Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest

J >> J. Frank Dobie >> Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest

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The story of the American Indian is--despite taboos and
squalor--a story of harmonizations with nature. "Wolf
Brother," in _Long Lance_, by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance,
is a poetic concretion of this harmony. As much at ease with
the wilderness as any Blackfoot Indian was George Frederick
Ruxton, educated English officer and gentleman, who rode
horseback from Vera Cruz to the Missouri River and wrote
_Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains_. In this book
he tells how a lobo followed him for days from camp to camp,
waiting each evening for his share of fresh meat and sometimes
coming close to the fire at night. Any orthodox American would
have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton had the
civilized perspective on nature represented by Thoreau
and Saint Francis of Assisi. Primitive harmony was run over by
frontier wrath to kill, a wrath no less barbaric than
primitive superstitions.

But the coyote's howl is more tonic than all theories about
nature; the buck's whistle more invigorating; the bull's
bellow in the canyon more musical; the call of the bobwhite
more serene; the rattling of the rattlesnake more logical; the
scream of the panther more arousing to the imagination; the
odor from the skunk more lingering; the sweep of the buzzard
in the air more majestical; the wariness of the wild turkey
brighter; the bark of the prairie dog lighter; the guesses of
the armadillo more comical; the upward dartings and dippings
of the scissortail more lovely; the flight of the sandhill
cranes more fraught with mystery.

There is an abundance of printed information on the animal
life of America, to the west as well as to the east. Much of
it cannot be segregated; the earthworm, on which Darwin wrote
a book, knows nothing of regionalism. The best books on nature
come from and lead to the Grasshopper's Library, which is free
to all consultants. I advise the consultant to listen to the
owl's hoot for wisdom, plant nine bean rows for peace, and,
with Wordsworth, sit on an old gray stone listening for
"authentic tidings of invisible things." Studies are only to
"perfect nature." In the words of Mary Austin, "They that make
the sun noise shall not fail of the sun's full recompense."

Like knowledge in any other department of life, that on nature
never comes to a stand so long as it has vitality. A
continuing interest in natural history is nurtured by _Natural
History_, published by the American Museum of Natural History,
New York; _Nature_, published in Washington, D. C.; _The
Living Wilderness_, also from Washington; _Journal of
Mammalogy_, a quarterly, Baltimore, Maryland; _Audubon
Magazine_ (formerly _Bird Lore_), published by the National
Audubon Society, New York; _American Forests_, Washington, D.
C., and various other publications.

In addition to books of natural history interest listed below,
others are listed under "Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters,"
"Bears and Bear Hunters," "Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers,"
"Birds and Wild Flowers," and "Interpreters." Perhaps a
majority of worthy books pertaining to the western half of
America look on the outdoors.

ADAMS, W. H. DAVENPORT (from the French of Benedict Revoil).
_The Hunter and the Trapper of North America_, London, 1875. A
strange book.

ARNOLD, OREN. _Wild Life in the Southwest_, Dallas, 1936.
Helpful chapters on various characteristic animals and plants.
OP.

BAILEY, VERNON. _Mammals of New Mexico_, United States
Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Biological Survey,
Washington, D. C., 1931. _Biological Survey of Texas_, 1905.
OP. The "North American Fauna Series," to which these two
books belong, contains or points to the basic facts covering
most of the mammals of the Southwest.

BAILLIE-GROHMAN, WILLIAM A. _Camps in the Rockies_, 1882. A
true sportsman, Baillie-Grohman was more interested in living
animals than in just killing. OP.

BEDICHEK, ROY. _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_,
Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1947. To be personal, Roy
Bedichek has the most richly stored mind I have ever met; it
is as active as it is full. Liberal in the true sense of the
word, it frees other minds. Here, using facts as a means, it
gives meanings to the hackberry tree, limestone, mockingbird,
Inca dove, Mexican primrose, golden eagle, the Davis
Mountains, cedar cutters, and many another natural phenomenon.
_Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_ is regarded by some good
judges as the wisest book in the realm of natural history
produced in America since Thoreau wrote.

The title of Bedichek's second book, _Karankaway Country_
(Garden City, 1950), is misleading. The Karankawa Indians
start it off, but it goes to coon inquisitiveness, prairie
chicken dances, the extinction of species to which the
whooping crane is approaching, browsing goats, dignified
skunks, swifts in love flight, a camp in the brush, dust,
erosion, silt--always with thinking added to seeing. The
foremost naturalist of the Southwest, Bedichek constantly
relates nature to civilization and human values.

BROWNING, MESHACH. _Forty-Four Years of the Life of a Hunter_,
1859; reprinted, Philadelphia, 1928. Prodigal on bear and
deer.

CAHALANE, VICTOR H. _Mammals of North America_, Macmillan, New
York, 1947. The author is a scientist with an open mind on the
relationships between predators and game animals. His thick,
delightfully illustrated book is the best dragnet on American
mammals extant. It contains excellent lists of references.

CATON, JUDGE JOHN DEAN. _Antelope and Deer of America_, 1877.
Standard work. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Longhorns_ (1941) and _The Mustangs_
(1952), while hardly to be catalogued as natural history
books, go farther into natural history than most books on
cattle and horses go. _On the Open Range_ (1931; reprinted by
Banks Upshaw, Dallas) contains a number of animal stories more
or less true. Ben Lilly of _The Ben Lilly Legend_ (Boston,
1950) thought that God had called him to hunt. He spent his
life, therefore, in hunting. He saw some things in nature
beyond targets.

DODGE, RICHARD I. _The Hunting Grounds of the Great West_,
London, 1877. Published in New York the same year under title
of _The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants_.
Outstanding survey of outstanding wild creatures.

DUNRAVEN, EARL OF. _The Great Divide_, London, 1876; reprinted
under title of _Hunting in the Yellowstone_, 1925. OP.

ELLIOTT, CHARLES (editor). _Fading Trails_, New York, 1942.
Humanistic review of characteristic American wild life. OP.

FLACK, CAPTAIN. _The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the
Backwoods_, 1866; another form of _A Hunter's Experience in
the Southern States of America_, by Captain Flack, "The
Ranger," London, 1866.

GANSON, EVE. _Desert Mavericks_, Santa Barbara, California,
1928. Illustrated; delightful. OP.

GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. _Naturalists of the Frontier_, Southern
Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1937; revised and enlarged
edition, 1948. Biographies of men who were characters as well
as scientists, generally in environments alien to their
interests.

GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. _Wild Sports in the Far West_, 1854. A
translation from the German. Delightful reading and revealing
picture of how backwoodsmen of the Mississippi Valley "lived
off the country."

GRAHAM, GID. _Animal Outlaws_, Collinsville, Oklahoma, 1938.
OP. A remarkable collection of animal stories. Privately
printed.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Between 1893 and 1913, Grinnell, partly
in collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt, edited five volumes
for The Boone and Crockett Club that contain an extraordinary
amount of information, written mostly by men of civilized
perspective, on bears, deer, mountain sheep, buffaloes,
cougars, elk, wolves, moose, mountains, and forests. The
series, long out of print, is a storehouse of knowledge not to
be overlooked by any student of wild life in the West. The
titles are: _American Big-Game Hunting_, 1893; _Hunting in
Many Lands_, 1895; _Trail and Camp-Fire_, 1897; _American Big
Game in Its Haunts_, 1904; _Hunting at High Altitudes_, 1913.

GRINNELL, JOSEPH; DIXON, JOSEPH S.; and LINSDALE, JEAN M.
_Fur-Bearing Mammals of California: Their Natural History,
Systematic Status, and Relation to Man_, two volumes,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1937. The king, so
far, of all state natural histories.

HALL, E. RAYMOND. _Mammals of Nevada_, University of
California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946. So far as
my knowledge goes, this is the only respect-worthy book extant
pertaining to the state whose economy is based on fees from
divorces and gambling and whose best-known citizen is Senator
Pat McCarran.

HARTMAN, CARL G. _Possum_, University of Texas Press, Austin,
1952. This richly illustrated book comprehends

{illust. caption =
Charles M. Russell, in _The Blazed Trail of the
Old Frontier_ by Agnes C. Laut (1926)}

everything pertaining to the subject from prehistoric
marsupium to baking with sweet potatoes in a Negro cabin. It
is the outcome of a lifetime's scientific investigation not
only of possums but of libraries and popular talk. Thus, in
addition to its biographical and natural history aspects, it
is a study in the evolution of man's knowledge about one of
the world's folkiest creatures.

HORNADAY, WILLIAM T. _Camp Fires on Desert and Lava_, London,
n.d. OP. Dr. Hornaday, who died in 1937, was the first
director of the New York Zoological Park. He was a great
conservationist and an authority on the wild life of America.

HUDSON, W. H. _The Naturalist in La Plata_, New York, 1892.
Not about the Southwest or even North America, but
Hudson's chapters on "The Puma," "Some Curious Animal
Weapons," "The Mephitic Skunk," "Humming Birds," "The Strange
Instincts of Cattle," "Horse and Man," etc. come home to the
Southwest. Few writers tend to make readers so aware; no other
has written so delightfully of the lands of grass.

INGERSOLL, ERNEST. _Wild Neighbors_, New York, 1897. OP. A
superior work. Chapter II, "The Father of Game," is on the
cougar; Chapter IV, "The Hound of the Plains," is on the
coyote; there is an excellent essay on the badger. Each
chapter is provided with a list of books affording more
extended treatment of the subject.

JAEGER, EDMUND C. _Denizens of the Desert_, Boston, 1922. OP.
"Don Coyote," the roadrunner, and other characteristic
animals. _Our Desert Neighbors_, Stanford University Press,
California, 1950.

LOCKE, LUCIE H. _Naturally Yours, Texas_, Naylor, San Antonio,
1949. Charm must never be discounted; it is far rarer than
facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book
is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable
black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo,
sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens
of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list
to which it is akin is Eve Ganson's _Desert Mavericks_.

LUMHOLTZ, CARL. _Unknown Mexico_, New York, 1902. Nearly
anything about animals as well as about Indians and mountains
of Mexico may be found in this extraordinary two-volume work.
OP.

MCILHENNY, EDWARD A. _The Alligator s Life History_, Boston,
1935. OP. The alligator got farther west than is generally
known--at least within reach of Laredo and Eagle Pass on the
Rio Grande. McIlhenny's book treats--engagingly, intimately,
and with precision--of the animal in Louisiana. Hungerers for
anatomical biology are referred to _The Alligator and Its
Allies_ by A. M. Reese, New York, 1915. I have more to say
about McIlhenny in Chapter 30.

MARCY, COLONEL R. B. _Thirty Years of Army Life on the
Border_, New York, 1866. Marcy had a scientific mind and a
high sense of values. He knew how to write and what he wrote
remains informing and pleasant.

MARTIN, HORACE T. _Castorologia, or The History and Traditions
of the Canadian Beaver_, London, 1892. OP. The beaver is a
beaver, whether on Hudson's Bay or the Mexican side of the Rio
Grande. Much has been written on this animal, the propeller of
the trappers of the West, but this famous book remains the
most comprehensive on facts and the amplest in conception. The
author was humorist as well as scientist.

MENGER, RUDOLPH. _Texas Nature Observations and
Reminiscences_, San Antonio, 1913. OP. Being of an educated
German family, Dr. Menger found many things in nature more
interesting than two-headed calves.

MILLS, ENOS. _The Rocky Mountain Wonderland, Wild Life on the
Rockies, Waiting in the Wilderness_, and other books. Some
naturalists have taken exception to some observations recorded
by Mills; nevertheless, he enlarges and freshens mountain
life.

MUIR, JOHN. _The Mountains of California, Our National Parks_,
and other books. Muir, a great naturalist, had the power to
convey his wise sympathies and brooded-over knowledge.

MURPHY, JOHN MORTIMER. _Sporting Adventures in the Far West_,
London, 1879. One of the earliest roundups of game animals of
the West.

NEWSOME, WILLIAM M. _The Whitetailed Deer_, New York, 1926.
OP. Standard work.

PALLISER, JOHN. _The Solitary Hunter; or Storting Adventures
in the Prairies_, London, 1857.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter_,
with a chapter entitled "Books on Big Game"; _Hunting
Adventures in the West; The Wilderness Hunter; Ranch Life and
the Hunting Trail; A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open; The
Deer Family_ (in collaboration).

SEARS, PAUL B. _Deserts on the March_, University of Oklahoma
Press, Norman, 1935. Dramatic picturization of the forces of
nature operating in what droughts of the 1930's caused to be
called "the Dust Bowl." "Drought and Wind and Man" might be
another title.

SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. _Wild Animals I Have Known; Lives of
the Hunted_. Probably no other writer of America has aroused
so many people, young people especially, to an interest in our
wild animals. Natural history encyclopedias he has authored
are _Life Histories of Northern Animals_, New York, 1920, and
_Lives of Game Animals_, New York, 1929. Seton's final
testament, _Trail of an Artist Naturalist_ (Scribner's, New
York, 1941), has a deal on wild life of the Southwest.

THORPE, T. B. _The Hive of the Bee-Hunter_, New York, 1854.
OP. Juicy.

WARREN, EDWARD ROYAL. _The Mammals of Colorado_, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942. OP.

_27_

Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters

THE LITERATURE on the American bison, more popularly called
buffalo, is enormous. Nearly everything of consequence
pertaining to the Plains Indians touches the animal. The
relationship of the Indian to the buffalo has nowhere been
better stated than in Note 49 to the Benavides _Memorial_,
edited by Hodge and Lummis. "The Great Buffalo Hunt at
Standing Rock," a chapter in _My Friend the Indian_ by James
McLaughlin, sums up the hunting procedure; other outstanding
treatments of the buffalo in Indian books are to be found in
_Long Lance_ by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance; _Letters and
Notes on . . . the North American Indians_ by George Catlin;
_Forty Years a Fur Trader_ by Charles Larpenteur. Floyd B.
Streeter's chapter on "The Buffalo Range" in _Prairie Trails
and Cow Towns_ lists twenty-five sources of information.

The bibliography that supersedes all other bibliographies is
in the book that supersedes all other books on the subject--
Frank Gilbert Roe's _The North American Buffalo_. More about
it in the list that follows.

Nearly all men who got out on the plains were "wrathy to kill"
buffaloes above all else. The Indians killed in great numbers
but seldom wastefully. The Spaniards were restrained by Indian
hostility. Mountain men, emigrants crossing the plains, Santa
Fe traders, railroad builders, Indian fighters, settlers on
the edge of the plains, European sportsmen, all slaughtered
and slew. Some observed, but the average American hunter's
observations on game animals are about as illuminating as the
trophy-stuffed den of a rich oilman or the

{illust. caption = Harold D. Bugbee: Buffaloes

lockers of a packing house. Lawrence of Arabia won his name
through knowledge and understanding of Arabian life and
through power to lead and to write. Buffalo Bill won his name
through power to exterminate 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_.

_25_

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.

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