Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest

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

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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.

_32_

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.

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