Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest

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Guide to Life and Literature
of the
Southwest

REVISED AND ENLARGED IN BOTH KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

J. FRANK DOBIE

DALLAS . 1952

SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY PRESS

_Not copyright in 1942
Again not copyright in 1952_

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

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 52-11834

S.M.U. PRESS

Contents

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

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

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

A Preface With Some Revised Ideas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_1_

A Declaration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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