Guide to Life and Literature
of the
Southwest

REVISED AND ENLARGED IN BOTH KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

J. FRANK DOBIE

DALLAS . 1952

SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY PRESS

_Not copyright in 1942
Again not copyright in 1952_

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

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 52-11834

S.M.U. PRESS

Contents

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

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

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

A Preface With Some Revised Ideas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hundreds of the books listed in this _Guide_ have given
me pleasure as well as particles for the mosaic work of my
own books; but, with minor exceptions, they increasingly
seem to me to explore only the exteriors of life. There is in
them much good humor but scant wit. The hunger for
something afar is absent or battened down. Drought blasts
the turf, but its unhealing blast to human hope is glossed
over. The body's thirst for water is a recurring theme, but
human thirst for love and just thinking is beyond consideration.
Horses run with their riders to death or victory, but
fleeting beauty haunts no soul to the "doorway of the dead."