Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest
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J. Frank Dobie >> Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest
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A great deal of chronicle writing that makes no pretense
at being belles-lettres is really superior literature to much
that is so classified. I will vote three times a day and all night
for John C. Duval's _Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace_, Charlie
Siringo's _Riata and Spurs_, James B. Gillett's _Six Years with
the Texas Rangers_, and dozens of other straightaway chronicles
of the Southwest in preference to "The Culprit Fay" and
much other watery "literature" with which anthologies
representing the earlier stages of American writing are padded.
Ike Fridge's pamphlet story of his ridings for John Chisum--
chief provider of cattle for Billy the Kid to steal--has more
of the juice of reality in it and, therefore, more of literary
virtue than some of James Fenimore Cooper's novels, and
than some of James Russell Lowell's odes.
The one thing essential to writing if it is to be read, to art
if it is to be looked at, is vitality. No critic or professor can
be hired to pump vitality into any kind of human expression,
but professors and critics have taken it out of many a human
being who in his attempts to say something decided to be
correct at the expense of being himself--being natural,
being alive. The priests of literary conformity never had a
chance at the homemade chronicles of the Southwest.
The orderly way in which to study the Southwest would
be to take up first the land, its flora, fauna, climate, soils,
rivers, etc., then the aborigines, next the exploring and
settling Spaniards, and finally, after a hasty glance at the
French, the English-speaking people who brought the Southwest
to what it is today. We cannot proceed in this way, however.
Neither the prairies nor the Indians who first hunted
deer on them have left any records, other than hieroglyphic,
as to their lives. Some late-coming men have written about
them. Droughts and rains have had far more influence on
all forms of life in the Southwest and on all forms of its
development culturally and otherwise than all of the Coronado
expeditions put together. I have emphasized the literature
that reveals nature. My method has been to take up
types and subjects rather than to follow chronology.
Chronology is often an impediment to the acquiring of
useful knowledge. I am not nearly so much interested in
what happened in Abilene, Kansas, in 1867--the year that
the first herds of Texas Longhorns over the Chisholm Trail
found a market at that place--as I am in picking out of
Abilene in 1867 some thing that reveals the character of the
men who went up the trail, some thing that will illuminate
certain phenomena along the trail human beings of the
Southwest are going up today, some thing to awaken observation
and to enrich with added meaning this corner of the
earth of which we are the temporary inheritors.
By "literature of the Southwest" I mean writings that
interpret the region, whether they have been produced by
the Southwest or not. Many of them have not. What we are
interested in is life in the Southwest, and any interpreter of
that life, foreign or domestic, ancient or modern, is of value.
The term Southwest is variable because the boundaries
of the Southwest are themselves fluid, expanding and
contracting according to the point of view from which the
Southwest is viewed and according to whatever common
denominator is taken for defining it. The Spanish Southwest
includes California, but California regards itself as more
closely akin to the Pacific Northwest than to Texas;
California is Southwest more in an antiquarian way than other-
wise. From the point of view of the most picturesque and
imagination-influencing occupation of the Southwest, the
occupation of ranching, the Southwest might be said to run
up into Montana. Certainly one will have to go up the trail
to Montana to finish out the story of the Texas cowboy.
Early in the nineteenth century the Southwest meant
Tennessee, Georgia, and other frontier territory now regarded
as strictly South. The men and women who "redeemed Texas
from the wilderness" came principally from that region. The
code of conduct they gave Texas was largely the code of the
booming West. Considering the character of the Anglo-
American people who took over the Southwest, the region
is closer to Missouri than to Kansas, which is not Southwest
in any sense but which has had a strong influence on Oklahoma.
Chihuahua is more southwestern than large parts of
Oklahoma. In _Our Southwest_, Erna Fergusson has a whole
chapter on "What is the Southwest?" She finds Fort Worth
to be in the Southwest but Dallas, thirty miles east, to be
facing north and east. The principal areas of the Southwest
are, to have done with air-minded reservations, Arizona, New
Mexico, most of Texas, some of Oklahoma, and anything
else north, south, east, or west that anybody wants to bring
in. The boundaries of cultures and rainfall never follow
survey lines. In talking about the Southwest I naturally
incline to emphasize the Texas part of it.
Life is fluid, and definitions that would apprehend it
must also be. Yet I will venture one definition--not the
only one--of an educated person. An educated person is
one who can view with interest and intelligence the
phenomena of life about him. Like people elsewhere, the people
of the Southwest find the features of the land on which they
live blank or full of pictures according to the amount of
interest and intelligence with which they view the features.
Intelligence cannot be acquired, but interest can; and data
for interest and intelligence to act upon are entirely acquirable.
"Studies perfect nature," Bacon said. "Nature follows
art" to the extent that most of us see principally what our
attention has been called to. I might never have noticed rose-
purple snow between shadows if I had not seen a picture of
that kind of snow. I had thought white the only natural
color of snow. I cannot think of yew trees, which I have
never seen, without thinking of Wordsworth's poem on
three yew trees.
Nobody has written a memorable poem on the mesquite.
Yet the mesquite has entered into the social, economic, and
aesthetic life of the land; it has made history and has been
painted by artists. In the homely chronicles of the Southwest
its thorns stick, its roots burn into bright coals, its trunks
make fence posts, its lovely leaves wave. To live beside this
beautiful, often pernicious, always interesting and highly
characteristic tree--or bush--and to know nothing of its
significance is to be cheated out of a part of life. It is but one
of a thousand factors peculiar to the Southwest and to the
land's cultural inheritance.
For a long time, as he tells in his _Narrative_, Cabeza de
Vaca was a kind of prisoner to coastal Indians of Texas.
Annually, during the season when prickly pear apples
(_tunas_, or Indian figs, as they are called in books) were ripe,
these Indians would go upland to feed on the fruit. During
his sojourn with them Cabeza de Vaca went along. He
describes how the Indians would dig a hole in the ground,
squeeze the fruit out of _tunas_ into the hole, and then swill
up big drinks of it. Long ago the Indians vanished, but
prickly pears still flourish over millions of acres of land. The
prickly pear is one of the characteristic growths of the Southwest.
Strangers look at it and regard it as odd. Painters look
at it in bloom or in fruit and strive to capture the colors.
During the droughts ranchmen singe the thorns off its
leaves, using a flame-throwing machine, easily portable by a
man on foot, fed from a small gasoline tank. From Central
Texas on down into Central America prickly pear acts as
host for the infinitesimal insect called cochineal, which
supplied the famous dyes of Aztec civilization.
A long essay might be written on prickly pear. It weaves
in and out of many chronicles of the Southwest. A. J. Sowell,
one of the best chroniclers of Texas pioneer life, tells in his
life of Bigfoot Wallace how that picturesque ranger captain
once took one of his wounded men away from an army surgeon
because the surgeon would not apply prickly pear
poultices to the wound. In _Rangers and Pioneers of Texas_,
Sowell narrates how rattlesnakes were so large and numerous
in a great prickly pear flat out from the Nueces River that
rangers pursuing bandits had to turn back. Nobody has
written a better description of a prickly pear flat than
O. Henry in his story of "The Caballero's Way."
People may look at prickly pear, and it will be just prickly
pear and nothing more. Or they may look at it and find it
full of significances; the mere sight of a prickly pear may
call up a chain of incidents, facts, associations. A mind that
can thus look out on the common phenomena of life is rich,
and all of the years of the person whose mind is thus stored
will be more interesting and full.
Cabeza de Vaca's _Narrative_, the chronicles of A. J.
Sowell, and O. Henry's story are just three samples of
southwestern literature that bring in prickly pear. No active-
minded person who reads any one of these three samples will
ever again look at prickly pear in the same light that he
looked at it before he read. Yet prickly pear is just one of
hundreds of manifestations of life in the Southwest that
writers have commented on, told stories about, dignified
with significance.
Cotton no longer has the economic importance to Texas
that it once had. Still, it is mighty important. In the minds
of millions of farm people of the South, cotton and the boll
weevil are associated. The boll weevil was once a curse; then
it came to be somewhat regarded as a disguised blessing--in
limiting production.
De first time I seen de boll weevil,
He was a-settin' on de square.
Next time I seen him, he had all his family dere--
Jest a-lookin' foh a home, jest a-lookin' foh a home.
A man dependent on cotton for a living and having that
living threatened by the boll weevil will not be much interested
in ballads, but for the generality of people this boll
weevil ballad--the entirety of which is a kind of life history
of the insect--is, while delightful in itself, a veritable story-
book on the weevil. Without the ballad, the weevil's effect
on economic history would be unchanged; but as respects
mind and imagination, the ballad gives the weevil all sorts
of significances. The ballad is a part of the literature of
the Southwest.
But I am assigning too many motives of self-improvement
to reading. People read for fun, for pleasure. The literature
of the Southwest affords bully reading.
"If I had read as much as other men, I would know as
little," Thomas Hobbes is credited with having said. A student
in the presence of Bishop E. D. Mouzon was telling
about the scores and scores of books he had read. At a pause
the bishop shook his long, wise head and remarked, "My son,
when DO you get time to think?" Two of the best educated
men I have ever had the fortune of talking with were neither
schooled nor widely read. They were extraordinary observers.
One was a plainsman, Charles Goodnight; the other was a
borderer, Don Alberto Guajardo, in part educated by an old
Lipan Indian.
But here are the books. I list them not so much to give
knowledge as to direct people with intellectual curiosity and
with interest in their own land to the sources of knowledge;
not to create life directly, but to point out where it has
been created or copied. On some of the books I have made
brief observations. Those observations can never be nearly
so important to a reader as the development of his own
powers of observation. With something of an apologetic
feeling I confess that I have read, in my way, most of the
books. I should probably have been a wiser and better
informed man had I spent more time out with the grasshoppers,
horned toads, and coyotes.
November 5, 1942 J. FRANK DOBIE
_2_
Interpreters of the Land
"HE'S FOR A JIG or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps." Thought
employs ideas, but having an idea is not the same thing as
thinking. A rooster in a pen of hens has an idea. Thought
has never been so popular with mankind as horse opera, horse
play, the main idea behind sheep's eyes. Far be it from me
to feel contempt for people who cannot and do not want
to think. The human species has not yet evolved to the stage
at which thought is natural. I am far more at ease lying in
grass and gazing without thought process at clouds than in
sitting in a chair trying to be logical. Just the same, free play
of mind upon life is the essence of good writing, and intellectual
activity is synonymous with critical interpretations.
To the constant disregard of thought, Americans of the
mid-twentieth century have added positive opposition. Critical
ideas are apt to make any critic suspected of being
subversive. The Southwest, Texas especially, is more articulately
aware of its land spaces than of any other feature pertaining
to itself. Yet in the realm of government, the Southwest has
not produced a single spacious thinker. So far as the cultural
ancestry of the region goes, the South has been arid of
thought since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the much talked-
of mind of John C. Calhoun being principally casuistic; on
another side, derivatives from the Spanish Inquisition could
contribute to thought little more than tribal medicine men
have contributed.
Among historians of the Southwest the general rule has
been to be careful with facts and equally careful in avoiding
thought-provoking interpretations. In the multitudinous
studies on Spanish-American history all padres are "good"
and all conquistadores are "intrepid," and that is about as
far as interpretation goes. The one state book of the
Southwest that does not chloroform ideas is Erna Fergusson's _New
Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples_ (Knopf, New York,
1952). Essayical in form, it treats only of the consequential.
It evaluates from the point of view of good taste, good sense,
and an urbane comprehension of democracy. The subject is
provincial, but the historian transcends all provincialism. Her
sympathy does not stifle conclusions unusable in church or
chamber of commerce propaganda. In brief, a cultivated
mind can take pleasure in this interpretation of New Mexico
--and that marks it as a solitary among the histories of
neighboring states.
The outstanding historical interpreter of the Southwest
is Walter Prescott Webb, of the University of Texas. _The
Great Plains_ utilizes chronology to explain the presence of
man on the plains; it is primarily a study in cause and effect,
of water and drought, of adaptations and lack of adaptations,
of the land's growth into human imagination as well as
economic institutions. Webb uses facts to get at meanings. He
fulfils Emerson's definition of Scholar: "Man Thinking." In
_Divided We Stand_ he goes into machinery, the feudalism of
corporation-dominated economy, the economic supremacy of
the North over the South and the West. In _The Great Frontier_
(Houghton Mifilin, Boston, 1952) he considers the
Western Hemisphere as a frontier for Europe--a frontier
that brought about the rise of democracy and capitalism and
that, now vanished as a frontier, foreshadows the vanishment
of democracy and capitalism.
In _Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and
a Myth_ (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1950) Henry Nash Smith plows deep. But the tools of this
humanistic historian are of delicate finish rather than of
horsepower. To him, thinking is a joyful process and lucidity
out of complexity is natural. He compasses Parrington's
_Main Currents in American Thought_ and Beadle's Dime
Novels along with agriculture and manufacturing. Excepting
the powerful books by Walter Prescott Webb, not since
Frederick Jackson Turner, in 1893, presented his famous
thesis on "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History" has such a revealing evaluation of frontier movements
appeared As a matter of fact, Henry Nash Smith leaves
Turner's ideas on the dependence of democracy upon farmers
without more than one leg to stand upon. Not being a King
Canute, he does not take sides for or against social evolution.
With the clearest eyes imaginable, he looks into it. Turner's
_The Frontier in American History_ (1920) has been a fertile
begetter of interpretations of history.
Instead of being the usual kind of jokesmith book or
concatenation of tall tales, _Folk Laughter on the American
Frontier_ by Mody C. Boatright (Macmillan, New York,
1949) goes into the human and social significances of humor.
Of boastings, anecdotal exaggerations, hide-and-hair metaphors,
stump and pulpit parables, tenderfoot baitings, and
the like there is plenty, but thought plays upon them and
arranges them into patterns of social history.
Mary Austin (1868-1934) is an interpreter of nature,
which for her includes naturally placed human beings as
much as naturally placed antelopes and cacti. She wrote _The
American Rhythm_ on the theory that authentic poetry expresses
the rhythms of that patch of earth to which the poet
is rooted. Rhythm is experience passed into the subconscious
and is "distinct from our intellectual perception of it."
Before they can make true poetry, English-speaking Americans
will be in accord with "the run of wind in tall grass" as
were the Pueblo Indians when Europeans discovered them.
But Mary Austin's primary importance is not as a theorist.
Her spiritual depth is greater than her intellectual. She is a
translator of nature through concrete observations. She interprets
through character sketches, folk tales, novels. "Anybody
can write facts about a country," she said. She infuses
fact with understanding and imagination. In _Lost Borders_,
_The Land of Little Rain_, _The Land of Journey's Ending_, and
_The Flock_ the land itself often seems to speak, but often she
gets in its way. She sees "with an eye made quiet by the power
of harmony." _Earth Horizons_, a stubborn book, is Mary
Austin's inner autobiography. _The Beloved House_, by T. M.
Pearce (Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1940), is an understanding
biography.
Joseph Wood Krutch of Columbia University spent a
year in Arizona, near Tucson. Instead of talking about his
_The Desert Year_ (Sloane, New York, 1952), I quote a
representative paragraph:
In New England the struggle for existence is visibly the struggle of
plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the
spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned,
would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of
plant against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting
factor is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if this is, perhaps,
one of the things which makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of
peace one does not find elsewhere. The struggle of living thing against
living thing can be distressing in a way that a mere battle with the
elements is not. If some great clump of cactus dies this summer it will
be because the cactus has grown beyond the capacity of its roots to
get water, not because one green fellow creature has bested it in some
limb-to-limb struggle. In my more familiar East the crowding of the
countryside seems almost to parallel the crowding of the cities. Out
here there is, even in nature, no congestion.
_Southwest_, by Laura Adams Armer (New York, 1935,
OP) came from long living and brooding in desert land. It
says something beautiful.
_Talking to the Moon_, by John Joseph Mathews (University
of Chicago Press, 1945) is set in the blackjack country
of eastern Oklahoma. This Oxford scholar of Osage blood
built his ranch house around a fireplace, flanked by shelves
of books. His observations are of the outside, but they are
informed by reflections made beside a fire. They are not
bookish at all, but the spirits of great writers mingle with
echoes of coyote wailing and wood-thrush singing.
_Sky Determines: An Interpretation of the Southwest_, by
Ross Calvin (New York, 1934; republished by the University
of New Mexico Press) lives up to its striking title. The
introductory words suggest the essence of the book:
In New Mexico whatever is both old and peculiar appears upon examination
to have a connection with the arid climate. Peculiarities range
from the striking adaptations of the flora onward to those of fauna,
and on up to those of the human animal. Sky determines. And the
writer once having picked up the trail followed it with certainty, and
indeed almost inevitably, as it led from ecology to anthropology and
economics.
Cultivated intellect is the highest form of civilization.
It is inseparable from the arts, literature, architecture. In any
civilized land, birds, trees, flowers, animals, places, human
contributors to life out of the past, all are richer and more
significant because of representations through literature and
art. No literate person can listen to a skylark over an English
meadow without hearing in its notes the melodies of Chaucer
and Shelley. As the Southwest advances in maturity of mind
and civilization, the features of the land take on accretions
from varied interpreters.
It is not necessary for an interpreter to write a whole
book about a feature to bring out its significance. We need
more gossipy books--something in the manner of _Pinon
Country_ by Haniel Long (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New
York, 1941), in which one can get a swift slant on Billy the
Kid, smell the pinon trees, feel the deeply religious attitude
toward his corn patch of a Zuni Indian. Roy Bedichek's
chapters on the mockingbird, in _Adventures with a Texas
Naturalist_, are like rich talk under a tree on a pleasant patch
of ground staked out for his claim by an April-voiced
mockingbird. In _The Voice of the Coyote_ I tried to compass the
whole animal, and I should think that the "Father of Song-
Making" chapter might make coyote music and the night
more interesting and beautiful for any listener. Intelligent
writers often interpret without set purpose, and many books
under various categories in this _Guide_ are interpretative.
_3_
General Helps
THERE IS no chart to the Life and Literature of the Southwest.
An attempt to put it all into an alphabetically arranged
encyclopedia would be futile. All guides to knowledge are too
long or too short. This one at the outset adds to its length--
perhaps to its usefulness--by citing other general reference
works and a few anthologies.
_Books of the Southwest: A General Bibliography_, by Mary
Tucker, published by J. J. Augustin, New York, 1937, is better
on Indians and the Spanish period than on Anglo-American
culture. _Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with
Bibliography_, by Mabel Major, Rebecca W. Smith, and T. M.
Pearce, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1938,
revised 1948, takes up the written material under the time-
established heads of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, etc., with due
respect to chronological development. _A Treasury of Southern
Folklore_, 1949, and _A Treasury of Western Folklore_, 1951,
both edited by B. A. Botkin and both published by Crown, New
York, are so liberal in the extensions of folklore and so
voluminous that they amount to literary anthologies.
Of possible use in working out certain phases of life and
literature common to the Southwest as well as to the West
and Middle West are the following academic treatises: _The
Frontier in American Literature_, by Lucy Lockwood Hazard,
New York, 1927; _The Literature of the Middle Western
Frontier_, by Ralph Leslie Rusk, New York, 1925; _The Prairie
and the Making of Middle America_, by Dorothy Anne Dondore,
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1926; _The Literature of the Rocky_
Mountain West 1803-1903_, by L. J. Davidson and P. Bostwick,
Caldwell, Idaho, 1939; and _The Rediscovery of the Frontier_,
by Percy H. Boynton, Chicago, 1931. Anyone interested in
vitality in any phase of American writing will find Vernon L.
Parrington's _Main Currents in American Thought_ (three
vols.), New York, 1927-39, an opener-up of avenues.
Perhaps the best anthology of southwestern narratives is
_Golden Tales of the Southwest_, selected by Mary L. Becker,
New York, 1939. Two anthologies of southwestern writings are
_Southwesterners Write_, edited by T. M. Pearce and A. P.
Thomason, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946,
and _Roundup Time_, edited by George Sessions Perry,
Whittlesey House, New York, 1943. Themes common to the
Southwest are represented in _Western Prose and Poetry_, an
anthology put together by Rufus A. Coleman, New York, 1932,
and in _Mid Country: Writings from the Heart of America_,
edited by Lowry C. Wimberly, University of Nebraska Press,
Lincoln, 1945.
For the southern tradition that has flowed into the Southwest
Franklin J. Meine's _Tall Tales of the Southwest_, New York,
1930, OP, is the best anthology published. It is the best
anthology of any kind that I know of. _A Southern Treasury of
Life and Literature_, selected by Stark Young, New York, 1937,
brings in Texas.
Anthologies of poetry are listed under the heading of "Poetry
and Drama." The outstanding state bibliography of the region
is _A Bibliography of Texas_, by C. W. Raines, Austin, 1896.
Since this is half a century behind the times, its usefulness
is limited. At that, it is more useful than the shiftless,
hit-and-miss, ignorance-revealing _South of Forty: From the
Mississippi to the Rio Grande: A Bibliography_, by Jesse L.
Rader, Norman, Oklahoma, 1947. Henry R. Wagner's _The Plains
and the Rockies_, "a contribution to the bibliography of
original narratives of travel and adventure, 1800-1865," which
came out 1920-21, was revised and extended by Charles L. Camp
and reprinted in 1937. It is stronger on overland travel than
on anything else, only in part covers the
Southwest, and excludes a greater length of time than Raines's
_Bibliography_. Now published by Long's College Book Co.,
Columbus, Ohio.
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