through power to exterminate buffaloes. He was a buffalo man in the way that Hitler was a Polish Jew man.
It is a pleasure to note the writings of sportsmen with inquiring minds and of scientists and artists who hunted. Three examples are: _The English Sportsman in the Western Prairies_, by the Hon. Grantley F. Berkeley, London, 1861; _Travels in the Interior of North America, 1833-1834_, by Maximilian, Prince of Wied (original edition, 1843), included in that “incomparable storehouse of buffalo lore from early eye-witnesses,” _Early Western Travels_, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites; George Catlin’s _Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians_, London, 1841.
Three aspects of the buffalo stand out: the natural history of the great American animal; the interrelationship between Indian and buffalo; the white hunter–and exterminator.
ALLEN, J. A. _The American Bison, Living and Extinct_, Cambridge, Mass., 1876. Reprinted in 9th Annual Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, Washington, 1877. Basic and rich work, much of it appropriated by Hornaday.
BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. _The Hunting of the Buffalo_, New York, 1925. Interpretative as well as factual. OP.
COOK, JOHN R. _The Border and the Buffalo_. Topeka, Kansas, 1907. Personal narrative.
DIXON, OLIVE. _Billy Dixon_, Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1914; reprinted, Dallas, 1927. Bully autobiography; excellent on the buffalo hunter as a type. OP.
DODGE, R. I. _The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants_, New York, 1877. One of the best chapters of this source book is on the buffalo.
GARRETSON, MARTIN S. _The American Bison_, New York Zoological Society, New York, 1938. Not thorough, but informing. Limited bibliography. OP.
GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD (1849-1938) may be classed next to J. A. Allen and W. T. Hornaday as historian of the buffalo. His primary sources were the buffaloed plains and the Plains Indians, whom he knew intimately. “In Buffalo Days” is a long and excellent essay by him in _American Big-Game Hunting_, edited by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, New York, 1893. He has another long essay, “The Bison,” in _Musk- Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat_ by Caspar
Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen Wister, New York, 1904. His noble and beautifully simple _When Buffalo Ran_, New Haven, 1920, is specific on work from a buffalo horse. Again in his noble two-volume work on _The Cheyenne Indians_ (1923) Grinnell is rich not only on the animal but on the Plains Indian relationship to it. All OP.
HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman_, 1936. Goodnight killed and also helped save the buffalo. Haley has preserved his observations.
HORNADAY, W. T. _Extermination of the American Bison_ (Smithsonian Reports for 1887, published in 1889, Part II). Hornaday was a good zoologist but inferior in research.
INMAN, HENRY. _Buffalo Jones Forty Years of Adventure_, Topeka, Kansas, 1899. A book rich in observations as well as experience, though Jones was a poser. OP.
LAKE, STUART N. _Wyatt Earp_, Boston, 1931. Early chapters excellent on buffalo hunting.
MCCREIGHT, M. I. _Buffalo Bone Days_, Sykesville, Pa., 1939. OP. A pamphlet strong on buffalo bones, for fertilizer.
PALLISER, JOHN (and others). _Journals, Detailed Reports, and Observations, relative to Palliser’s Exploration of British North America, 1857-1860_, London, 1863. According to Frank Gilbert Roe, “a mine of inestimable information” on the buffalo.
_Panhandle-Plains Historical Review_, Canyon, Texas. Articles and reminiscences, _passim_.
PARKMAN, FRANCIS. _The Oregon Trail_, 1847. Available in various editions, this book contains superb descriptions of buffaloes and prairies.
POE, SOPHIE A. _Buckboard Days_ (edited by Eugene Cunningham), Caldwell, Idaho, 1936. Early chapters. OP.
ROE, FRANK GILBERT. _The North American Buffalo_, University of Toronto Press, 1951. A monumental work comprising and critically reviewing virtually all that has been written on the subject and supplanting much of it. No other scholar dealing with the buffalo has gone so fully into the subject or viewed it from so many angles, brought out so many aspects of natural history and human history. In a field where ignorance has often prevailed, Roe has to be iconoclastic in order to be constructive. If his words are sometimes sharp, his mind is sharper. The one indispensable book on the subject.
RYE, EDGAR. _The Quirt and the Spur_, Chicago, 1909. Rye was in the Fort Griffin, Texas, country when buffalo hunters dominated it. OP.
SCHULTZ, JAMES WILLARD. _Apauk, Caller of Buffalo_, New York, 1916. OP. Whether fiction or nonfiction, as claimed by the author, this book realizes the relationships between Plains Indian and buffalo.
WEEKES, MARY. _The Last Buffalo Hunter_ (as told by Norbert Welsh), New York, 1939. OP. The old days recalled with upspringing sympathy. Canada–but buffaloes and buffalo hunters were pretty much the same everywhere.
West Texas Historical Association (Abilene, Texas) _Year Books_. Reminiscences and articles, _passim_.
WILLIAMS, O. W. A privately printed letter of eight unnumbered pages, dated from Fort Stockton, Texas, June 30, 1930, containing the best description of a buffalo stampede that I have encountered. It is reproduced in Dobie’s _On the Open Range_.
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Bears and Bear Hunters
THE BEAR, whether black or grizzly, is a great American citizen. Think of how many children have been put to sleep with bear stories! Facts about the animal are fascinating; the effect he has had on the minds of human beings associated with him transcends naturalistic facts. The tree on which Daniel Boone carved the naked fact that here he “Killed A. Bar In the YEAR 1760” will never die. Davy Crockett killed 105 bars in one season, and his reputation as a bar hunter, plus ability to tell about his exploits, sent him to Congress. He had no other reason for going. The grizzly was the hero of western tribes of Indians from Alaska on down into the Sierra Madre. Among western white men who met him, occasionally in death, the grizzly inspired a mighty saga, the cantos of which lie dispersed in homely chronicles and unrecorded memories as well as in certain vivid narratives by Ernest Thompson Seton, Hittell’s John Capen Adams, John G. Neihardt, and others.
For all that, neither the black bear nor the grizzly has been amply conceived of as an American character. The conception must include a vast amount of folklore. In a chapter on “Bars and Bar Hunters” in _On the Open Range_ and in “Juan Oso” and “Under the Sign of Ursa Major,” chapters of _Tongues of the Monte_, I have indicated the nature of this dispersed epic in folk tales.
In many of the books listed under “Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists” and “Mountain Men” the bear “walks like a man.”
ALTER, J. CECIL. _James Bridger_, Salt Lake City, 1922 reprinted by Long’s College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Contains several versions of the famous Hugh Glass bear story.
HITTELL, THEODORE H. _The Adventures of John Capen Adams_, 1860; reprinted 1911, New York. OP. Perhaps no man has lived who knew grizzlies better than Adams. A rare personal narrative.
MILLER, JOAQUIN. _True Bear Stories_, Chicago, 1900. OP. Truth questionable in places; interest guaranteed.
MILLER, LEWIS B. _Saddles and Lariats_, Boston, 1909. OP. The chapter “In a Grizzly’s Jaws” is a wonderful bear story.
MILLS, ENOS A. _The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1919. Some naturalists have accused Mills of having too much imagination. He saw much and wrote vividly.
NEIHARDT, JOHN G. _The Song of Hugh Glass_, New York, 1915. An epic in vigorous verse of the West’s most famous man-and-bear story. This imagination-rousing story has been told over and over, by J. Cecil Alter in _James Bridger_, by Stanley Vestal in _Mountain Men_, and by other writers.
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Hunting Adventures in the_
{illust. caption =
Charles M. Russell, in _Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage_ by Carrie Adell Strahorn (1915 )
_West_ (1885) and _The Wilderness Hunter_ (1893)–books reprinted in parts or wholly under varying titles. Several narratives of hunts intermixed with baldfaced facts.
SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. _The Biography of a Grizzly_, 1900; now published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York. _Monarch, the Big Bear of Tallac_, 1904. Graphic narratives.
SKINNER, M. P. _Bears in the Yellowstone_, Chicago, 1925. OP. A naturalist’s rounded knowledge, pleasantly told.
STEVENS, MONTAGUE. _Meet Mr. Grizzly_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943. Montague Stevens graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1881 and came to New Mexico to ranch. As respects deductions on observed data, his book is about the most mature yet published by a ranchman. Goodnight experienced more, had a more ample nature, but he lacked the perspective, the mental training, to know what to make of his observations. Another English rancher, R. B. Townshend, had perspective and charm but was not a scientific observer. So far as sense of smell goes, _Meet Mr. Grizzly_ is as good as W. H. Hudson’s _A Hind in Richmond Park_. On the nature and habits of grizzly bears, it is better than _The Grizzly_ by Enos Mills.
WRIGHT, WILLIAM H. _The Grizzly Bear: The Narrative of a Hunter-Naturalist, Historical, Scientific and Adventurous_, New York, 1928. OP. This is not only the richest and justest book published on the grizzly; it is among the best books of the language on specific mammals. Wright had a passion for bears, for their preservation, and for arousing informed sympathy in other people. Yet he did not descend to propaganda. _His The Black Bear_, London, n.d., is good but no peer to his work on the grizzly. Also OP.
_29_
Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers
I SEPARATE COYOTES, lobos, and panthers from the mass of animals because they, along with bears, have made such an imprint on human imagination. White-tailed deer are far more common and more widely dispersed. Men, women also, by the tens of thousands go out with rifles every fall in efforts to get near them; but the night-piercing howl and the cunning ways of the coyote, the panther’s track and the rumor of his scream have inspired more folk tales than all the deer.
Lore and facts about these animals are dispersed in many books not classifiable under natural history. Lewis and Clark and nearly all the other chroniclers of Trans-Mississippi America set down much on wild life. James Pike’s _Scout and Ranger_ details the manner in which, he says, a panther covered him up alive, duplicating a fanciful and delightful tale in Gerstaecker’s _Wild Sports in the Far West_. James B. O’Neil concludes _They Die but Once_ with some “Bedtime Stories” that–almost necessarily–bring in a man-hungry panther.
COYOTES AND LOBOS
The two full-length books on Brother Coyote listed below specify most of the printed literature on the animal. (He is “Brother” in Mexican tales and I feel much more brotherly toward him than I feel toward character assassins in political power.) It would require another book to catalogue in detail all the writings that include folk tales about Don Coyote. Ethnologists and scientific folklorists recognize what they call “the Coyote Circle” in the folklore of many tribes of Indians.
Morris Edward Opler in _Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache Indians_, 1940, and in _Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians_, 1942 (both issued by the American Folklore Society, New York) treats fully of this cycle. Numerous tales that belong to the cycle are included by J. Gilbert McAllister, an anthropologist who writes as a humanist, in his extended collection, “Kiowa-Apache Tales,” in _The Sky Is My Tipi_, edited by Mody C. Boatright for the Texas Folklore Society (Publication XXII), Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1949.
Literary retellers of Indian coyote folk tales have been many. The majority of retellers from western Indians include Coyote. One of the very best is Frank B. Linderman, in _Indian Why Stories_ and _Indian Old-Man Stories_. These titles are substantive: _Old Man Coyote_ by Clara Kern Bayliss (New York, 1908, OP), _Coyote Stories_ by Mourning Dove (Caldwell, Idaho, 1934, OP); _Don Coyote_ by Leigh Peck (Boston, 1941) gets farther away from the Indian, is more juvenile. The _Journal of American Folklore_ and numerous Mexican books have published hundreds of coyote folk tales from Mexico. Among the most pleasingly told are _Picture Tales frown Mexico_ by Dan Storm, 1941 (Lippincott, Philadelphia). The first two writers listed below bring in folklore.
CUSHING, FRANK HAMILTON. _Zuni Breadstuff_, Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, 1920. This extraordinary book, one of the most extraordinary ever written on a particular people, is not made up of coyote lore alone. In it the coyote becomes a character of dignity and destiny, and the telling is epic in dignity as well as in prolongation. Frank Hamilton Cushing was a genius; his sympathy, insight, knowledge, and mastery of the art of writing enabled him to reveal the spirit of the Zuni Indians as almost no other writer has revealed the spirit of any other tribe. Their attitude toward Coyote is beautifully developed. Cushing’s _Zuni Folk Tales_ (Knopf, New York, 1901, 1931) is climactic on “tellings” about Coyote.
DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Voice of the Coyote_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1949. Not only the coyote but his effect on human imagination and ecological relationships. Natural history and folklore; many tales from factual trappers as well as from Mexican and Indian folk. This is a strange book in some ways. If the author had quit at the end of the first chapter, which is on coyote voicings and their meaning to varied listeners, he would still have said something. The book includes some, but by no means all, of the material on the subject in _Coyote Wisdom_ (Publication XIV of the Texas Folklore Society, 1938) edited by J. Frank Dobie and now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas.
GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Wolves and Wolf Nature, in _Trail and Camp-Fire_, New York, 1897. This long chapter is richer in facts about the coyote than anything published prior to _The Voice of the Coyote_, which borrows from it extensively.
LOFBERG, LILA, and MALCOLMSON, DAVID. _Sierra Outpost_, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1941. An extraordinary detailment of the friendship between two people, isolated by snow high in the California Sierras, and three coyotes. Written with fine sympathy, minute in observations.
MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. _Talking to the Moon_, University of Chicago Press, 1945. A wise and spiritual interpretation of the black-jack country of eastern Oklahoma, close to the Osages, in which John Joseph Mathews lives. Not primarily about coyotes, the book illuminates them more than numerous books on particular animals illuminate their subjects.
MURIE, ADOLPH. _Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone_, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., 1940. An example of strict science informed by civilized humanity. _The Wolves of Mount McKinley_, United States Government Printing Of ice, Washington, D. C., 1944. Murie’s combination of prolonged patience, science, and sympathy behind the observations has never been common. His ecological point of view is steady. Highly interesting reading.
YOUNG, STANLEY PAUL (with Edward A. Goldman). _The Wolves of North America_, American Wildlife Institute, Washington, D. C., 1944. Full information, full bibliography, without narrative power. _Sketches of American Wildlife_, Monumental Press, Baltimore, 1946. This slight book contains pleasant chapters on the Puma, Wolf, Coyote, Antelope and other animals characteristic of the West. (With Hartley H. T. Jackson) _The Clever Coyote_, Stackpole, Harrisburg, Pa., and Wildlife Management Institute, Washington, D. C., 1951. Emphasis upon the economic status and control of the species, an extended classification of subspecies, and a full bibliography make this book and Dobie’s _The Voice of the Coyote_ complemental to each other rather than duplicative.
PANTHERS
Anybody who so wishes may call them mountain lions. Where there were Negro mammies, white children were likely to be haunted in the night by fear of ghosts. Otherwise, for some children of the South and West, no imagined terror of the night equaled the panther’s scream. The Anglo-American lore pertaining to the panther is replete with stories of attacks on human beings. Indian and Spanish lore, clear down to where W. H. Hudson of the pampas heard it, views the animal as _un amigo de los cristianos_–a friend of man. The panther is another animal as interesting for what people associated with him have taken to be facts as for the facts themselves.
BARKER, ELLIOTT S. _When the Dogs Barked `Treed’_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946. Mainly on mountain lions, but firsthand observations on other predatory animals also. Before he became state game warden, the author was for years with the United States Forest Service.
HIBBEN, FRANK C. _Hunting American Lions_, New York, 1948; reprinted by University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Mr. Hibben considers hunting panthers and bears a terribly dangerous business that only intrepid heroes like him- self would undertake. Sometimes in this book, but more awesomely in _Hunting American Bears_, he manages to out-zane Zane Grey, who had to warn his boy scout readers and puerile- minded readers of added years that _Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon_ is true in contrast to the fictional _Young Lion Hunter_, which uses some of the same material.
HUDSON, W. H. _The Naturalist in La Plata_, New York, 1892. A chapter in this book entitled “The Puma, or Lion of America” provoked an attack from Theodore Roosevelt (in _Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter_); but it remains the most delightful narrative-essay yet written on the subject.
YOUNG, STANLEY PAUL, and GOLDMAN, EDWARD A. _The Puma, Mysterious American Cat_, American Wildlife Institute, Washington, D. C., 1946. Scientific, liberal with information of human interest, bibliography. We get an analysis of the panther’s scream but it does not curdle the blood.
{illust}
_30_
Birds and Wild Flowers
NEARLY EVERYBODY ENJOYS to an extent the singing of birds and the colors of flowers; to the majority, however, the enjoyment is casual, generalized, vague, in the same category as that derived from a short spell of prattling by a healthy baby. Individuals who study birds and native flora experience an almost daily refreshment of the spirit and growth of the intellect. For them the world is an unending Garden of Delight and a hundred-yard walk down a creek that runs through town or pasture is an exploration. Hardly anything beyond good books, good pictures and music, and good talk is so contributory to the enrichment of life as a sympathetic knowledge of the birds, wild flowers, and other native fauna and flora around us.
The books listed are dominantly scientific. Some include keys to identification. Once a person has learned to use the key for identifying botanical or ornithological species, he can spend the remainder of his life adding to his stature.
BIRDS
BAILEY, FLORENCE MERRIAM. _Birds of New Mexico_, 1928. OP. Said by those who know to be at the top of all state bird books. Much on habits.
BEDICHEK, ROY. _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_ (1947) and _Karankaway Country_ (1950), Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y. These are books of essays on various aspects of nature, but nowhere else can one find an equal amount of penetrating observation on chimney swifts, Inca doves, swallows, golden eagles, mockingbirds, herons, prairie chickens, whooping cranes, swifts, scissortails, and some other birds. As Bedichek writes of them they become integrated with all life.
BRANDT, HERBERT. _Arizona and Its Bird Life_, Bird Research Foundation, Cleveland, 1951. This beautiful, richly illustrated volume of 525 pages lives up to its title; the birds belong to the Arizona country, and with them we get pines, mesquites, cottonwoods, John Slaughter’s ranch, the northward-flowing San Pedro, and many other features of the land. Herbert Brandt’s _Texas Bird Adventures_, illustrated by George Miksch Sutton (Cleveland, 1940), is more on the Big Bend country and ranch country to the north than on birds, though birds are here.
DAWSON, WILLIAM LEON. _The Birds of California_, San Diego, etc., California, 1923. OP. Four magnificent volumes, full in illustrations, special observations on birds, and scientific data.
DOBIE, J. FRANK, who is no more of an ornithologist than he is a geologist, specialized on an especially characteristic bird of the Southwest and gathered its history, habits, and folklore into a long article: “The Roadrunner in Fact and Folklore,” in _In the Shadow of History_, Publication XV of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1939. OP. “Bob More: Man and Bird Man,” _Southwest Review_, Dallas, Vol. XXVII, No. 1 (Autumn, 1941).
NICE, MARGARET MORSE. _The Birds of Oklahoma_, Norman, 1931. OP. United States Biological Survey publication.
OBERHOLSER, HARRY CHURCH. The Birds of Texas in manuscript form. “A stupendous work, the greatest of its genre, by the nation’s outstanding ornithologist, who has been fifty years making it.” The quotation is condensed from an essay by Roy Bedichek in the _Southwest Review_, Dallas, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1 (Winter, 1953). Maybe some day some man or woman with means will see the light of civilized patriotism and underwrite the publication of these great volumes. Patriotism that does not act to promote the beautiful, the true, and the good had better pipe down.
PETERSON, ROGER TORY. _A Field Guide to Western Birds_ (1941) and _A Field Guide to the Birds_ (birds of the eastern United States, revised 1947), Houghton Mifflin, Boston. These are standard guides for identification. The range, habits, and characteristics of each bird are summarized.
SIMMONS, GEORGE FINLEY. _Birds of the Austin Region_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1925. A very thorough work, including migratory as well as nesting species.
SUTTON, GEORGE MIKSCH. _Mexican Birds_, illustrated with water-color and pen-and-ink drawings by the author, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. The main part of this handsome book is a personal narrative–pleasant to read even by one who is not a bird man–of discovery in Mexico. To it is appended a resume of Mexican bird life for the use of other seekers. Sutton’s _Birds in the Wilderness: Adventures of an Ornithologist_ (Macmillan, New York, 1936) contains essays on pet roadrunners, screech owls, and other congenial folk of the Big Bend of Texas. _The Birds of Brewster County, Texas_, in collaboration with Josselyn Van Tyne, is a publication of the Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1937.
_Wild Turkey_. Literature on this national bird is enormous. Among books I name first _The Wild Turkey and Its Hunting_, by Edward A. McIlhenny, New York, 1914. OP. McIlhenny was a singular man. His family settled on Avery Island, Louisiana, in 1832; he made it into a famous refuge for wild fowls. The memories of individuals of a family long established on a country estate go back several lifetimes. In two books of Negro folklore and in _The Alligator’s Life History_, McIlhenny wrote as an inheritor. Initially, he was a hunter- naturalist, but scientific enough to publish in the _Auk_ and the _Journal of Heredity_. Age, desire for knowledge, and practice in the art of living dimmed his lust for hunting and sharpened his interest in natural history. His book on the wild turkey, an extension into publishable form of a manuscript
from a civilized Alabama hunter, is delightful and illuminative reading.
_The Wild Turkey of Virginia_, by Henry S. Mosby and Charles O. Handley, published by the Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries of Virginia, Richmond, 1943, is written from the point of view of wild life management. It contains an extensive bibliography. Less technical is _The American Wild Turkey_, by Henry E. Davis, Small Arms Technical Company, Georgetown, South Carolina, 1949. No strain, or subspecies, of the wild turkey is foreign to any other, but human blends in J. Stokley Ligon, naturalist, are unique. The title of his much-in-little book is _History and Management of Merriam’s Wild Turkey_, New Mexico Game and Fish Commission, through the University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946.
WILD FLOWERS AND GRASSES
The scientific literature on botany of western America is extensive. The list that follows is for laymen as much as for botanists.
BENSON, LYMAN, and DARROW, ROBERT A. _A Manual of Southwestern Desert Trees and Shrubs_, Biological Science Bulletin No. 6, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1944. A thorough work of 411 pages, richly illustrated, with general information added to scientific description.
CARR, WILLIAM HENRY. _Desert Parade: A Guide to Southwestern Desert Plants and Wildlife_, Viking, New York, 1947.
CLEMENTS, FREDERIC E. and EDITH S. _Rocky Mountain Flowers_, H. W. Wilson, New York, 1928. Scientific description, with glossary of terms and key for identification.
COULTER, JOHN M. _Botany of Western Texas_, United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, 1891-94. OP. Nothing has appeared during the past sixty years to take the place of this master opus.
GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. _Horticulture and Horticultur- ists in Early Texas_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1945. Historical-scientific, more technical than the author’s _Naturalists of the Frontier_.
JAEGER, EDMUND C. _Desert Wild Flowers_, Stanford University Press, California, 1940, revised 1947. Scientific but designed for use by any intelligent inquirer.
LUNDELL, CYRUS L., and collaborators. _Flora of Texas_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1942- . A “monumental” work, highly technical, being published part by part.
MCKELVEY, SUSAN DELANO. _Yuccas of the Southwestern United States_, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1938. Definitive work in two volumes.
_Range Plant Handbook_, prepared by the Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1937. A veritable encyclopedia, illustrated.
SCHULZ, ELLEN D. _Texas Wild Flowers_, Chicago, 1928. Good as a botanical guide and also for human uses; includes lore on many plants. OP. _Cactus Culture_, Orange Judd, New York, 1932. Now in revised edition.
SILVIUS, W. A. _Texas Grasses_, published by the author, San Antonio, 1933. A monument, of 782 illustrated pages, to a lifetime’s disinterested following of knowledge “like a star.”
STEVENS, WILLIAM CHASE. _Kansas Wild Flowers_, University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 1948. This is more than a state book, and the integration of knowledge, wisdom, and appreciation of flower life with botanical science makes it appeal to layman as well as to botanist. 463 pages, 774 illustrations. Applicable to the whole plains area.
STOCKWELL, WILLIAM PALMER, and BREAZEALE, LUCRETIA. _Arizona Cacti_, Biological Science Bulletin No. 1, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1933. Beautifully illustrated.
THORNBER, JOHN JAMES, and BONKER, FRANCES. _The Fantastic Clan: The Cactus Family_, New York, 1932. OP.
THORP, BENJAMIN CARROLL. _Texas Range Grasses_, Uni- versity of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. A survey of 168 species of grasses, their adaptability to soils and regions, and their values for grazing. Beautifully illustrated and printed, but no index.
WHITEHOUSE, EULA. _Texas Wild Flowers in Natural Colors_, 1936; republished 1948 in Dallas. OP. Toward 200 flowers are pictured in colors, each in conjunction with descriptive material. The finding lists are designed to enable novices to identify flowers. A charming book.
{illust. caption =
Paisano (roadrunner) means
fellow-countryman}
_31_
Negro Folk Songs and Tales
WEST OF A WAVERING line along the western edge of the central parts of Texas and Oklahoma the Negro is not an important social or cultural element of the Southwest, just as the modern Indian hardly enters into Texas life at all and the Mexican recedes to the east. Negro folk songs and tales of the Southwest have in treatment been blended with those of the South. Dorothy Scarborough’s _On the Trail of Negro Folk- Songs_ (1925, OP) derives mainly from Texas, but in making up the body of a Negro song, Miss Scarborough says, “You may find one bone in Texas, one in Virginia and one in Mississippi.” Leadbelly, a guitar player equally at home in the penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana, furnished John A. and Alan Lomax with _Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly_, New York, 1936 (OP). The Lomax anthologies, _American Ballads and Folk Songs_, 1934, and _Our Singing Country_, 1941 (Macmillan, New York) and Carl Sandburg’s _American Songbag_ (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927) all give the Negro of the Southwest full representation.
Three books of loveliness by R. Emmett Kennedy, _Black Cameos_ (1924), _Mellows_ (1925), and _More Mellows_ (1931) represent Louisiana Negroes. All are OP. An excellent all-American collection is James Weldon Johnson’s _Book of American Negro Spirituals_, Viking, New York, 1940. Bibliographies and lists of other books will be found in _The Negro and His Songs_ (1925, OP) and _Negro Workaday Songs_, by Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1926, and in _American Negro Folk-Songs_, by Newman I. White, Cambridge, 1928.
A succinct guide to Negro lore is _American Folk Song and Folk Lore: A Regional Bibliography_, by Alan Lomax and Sidney R. Crowell, New York, 1942. OP.
Narrowing the field down to Texas, J. Mason Brewer’s “Juneteenth,” in _Tone the Bell Easy_, Publication X of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1932, is outstanding as a collection of tales. In volume after volume the Texas Folklore Society has published collections of Negro songs and tales A. W. Eddins, Martha Emmons, Gates Thomas, and H. B. Parks being principal contributors.
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Fiction–Including Folk Tales
FROM THE DAYS of the first innocent sensations in Beadle’s Dime Novel series, on through Zane Grey’s mass production and up to any present-day newsstand’s crowded shelf of _Ace High_ and _Flaming Guns_ magazines, the Southwest, along with all the rest of the West, has been represented in a fictional output quantitatively stupendous. Most of it has betrayed rather than revealed life, though not with the contemptible contempt for both audience and subject that characterizes most of Hollywood’s pictures on the same times, people, and places. Certain historical aspects of the fictional betrayal of the West may be found in E. Douglas Branch’s _The Cowboy and His Interpreters_, in _The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels_, by Albert Johannsen in two magnificent volumes, and in Jay Monaghan’s _The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline_ Buntline having been perhaps the most prolific of all Wild West fictionists.
Some “Westerns” have a kind of validity. If a serious reader went through the hundreds of titles produced by William McLeod Raine, Dane Coolidge, Eugene Cunningham,. B. M. Bower, the late Ernest Haycox, and other manufacturers of range novels who have known their West at firsthand, he would find, spottedly, a surprising amount of truth about land and men, a fluency in genuine cowboy lingo, and a respect for the code of conduct. Yet even these novels have added to the difficulty that serious writing in the Western field has in getting a hearing on literary, rather than merely Western, grounds. Any writer of Westerns must, like all
other creators, be judged on his own intellectual development. “The Western and Ernest Haycox,” by James Fargo, in _Prairie Schooner_, XXVI (Summer, 1952) has something on this subject.
Actualities in the Southwest seem to have stifled fictional creation. No historical novel dealing with Texas history has achieved the drama of the fall of the Alamo or the drawing of the black beans, has presented a character with half the reality of Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, or Sallie Skull, or has captured the flavor inherent in the talk on many a ranch gallery.
Historical fiction dealing with early day Texas is, however, distinctly maturing. As a dramatization of Jim Bowie and the bowie knife, _The Iron Mistress_, by Paul Wellman (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1951), is the best novel published so far dealing with a figure of the Texas revolution. In _Divine Average_ (Little, Brown, Boston, 1952), Elithe Hamilton Kirkland weaves from her seasoned knowledge of life and from “realities of those violent years in Texas history between 1838 and 1858” a story of human destiny. She reveals the essential nature of Range Templeton more distinctly, more mordantly, than history has revealed the essential nature of Sam Houston or any of his contemporaries. The wife and daughter of Range Templeton are the most plausible women in any historical novel of Texas that I have read. The created world here is more real than the actual.
Among the early tale-tellers of the Southwest are Jeremiah Clemens, who wrote _Mustang Gray_, Mollie E. Moore Davis, of plantation tradition, Mayne Reid, who dared convey real information in his romances, Charles W. Webber, a naturalist, and T. B. Thorpe, creator of “The Big Bear of Arkansas.”
Fiction that appeared before World War I can hardly be called modern. No fiction is likely to appear, however, that will do better by certain types of western character and certain stages of development in western society than that produced by Bret Harte, with his gamblers; stage drivers, and mining camps; O. Henry with his “Heart of the West” types; Alfred Henry Lewis with his “Wolfville” anecdotes and characters; Owen Wister, whose _Virginian_ remains the classic of cowboy novels without cows; and Andy Adams, whose _Log of a Cowboy_ will be read as long as people want a narrative of cowboys sweating with herds.
The authors listed below are in alphabetical order. Those who seem to me to have a chance to survive are not exactly in that order.
FRANK APPLEGATE (died 1932) wrote only two books, _Native Tales of New Mexico_ and _Indian Stories from the Pueblos_, but as a delighted and delightful teller of folk tales his place is secure.
MARY AUSTIN seems to be settling down as primarily an expositor. Her novels are no longer read, but the simple tales in _One-Smoke Stories_ (her last book, 1934) and in some nonfiction collections, notably _Lost Borders_ and _The Flock_, do not recede with time.
While the Southwest can hardly claim Willa Cather, of Nebraska, her _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ (1927), which is made out of New Mexican life, is not only the best-known novel concerned with the Southwest but one of the finest of America.
Despite the fact that it is not on the literary map, Will Levington Comfort’s _Apache_ (1931) remains for me the most moving and incisive piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest that I have found.
If a teller of folk tales and plotless narratives belongs in this chapter, then J. Frank Dobie should be mentioned for the folk tales in _Coronado’s Children, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver_, and _Tongues of the Monte_, also for some of his animal tales in _The Voice of the Coyote_, outlaw and maverick narratives in _The Longhorns_, and “The Pacing White Steed of the Prairies” and other horse stories in _The Mustangs_.
The characters in Harvey Fergusson’s _Wolf Song_ (1927) are the Mountain Men of Kit Carson’s time, and the city of their soul is rollicky Taos. It is a lusty, swift song of the pristine earth. Fergusson’s _The Blood of the Conquerors_ (1931) tackles the juxtaposition of Spanish-Mexican and Anglo- American elements in New Mexico, of which state he is a native. _Grant of Kingdom_ (1850) is strong in wisdom life, vitality of character, and historical values.
FRED GIPSON’S _Hound-Dog Man_ and _The Home Place_ lack the critical attitude toward life present in great fiction but they are as honest and tonic as creek bottom soil and the people in them are genuine.
FRANK GOODWYN’S _The Magic of Limping John_ (New York, 1944, OP) is a coherence of Mexican characters, folk tales, beliefs, and ways in the ranch country of South Texas. There is something of magic in the telling, but Frank Goodwyn has not achieved objective control over imagination or sufficiently stressed the art of writing.
PAUL HORGAN of New Mexico has in _The Return of the Weed_ (short stories), _Far from Cibola_, and other fiction coped with modern life in the past-haunted New Mexico.
OLIVER LAFARGE’S _Laughing Boy_ (1929) grew out of the author’s ethnological knowledge of the Navajo Indians. He achieves character.
TOM LEA’S _The Brave Bulls_ (1949) has, although it is a sublimation of the Mexican bullfighting world, Death and Fear of Death for its dominant theme. It may be compared in theme with Stephen Crane’s _The Red Badge of Courage_. It is written with the utmost of economy, and is beautiful in its power. _The Wonderful Country_ (1952), a historical novel of the frontier, but emphatically not a “Western,” recognizes more complexities of society. Its economy and directness parallel the style of Tom Lea’s drawings and paintings, with which both books are illustrated
_Sundown_, by John Joseph Mathews (1934), goes more profoundly than _Laughing Boy_ into the soul of a young Indian (an Osage) and his people. Its translation of the “long, long thoughts” of the boy and then of “shades of the prison house” closing down upon him is superb writing. The “shades of the prison house” come from oil, with all of the world’s coarse thumbs that go with oil.
GEORGE SESSIONS PERRY’S _Hold Autumn in Your Hand_ (1941) incarnates a Texas farm hand too poor “to flag a gut-wagon,” but with the good nature, dignity, and independence of the earth itself. _Walls Rise Up_ (1939) is a kind of _Crock of Gold_, both whimsical and earthy, laid on the Brazos River.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER is as dedicated to artistic perfection as was A. E. Housman. Her output has, therefore, been limited: _Flowering Judas_ (1930, enlarged 1935); _Pale Horse, Pale Rider_ (1939), _The Leaning Tower_ (1944). Her stories penetrate psychology, especially the psychology of a Mexican hacienda, with rare finesse. Her small canvases sublimate the inner realities of men and women. She appeals only to cultivated taste, and to some tastes no other fiction writer in America today is her peer in subtlety.
EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES died in 1934. Most of his novels– distinguished by intricate plots and bright dialogue–had appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_. His finest story is “Paso Por Aqui,” published in the volume entitled _Once in the Saddle_ (1927). Gene Rhodes, who has a canyon–on which he ranched–named for him in New Mexico, was an artist; at the same time, he was a man akin to his land and its men. He is the only writer of the range country who has been accorded a biography–_The Hired Man on Horseback_, by May D. Rhodes, his wife. See under “Range Life.”
CONRAD RICHTER’S _The Sea of Grass_ (1937) is a kind of prose poem, beautiful and tragic. Lutie, wife of the owner of the grass, is perhaps the most successful creation of a ranch woman that fiction has so far achieved.
DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH’S _The Wind_ (1925) excited the wrath of chambers of commerce and other boosters in West Texas–a tribute to its realism.
_The Grapes of Wrath_, by John Steinbeck (1939), made Okies a word in the American language. Although dated by the Great Depression, its humanity and realism are beyond date. It is among the few good novels produced by America in the first half of the twentieth century.
JOHN W. THOMASON, after fighting as a marine in World War I, wrote _Fix Bayonets_ (1926), followed by _Jeb Stuart_ (1930). A native Texan, he followed the southern tradition rather than the western. _Lone Star Preacher_ (1941) is a strong and sympathetic characterization of Confederate fighting men woven into fictional form.
In _High John the Conqueror_ (Macmillan, 1948) John W. Wilson conveys real feeling for the tragic life of Negro sharecroppers in the Brazos bottoms. He represents the critical awareness of life that has come to modern fiction of the Southwest, in contrast to the sterile action, without creation of character, in most older fiction of the region.
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Poetry and Drama
“KNOWLEDGE itself is power,” Sir Francis Bacon wrote in classical Latin, and in abbreviated form the proverb became a familiar in households and universities alike. But knowledge of what? There is no power in knowledge of mediocre verse.
I had rather flunk my Wasserman test Than read a poem by Edgar A. Guest.
The power of great poetry lies not in knowledge of it but in assimilation of it. Most talk about poetry is vacuous. Poetry can pass no power into any human being unless it itself has power–power of beauty, truth, wit, humor, pathos, satire, worship, and other attributes, always through form. No poor poetry is worth reading. Taste for the best makes the other kind insipid.
Compared with America’s best poetry, most poetry of the Southwest is as mediocre as American poetry in the mass is as compared with the great body of English poetry between Chaucer and Masefield. Yet mediocre poetry is not so bad as mediocre sculpture. The mediocre in poetry is merely fatuous; in sculpture, it is ugly. Generations to come will have to look at Coppini’s monstrosity in front of the Alamo; it can’t rot down or burn up. Volumes of worthless verse, most of it printed at the expense of the versifiers, hardly come to sight, and before long they disappear from existence except for copies religiously preserved in public libraries.
Weak fiction goes the same way. But a good deal of very bad prose in the nonfiction field has some value. In an otherwise dull book there may be a solitary anecdote, an isolated observation on a skunk, a single gesture of some human being otherwise highly unimportant, one salty phrase, a side glimpse into the human comedy. If poetry is not good, it is positively nothing.
The earliest poet of historical consequence the only form of his poetical consequence–of the Southwest was Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. He led the Texas cavalry at San Jacinto, became president of the Republic of Texas, organized the futile Santa Fe Expedition, gathered up six volumes of notes and letters for a history of Texas that might have been as raw-meat realistic as anything in Zola or Tolstoy. Then as a poet he reached his climax in “The Daughter of Mendoza”–a graceful but moonshiny imitation of Tom Moore and Lord Byron. Perhaps it is better for the weak to imitate than to try to be original.
It would not take one more than an hour to read aloud all the poetry of the Southwest that could stand rereading. At the top of all I should place Fay Yauger’s “Planter’s Charm,” published in a volume of the same title. With it belongs “The Hired Man on Horseback,” by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a long poem of passionate fidelity to his own decent kind of men, with power to ennoble the reader, and with the form necessary to all beautiful composition. This is the sole and solitary piece of poetry to be found in all the myriads of rhymes classed as “cowboy poetry.” I’d want Stanley Vestal’s “Fandango,” in a volume of the same title. Margaret Bell Houston’s “Song from the Traffic,” which takes one to the feathered mesquites and the bluebonnets, might come next. Begging pardon of the perpetually palpitating New Mexico lyricists, I would skip most of them, except for bits of Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Haniel Long, and maybe somebody I don’t know, and go to George Sterling’s “Father Coyote”–in California. Probably I would come back to gallant Phil LeNoir’s “Finger of Billy the Kid,” written while he was dying of tuberculosis in New Mexico. I wouldn’t leave without the swift, brilliantly economical stanzas that open the
ballad of “Sam Bass,” and a single line, “He came of a solitary race,” in the ballad of “Jesse James.”
Several other poets have, of course, achieved something for mortals to enjoy and be lifted by. Their work has been sifted into various anthologies. The best one is_ Signature of the Sun: Southwest Verse, 1900-1950_, selected and edited by Mabel Major and T. M. Pearce, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950. Two other anthologies are _Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp_, by John A. Lomax, 1919, reprinted in 1950 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York; _The Road to Texas_, by Whitney Montgomery, Kaleidograph, Dallas, 1940. Montgomery’s Kaleidograph Press has published many volumes by southwestern poets. Somebody who has read them all and has read all the poets represented, without enough of distillation, in _Signature of the Sun_ could no doubt be juster on the subject than I am.
Like historical fiction, drama of the Southwest has been less dramatic than actuality and less realistic than real characters. Lynn Riggs of Oklahoma, author of _Green Grow the Lilacs_, has so far been the most successful dramatist.
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Miscellaneous Interpreters and Institutions
ARTISTS
ART MAY BE SUBSTANTIVE, but more than being its own excuse for being, it lights up the land it depicts, shows people what is significant, cherishable in their own lives and environments. Thus Peter Hurd of New Mexico has revealed windmills, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri has elevated mules. Nature may not literally follow art, but human eyes follow art and literature in recognizing nature.
The history of art in the Southwest, if it is ever rightly written, will not bother with the Italian “Holy Families” imported by agent-guided millionaires trying to buy exclusiveness. It will begin with clay (Indian pottery), horse hair (vaquero weaving), hide (vaquero plaiting), and horn (backwoods carving). It will note Navajo sand painting and designs in blankets.
Charles M. Russell’s art has been characterized in the chapter on “Range Life.” He had to paint, and the Old West was his life. More versatile was his contemporary Frederic Remington, author of _Pony Tracks, Crooked Trails_, and other books, and prolific illustrator of Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Henry Lewis, and numerous other writers of the West. Not so well known as these two, but rising in estimation, was Charles Schreyvogle. He did not write; his best-known pictures are reproduced in a folio entitled _My Bunkie and Others_. Remington, Russell, and Schreyvogle all did superb sculptoring in bronze. One of the
finest pieces of sculpture in the Southwest is “The Seven Mustangs” by A. Phimister Proctor, in front of the Texas Memorial Museum at Austin.
Among contemporary artists, Ross Santee and Will James (died, 1942) have illustrated their own cow country books, some of which are listed under “Range Life” and “Horses.” William R. Leigh, author of _The Western Pony_, is a significant painter of the range. Edward Borein of Santa Barbara, California, has in scores of etchings and a limited amount of book illustrations “documented” many phases of western life. Buck Dunton of Taos illustrated also. His lithographs and paintings of wild animals, trappers, cowboys, and Indians seem secure.
I cannot name and evaluate modern artists of the Southwest. They are many, and the excellence of numbers of them is nationally recognized. Many articles have been written about the artists who during this century have lived around Taos and painted that region of the Southwest. Some of the better-known names are Ernest L. Blumenschein, Oscar Berninghaus, Ward Lockwood, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ila McAfee, Barbara Latham Cook, Howard Cook. Artists thrive in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas as well as in New Mexico. Tom Lea, of El Paso, may be quitting painting and drawing to spend the remainder of his life in writing. Perhaps he himself does not know. Jerry Bywaters, who is at work on the history of art in the Southwest, has about quit producing to direct the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Alexandre Hogue gives his strength to teaching art in Tulsa University. Exhibitions, not commentators, are the revealers of art.
A few books, all expensive, reproduce the art of certain depicters of the West and Southwest. _Etchings of the West_, by Edward Borein, and _The West of Alfred Jacob Miller_ have been noted in other chapters (consult Index). Other recent art works are: _Peter Hurd: Portfolio of Landscapes and Portraits_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950; _Gallery of Western Paintings_, edited by Raymond Carlson, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1951 (unsatisfactory reproduction); _Frederic Remington, Artist of the Old West_, by Harold McCracken, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1947 (biography and check list with many reproductions); _Portrait of the Old West_, by Harold McCracken, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1952 (samplings of numerous artists).
In February, 1946, Robert Taft of the University of Kansas began publishing in the _Kansas Historical Quarterly_ chapters, richly illustrated in black and white, in “The Pictorial Record of the Old West.” The book to be made from these chapters will have a historical validity missing in most picture books.
MAGAZINES
The leading literary magazine of the region is the _Southwest Review_, published quarterly at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. The _New Mexico Quarterly_, published by the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, the _Arizona Quarterly_, published by the University of Arizona at Tucson the _Colorado Quarterly_, published by the University of Colorado at Boulder, and _Prairie Schooner_, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, are excellent exponents of current writing in the Southwest and West. All these magazines are liberated from provincialism.
HISTORICAL SOCIETIES
Every state in the Southwest has a state historical organization that publishes. The oldest and most productive of these, outside of California, is the Texas State Historical Association, with headquarters at Austin.
HISTORIES
A majority of the state histories of the Southwest have been written with the hope of securing an adoption for school use. It would require a blacksnake whip to make most juve- niles, or adults either, read these productions, as devoid of picturesqueness, life-blood, and intellectual content as so many concrete slabs. No genuinely humanistic history of the Southwest has ever been printed. There are good factual histories–and a history not based on facts can’t possibly be good–but the lack of synthesis, of intelligent evaluations, of imagination, of the seeing eye and portraying hand is too evident. The stuff out of which history is woven–diaries, personal narratives, county histories, chronicles of ranches and trails, etc.–has been better done than history itself.
FOLKLORE
Considered scientifically, folklore belongs to science and not to the humanities. When folk and fun are not scienced out of it, it is song and story and in literature is mingled with other ingredients of life and art, as exampled by the folklore in _Hamlet_ and _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. In “Indian Culture,” “Spanish-Mexican Strains,” “Backwoods Life and Humor,” “Cowboy Songs,” “The Bad Man Tradition,” “Bears,” “Coyotes,” “Negro Folk Songs and Tales,” and other chapters of this _Guide_ numerous books charged with folklore have been listed.
The most active state society of its kind in America has been the Texas Folklore Society, with headquarters at the University of Texas, Austin. Volume XXIV of its Publications appeared in 1951, and it has published and distributed other books. Its Publications are now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press in Dallas. J. Frank Dobie, with constant help, was editor from 1922 to 1943, when he resigned. Since 1943 Mody C. Boatright has been editor.
In 1947 the New Mexico Folklore Society began publishing yearly the _New Mexico Folklore Record_. It is printed by the University of New Mexico Press. The University of Arizona, Tucson, has published several folklore bulletins. The California Folklore Society publishes, through the University of California Press, Berkeley, _Western Folklore_, a quarterly.
In co-operation with the Southeastern Folklore Society, the University of Florida, Gainesville, publishes the _Southern Folklore Quarterly_. Levette J. Davidson of the University of Denver, author of _A Guide to American Folklore_, University of Denver Press, 1951, directs the Western Folklore Conference. The _Journal of American Folklore_ has published a good deal from the Southwest and Mexico. The Sociedad Folklorica de Mexico publishes its own _Anurio_. Between 1929 and 1932, B. A. Botkin, editor of _A Treasury of Southern Folklore_, 1949, and A _Treasury of Western Folklore_, 1951 (Crown, New York), brought out four volumes entitled _Folk- Say_, University of Oklahoma Press. OP. The volumes are significant for literary utilizations of folklore and interpretations of folks.
MUSEUMS
Museums do not belong to the DAR. Their perspective on the past is constructive. The growing museums in Santa Fe, Tucson, Phoenix, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Denver, and on west into California represent the art, fauna, flora, geology, archeology, occupations, transportation, architecture, and other phases of the Southwest in a way that may be more informing than many printed volumes.
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Subjects for Themes
THE OBJECT OF THEME-WRITING is to make a student observe, to become aware, to evaluate, to enrich himself. Any phase of life or literature named or suggested in the foregoing chapters could be taken as a subject for an essay. The most immature essay must be more than a summary; a mere summary is never an essay. The writer must synthesize, make his own combination of thoughts, facts, incidents, characteristics, anecdotes, interpretations, illustrations, according to his own pattern. A writer is a weaver, weaving various threads of various hues and textures into a design that is his own.
“Look into thy heart and write.” “Write what you know about.” All this is good advice in a way–but students have to write themes whether they have anything to write or not. The way to get full of a subject, to generate a conveyable interest, is to fill up on the subject. As clouds are but transient forms of matter that “change but cannot die,” so most writing, even the best, is but a variation in form of experiences, ideas, observations, emotions that have been recorded over and over.
In general, the materials a student weaves are derived from three sources: what he has read, what he has heard, what he has observed and experienced himself. If he chooses to sketch an interesting character, he will make his sketch richer and more interesting if he reads all he can find that illuminates his subject’s background. If he sets out to tell a legend or a series of related folk tales or anecdotes, he will improve his telling by reading what he can on the subjects that his proposed narratives treat of and by reading similar narratives already written by others. If he wishes to tell what he knows about rattlesnakes, buzzards, pet coyotes, Brahma cattle, prickly pear, cottonwoods, Caddo Lake, the Brazos River, Santa Fe adobes, or other features of the land, let him bolster and put into perspective his own knowledge by reading what others have said on the matter. Knowledge fosters originality. Reading gives ideas.
The list of subjects that follows is meant to be suggestive, and must not be regarded as inclusive. The best subject for any writer is one that he is interested in. A single name or category may afford scores of subjects. For example, take Andy Adams, the writer about cowboys and range life. His campfire yarns, the attitude of his cowboys toward their horses, what he has to say about cows, the metaphor of the range as he has recorded it, the placidity of his cowboys as opposed to Zane Grey sensationalism, etc., are a few of the subjects to be derived from a study of his books. Or take a category like “How the Early Settlers Lived.” Pioneer food, transportation, sociables, houses, neighborliness, loneliness, living on game meat, etc., make subjects. Almost every subject listed below will suggest either variations or associated subjects.
The Humor of the Southwest
Similes from Nature (Crockett is rich in them) The Code of Individualism
The Code of the Range
Six-shooter Ethics
The Right to Kill
The Tradition of Cowboy Gallantry
(read Owen Wister’s _The
Virginian_ and _A Journey in Search of Christmas;_ also novels by
Eugene Manlove Rhodes)
Frontier Hospitality
Amusements (shooting matches,
tournaments, play parties, dances, poker, horse races, quiltings,
house-raisings)
The Western Gambler (Bret Harte
and Alfred Henry Lewis have
idealized him in fiction; he might be contrasted with the Mississippi
River gambler)
Indian Captives
The Age of Horse Culture (Spanish,
Indian, Anglo-American; the
horse was important enough to
any one of these classes to
warrant extended study)
The Cowboy’s Horse
The Cowboy Myth (Mody Boat-
right is writing a book on the subject) Evolution of the Frontier Criminal Lawyer The Frontier Intellect in the Atomic Age British Chroniclers of the West
Civilized Perspective in Writings on the Old West The Indian in Fiction
Fictional Betrayal of the West
The West in Reality and the West on the Screen Around the Chuck Wagon: Cowboy Yarns
Stretching the Blanket
Authentic Liars
Recent Fiction of the Southwest
(any writer worth writing about)
Literary Magazines of the Southwest Ranch Women
Mexican Labor (on ranch, farm,
or in town)
Mexican Folk Tales
Backwoods Life in Frederick Gerstaecker “The Old Catdeman” in Alfred
Henry Lewis’ _Wolfville_ Books
Mayne Reid as an Exponent of the
Southwest (see estimate of him
in _Mesa, Canon and Pueblo_,
by Charles F. Lummis)
The Gunman in Fiction and Reality
(O. Henry, Bret Harte, Alfred
Henry Lewis; _The Saga of Billy
the Kid_, by Walter Noble Burns;
Gillett’s _Six Years with the Texas Rangers;_ Webb’s _The Texas
Rangers;_ Lake’s _Wyatt Earp)_
Character of the Trail Drivers
Cowboy’s Life as Reflected in His Songs “Wrathy to Kill a Bear” (the
frontiersman as a destroyer of wild life) “I Thought I Might See Something to Shoot at” Anecdotes of the Stump Speaker
Exempla of Revivalists and Campmeeting Preachers The Campmeeting
Stagecoaching
Life on the Santa Fe Trail
The Rendezvous of the Mountain Men
In the Covered Wagon
Squatter Life
No Shade
From Grass to Wheat
From Wheat to Dust
Brush (a special study of prickly
pear, the mesquite, or some other
form of flora could be made)
Cotton (whole books are suggested
here, the tenant farmer being one
of the subjects)
Oil Booms
Longhorns
Coyote Stories
Deer Nature, or Whitetails and
Their Hunters
Rattlesnakes, or Rattlesnake Stories Panther Stories
Tarantula Lore
Grasshopper Plagues
The Javelina in Fact and in Folk Tale The Roadrunner (Paisano)
Wild Turkeys
The Poisoned-Out Prairie Dog
Sheep
Vanishing Sheep Herders
The Bee Hunter
Pot Hunters
Buffalo Hunters
The Bar Hunter and Bar Stories
Indian Fighter
Indian Hater
Scalps
Squaw Men
Mountain Men and Grizzlies
Scouts and Guides
Stage Drivers
Fiddlers and Fiddle Tunes
Frontier Justices of the Peace
(Roy Bean set the example)
Horse Traders
Horse Racers
Newspapermen
Frontier Schoolteacher
Circuit Rider
Pony Express Rider
Folk Tales of My Community
Flavorsome Characters of My Community Stanley Vestal
Harvey Fergusson
Kansas Cow Towns
Drought and Thirst
Washington Irving on the West
Witty Repartee in Eugene Manlove Rhodes Bigfoot Wallace’s Humor
Charles M. Russell as Artist of the West (or any other western artist)
Learning to See Life Around Me
Features of My Own Cultural
Inheritance
I Heard It Back Home
Family Traditions
My Family’s Interesting Character
Doodlebugs in the Sand
Bobwhites
Blue Quail
Coachwhips and Other Good Snakes
Mockingbird Habits
Jack Rabbit Lore
Catfish Lore
Herb Remedies
“Criticism of Life” in Southwestern Fiction
Intellectual Integrity in________________ (Name of writer or writers or
some locally prominent newspaper
to be supplied)
{pages 197 – 222 are an Index — these were not OCR’d}
End of Etext of Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest