Don Coyote. Ethnologists and scientific folklorists recognize what they call "the

Coyote Circle" in the folklore of many tribes of Indians. Morris Edward Opler in Myths and Legends of the

Lipan Apache Indians, 1940, and in Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians, 1942 (both issued by

the American Folklore Society, New York) treats fully of this cycle. Numerous tales that belong to the cycle

are included by J. Gilbert McAllister, an anthropologist who writes as a humanist, in his extended collection,

"KiowaApache Tales," in The Sky Is My Tipi, edited by Mody C. Boatright for the Texas Folklore Society

Literary retellers of Indian coyote folk tales have been many. The majority of retellers from western Indians

include Coyote. One of the very best is Frank B. Linderman, in Indian Why Stories and Indian OldMan

Stories. These titles are substantive: Old Man Coyote by Clara Kern Bayliss (New York, 1908, OP), Coyote

Stories by Mourning Dove (Caldwell, Idaho, 1934, OP); Don Coyote by Leigh Peck (Boston, 1941) gets

farther away from the Indian, is more juvenile. The Journal of American Folklore and numerous Mexican

books have published hundreds of coyote folk tales from Mexico. Among the most pleasingly told are

Picture Tales frown Mexico by Dan Storm, 1941 (Lippincott, Philadelphia). The first two writers listed below

CUSHING, FRANK HAMILTON. Zuni Breadstuff, Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation,

New York, 1920. This extraordinary book, one of the most extraordinary ever written on a particular people,

is not made up of coyote lore alone. In it the coyote becomes a character of dignity and destiny, and the

telling is epic in dignity as well as in prolongation. Frank Hamilton Cushing was a genius; his sympathy,

insight, knowledge, and mastery of the art of writing enabled him to reveal the spirit of the Zuni Indians as

almost no other writer has revealed the spirit of any other tribe. Their attitude toward Coyote is beautifully

developed. Cushing's Zuni Folk Tales (Knopf, New York, 1901, 1931) is climactic on "tellings" about

DOBIE, J. FRANK. The Voice of the Coyote, Little, Brown, Boston, 1949. Not only the coyote but his effect

on human imagination and ecological relationships. Natural history and folklore; many tales from factual

trappers as well as from Mexican and Indian folk. This is a strange book in some ways. If the author had quit

at the end of the first chapter, which is on coyote voicings and their meaning to varied listeners, he would still

have said something. The book includes some, but by no means all, of the material on the subject in Coyote

Wisdom (Publication XIV of the Texas Folklore Society, 1938) edited by J. Frank Dobie and now distributed

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Wolves and Wolf Nature, in Trail and CampFire, New York, 1897. This

long chapter is richer in facts about the coyote than anything published prior to The Voice of the Coyote,

LOFBERG, LILA, and MALCOLMSON, DAVID. Sierra Outpost, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York,

1941. An extraordinary detailment of the friendship between two people, isolated by snow high in the

California Sierras, and three coyotes. Written with fine sympathy, minute in observations.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. Talking to the Moon, University of Chicago Press, 1945. A wise and spiritual

interpretation of the blackjack country of eastern Oklahoma, close to the Osages, in which John Joseph

Mathews lives. Not primarily about coyotes, the book illuminates them more than numerous books on

MURIE, ADOLPH. Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone, United States Government Printing Office,

Washington, D. C., 1940. An example of strict science informed by civilized humanity. The Wolves of Mount

McKinley, United States Government Printing Of ice, Washington, D. C., 1944. Murie's combination of

prolonged patience, science, and sympathy behind the observations has never been common. His ecological

YOUNG, STANLEY PAUL (with Edward A. Goldman). The Wolves of North America, American Wildlife

Institute, Washington, D. C., 1944. Full information, full bibliography, without narrative power. Sketches of

American Wildlife, Monumental Press, Baltimore, 1946. This slight book contains pleasant chapters on the

Puma, Wolf, Coyote, Antelope and other animals characteristic of the West. (With Hartley H. T. Jackson)

The Clever Coyote, Stackpole, Harrisburg, Pa., and Wildlife Management Institute, Washington, D. C., 1951.

Emphasis upon the economic status and control of the species, an extended classification of subspecies, and a

full bibliography make this book and Dobie's The Voice of the Coyote complemental to each other rather than

Anybody who so wishes may call them mountain lions. Where there were Negro mammies, white children

were likely to be haunted in the night by fear of ghosts. Otherwise, for some children of the South and West,

no imagined terror of the night equaled the panther's scream. The AngloAmerican lore pertaining to the

panther is replete with stories of attacks on human beings. Indian and Spanish lore, clear down to where W.

H. Hudson of the pampas heard it, views the animal as un amigo de los cristianosa friend of man. The

panther is another animal as interesting for what people associated with him have taken to be facts as for the

BARKER, ELLIOTT S. When the Dogs Barked `Treed', University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque,

1946. Mainly on mountain lions, but firsthand observations on other predatory animals also. Before he

became state game warden, the author was for years with the United States Forest Service.

HIBBEN, FRANK C. Hunting American Lions, New York, 1948; reprinted by University of New Mexico

Press, Albuquerque. Mr. Hibben considers hunting panthers and bears a terribly dangerous business that only

intrepid heroes like him self would undertake. Sometimes in this book, but more awesomely in Hunting

American Bears, he manages to outzane Zane Grey, who had to warn his boy scout readers and puerile

minded readers of added years that Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon is true in contrast to the fictional

HUDSON, W. H. The Naturalist in La Plata, New York, 1892. A chapter in this book entitled "The Puma, or

Lion of America" provoked an attack from Theodore Roosevelt (in Outdoor Pastimes of an American

Hunter); but it remains the most delightful narrativeessay yet written on the subject.

American Wildlife Institute, Washington, D. C., 1946. Scientific, liberal with information of human interest,

bibliography. We get an analysis of the panther's scream but it does not curdle the blood.

NEARLY EVERYBODY ENJOYS to an extent the singing of birds and the colors of flowers; to the

majority, however, the enjoyment is casual, generalized, vague, in the same category as that derived from a

short spell of prattling by a healthy baby. Individuals who study birds and native flora experience an almost

daily refreshment of the spirit and growth of the intellect. For them the world is an unending Garden of

Delight and a hundredyard walk down a creek that runs through town or pasture is an exploration. Hardly

anything beyond good books, good pictures and music, and good talk is so contributory to the enrichment of

life as a sympathetic knowledge of the birds, wild flowers, and other native fauna and flora around us.

The books listed are dominantly scientific. Some include keys to identification. Once a person has learned to

use the key for identifying botanical or ornithological species, he can spend the remainder of his life adding

BAILEY, FLORENCE MERRIAM. Birds of New Mexico, 1928. OP. Said by those who know to be at the

BEDICHEK, ROY. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (1947) and Karankaway Country (1950), Doubleday,

Garden City, N. Y. These are books of essays on various aspects of nature, but nowhere else can one find an

equal amount of penetrating observation on chimney swifts, Inca doves, swallows, golden eagles,

mockingbirds, herons, prairie chickens, whooping cranes, swifts, scissortails, and some other birds. As

BRANDT, HERBERT. Arizona and Its Bird Life, Bird Research Foundation, Cleveland, 1951. This

beautiful, richly illustrated volume of 525 pages lives up to its title; the birds belong to the Arizona country,

and with them we get pines, mesquites, cottonwoods, John Slaughter's ranch, the northwardflowing San

Pedro, and many other features of the land. Herbert Brandt's Texas Bird Adventures, illustrated by George

Miksch Sutton (Cleveland, 1940), is more on the Big Bend country and ranch country to the north than on

DAWSON, WILLIAM LEON. The Birds of California, San Diego, etc., California, 1923. OP. Four

magnificent volumes, full in illustrations, special observations on birds, and scientific data.

DOBIE, J. FRANK, who is no more of an ornithologist than he is a geologist, specialized on an especially

characteristic bird of the Southwest and gathered its history, habits, and folklore into a long article: "The

Roadrunner in Fact and Folklore," in In the Shadow of History, Publication XV of the Texas Folklore

Society, Austin, 1939. OP. "Bob More: Man and Bird Man," Southwest Review, Dallas, Vol. XXVII, No. 1

NICE, MARGARET MORSE. The Birds of Oklahoma, Norman, 1931. OP. United States Biological Survey

OBERHOLSER, HARRY CHURCH. The Birds of Texas in manuscript form. "A stupendous work, the

greatest of its genre, by the nation's outstanding ornithologist, who has been fifty years making it." The

quotation is condensed from an essay by Roy Bedichek in the Southwest Review, Dallas, Vol. XXXVIII, No.

1 (Winter, 1953). Maybe some day some man or woman with means will see the light of civilized patriotism

and underwrite the publication of these great volumes. Patriotism that does not act to promote the beautiful,

PETERSON, ROGER TORY. A Field Guide to Western Birds (1941) and A Field Guide to the Birds (birds

of the eastern United States, revised 1947), Houghton Mifflin, Boston. These are standard guides for

identification. The range, habits, and characteristics of each bird are summarized.

SIMMONS, GEORGE FINLEY. Birds of the Austin Region, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1925. A very

SUTTON, GEORGE MIKSCH. Mexican Birds, illustrated with watercolor and penandink drawings by

the author, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. The main part of this handsome book is a personal

narrativepleasant to read even by one who is not a bird manof discovery in Mexico. To it is appended a

resume of Mexican bird life for the use of other seekers. Sutton's Birds in the Wilderness: Adventures of an

Ornithologist (Macmillan, New York, 1936) contains essays on pet roadrunners, screech owls, and other

congenial folk of the Big Bend of Texas. The Birds of Brewster County, Texas, in collaboration with Josselyn

Van Tyne, is a publication of the Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan, University of Michigan Press,

Wild Turkey. Literature on this national bird is enormous. Among books I name first The Wild Turkey and Its

Hunting, by Edward A. McIlhenny, New York, 1914. OP. McIlhenny was a singular man. His family settled

on Avery Island, Louisiana, in 1832; he made it into a famous refuge for wild fowls. The memories of

individuals of a family long established on a country estate go back several lifetimes. In two books of Negro

folklore and in The Alligator's Life History, McIlhenny wrote as an inheritor. Initially, he was a hunter

naturalist, but scientific enough to publish in the Auk and the Journal of Heredity. Age, desire for knowledge,

and practice in the art of living dimmed his lust for hunting and sharpened his interest in natural history. His

book on the wild turkey, an extension into publishable form of a manuscript from a civilized Alabama hunter,

The Wild Turkey of Virginia, by Henry S. Mosby and Charles O. Handley, published by the Commission of

Game and Inland Fisheries of Virginia, Richmond, 1943, is written from the point of view of wild life

management. It contains an extensive bibliography. Less technical is The American Wild Turkey, by Henry E.

Davis, Small Arms Technical Company, Georgetown, South Carolina, 1949. No strain, or subspecies, of the

wild turkey is foreign to any other, but human blends in J. Stokley Ligon, naturalist, are unique. The title of

his muchinlittle book is History and Management of Merriam's Wild Turkey, New Mexico Game and Fish

The scientific literature on botany of western America is extensive. The list that follows is for laymen as

BENSON, LYMAN, and DARROW, ROBERT A. A Manual of Southwestern Desert Trees and Shrubs,

Biological Science Bulletin No. 6, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1944. A thorough work of 411 pages,

CARR, WILLIAM HENRY. Desert Parade: A Guide to Southwestern Desert Plants and Wildlife, Viking,

CLEMENTS, FREDERIC E. and EDITH S. Rocky Mountain Flowers, H. W. Wilson, New York, 1928.

COULTER, JOHN M. Botany of Western Texas, United States Department of Agriculture, Washington,

189194. OP. Nothing has appeared during the past sixty years to take the place of this master opus.

GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. Horticulture and Horticultur ists in Early Texas, Southern Methodist

University Press, Dallas, 1945. Historicalscientific, more technical than the author's Naturalists of the

JAEGER, EDMUND C. Desert Wild Flowers, Stanford University Press, California, 1940, revised 1947.

LUNDELL, CYRUS L., and collaborators. Flora of Texas, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas,

MCKELVEY, SUSAN DELANO. Yuccas of the Southwestern United States, Harvard University Press,

United States Department of Agriculture. United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1937. A

SCHULZ, ELLEN D. Texas Wild Flowers, Chicago, 1928. Good as a botanical guide and also for human

uses; includes lore on many plants. OP. Cactus Culture, Orange Judd, New York, 1932. Now in revised

SILVIUS, W. A. Texas Grasses, published by the author, San Antonio, 1933. A monument, of 782 illustrated

STEVENS, WILLIAM CHASE. Kansas Wild Flowers, University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 1948. This is

more than a state book, and the integration of knowledge, wisdom, and appreciation of flower life with

botanical science makes it appeal to layman as well as to botanist. 463 pages, 774 illustrations. Applicable to

STOCKWELL, WILLIAM PALMER, and BREAZEALE, LUCRETIA. Arizona Cacti, Biological Science

THORNBER, JOHN JAMES, and BONKER, FRANCES. The Fantastic Clan: The Cactus Family, New

THORP, BENJAMIN CARROLL. Texas Range Grasses, Uni versity of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. A

survey of 168 species of grasses, their adaptability to soils and regions, and their values for grazing.

WHITEHOUSE, EULA. Texas Wild Flowers in Natural Colors, 1936; republished 1948 in Dallas. OP.

Toward 200 flowers are pictured in colors, each in conjunction with descriptive material. The finding lists are

WEST OF A WAVERING line along the western edge of the central parts of Texas and Oklahoma the Negro

is not an important social or cultural element of the Southwest, just as the modern Indian hardly enters into

Texas life at all and the Mexican recedes to the east. Negro folk songs and tales of the Southwest have in

treatment been blended with those of the South. Dorothy Scarborough's On the Trail of Negro Folk

Songs (1925, OP) derives mainly from Texas, but in making up the body of a Negro song, Miss Scarborough

says, "You may find one bone in Texas, one in Virginia and one in Mississippi." Leadbelly, a guitar player

equally at home in the penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana, furnished John A. and Alan Lomax with Negro

Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, New York, 1936 (OP). The Lomax anthologies, American Ballads and

Folk Songs, 1934, and Our Singing Country, 1941 (Macmillan, New York) and Carl Sandburg's American

Songbag (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927) all give the Negro of the Southwest full representation.

Three books of loveliness by R. Emmett Kennedy, Black Cameos (1924), Mellows (1925), and More

Mellows (1931) represent Louisiana Negroes. All are OP. An excellent allAmerican collection is James

Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Spirituals, Viking, New York, 1940. Bibliographies and lists of

other books will be found in The Negro and His Songs (1925, OP) and Negro Workaday Songs, by Howard

W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1926, and in American

A succinct guide to Negro lore is American Folk Song and Folk Lore: A Regional Bibliography, by Alan

Narrowing the field down to Texas, J. Mason Brewer's "Juneteenth," in Tone the Bell Easy, Publication X of

the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1932, is outstanding as a collection of tales. In volume after volume the

Texas Folklore Society has published collections of Negro songs and tales A. W. Eddins, Martha Emmons,

FROM THE DAYS of the first innocent sensations in Beadle's Dime Novel series, on through Zane Grey's

mass production and up to any presentday newsstand's crowded shelf of Ace High and Flaming

Guns magazines, the Southwest, along with all the rest of the West, has been represented in a fictional output

quantitatively stupendous. Most of it has betrayed rather than revealed life, though not with the contemptible

contempt for both audience and subject that characterizes most of Hollywood's pictures on the same times,

people, and places. Certain historical aspects of the fictional betrayal of the West may be found in E. Douglas

Branch's The Cowboy and His Interpreters, in The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel

Novels, by Albert Johannsen in two magnificent volumes, and in Jay Monaghan's The Great Rascal: The Life

and Adventures of Ned Buntline Buntline having been perhaps the most prolific of all Wild West fictionists.

Some "Westerns" have a kind of validity. If a serious reader went through the hundreds of titles produced by

William McLeod Raine, Dane Coolidge, Eugene Cunningham,. B. M. Bower, the late Ernest Haycox, and

other manufacturers of range novels who have known their West at firsthand, he would find, spottedly, a

surprising amount of truth about land and men, a fluency in genuine cowboy lingo, and a respect for the code

of conduct. Yet even these novels have added to the difficulty that serious writing in the Western field has in

getting a hearing on literary, rather than merely Western, grounds. Any writer of Westerns must, like all other

creators, be judged on his own intellectual development. "The Western and Ernest Haycox," by James Fargo,

Actualities in the Southwest seem to have stifled fictional creation. No historical novel dealing with Texas

history has achieved the drama of the fall of the Alamo or the drawing of the black beans, has presented a

character with half the reality of Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, or Sallie Skull, or has captured the flavor inherent

Historical fiction dealing with early day Texas is, however, distinctly maturing. As a dramatization of Jim

Bowie and the bowie knife, The Iron Mistress, by Paul Wellman (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1951),

is the best novel published so far dealing with a figure of the Texas revolution. In Divine Average (Little,

Brown, Boston, 1952), Elithe Hamilton Kirkland weaves from her seasoned knowledge of life and from

"realities of those violent years in Texas history between 1838 and 1858" a story of human destiny. She

reveals the essential nature of Range Templeton more distinctly, more mordantly, than history has revealed

the essential nature of Sam Houston or any of his contemporaries. The wife and daughter of Range

Templeton are the most plausible women in any historical novel of Texas that I have read. The created world

Among the early taletellers of the Southwest are Jeremiah Clemens, who wrote Mustang Gray, Mollie E.

Moore Davis, of plantation tradition, Mayne Reid, who dared convey real information in his romances,

Charles W. Webber, a naturalist, and T. B. Thorpe, creator of "The Big Bear of Arkansas."

Fiction that appeared before World War I can hardly be called modern. No fiction is likely to appear,

however, that will do better by certain types of western character and certain stages of development in

western society than that produced by Bret Harte, with his gamblers; stage drivers, and mining camps; O.

Henry with his "Heart of the West" types; Alfred Henry Lewis with his "Wolfville" anecdotes and characters;

Owen Wister, whose Virginian remains the classic of cowboy novels without cows; and Andy Adams, whose

Log of a Cowboy will be read as long as people want a narrative of cowboys sweating with herds.

The authors listed below are in alphabetical order. Those who seem to me to have a chance to survive are not

FRANK APPLEGATE (died 1932) wrote only two books, Native Tales of New Mexico and Indian Stories

from the Pueblos, but as a delighted and delightful teller of folk tales his place is secure.

MARY AUSTIN seems to be settling down as primarily an expositor. Her novels are no longer read, but the

simple tales in OneSmoke Stories (her last book, 1934) and in some nonfiction collections, notably Lost

While the Southwest can hardly claim Willa Cather, of Nebraska, her Death Comes for the

Archbishop (1927), which is made out of New Mexican life, is not only the bestknown novel concerned

Despite the fact that it is not on the literary map, Will Levington Comfort's Apache (1931) remains for me the

most moving and incisive piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest that I have found.

If a teller of folk tales and plotless narratives belongs in this chapter, then J. Frank Dobie should be

mentioned for the folk tales in Coronado's Children, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, and Tongues of the

Monte, also for some of his animal tales in The Voice of the Coyote, outlaw and maverick narratives in The

Longhorns, and "The Pacing White Steed of the Prairies" and other horse stories in The Mustangs.

The characters in Harvey Fergusson's Wolf Song (1927) are the Mountain Men of Kit Carson's time, and the

city of their soul is rollicky Taos. It is a lusty, swift song of the pristine earth. Fergusson's The Blood of the

Conquerors (1931) tackles the juxtaposition of SpanishMexican and Anglo American elements in New

Mexico, of which state he is a native. Grant of Kingdom (1850) is strong in wisdom life, vitality of character,

FRED GIPSON'S HoundDog Man and The Home Place lack the critical attitude toward life present in great

fiction but they are as honest and tonic as creek bottom soil and the people in them are genuine.

FRANK GOODWYN'S The Magic of Limping John (New York, 1944, OP) is a coherence of Mexican

characters, folk tales, beliefs, and ways in the ranch country of South Texas. There is something of magic in

the telling, but Frank Goodwyn has not achieved objective control over imagination or sufficiently stressed

PAUL HORGAN of New Mexico has in The Return of the Weed (short stories), Far from Cibola, and other

OLIVER LAFARGE'S Laughing Boy (1929) grew out of the author's ethnological knowledge of the Navajo

TOM LEA'S The Brave Bulls (1949) has, although it is a sublimation of the Mexican bullfighting world,

Death and Fear of Death for its dominant theme. It may be compared in theme with Stephen Crane's The Red

Badge of Courage. It is written with the utmost of economy, and is beautiful in its power. The Wonderful

Country (1952), a historical novel of the frontier, but emphatically not a "Western," recognizes more

complexities of society. Its economy and directness parallel the style of Tom Lea's drawings and paintings,

Sundown, by John Joseph Mathews (1934), goes more profoundly than Laughing Boy into the soul of a

young Indian (an Osage) and his people. Its translation of the "long, long thoughts" of the boy and then of

"shades of the prison house" closing down upon him is superb writing. The "shades of the prison house"

GEORGE SESSIONS PERRY'S Hold Autumn in Your Hand (1941) incarnates a Texas farm hand too poor

"to flag a gutwagon," but with the good nature, dignity, and independence of the earth itself. Walls Rise

Up (1939) is a kind of Crock of Gold, both whimsical and earthy, laid on the Brazos River.

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER is as dedicated to artistic perfection as was A. E. Housman. Her output has,

therefore, been limited: Flowering Judas (1930, enlarged 1935); Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), The Leaning

Tower (1944). Her stories penetrate psychology, especially the psychology of a Mexican hacienda, with rare

finesse. Her small canvases sublimate the inner realities of men and women. She appeals only to cultivated

taste, and to some tastes no other fiction writer in America today is her peer in subtlety.

EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES died in 1934. Most of his novels distinguished by intricate plots and

bright dialoguehad appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. His finest story is "Paso Por Aqui," published

in the volume entitled Once in the Saddle (1927). Gene Rhodes, who has a canyonon which he

ranchednamed for him in New Mexico, was an artist; at the same time, he was a man akin to his land and

its men. He is the only writer of the range country who has been accorded a biographyThe Hired Man on

CONRAD RICHTER'S The Sea of Grass (1937) is a kind of prose poem, beautiful and tragic. Lutie, wife of

the owner of the grass, is perhaps the most successful creation of a ranch woman that fiction has so far

DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH'S The Wind (1925) excited the wrath of chambers of commerce and other

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (1939), made Okies a word in the American language. Although

dated by the Great Depression, its humanity and realism are beyond date. It is among the few good novels

JOHN W. THOMASON, after fighting as a marine in World War I, wrote Fix Bayonets (1926), followed by

Jeb Stuart (1930). A native Texan, he followed the southern tradition rather than the western. Lone Star

Preacher (1941) is a strong and sympathetic characterization of Confederate fighting men woven into

In High John the Conqueror (Macmillan, 1948) John W. Wilson conveys real feeling for the tragic life of

Negro sharecroppers in the Brazos bottoms. He represents the critical awareness of life that has come to

modern fiction of the Southwest, in contrast to the sterile action, without creation of character, in most older

"KNOWLEDGE itself is power," Sir Francis Bacon wrote in classical Latin, and in abbreviated form the

proverb became a familiar in households and universities alike. But knowledge of what? There is no power in

The power of great poetry lies not in knowledge of it but in assimilation of it. Most talk about poetry is

vacuous. Poetry can pass no power into any human being unless it itself has powerpower of beauty, truth,

wit, humor, pathos, satire, worship, and other attributes, always through form. No poor poetry is worth

Compared with America's best poetry, most poetry of the Southwest is as mediocre as American poetry in the

mass is as compared with the great body of English poetry between Chaucer and Masefield. Yet mediocre

poetry is not so bad as mediocre sculpture. The mediocre in poetry is merely fatuous; in sculpture, it is ugly.

Generations to come will have to look at Coppini's monstrosity in front of the Alamo; it can't rot down or

burn up. Volumes of worthless verse, most of it printed at the expense of the versifiers, hardly come to sight,

and before long they disappear from existence except for copies religiously preserved in public libraries.

Weak fiction goes the same way. But a good deal of very bad prose in the nonfiction field has some value. In

an otherwise dull book there may be a solitary anecdote, an isolated observation on a skunk, a single gesture

of some human being otherwise highly unimportant, one salty phrase, a side glimpse into the human comedy.

The earliest poet of historical consequence the only form of his poetical consequenceof the Southwest was

Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. He led the Texas cavalry at San Jacinto, became president of the Republic of

Texas, organized the futile Santa Fe Expedition, gathered up six volumes of notes and letters for a history of

Texas that might have been as rawmeat realistic as anything in Zola or Tolstoy. Then as a poet he reached

his climax in "The Daughter of Mendoza"a graceful but moonshiny imitation of Tom Moore and Lord

It would not take one more than an hour to read aloud all the poetry of the Southwest that could stand

rereading. At the top of all I should place Fay Yauger's "Planter's Charm," published in a volume of the same

title. With it belongs "The Hired Man on Horseback," by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a long poem of passionate

fidelity to his own decent kind of men, with power to ennoble the reader, and with the form necessary to all

beautiful composition. This is the sole and solitary piece of poetry to be found in all the myriads of rhymes

classed as "cowboy poetry." I'd want Stanley Vestal's "Fandango," in a volume of the same title. Margaret

Bell Houston's "Song from the Traffic," which takes one to the feathered mesquites and the bluebonnets,

might come next. Begging pardon of the perpetually palpitating New Mexico lyricists, I would skip most of

them, except for bits of Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Haniel Long, and maybe somebody I don't know, and

go to George Sterling's "Father Coyote"in California. Probably I would come back to gallant Phil LeNoir's

"Finger of Billy the Kid," written while he was dying of tuberculosis in New Mexico. I wouldn't leave

without the swift, brilliantly economical stanzas that open the ballad of "Sam Bass," and a single line, "He

Several other poets have, of course, achieved something for mortals to enjoy and be lifted by. Their work has

been sifted into various anthologies. The best one is Signature of the Sun: Southwest Verse, 19001950,

selected and edited by Mabel Major and T. M. Pearce, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950.

Two other anthologies are Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp, by John A. Lomax, 1919, reprinted in

1950 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York; The Road to Texas, by Whitney Montgomery, Kaleidograph,

Dallas, 1940. Montgomery's Kaleidograph Press has published many volumes by southwestern poets.

Somebody who has read them all and has read all the poets represented, without enough of distillation, in

Like historical fiction, drama of the Southwest has been less dramatic than actuality and less realistic than

real characters. Lynn Riggs of Oklahoma, author of Green Grow the Lilacs, has so far been the most

ART MAY BE SUBSTANTIVE, but more than being its own excuse for being, it lights up the land it

depicts, shows people what is significant, cherishable in their own lives and environments. Thus Peter Hurd

of New Mexico has revealed windmills, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri has elevated mules. Nature may

not literally follow art, but human eyes follow art and literature in recognizing nature.

The history of art in the Southwest, if it is ever rightly written, will not bother with the Italian "Holy

Families" imported by agentguided millionaires trying to buy exclusiveness. It will begin with clay (Indian

pottery), horse hair (vaquero weaving), hide (vaquero plaiting), and horn (backwoods carving). It will note

Charles M. Russell's art has been characterized in the chapter on "Range Life." He had to paint, and the Old

West was his life. More versatile was his contemporary Frederic Remington, author of Pony Tracks, Crooked

Trails, and other books, and prolific illustrator of Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Henry Lewis,

and numerous other writers of the West. Not so well known as these two, but rising in estimation, was

Charles Schreyvogle. He did not write; his bestknown pictures are reproduced in a folio entitled My Bunkie

and Others. Remington, Russell, and Schreyvogle all did superb sculptoring in bronze. One of the finest

pieces of sculpture in the Southwest is "The Seven Mustangs" by A. Phimister Proctor, in front of the Texas

Among contemporary artists, Ross Santee and Will James (died, 1942) have illustrated their own cow country

books, some of which are listed under "Range Life" and "Horses." William R. Leigh, author of The Western

Pony, is a significant painter of the range. Edward Borein of Santa Barbara, California, has in scores of

etchings and a limited amount of book illustrations "documented" many phases of western life. Buck Dunton

of Taos illustrated also. His lithographs and paintings of wild animals, trappers, cowboys, and Indians seem

I cannot name and evaluate modern artists of the Southwest. They are many, and the excellence of numbers

of them is nationally recognized. Many articles have been written about the artists who during this century

have lived around Taos and painted that region of the Southwest. Some of the betterknown names are Ernest

L. Blumenschein, Oscar Berninghaus, Ward Lockwood, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ila McAfee,

Barbara Latham Cook, Howard Cook. Artists thrive in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas as well as in New

Mexico. Tom Lea, of El Paso, may be quitting painting and drawing to spend the remainder of his life in

writing. Perhaps he himself does not know. Jerry Bywaters, who is at work on the history of art in the

Southwest, has about quit producing to direct the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Alexandre Hogue gives his

strength to teaching art in Tulsa University. Exhibitions, not commentators, are the revealers of art.

A few books, all expensive, reproduce the art of certain depicters of the West and Southwest. Etchings of the

West, by Edward Borein, and The West of Alfred Jacob Miller have been noted in other chapters (consult

Index). Other recent art works are: Peter Hurd: Portfolio of Landscapes and Portraits, University of New

Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950; Gallery of Western Paintings, edited by Raymond Carlson, McGrawHill,

New York, 1951 (unsatisfactory reproduction); Frederic Remington, Artist of the Old West, by Harold

McCracken, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1947 (biography and check list with many reproductions); Portrait of

the Old West, by Harold McCracken, McGrawHill, New York, 1952 (samplings of numerous artists).

In February, 1946, Robert Taft of the University of Kansas began publishing in the Kansas Historical

Quarterly chapters, richly illustrated in black and white, in "The Pictorial Record of the Old West." The book

to be made from these chapters will have a historical validity missing in most picture books.

The leading literary magazine of the region is the Southwest Review, published quarterly at Southern

Methodist University, Dallas. The New Mexico Quarterly, published by the University of New Mexico at

Albuquerque, the Arizona Quarterly, published by the University of Arizona at Tucson the Colorado

Quarterly, published by the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Prairie Schooner, University of Nebraska

Press, Lincoln, are excellent exponents of current writing in the Southwest and West. All these magazines are

Every state in the Southwest has a state historical organization that publishes. The oldest and most productive

of these, outside of California, is the Texas State Historical Association, with headquarters at Austin.

A majority of the state histories of the Southwest have been written with the hope of securing an adoption for

school use. It would require a blacksnake whip to make most juve niles, or adults either, read these

productions, as devoid of picturesqueness, lifeblood, and intellectual content as so many concrete slabs. No

genuinely humanistic history of the Southwest has ever been printed. There are good factual historiesand a

history not based on facts can't possibly be goodbut the lack of synthesis, of intelligent evaluations, of

imagination, of the seeing eye and portraying hand is too evident. The stuff out of which history is

wovendiaries, personal narratives, county histories, chronicles of ranches and trails, etc.has been better

Considered scientifically, folklore belongs to science and not to the humanities. When folk and fun are not

scienced out of it, it is song and story and in literature is mingled with other ingredients of life and art, as

exampled by the folklore in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In "Indian Culture,"

"SpanishMexican Strains," "Backwoods Life and Humor," "Cowboy Songs," "The Bad Man Tradition,"

"Bears," "Coyotes," "Negro Folk Songs and Tales," and other chapters of this Guide numerous books charged

The most active state society of its kind in America has been the Texas Folklore Society, with headquarters at

the University of Texas, Austin. Volume XXIV of its Publications appeared in 1951, and it has published and

distributed other books. Its Publications are now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press in

Dallas. J. Frank Dobie, with constant help, was editor from 1922 to 1943, when he resigned. Since 1943

In 1947 the New Mexico Folklore Society began publishing yearly the New Mexico Folklore Record. It is

printed by the University of New Mexico Press. The University of Arizona, Tucson, has published several

folklore bulletins. The California Folklore Society publishes, through the University of California Press,

Berkeley, Western Folklore, a quarterly. In cooperation with the Southeastern Folklore Society, the

University of Florida, Gainesville, publishes the Southern Folklore Quarterly. Levette J. Davidson of the

University of Denver, author of A Guide to American Folklore, University of Denver Press, 1951, directs the

Western Folklore Conference. The Journal of American Folklore has published a good deal from the

Southwest and Mexico. The Sociedad Folklorica de Mexico publishes its own Anurio. Between 1929 and

1932, B. A. Botkin, editor of A Treasury of Southern Folklore, 1949, and A Treasury of Western Folklore,

1951 (Crown, New York), brought out four volumes entitled Folk Say, University of Oklahoma Press. OP.

The volumes are significant for literary utilizations of folklore and interpretations of folks.

Museums do not belong to the DAR. Their perspective on the past is constructive. The growing museums in

Santa Fe, Tucson, Phoenix, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Denver, and on

west into California represent the art, fauna, flora, geology, archeology, occupations, transportation,

architecture, and other phases of the Southwest in a way that may be more informing than many printed

THE OBJECT OF THEMEWRITING is to make a student observe, to become aware, to evaluate, to enrich

himself. Any phase of life or literature named or suggested in the foregoing chapters could be taken as a

subject for an essay. The most immature essay must be more than a summary; a mere summary is never an

essay. The writer must synthesize, make his own combination of thoughts, facts, incidents, characteristics,

anecdotes, interpretations, illustrations, according to his own pattern. A writer is a weaver, weaving various

"Look into thy heart and write." "Write what you know about." All this is good advice in a waybut

students have to write themes whether they have anything to write or not. The way to get full of a subject, to

generate a conveyable interest, is to fill up on the subject. As clouds are but transient forms of matter that

"change but cannot die," so most writing, even the best, is but a variation in form of experiences, ideas,

In general, the materials a student weaves are derived from three sources: what he has read, what he has

heard, what he has observed and experienced himself. If he chooses to sketch an interesting character, he will

make his sketch richer and more interesting if he reads all he can find that illuminates his subject's

background. If he sets out to tell a legend or a series of related folk tales or anecdotes, he will improve his

telling by reading what he can on the subjects that his proposed narratives treat of and by reading similar

narratives already written by others. If he wishes to tell what he knows about rattlesnakes, buzzards, pet

coyotes, Brahma cattle, prickly pear, cottonwoods, Caddo Lake, the Brazos River, Santa Fe adobes, or other

features of the land, let him bolster and put into perspective his own knowledge by reading what others have

The list of subjects that follows is meant to be suggestive, and must not be regarded as inclusive. The best

subject for any writer is one that he is interested in. A single name or category may afford scores of subjects.

For example, take Andy Adams, the writer about cowboys and range life. His campfire yarns, the attitude of

his cowboys toward their horses, what he has to say about cows, the metaphor of the range as he has recorded

it, the placidity of his cowboys as opposed to Zane Grey sensationalism, etc., are a few of the subjects to be

derived from a study of his books. Or take a category like "How the Early Settlers Lived." Pioneer food,

transportation, sociables, houses, neighborliness, loneliness, living on game meat, etc., make subjects. Almost

every subject listed below will suggest either variations or associated subjects.