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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FULTON, MAURICE G., and HORGAN, PAUL (editors). _New Mexico's
Own Chronicle_, Dallas, 1937. OP. Selections from writers
about the New Mexico scene.
GILPATRICK, WALLACE. _The Man Who Likes Mexico_, New York,
1911. OP. Bully reading.
GONZALEZ, JOVITA. Tales about Texas-Mexican vaquero folk in
_Texas and Southwestern Lore_, in _Man, Bird, and Beast_, and
in _Mustangs and Cow Horses_, Publications VI, VIII, and XVI
of Texas Folklore Society.
{illust. caption =
Jose Cisneros: Fray Marcos, in _The Journey of Fray Marcos
de Niza_ by Cleve Hallenbeck (1949)}
GRAHAM, R. B. CUNNINGHAME. _Hernando De Soto_, London, 1912.
Biography. OP.
HARTE, BRET. _The Bell Ringer of Angels_ and other legendary
tales of California.
LAUGHLIN, RUTH. _Caballeros_. When the book was published in
1931, the author was named Ruth Laughlin Barker; after she
discarded the Barker part, it was reissued, in 1946, by
Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. Delightful picturings of Mexican--or
Spanish, as many New Mexicans prefer--life around Santa Fe.
LEA, TOM. _The Brave Bulls_. See under "Fiction."
LUMMIS, C. F. _Flowers of Our Lost Romance_, Boston, 1929.
Humanistic essays on Spanish contributions to southwestern
civilization. OP. _The Land of Poco Tiempo_, New York, 1913
(reissued by University of New Mexico Press, 1952), in an
easier style. _A New Mexico David_, 1891, 1930. Folk tales and
sketches. OP.
MERRIAM, CHARLES. _Machete_, Dallas, 1932. Plain and true to
the _gente_. OP.
NIGGLI, JOSEPHINA. _Mexican Village_, University of North
Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1945. A collection of skilfully
told stories that reveal Mexican life.
O'SHAUGHNESSY, EDITH. _A Diplomat s Wife in Mexico_, New York,
1916; _Diplomatic Days_, 1917; _Intimate Pages of Mexican
History_, 1920. Books of passion and power and high literary
merit, interpretative of revolutionary Mexico. OP.
OTERO, NINA. _Old Spain in Our Southwest_, New York, 1936.
Genuine. OP.
PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE. _Flowering Judas_. See under
"Fiction."
PRESCOTT, WILLIAM H. _Conquest of Mexico_. History that is
literature.
REMINGTON, FREDERIC W. _Pony Tracks_, New York, 1895. Includes
sketches of Mexican ranch life.
ROSS, PATRICIA FENT. _Made in Mexico: The Story of a Country's
Arts and Crafts_, Knopf, New York, 1952. Picturesquely and
instructively illustrated by Carlos Merida.
TANNENBAUM, FRANK. _Peace by Revolution_, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1933; _Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and
Bread_, Knopf, New York, 1950. Tannenbaum dodges nothing, not
even the church.
_Terry's Guide to Mexico_. It has everything.
Texas Folklore Society. Its publications are a storehouse of
Mexican folklore in the Southwest and in Mexico also.
Especially recommended are _Texas and Southwestern Lore_ (VI),
_Man, Bird, and Beast_ (VIII), _Southwestern Lore_ (IX),
_Spur-of -the-Cock_ (XI), _Puro Mexicano_ (XII), _Texian
Stomping Grounds_ (XVII), _Mexican Border Ballads and Other
Lore_ (XXI), _The Healer of Los Olmos and Other Mexican Lore_
(XXIV, 1951). All published by Southern Methodist University
Press, Dallas.
TOOR, FRANCES. A _Treasury of Mexican Folkways_, Crown, New
York, 1947. An anthology of life.
TURNER, TIMOTHY G._ Bullets, Bottles and Gardenias_, Dallas,
1935. Obscurely published but one of the best books on Mexican
life. OP.
_7_
Flavor of France
THERE IS little justification for including Louisiana as a
part of the Southwest. Despite the fact that the French flag--
tied to a pole in Louisiana--once waved over Texas, French
influence on it and other parts of the Southwest has been
minor.
ARTHUR, STANLEY CLISBY. _Jean Laffite, Gentleman Rover_ (1952)
and _Audubon: An Intimate Life of the American Woodsman_
(1937), both published by Harmanson--Publisher and Bookseller,
333 Royal St., New Orleans.
CABLE, GEORGE W. _Old Creole Days: Strange True Stories of
Louisiana_.
CHOPIN, KATE. _Bayou Folk_.
FORTIER, ALCEE. Any of his work on Louisiana.
HEARN, LAFCADIO. _Chita_. A lovely story.
JOUTEL. _Journal_ of La Salle's career in Texas.
KANE, HARNETT T. _Plantation Parade: The Grand Manner in
Louisiana_ (1945), _Natchez on the Mississippi_ (1947), _Queen
New Orleans_ (1949), all published by Morrow, New York.
KING, GRACE. _New Orleans: The Place and the People; Balcony
Stories.
_MCVOY, LIZZIE CARTER. _Louisiana in the Short Story_,
Louisiana State University Press, 1940.
SAXON, LYLE. _Fabulous New Orleans; Old Louisiana; Lafitte the
Pirate_.
_8_
Backwoods Life and Humor
THE SETTLERS who put their stamp on Texas were predominantly
from the southern states--and far more of them came to Texas
to work out of debt than came with riches in the form of
slaves. The plantation owner came too, but the go-ahead
Crockett kind of backwoodsman was typical. The southern type
never became so prominent in New Mexico, Arizona, and
California as in Texas. Nevertheless, the fact glares out that
the code of conduct--the riding and shooting tradition, the
eagerness to stand up and fight for one's rights, the
readiness to back one's judgment with a gun, a bowie knife,
money, life itself--that characterized the whole West as well
as the Southwest was southern, hardly at all New England.
The very qualities that made many of the Texas pioneers rebels
to society and forced not a few of them to quit it between sun
and sun without leaving new addresses fitted them to conquer
the wilderness--qualities of daring, bravery, reckless
abandon, heavy self-assertiveness. A lot of them were hell-
raisers, for they had a lust for life and were maddened by
tame respectability. Nobody but obsequious politicians and
priggish "Daughters" wants to make them out as models of
virtue and conformity. A smooth and settled society--a society
shockingly tame--may accept Cardinal Newman's definition, "A
gentleman is one who never gives offense." Under this
definition a shaded violet, a butterfly, and a floating summer
cloud are all gentlemen. "The art of war," said Napoleon, "is
to make offense." Conquering the hostile Texas
wilderness meant war with nature and against savages as well
as against Mexicans. Go-ahead Crockett's ideal of a gentleman
was one who looked in another direction while a visitor was
pouring himself out a horn of whiskey.
Laying aside climatic influences on occupations and manners,
certain Spanish influences, and minor Pueblo Indian touches,
the Southwest from the point of view of the bedrock Anglo-
Saxon character that has made it might well include Arkansas
and Missouri. The realism of southern folk and of a very
considerable body of indigenous literature representing them
has been too much overshadowed by a kind of _So Red the Rose_
idealization of slave-holding aristocrats.
ALLSOPP, FRED W. _Folklore of Romantic Arkansas_, 2 vols.,
Grolier Society, 1931. Allsopp assembled a rich and varied
collection of materials in the tone of "The Arkansas
Traveler." OP.
ARRINGTON, ALFRED W. _The Rangers and Regulators of the
Tanaha_, 18 56. East Texas bloodletting.
BALDWIN, JOSEPH G. _The Flush Times of Alabama and
Mississippi_, 1853.
BLAIR, WALTER. _Horse Sense in American Humor from Benjamin
Franklin to Ogden Nash_, 1942. OP. _Native American Humor_,
1937. OP. _Tall Tale America_, Coward-McCann, New York, 1944.
Orderly analyses with many concrete examples. With Franklin J.
Meine as co-author, _Mike Fink, King of Mississippi River
Keelboatmen_, 1933. Biography of a folk type against pioneer
and frontier background. OP.
BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Folk Laughter on the American Frontier_.
See under "Interpreters."
CLARK, THOMAS D. _The Rampaging Frontier_, 1939. OP.
Historical picturization and analysis, fortified by incidents
and tales of "Varmints," "Liars," "Quarter Horses,"
"Fiddlin'," "Foolin' with the Gals," etc.
CROCKETT, DAVID. _Autobiography_. Reprinted many times.
Scribner's edition in the "Modern Students' Library" includes
_Colonel Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in_
_Texas_. Crockett set the backwoods type. See treatment of him
in Parrington's _Main Currents in American Thought_. Richard
M. Dorson's _Davy Crockett, American Comic Legend_, 1939, is a
summation of the Crockett tradition.
FEATHERSTONHAUGH, G. W. _Excursion through the Slave States_,
London, 1866. Refreshing on manners and characters.
FLACK, CAPTAIN. _The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the
Backwoods_, London, 1866.
GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. _Wild Sports in the Far West_. Nothing
better on backwoods life in the Mississippi Valley.
HAMMETT, SAMUEL ADAMS (who wrote under the name of Philip
Paxton), _Piney Woods Tavern; or Sam Slick in Texas_ and _A
Stray Yankee in Texas_. Humor on the roughneck element. For
treatment of Hammett as man and writer see _Sam Slick in
Texas_, by W. Stanley Hoole, Naylor, San Antonio, 1945.
HARRIS, GEORGE W. _Sut Lovingood_, New York, 1867. Prerealism.
HOGUE, WAYMAN. _Back Yonder_. Minton, Balch, New York, 1932.
Ozark life. OP.
HOOPER, J. J. _Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs_, 1845. OP.
Downright realism. Like Longstreet, Hooper in maturity wanted
his realism forgotten. An Alabama journalist, he got into the
camp of respectable slave-holders and spent the later years of
his life shouting against the "enemies of the institution of
African slavery." His life partly explains the lack of
intellectual honesty in most southern spokesmen today. _Alias
Simon Suggs: The Life and Times of Johnson Jones Hooper_, by
W. Stanley Hoole, University of Alabama Press, 1952, is a
careful study of Hooper's career.
HUDSON, A. P. _Humor of the Old Deep South_, New York, 1936.
An anthology. OP.
LONGSTREET, A. B. _Georgia Scenes_, 1835. Numerous reprints.
Realism.
MASTERSON, JAMES R. _Tall Tales of Arkansas_, Boston, 1943.
OP. The title belies this excellent social history--by a
scholar. It has become quite scarce on account of the fact
that it contains unexpurgated versions of the notorious speech
on "Change the Name of Arkansas"--which in 1919 in officers'
barracks at Bordeaux, France, I heard a lusty individual
recite with as many variations as Roxane of _Cyrano de
Bergerac_ wanted in love-making. When Fred W. Allsopp,
newspaper publisher and pillar of Arkansas respectability,
found that this book of unexpurgations had been dedicated to
him by the author--a Harvard Ph.D. teaching in Michigan--he
almost "had a colt."
MEINE, FRANKLIN J. (editor). _Tall Tales of the Southwest_,
Knopf, New York, 1930. A superbly edited and superbly selected
anthology with appendices affording a guide to the whole field
of early southern humor and realism. No cavalier idealism. The
"Southwest" of this excellent book is South.
OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. _A Journey in the Seaboard Slave
States_, 1856. _A Journey Through Texas_, 1857. Invaluable
books on social history.
POSTL, KARL ANTON (Charles Sealsfield or Francis Hardman,
pseudonyms). _The Cabin Book; Frontier Life_. Translations all
OP.
RANDOLPH, VANCE. _We Always Lie to Strangers_, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1951. A collection of tall tales
of the adding machine variety. Fertile in invention but devoid
of any yearning for the beautiful or suggestion that the human
spirit hungers for something beyond horse play; in short,
typical of American humor.
ROURKE, CONSTANCE. _American Humor_, 1931; _Davy Crockett_,
1934; _Roots of American Culture and Other Essays_, 1942, all
published by Harcourt, Brace, New York.
THOMPSON, WILLIAM T. _Major Jones's Courtship_, Philadelphia,
1844. Realism.
THORPE, T. B. _The Hive of the Bee-Hunter_, New York, 1854.
This excellent book should be reprinted.
WATTERSON, HENRY. _Oddities in Southern Life and Character_,
Boston, 1882. An anthology with interpretative notes.
WILSON, CHARLES MORROW. _Backwoods America_. University of
North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1935. Well ordered survey
with excellent samplings.
WOOD, RAY. _The American Mother Goose_, 1940; _Fun in American
Folk Rhymes_, 1952; both published by Lippincott,
Philadelphia.
_9_
How the Early Settlers Lived
DESPITE THE FACT that the tendency of a majority of early day
rememberers has been to emphasize Indian fights, killings, and
other sensational episodes, chronicles rich in the everyday
manners and customs of the folk are plentiful. The classic of
them all is Noah Smithwick's _The Evolution of a State_,
listed below.
See also "Backwoods Life and Humor," "Pioneer Doctors," "Women
Pioneers," "Fighting Texians."
BARKER, E. C. _The Austin Papers_. Four volumes of sources for
any theme in social history connected with colonial Texans.
BATES, ED. F. _History and Reminiscences of Denton County_,
Denton, Texas, 1918. A sample of much folk life found in
county histories.
BELL, HORACE. _On the Old West Coast_, New York, 1930. Social
history by anecdote. California. OP.
BRACHT, VIKTOR. _Texas in 1848_, translated from the German by
C. F. Schmidt, San Antonio, 1931. Better on natural resources
than on human inhabitants. OP.
CARL, PRINCE OF SOLMS-BRAUNFELS. _Texas, 1844-1845_.
Translation, Houston, 1936. OP.
COX, C. C. "Reminiscences," in Vol. VI of _Southwestern
Historical Quarterly_. One of the best of many pioneer
recollections published by the Texas State Historical
Association.
CROCKETT, DAVID. Anything about him.
DICK, EVERETT. _The Sod House Frontier_ (1937) and _Vanguards
of the Frontier_ (1941). Both OP. Life on north-
ern Plains into Rocky Mountains, but applicable to life
southward.
DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Flavor of Texas_, 1936. OP. Considerable
social history.
FENLEY, FLORENCE. _Oldtimers: Their Own Stories_, Uvalde,
Texas, 1939. OP. Faithful reporting of realistic detail.
Southwest Texas, mostly ranch life.
FRANTZ, JOE B. _Gail Borden, Dairyman to a Nation_. University
of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. This biography of a
newspaperman and inventor brings out sides of pioneer life
that emphasis on fighting, farming, and ranching generally
overlooks.
GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. _Wild Sports in the Far West_, 1860.
Dances are among the sports.
HARRIS, MRS. DILUE. "Reminiscences," edited by Mrs. A. B.
Looscan, in Vols. IV and VII of _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_.
HART, JOHN A. _History of Pioneer Days in Texas and Oklahoma_;
no date. Extended and republished under the title of _Pioneer
Days in the Southwest_, 1909. Much on frontier ways of living.
HOFF, CAROL _Johnny Texas_, Wilcox and Follett, Chicago, 1950.
Juvenile, historical fiction. Delightful in both text and
illustrations.
HOGAN, WILLIAM R. _The Texas Republic: A Social and Economic
History_, University of Oklahoma Press, 1946. Long on facts,
short on intellectual activity; that is, on interpretations
from the perspective of time and civilization.
HOLDEN, W. C. _Alkali Trails_, Dallas, 1930. Pioneer life in
West Texas. OP.
HOLLEY, MARY AUSTIN. _Texas . . . in a Series of Letters_,
Baltimore, 1833; reprinted under the title of _Letters of an
American Traveler_, edited by Mattie Austin Hatcher, Dallas,
1933. First good book on Texas to be printed. OP.
_Lamar Papers_. Six volumes of scrappy source material on
Texas history and life, issued by Texas State Library, Austin.
OP.
LEWIS, WILLIE NEWBURY. _Between Sun and Sod_, Clarendon,
Texas, 1938. OP. Again, want of perspective.
LUBBOCK, F. R. Six _Decades in Texas_, Austin, 1900.
MCCONNELL, H. H. _Five Years a Cavalryman_, Jacksboro, Texas,
1889. Bully.
McDANIELD, H. F., and TAYLOR, NATHANIEL A. _The Coming Empire,
or 2000 Miles in Texas on Horseback_, New York, 1878;
privately reprinted, 1937. Delightful travel narrative. OP.
MCNEAL, T. A. _When Kansas Was Young_, New York, 1922.
Episodes and characters of Plains country. OP.
OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. _A Journey Through Texas_, New York,
1857. Olmsted journeyed in order to see. He saw.
READ, OPIE. _An Arkansas Planter_, 1896. Pleasant fiction.
RICHARDSON, ALBERT D. _Beyond the Mississippi_, Hartford,
1867. What a traveling journalist saw.
RISTER, CARL C. _Southern Plainsmen_, University of Oklahoma
Press, 1938. Though pedestrian in style, good social data.
Bibliography.
ROEMER, DR. FERDINAND. _Texas_, translated from the German by
Oswald Mueller, San Antonio, 1935. OP. Roemer, a geologist,
rode through Texas in the forties and made acute observations
on the land, its plants and animals, and the settlers.
SCHMITZ, JOSEPH WILLIAM. _Thus They Lived_, Naylor, San
Antonio, 1935. This would have been a good social history of
Texas had the writer devoted ten more years to the subject.
Unsatisfactory bibliography.
SHIPMAN, DANIEL. _Frontier Life, 58 Years in Texas_, n.p.,
1879. One of the pioneer reminiscences that should be
reprinted.
SMITH, HENRY. "Reminiscences," in _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_, Vol. XIV. Telling details.
SMITHWICK, NOAH. _The Evolution of a State_, Austin, 1900.
Reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1935. Best of all books dealing
with life in early Texas. Bully reading.
_Southwestern Historical Quarterly_, published since 1897 by
Texas State Historical Association, Austin. A depository of
all kinds of history; the first twenty-five or thirty volumes
are the more interesting.
SWEET, ALEXANDER E., and KNOX, J. ARMOY. _On a Mexican Mustang
Through Texas_, Hartford, 1883. Humorous satire, often
penetrating and ruddy with actuality.
WALLIS, JONNIE LOCKHART. _Sixty Years on the Brazos: The Life
and Letters of Dr. John Washington Lockhart_, privately
printed, Los Angeles, 1930. In notebook style, but as rare in
essence as it is among dealers in out-of-print books.
WAUGH, JULIA NOTT. _Castroville and Henry Castro_, San
Antonio, 1934. OP. Best-written monograph dealing with any
aspect of Texas history that I have read.
WYNN, AFTON. "Pioneer Folk Ways," in _Straight Texas_, Texas
Folklore Society Publication XIII, 1937.
_10_
Fighting Texians
THE TEXAS PEOPLE belong to a fighting tradition that the
majority of them are proud of. The footholds that the
Spaniards and Mexicans held in Texas were maintained by virtue
of fighting, irrespective of missionary baptizing. The purpose
of the Anglo-American colonizer Stephen F. Austin to "redeem
Texas from the wilderness" was accomplished only by fighting.
The Texans bought their liberty with blood and maintained it
for nine years as a republic with blood. It was fighting men
who pushed back the frontiers and blazed trails.
The fighting tradition is now giving way to the oil tradition.
The Texas myth as imagined by non-Texans is coming to embody
oil millionaires in airplanes instead of horsemen with six-
shooters and rifles. See Edna Ferber's Giant (1952 novel).
Nevertheless, many Texans who never rode a horse over three
miles at a stretch wear cowboy boots, and a lot of Texans are
under the delusion that bullets and atomic bombs can settle
complexities that demand informed intelligence and the power
to think.
As I have pointed out in _The Flavor of Texas_, the chronicles
of men who fought the Mexicans and were prisoners to them
comprise a unique unit in the personal narratives and annals
of America.
Many of the books listed under the headings of "Texas
Rangers," "How the Early Settlers Lived," and "Range Life"
specify the fighting tradition.
BEAN, PETER ELLIS. _Memoir_, published first in Vol. I of
Yoakum's _History of Texas_; in 1930 printed as a small book
by the Book Club of Texas, Dallas, now OP. A fascinating
narrative.
BECHDOLT, FREDERICK R. _Tales of the Old Timers_, New York,
1924. Forceful retelling of the story of the Mier Expedition
and of other activities of the "fighting Texans." OP.
CHABOT, FREDERICK C. _The Perote Prisoners_, San Antonio,
1934. Annotated diaries of Texas prisoners in Mexico. OP.
DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Flavor of Texas_, Dallas, 1936. OP.
Chapters on Bean, Green, Duval, Kendall, and other
representers of the fighting Texans.
DUVAL, JOHN C. _Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace_, 1870; _Early
Times in Texas_, 1892. Both books are kept in print by Steck,
Austin. For biography and critical estimate, see _John C.
Duval: First Texas Man of Letters_, by J. Frank Dobie
(illustrated by Tom Lea), Dallas, 1939. OP. _Early Times in
Texas_, called "the _Robinson Crusoe_ of Texas," is Duval's
story of the Goliad Massacre and of his escape from it. Duval
served as a Texas Ranger with Bigfoot Wallace, who was in the
Mier Expedition. His narrative of Bigfoot's _Adventures_ is
the rollickiest and the most flavorsome that any American
frontiersman has yet inspired. The tiresome thumping on the
hero theme present in many biographies of frontiersmen is
entirely absent. Stanley Vestal wrote _Bigfoot Wallace_ also,
Boston, 1942. OP.
ERATH, MAJOR GEORGE G. _Memoirs_, Texas State Historical
Association, Austin, 1923. Erath understood his fellow
Texians. OP.
GILLETT, JAMES B. _Six Years with the Texas Rangers_, 1921.
OP.
GREEN, THOMAS JEFFERSON. _Journal of the Texan Expedition
against Mier_, 1845; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Green
was one of the leaders of the Mier Expedition. He lived in
wrath and wrote with fire. For information on Green see
_Recollections and Reflections_ by his son, Wharton J. Green,
1906. OP.
HOUSTON, SAM. _The Raven_, by Marquis James, 1929, is
not the only biography of the Texan general, but it is the
best, and embodies most of what has been written on Houston
excepting the multivolumed _Houston Papers_ issued by the
University of Texas Press, Austin, under the editorship of E.
C. Barker. Houston was an original character even after he
became a respectable Baptist.
KENDALL, GEORGE W. _Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe
Expedition_, 1844; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Two
volumes. Kendall, a New Orleans journalist in search of copy,
joined the Santa Fe Expedition sent by the Republic of Texas
to annex New Mexico. Lost on the Staked Plains and then
marched afoot as a prisoner to Mexico City, he found plenty of
copy and wrote a narrative that if it were not so
journalistically verbose might rank alongside Dana's _Two
Years Before the Mast_. Fayette Copeland's _Kendall of the
Picayune_, 1943 but OP, is a biography. An interesting
parallel to Kendall's _Narrative is Letters and Notes on the
Texan Santa Fe Expedition, 1841-1842_, by Thomas Falconer,
with Notes and Introduction by F. W. Hodge, New York, 1930.
OP. The route of the expedition is logged and otherwise
illuminated in _The Texan Santa Fe Trail_, by H. Bailey
Carroll, Panhandle-Plains Historical Society, Canyon, Texas,
1951.
LEACH, JOSEPH. _The Typical Texan: Biography of an American
Myth_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1952. At
the time Texas was emerging, the three main types of Americans
were Yankees, southern aristocrats, Kentucky westerners
embodied by Daniel Boone. Texas took over the Kentucky
tradition. It was enlarged by Crockett, who stayed in Texas
only long enough to get killed, Sam Houston, and Bigfoot
Wallace. Novels, plays, stories, travel books, and the Texans
themselves have kept the tradition going. This is the main
thesis of the book. Mr. Leach fails to note that the best
books concerning Texas have done little to keep the typical
Texan alive and that a great part of the present Texas Brags
spirit is as absurdly unrealistic as Mussolini's splurge at
making twentieth-century Italians imagine themselves a
{illust. caption =
John W. Thomason, in his _Lone Star Preacher_ (1941)}
reincarnation of Caesar's Roman legions. Mr. Leach dissects
the myth and then swallows it.
LINN, JOHN J. _Reminiscences of Fifty Years in Texas_, 1883;
reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Mixture of personal
narrative and historical notes, written with energy and
prejudice.
MAVERICK, MARY A. _Memoirs_, 1921. OP. Mrs. Maverick's
husband, Sam Maverick, was among the citizens of San Antonio
haled off to Mexico as prisoners in 1842.
MORRELL, Z. N. _Fruits and Flowers in the Wilderness_, 1872.
OP. Morrell, a circuit-riding Baptist preacher, fought the
Indians and the Mexicans. See other books of this kind listed
under "Circuit Riders and Missionaries."
PERRY, GEORGE SESSIONS. Texas, A _World in Itself_, McGraw-
Hill, New York, 1942. Especially good chapter on the Alamo.
SMYTHE, H. _Historical Sketch of Parker County, Texas_, 1877.
One of various good county histories of Texas replete with
fighting. For bibliography of this extensive class of
literature consult _Texas County Histories_, by H. Bailey
Carroll, Texas State Historical Association, Austin, 1943. OP.
SONNICHSEN, C. L. _I'll Die Before I'll Run: The Story of the
Great Feuds of Texas_--and of some not great. Harper, New
York, 1951.
SOWELL, A. J. _Rangers and Pioneers of Texas_, 1884; _Life of
Bigfoot Wallace_, 1899; _Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of
Southwest Texas_, 1900. All OP; all meaty with the character
of ready-to-fight but peace-seeking Texas pioneers. Sowell
will some day be recognized as an extraordinary chronicler.
STAPP, WILLIAM P. _The Prisoners of Perote_, 1845; reprinted
by Steck, Austin, 1936. Journal of one of the Mier men who
drew a white bean.
THOMASON, JOHN W. _Lone Star Preacher_, Scribner's, New York,
1941. The cream, the essence, the spirit, and the body of the
fighting tradition of Texas. Historical novel of Civil War.
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