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.
McDANFIELD, 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.
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.
WEBB, WALTER PRESCOTT. The Texas Rangers, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1935. See under "Texas Rangers."
WILBARGER, J. W. Indian Depredations in Texas, 1889; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Narratives that have for generations been a household heritage among Texas families who fought for their land.
THE TEXAS RANGERS were never more than a handful in number, but they were picked men who knew how to ride, shoot, and tell the truth. On the Mexican border and on the Indian frontier, a few rangers time and again proved themselves more effective than battalions of soldiers.
BANTA, WILLIAM. Twenty-seven Years on the Texas Frontier, 1893; reprinted, 1933. OP.
GAY, BEATRICE GRADY. Into the Setting Sun, Santa Anna, Texas, 1936. Coleman County scenes and characters, dominated by ranger character. OP.
GILLETT, JAMES B. Six Years with the Texas Rangers, printed for the author at Austin, Texas, 1921. He paid the printer cash for either one or two thousand copies, as he told me, and sold them personally. Edited by Milo M. Quaife, the book was published by Yale University Press in 1925. This edition was reprinted, 1943, by the Lakeside Press, Chicago, in its "Lakeside Classics" series, which are given away by the publishers at Christmas annually and are not for sale—except through second-hand dealers. Meantime, in 1927, the narrative had appeared under title of The Texas Ranger, "in collaboration with Howard R. Driggs," a professional neutralizer for school readers of any writing not standardized, published by World Book Co., Yonkers-on-Hudson, New York. All editions OP. I regard Gillett as the strongest and straightest of all ranger narrators. He combined in his nature wild restlessness and loyal gentleness. He wrote in sunlight.
GREER, JAMES K. Buck Barry, Dallas, 1932. OP. Colonel Jack Hays, Texas Frontier Leader and California Builder, Dutton, New York, 1952. Hays achieved more vividness in reputation than narratives about him have attained to.
JENNINGS, N. A. The Texas Ranger, New York, 1899; reprinted 1930, with foreword by J. Frank Dobie. OP. Good narrative.
MALTBY, W. JEFF. Captain Jeff, Colorado, Texas, 1906. Amorphous. OP.
MARTIN, JACK. Border Boss, San Antonio, 1942. Mediocre biography of Captain John R. Hughes. OP.
PAINE, ALBERT BIGELOW. Captain Bill McDonald, New York, 1909. Paine did not do so well by "Captain Bill" as he did in his rich biography of Mark Twain. OP.
PIKE, JAMES. Scout and Ranger, 1865, reprinted 1932 by Princeton University Press. Pike drew a long bow; interesting. OP.
RAYMOND, DORA NEILL. Captain Lee Hall of Texas, Norman, Oklahoma, 1940. OP.
REID, SAMUEL C. Scouting Expeditions of the Texas Rangers, 1859; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Texas Rangers in Mexican War.
ROBERTS, DAN W. Rangers and Sovereignty, 1914. OP. Roberts was better as ranger than as writer.
ROBERTS, MRS. D. W. (wife of Captain Dan W. Roberts). A Woman's Reminiscences of Six Years in Camp with The Texas Rangers, Austin, 1928. OP. Mrs. Roberts was a sensible and charming woman with a seeing eye.
SOWELL, A. J. Rangers and Pioneers of Texas, San Antonio, 1884. A graphic book down to bedrock. OP.
WEBB, WALTER PRESCOTT. The Texas Rangers, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1935. The beginning, middle, and end of the subject. Bibliography.
ONE REASON for the ebullience of life and rollicky carelessness on the frontiers of the West was the lack—temporary—of women. The men, mostly young, had given no hostages to fortune. They were generally as free from family cares as the buccaneers. This was especially true of the first ranches on the Great Plains, of cattle trails, of mining camps, logging camps, and of trapping expeditions. It was not true of the colonial days in Texas, of ranch life in the southern part of Texas, of homesteading all over the West, of emigrant trails to California and Oregon, of backwoods life.
Various items listed under "How the Early Settlers Lived" contain material on pioneer women.
ALDERSON, NANNIE T., and SMITH, HELENA HUNTINGTON. A Bride Goes West, New York, 1942. Montana in the eighties. OP.
BAKER, D. W. C. A Texas Scrapbook, 1875; reprinted, 1936, by Steck, Austin.
BROTHERS, MARY HUDSON. A Pecos Pioneer, 1943. OP. The best part of this book is not about the writer's brother, who cowboyed with Chisum's Jinglebob outfit and ran into Billy the Kid, but is Mary Hudson's own life. Only Ross Santee has equaled her in description of drought and rain. The last chapters reveal a girl's inner life, amid outward experiences, as no other woman's chronicle of ranch ways—sheep ranch here.
CALL, HUGHIE. Golden Fleece, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1942. Hughie Call became wife of a Montana sheepman early in this century. OP.
CLEAVELAND, AGNES MORLEY. No Life for a Lady, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1941. Bright, witty, penetrating; anecdotal. Best account of frontier life from woman's point of view yet published. New Mexico is the setting, toward turn of the century. People who wished Mrs. Cleaveland would write another book were disappointed when her Satan's Paradise appeared in 1952.
ELLIS, ANNE. The Life of An Ordinary Woman, 1929, and Plain Anne Ellis, 1931, both OP. Colorado country and town. Books of disillusioned observations, wit, and wisdom by a frank woman.
FAUNCE, HILDA. Desert Wife, 1934. OP. Desert loneliness at a Navajo trading post.
HARRIS, MRS. DILUE. Reminiscences, in Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vols. IV and VII.
KLEBERG, ROSA. "Early Experiences in Texas," in Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association (initial title for Southwestern Historical Quarterly), Vols. I and II.
MAGOFFIN, SUSAN SHELBY. Down the Santa Fe Trail, 1926. OP. She was juicy and a bride, and all life was bright to her.
MATTHEWS, SALLIE REYNOLDS. Interwoven, Houston, 1936. Ranch life in the Texas frontier as a refined and intelligent woman saw it. OP.
MAVERICK, MARY A. Memoirs, San Antonio, 1921. OP. Essential.
PICKRELL, ANNIE DOOM. Pioneer Women in Texas, Austin, 1929. Too much lady business but valuable. OP.
POE, SOPHIE A. Buckboard Days, edited by Eugene Cunningham, Caldwell, Idaho, 1936. Mrs. Poe was there—New Mexico.
RAK, MARY KIDDER. A Cowman's Wife, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1934. The external experiences of an ex-teacher on a small Arizona ranch.
RHODES, MAY D. The Hired Man on Horseback, 1938. Biography of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, but also warm-natured autobiography of the woman who ranched with "Gene" in New Mexico. OP.
RICHARDS, CLARICE E. A Tenderfoot Bride, Garden City, N. Y., 1920. OP. Charming.
STEWART, ELINOR P. Letters of a Woman Homesteader, Boston, 1914. OP.
WHITE, OWEN P. A Frontier Mother, New York, 1929. OP. Overdone, as White overdid every subject he touched.
WILBARGER, J. W. Indian Depredations in Texas, 1889; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. A glimpse into the lives led by families that gave many women to savages—for death or for Cynthia Ann Parker captivity.
WYNN, AFTON. "Pioneer Folk Ways," in Straight Texas, Texas Folklore Society Publication XIII, 1937. Excellent.
NOTWITHSTANDING both the tradition and the facts of hardshooting, hard-riding cowboys, of bad men, of border lawlessness, of inhabitants who had left some other place under a cloud, of frontier towns "west of God," hard layouts and conscienceless "courthouse crowds"—notwithstanding all this, the Southwest has been and is religious-minded. This is not to say that it is spiritual-natured. It belongs to H. L. Mencken's "Bible Belt." "Pass-the-Biscuits" Pappy O'Daniel got to be governor of Texas and then U.S. senator by advertising his piety. A politician as "ignorant as a Mexican hog" on foreign affairs and the complexities of political economy can run in favor of what he and the voters call religion and leave an informed man of intellect and sincerity in the shade. The biggest campmeeting in the Southwest, the Bloys Campmeeting near Fort Davis, Texas, is in the midst of an enormous range country away from all factories and farmers.
Since about 1933 the United States Indian Service has not only allowed but rather encouraged the Indians to revert to their own religious ceremonies. They have always been religious. The Spanish colonists of the Southwest, as elsewhere, were zealously Catholic, and their descendants have generally remained Catholic. The first English-speaking settlers of the region—the colonists led by Stephen F. Austin to Texas—were overwhelmingly Protestant, though in order to establish Mexican citizenship and get titles to homestead land they had, technically, to declare themselves Catholics. One of the causes of the Texas Revolution as set forth by the Texans in their Declaration of Independence was the Mexican government's denial of "the right of worshipping the Almighty according to the dictates of our own conscience." A history of southwestern society that left out the Bible would be as badly gapped as one leaving out the horse or the six-shooter.
See chapter entitled "On the Lord's Side" in Dobie's The Flavor of Texas. Most of the books listed under "How the Early Settlers Lived" contain information on religion and preachers. Church histories are about as numerous as state histories. Virtually all county histories take into account church development. The books listed below are strong on personal experiences.
ASBURY, FRANCIS. Three or more lives have been written of this representative pioneer bishop.
BOLTON, HERBERT E. The Padre on Horseback, 1932. Life of the Jesuit missionary Kino. OP.
BROWNLOW, W. G. Portrait and Biography of Parson Brownlow, the Tennessee Patriot, 1862. Brownlow was a very representative figure. Under the title of William G Brownlow, Fighting Parson of the Southern Highland, E. M Coulter has brought out a thorough life of him, published by University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1937.
BURLESON, RUFUS C. Life and Writings, 1901. OP. The autobiographical part of this amorphously arranged volume is a social document of the first rank.
CARTWRIGHT, PETER. Autobiography, 1857. Out of Kentucky, into Indiana and then into Illinois, where he ran against Lincoln for Congress, Cartwright rode with saddlebags and Bible. Sandburg characterizes him as "an enemy of whisky, gambling, jewelry, fine clothes, and higher learning." He seems to me more unlovely in his intolerance and sectarianism than most circuit riders of the Southwest, but as a militant, rough-and-ready "soldier of the Lord" he represented southwestern frontiers as well as his own.
CRANFILL, J. B. Chronicle, A Story of Life in Texas, 1916. Cranfill was a lot of things besides a Baptist preacher—trail driver, fiddler, publisher, always an observer. OP.
DEVILBISS, JOHN WESLEY. Reminiscences and Events (compiled by H. A. Graves), 1886. The very essence of pioneering,
DOMENECH, ABBE. Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico (translated from the French), London, 1858. OP. The Abbe always had eyes open for wonders. He saw them. Delicious narrative.
EVANS, WILL G. Border Skylines, published in Dallas, 1940, for Bloys Campmeeting Association, Fort Davis, Texas. Chronicles of the men and women—cow people—and cow country responsible for the best known campmeeting, held annually, Texas has ever had. OP.
GRAVIS, PETER W. 25 Years on the Outside Row of the Northwest Texas Annual Conference, Comanche, Texas, 1892. Another one of those small personal records, privately printed but full of juice. OP.
LIDE, ANNA A. Robert Alexander and the Early Methodist Church in Texas, La Grange, Texas, 1935. OP.
MORRELL, Z. N. Fruits and Flowers in the Wilderness, 1872. Though reprinted three times, last in 1886, long OP. In many ways the best circuit rider's chronicle of the Southwest that has been published. Morrell fought Indians and Mexicans in Texas and was rich in other experiences.
MORRIS, T. A. Miscellany, 1884. The "Notes of Travel"—particularly to Texas in 1841—are what makes this book interesting.
PARISOT, P. F. Reminiscences of a Texas Missionary, 1899. Mostly the Texas-Mexican border.
POTTER, ANDREW JACKSON, commonly called the Fighting Parson. Life of him by H. A. Graves, 1890, not nearly so good as Potter was himself.
THOMASON, JOHN W. Lone Star Preacher, Scribner's, New York, 1941. Fiction, true to humanity. The moving story of a Texas chaplain who carried a Bible in one hand and a captain's sword in the other through the Civil War.
STEPHEN F. AUSTIN wanted to exclude lawyers, along with roving frontiersmen, from his colonies in Texas, and hoped thus to promote a utopian society. The lawyers got in, however. Their wit, the anecdotes of which they were both subject and author, and the political stories they made traditional from the stump, have not been adequately set down. As criminal lawyers they stood as high in society as corporation lawyers stand now and were a good deal more popular, though less wealthy. The code of independence that fostered personal violence and justified killings—in contradistinction to murders—and that ran to excess in outlaws naturally fostered the criminal lawyer. His type is now virtually obsolete.
Keen observers, richly stored in experience and delightful in talk, as many lawyers of the Southwest have been and are, very few of them have written on other than legal subjects. James D. Lynch's The Bench and the Bar of Texas (1885) is confined to the eminence of "eminent jurists" and to the mastery of "masters of jurisprudence." What we want is the flavor of life as represented by such characters as witty Three-Legged Willie (Judge R. M. Williamson) and mysterious Jonas Harrison. It takes a self-lover to write good autobiography. Lawyers are certainly as good at self-loving as preachers, but we have far better autobiographic records of circuit riders than of early-day lawyers.
Like them, the pioneer justice of peace resides more in folk anecdotes than in chroniclings. Horace Bell's expansive On the Old West Coast so represents him. A continent away, David Crockett, in his Autobiography, confessed, "I was afraid some one would ask me what the judiciary was. If I knowed I wish I may be shot." Before this, however, Crockett had been a J. P. "I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life."
COOMBES, CHARLES E. The Prairie Dog Lawyer, Dallas, 1945. OP. Experiences and anecdotes by a lawyer better read in rough-and-ready humanity than in law. The prairie dogs have all been poisoned out from the West Texas country over which he ranged from court to court.
HAWKINS, WALACE. The Case of John C. Watrous, United States Judge for Texas: A Political Story of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1950. More technical than social.
KITTRELL, NORMAN G. Governors Who Have Been and Other Public Men of Texas, Houston, 1921. OP. Best collection of lawyer anecdotes of the Southwest.
ROBINSON, DUNCAN W. Judge Robert McAlpin Williamson, Texas' Three-Legged Willie, Texas State Historical Association, Austin, 1948. This was the Republic of Texas judge who laid a Colt revolver across a Bowie knife and said: "Here is the constitution that overrides the law."
SONNICHSEN, C. L. Roy Bean, Law West of the Pecos, Macmillan, New York, 1943. Roy Bean (1830-1903), justice of peace at Langtry, Texas, advertised himself as "Law West of the Pecos." He was more picaresque than picturesque; folk imagination gave him notoriety. The Texas State Highway Department maintains for popular edification the beer joint wherein he held court. Three books have been written about him, besides scores of newspaper and magazine articles. The only biography of validity is Sonnichsen's.
SLOAN, RICHARD E. Memories of an Arizona Judge, Stanford, California, 1932. Full of humanity. OP.
SMITH, E. F. A Saga of Texas Law: A Factual Story of Texas Law, Lawyers, Judges and Famous Lawsuits, Naylor, San Antonio, 1940. Interesting.
BEFORE the family doctors came, frontiersmen sawed off legs with handsaws, tied up arteries with horsetail hair, cauterized them with branding irons. Before homemade surgery with steel tools was practiced, Mexican curanderas (herb women) supplied remedios, and they still know the medicinal properties of every weed and bush. Herb stores in San Antonio, Brownsville, and El Paso do a thriving business. Behind the curanderas were the medicine men of the tribes. Not all their lore was superstition, as any one who reads the delectable autobiography of Gideon Lincecum, published by the Mississippi Historical Society in 1904, will agree. Lincecum, learned in botany, a sharply-edged individual who later moved to Texas, went out to live with a Choctaw medicine man and wrote down all his lore about the virtues of native plants. The treatise has never been printed.
The extraordinary life of Lincecum has, however, been interestingly delineated in Samuel Wood Geiser's Naturalists of the Frontier, Southern Methodist University Press, 1937, 1948, and in Pat Ireland Nixon's The Medical Story of Early Texas, listed below. No historical novelist could ask for a richer theme than Gideon Lincecum or Edmund Montgomery, the subject of I. K. Stephens' biography listed below.
BUSH, I. J. Gringo Doctor, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939. OP. Dr. Bush represented frontier medicine and surgery on both sides of the Rio Grande. Living at El Paso, he was for a time with the Maderistas in the revolution against Diaz.
COE, URLING C. Frontier Doctor, New York, 1939. OP. Not of the Southwest but representing other frontier doctors. Lusty autobiography full of characters and anecdotes.
DODSON, RUTH. "Don Pedrito Jaramillo: The Curandero of Los Olmos," in The Healer of Los Olmos and Other Mexican Lore (Publication of the Texas Folklore Society XXIV), edited by Wilson M. Hudson, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1951. Don Pedrito was no more of a fraud than many an accredited psychiatrist, and he was the opposite of offensive.
NIXON, PAT IRELAND. A Century of Medicine in San Antonio, published by the author, San Antonio, 1936. Rich in information, diverting in anecdote, and tonic in philosophy. Bibliography. The Medical Story of Early Texas, 1528-1835 [San Antonio], 1946. Lightness of life with scholarly thoroughness; many character sketches.
RED, MRS. GEORGE P. The Medicine Man in Texas, Houston, 1930. Biographical. OP.
STEPHENS, I. K. The Hermit Philosopher of Liendo, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1951. Well-conceived and well-written biography of Edmund Montgomery—illegitimate son of a Scottish lord, husband of the sculptress Elisabet Ney—who, after being educated in Germany and becoming a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London, came to Texas with his wife and sons and settled on Liendo Plantation, near Hempstead, once known as Sixshooter Junction. Here, in utter isolation from people of cultivated minds, he conducted scientific experiments in his inadequate laboratory and thought out a philosophy said to be half a century ahead of his time. He died in 1911. His life was the drama of an elevated soul of complexities, far more tragic than any life associated with the lurid "killings" around him.
WOODHULL, FROST. "Ranch Remedios," in Man, Bird, and Beast, Texas Folklore Society Publication VIII, 1930. The richest and most readable collection of pioneer remedies yet published.
AS USED HERE, the term "Mountain Men" applies to those trappers and traders who went into the Rocky Mountains before emigrants had even sought a pass through them to the west or cattle had beat out a trail on the plains east of them. Beaver fur was the lodestar for the Mountain Men. Their span of activity was brief, their number insignificant. Yet hardly any other distinct class of men, irrespective of number or permanence, has called forth so many excellent books as the Mountain Men. The books are not nearly so numerous as those connected with range life, but when one considers the writings of Stanley Vestal, Sabin, Ruxton, Fer gusson, Chittenden, Favour, Garrard, Inman, Irving, Reid, and White in this Seld, one doubts whether any other form of American life at all has been so well covered in ballad, fiction, biography, history.
See James Hobbs, James O. Pattie, and Reuben Gold Thwaites under "Surge of Life in the West," also "Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail."
ALTER, J. CECIL. James Bridger, Salt Lake City, 1925. A hogshead of life. Bibliography. OP. Republished by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio.
BONNER, T. D. The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, 1856; reprinted in 1931, with an illuminating introduction by Bernard DeVoto. OP. Beckwourth was the champion of all western liars.
BREWERTON, G. D. Overland with Kit Carson, New York, 1930. Good narrative. OP.
CHITTENDEN, H. M. The American Fur Trade of the Far West, New York, 1902. OP. Basic work. Bibliography.
CLELAND, ROBERT GLASS. This Reckless Breed of Men: The Trappers and Fur Traders of the Southwest, Knopf, New York, 1950. Fresh emphasis on the California-Arizona-New Mexico region by a knowing scholar. Economical in style without loss of either humanity or history. Bibliography.
CONRAD, HOWARD L. Uncle Dick Wootton, 1890. Primary source. OP.
COYNER, D. H. The Lost Trappers, 1847.
DAVIDSON, L. J., and BOSTWICK, P. The Literature of the Rocky Mountain West 1803-1903, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939. Davidson and Forrester Blake, editors. Rocky Mountain Tales, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1947.
DEVOTO, BERNARD. Across the Wide Missouri, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1947. Superbly illustrated by reproductions of Alfred Jacob Miller. DeVoto has amplitude and is a master of his subject as well as of the craft of writing.
FAVOUR, ALPHEUS H. Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1936. Flavor and facts both. Full bibliography.
FERGUSSON, HARVEY. Rio Grande, 1933, republished by Tudor, New York. The drama and evolution of human life in New Mexico, written out of knowledge and with power. Wolf Song, New York, 1927. OP. Graphic historical novel of Mountain Men. It sings with life.
GARRARD, LEWIS H. Wah-toyah and the Taos Trail, 1850. One of the basic works.
GRANT, BLANCHE C. When Old Trails Were New—The Story of Taos, New York, 1934. OP. Taos was rendezvous town for the free trappers.
GUTHRIE, A. B., JR. The Big Sky, Sloane, New York, 1947 (now published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston). "An unusually original novel, superb as historical fiction."—Bernard DeVoto. I still prefer Harvey Fergusson's Wolf Song.
HAMILTON, W. T. My Sixty Years on the Plains, New York, 1905. Now published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio.
INMAN, HENRY. The Old Santa Fe Trail, 1897.
IRVING, WASHINGTON. The Adventures of Captain Bonneville and Astoria. The latter book was founded on Robert Stuart's Narratives. In 1935 these were prepared for the press, with much illuminative material, by Philip Ashton Rollins and issued under the title of The Discovery of the Oregon Trail.
LARPENTEUR, CHARLES. Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri, edited by Elliott Coues, New York, 1898. As Milo Milton Quaife shows in an edition of the narrative issued by the Lakeside Press, Chicago, 1933, the indefatigable Coues just about rewrote the old fur trader's narrative. It is immediate and vigorous.
LAUT, A. C. The Story of the Trapper, New York, 1902. A popular survey, emphasizing types and characters.
LEONARD, ZENAS. Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard, Clearfield, Pa., 1839. In 1833 the Leonard trappers reached San Francisco Bay, boarded a Boston ship anchored near shore, and for the first time in two years varied their meat diet by eating bread and drinking "Coneac." One of the trappers had a gun named Knock-him-stiff. Such earthy details abound in this narrative of adventures in a brand new world.
LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. Arizona Characters, Los Angeles, 1928. Very readable biographic sketches. OP.
MILLER, ALFRED JACOB. The West of Alfred Jacob Miller, with an account of the artist by Marvin C. Ross, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1950. Although Miller painted the West during 1837-38, only now is he being discovered by the public. This is mainly a picture book, in the top rank.
PATTIE, JAMES OHIO. The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky, Cincinnati, 1831. Pattie and his small party went west in 1824. For grizzlies, thirst, and other features of primitive adventure the narrative is primary.
REID, MAYNE. The Scalp Hunters. An antiquated novel, but it has some deep-dyed pictures of Mountain Men.
ROSS, ALEXANDER. Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River (1849) and The Fur Hunters of the Far West (1855). The trappers of the Southwest can no more be divorced from the trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company than can Texas cowboys from those of Montana.
RUSSELL, OSBORNE. Journal of a Trapper, Boise, Idaho, 1921. In the winter of 1839, at Fort Hall on Snake River, Russell and three other trappers "had some few books to read, such as Byron, Shakespeare and Scott's works, the Bible and Clark's Commentary on it, and some small works on geology, chemistry and philosophy." Russell was wont to speculate on Life and Nature. In perspective he approaches Ruxton.
RUXTON, GEORGE F. Life in the Far West, 1848; reprinted by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen. No other contemporary of the Mountain Men has been so much quoted as Ruxton. He remains supremely readable.
SABIN, EDWIN L. Kit Carson Days, 1914. A work long standard, rich on rendezvous, bears, and many other associated subjects. Bibliography. Republished in rewritten form, 1935. OP.
VESTAL, STANLEY (pseudonym for Walter S. Campbell). Kit Carson, 1928. As a clean-running biographic narrative, it is not likely to be superseded. Mountain Men, 1937, OP; The Old Santa Fe Trail, 1939. Vestal's "Fandango," a tale of the Mountain Men in Taos, is among the most spirited ballads America has produced. It and a few other Mountain Men ballads are contained in the slight collection, Fandango, 1927. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, published the aforementioned titles. James Bridger, Mountain Man, Morrow, New York, 1946, is smoother than J. Cecil Alter's biography but not so savory. Joe Meek, the Merry Mountain Man, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1952.
WHITE, STEWART EDWARD. The Long Rifle, 1932, and Ranchero, 1933, Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, N. Y. Historical fiction.