{illust. Lyrics = Kind friends, if you will listen, A story I will tell A-bout a final bust-up, That happened down in Dell.}
COWBOY SONGS and ballads are generally ranked alongside Negro spirituals as being the most important of America's contributions to folk song. As compared with the old English and Scottish ballads, the cowboy and all other ballads of the American frontiers generally sound cheap and shoddy. Since John A. Lomax brought out his collection in 1910, cowboy songs have found their way into scores of songbooks, have been recorded on hundreds of records, and have been popularized, often—and naturally—without any semblance to cowboy style, by thousands of radio singers. Two general anthologies are recommended especially for the cowboy songs they contain: American Ballads and Folk Songs, by John A. and Alan Lomax, Macmillan, New York, 1934; The American Songbag, by Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927.
LARRIN, MARGARET. Singing Cowboy (with music), New York, 1931. OP.
LOMAX, JOHN A., and LOMAX, ALAN. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, Macmillan, New York, 1938. This is a much added-to and revised form of Lomax's 1910 collection, under the same title. It is the most complete of all anthologies. More than any other man, John A. Lomax is responsible for having made cowboy songs a part of the common heritage of America. His autobiographic Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (Macmillan, 1947) is in quality far above the jingles that most cowboy songs are.
Missouri, as no other state, gave to the West and Southwest. Much of Missouri is still more southwestern in character than much of Oklahoma. For a full collection, with full treatment, of the ballads and songs, including bad-man and cowboy songs, sung in the Southwest there is nothing better than Ozark Folksongs, collected and edited by Vance Randolph, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, 1946-50. An unsurpassed work in four handsome volumes.
OWENS, WILLIAM A. Texas Folk Songs, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1950. A miscellany of British ballads, American ballads, "songs of doleful love," etc. collected in Texas mostly from country people of Anglo-American stock. Musical scores for all the songs.
The Texas Folklore Society has published many cowboy songs. Its publications Texas and Southwestern Lore (1927) and Follow de Drinkin' Gou'd (1928) contain scores, with music and anecdotal interpretations. Other volumes contain other kinds of songs, including Mexican.
THORP, JACK (N. Howard). Songs of the Cowboys, Boston, 1921. OP. Good, though limited, anthology, without music and with illuminating comments. A pamphlet collection that Thorp privately printed at Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908, was one of the first to be published. Thorp had the perspective of both range and civilization. He was a kind of troubadour himself. The opening chapter, "Banjo in the Cow Camps," of his posthumous reminiscences, Pardner of the Wind, is delicious.
THE WEST WAS DISCOVERED, battled over, and won by men on horseback. Spanish conquistadores saddled their horses in Vera Cruz and rode until they had mapped the continents from the Horn to Montana and from the Floridas to the harbors of the Californias. The padres with them rode on horseback, too, and made every mission a horse ranch. The national dance of Mexico, the Jarabe, is an interpretation of the clicking of hoofs and the pawing and prancing of spirited horses that the Aztecs noted when the Spaniards came. Likewise, the chief contribution made by white men of America to the folk songs of the world—the cowboy songs—are rhythmed to the walk of horses.
Astride horses introduced by the conquistadores to the Americas, the Plains Indians became almost a separate race from the foot-moving tribes of the East and the stationary Pueblos of the Rockies. The men that later conquered and corralled these wild-riding Plains Indians were plainsmen on horses and cavalrymen. The earliest American explorers and trappers of both Plains and Rocky Mountains went out in the saddle. The first industrial link between the East and the West was a mounted pack train beating out the Santa Fe Trail. On west beyond the end of this trail, in Spanish California, even the drivers of oxen rode horseback. The first transcontinental express was the Pony Express.
Outlaws and bad men were called "long riders." The Texas Ranger who followed them was, according to his own proverb, "no better than his horse." Booted sheriffs from Brownsville on the Rio Grande to the Hole in the Wall in the Big Horn Mountains lived in the saddle. Climactic of all the riders rode the cowboy, who lived with horse and herd.
In the Old West the phrase "left afoot" meant nothing short of being left flat on your back. "A man on foot is no man at all," the saying went. If an enemy could not take a man's life, the next best thing was to take his horse. Where cow thieves went scot free, horse thieves were hanged, and to say that a man was "as common as a horse thief" was to express the nadir of commonness. The pillow of the frontiersmen who slept with a six-shooter under it was a saddle, and hitched to the horn was the loose end of a stake rope. Just as "Colonel Colt" made all men equal in a fight, the horse made all men equal in swiftness and mobility.
The proudest names of civilized languages when literally translated mean "horseman": eques, caballero, chevalier, cavalier. Until just yesterday the Man on Horseback had been for centuries the symbol of power and pride. The advent of the horse, from Spanish sources, so changed the ways and psychology of the Plains Indians that they entered into what historians call the Age of Horse Culture. Almost until the automobile came, the whole West and Southwest were dominated by a Horse Culture.
Material on range horses is scattered through the books listed under "Range Life," "Stagecoaches, Freighting," "Pony Express."
No thorough comprehension of the Spanish horse of the Americas is possible without consideration of this horse's antecedents, and that involves a good deal of the horse history of the world.
BROWN, WILLIAM ROBINSON. The Horse of the Desert (no publisher or place on title page), 1936; reprinted by Macmillan, New York. A noble, beautiful, and informing book.
CABRERA, ANGEL. Caballos de America, Buenos Aires, 1945. The authority on Argentine horses.
CARTER, WILLIAM H. The Horses of the World, National Geographic Society, Washington, D. C., 1923. A concentrated survey.
Cattleman. Published at Fort Worth, this monthly magazine of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association began in 1939 to issue, for September, a horse number. It has published a vast amount of material both scientific and popular on range horses. Another monthly magazine worth knowing about is the Western Horseman, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
DENHARDT, ROBERT MOORMAN. The Horse of the Americas, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1947. This historical treatment of the Spanish horse could be better ordered; some sections of the book are little more than miscellanies.
DOBIE, J. FRANK. The Mustangs, illustrated by Charles Banks Wilson, Little, Brown, Boston, 1952. Before this handsome book arrives at the wild horses of North America, a third of it has been spent on the Arabian progenitors of the Spanish horse, the acquisition of the Spanish horse by western Indians, and the nature of Indian horses. There are many narratives of mustangs and mustangers and of Spanish-blooded horses under the saddle. The author has tried to compass the natural history of the animal and to blend vividness with learning. The book incorporates his Tales of the Mustang, a slight volume published in an edition of only three hundred copies in 1936. It also incorporates a large part of Mustangs and Cow Horses, edited by Dobie, Boatright, and Ransom, and issued by the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1940—a volume that went out of print not long after it was published.
DODGE, THEODORE A. Riders of Many Lands, New York, 1893. Illustrations by Remington. Wide and informed views.
GRAHAM, R. B. CUNNINGHAME. The Horses of the Conquest, London, 1930. Graham was both historian and horseman, as much at home on the pampas as in his ancient Scottish home. This excellent book on the Spanish horses introduced to the Western Hemisphere is in a pasture to itself. Reprinted in 1949 by the University of Oklahoma Press, with introduction and notes by Robert Moorman Denhardt.
{illust. caption = Charles Banks Wilson, in The Mustangs by J. Frank Dobie (1952)}
GREER, JAMES K. Bois d'Arc to Barbed Wire, Dallas, 1936. OP.
HASTINGS, FRANK. A Ranchman's Recollections, Chicago, 1921. "Old Gran'pa" is close to the best American horse story I have ever read. OP.
HAYES, M. HORACE. Points of the Horse, London, 1904. This and subsequent editions are superior in treatment and illustrations to earlier editions. Hayes was a far traveler and scholar as well as horseman. One of the less than a dozen best books on the horse.
JAMES, WILL. Smoky, Scribner's, New York, 1930. Perhaps the best of several books that Will James—always with illustrations—has woven around horse heroes.
LEIGH, WILLIAM R. The Western Pony, New York, 1933. One of the most beautifully printed books on the West; beautiful illustrations; illuminating text. OP.
MULLER, DAN. Horses, Reilly and Lee, Chicago, 1936. Interesting illustrations.
PATTULLO, GEORGE. The Untamed, New York, 1911. A collection of short stories, among which "Corazon" and "Neutria" are excellent on horses. OP.
PERKINS, CHARLES ELLIOTT. The Pinto Horse, Santa Barbara, California, 1927. A fine narrative, illustrated by Edward Borein. OP.
RIDGEWAY, W. The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse, Cambridge, England, 1905. A standard work, though many of its conclusions are disputed, especially by Lady Wentworth in her Thoroughbred Racing Stock and Its Ancestors, London, 1938.
SANTEE, ROSS. Men and Horses, New York, 1926. Three chapters of this book, "A Fool About a Horse," "The Horse Wrangler," and "The Rough String," are especially recommended. Cowboy, New York, 1928, reveals in a fine way the rapport between the cowboy and his horse. Sleepy Black, New York, 1933, is a story of a horse designed for younger readers; being good on the subject, it is good for any reader. All OP.
SIMPSON, GEORGE GAYLOR. Horses: The Story of the Horse Family in the Modern World and through Sixty Million Years of History, Oxford University Press, New York, 1951. In the realm of paleontology this work supplants all predecessors. Bibliography.
STEELE, RUFUS. Mustangs of the Mesas, Hollywood, California, 1941. OP. Modern mustanging in Nevada; excellently written narratives of outstanding mustangs.
STONG, PHIL. Horses and Americans, New York, 1939. A survey and a miscellany combined. OP.
{illust. caption = Charles M. Russell, in The Untamed by George Pattullo (1911)}
THORP, JACK (N. Howard) as told to Neil McCullough Clark. Pardner of the Wind, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. Two chapters in this book make the "Spanish thunderbolts," as Jack Thorp called the mustangs and Spanish cow horses, graze, run, pitch, and go gentle ways as free as the wind. "Five Hundred Mile Horse Race" is a great story. No other range man excepting Ross Santee has put down so much everyday horse lore in such a fresh way.
TWEEDIE, MAJOR GENERAL W. The Arabian Horse: His Country and People, Edinburgh and London, 1894. One of the few horse books to be classified as literature. Wise in the blend of horse, land, and people.
WENTWORTH, LADY. The Authentic Arabian Horse and His Descendants, London, 1945. Rich in knowledge and both magnificent and munificent in illustrations. Almost immediately after publication, this noble volume entered the rare book class.
WYMAN, WALKER D. The Wild Horse of the West, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. A scholarly sifting of virtually all available material on mustangs. Readable. Only thorough bibliography on subject so far published.
PLENTY of six-shooter play is to be found in most of the books about old-time cowboys; yet hardly one of the professional bad men was a representative cowboy. Bad men of the West and cowboys alike wore six-shooters and spurs; they drank each other's coffee; they had a fanatical passion for liberty—for themselves. But the representative cowboy was a reliable hand, hanging through drought, blizzard, and high water to his herd, whereas the bona fide bad man lived on the dodge. Between the killer and the cowboy standing up for his rights or merely shooting out the lights for fun, there was as much difference as between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. Of course, the elements were mixed in the worst of the bad men, as they are in the best of all good men. No matter what deductions analysis may lead to, the fact remains that the western bad men of open range days have become a part of the American tradition. They represent six-shooter culture at its zenith—the wild and woolly side of the West—a stage between receding bowie knife individualism of the backwoods and blackguard, machine-gun gangsterism of the city.
The songs about Sam Bass, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid reflect popular attitude toward the hard-riding outlaws. Sam Bass, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the Daltons, Cole Younger, Joaquin Murrieta, John Wesley Hardin, Al Jennings, Belle Starr, and other "long riders" with their guns in their hands have had their biographies written over and over. They were not nearly as immoral as certain newspaper columnists lying under the cloak of piety. As time goes on, they, like antique Robin Hood and the late Pancho Villa, recede from all realistic judgment. If the picture show finds in them models for generosity, gallantry, and fidelity to a code of liberty, and if the public finds them picturesque, then philosophers may well be thankful that they lived, rode, and shot.
{illust. caption = Tom Lea: Pancho Villa, in Southwest Review (1951)}
"The long-tailed heroes of the revolver," to pick a phrase from Mark Twain's unreverential treatment of them in Roughing It, often did society a service in shooting each other—aside from providing entertainment to future generations. As "The Old Cattleman" of Alfred Henry Lewis' Wolfville stories says, "A heap of people need a heap of killing." Nor can the bad men be logically segregated from the long-haired killers on the side of the law like Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp. W. H. Hudson once advanced the theory that bloodshed and morality go together. If American civilization proceeds, the rage for collecting books on bad men will probably subside until a copy of Miguel Antonio Otero's The Real Billy the Kid will bring no higher price than a first edition of A. Edward Newton's The Amenities of Book-Collecting.
See "Fighting Texians," "Texas Rangers," "Range Life," "Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads."
AIKMAN, DUNCAN. Calamity Jane and the Lady Wildcats, 1927. OP. Patronizing in the H. L. Mencken style.
BILLY THE KID. We ve got to take him seriously, not so much for what he was—
as for his provocations. Popular imagination, represented by writers of all degrees, goes on playing on him with cumulative effect. As a figure in literature the Kid has come to lead the whole field of western bad men. The Saturday Review, for October 11, 1952, features a philosophical essay entitled "Billy the Kid: Faust in America—The Making of a Legend." The growth of this legend is minutely traced through a period of seventy-one years (1881-1952) by J. C. Dykes in Billy the Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1952 (186 pages). It lists 437 titles, including magazine pieces, mimeographed plays, motion pictures, verses, pamphlets, fiction. In a blend of casualness and scholarship, it gives the substance and character of each item. Indeed, this bibliography reads like a continued story, with constant references to both antecedent and subsequent action. Pat Garrett, John Chisum, and other related characters weave all through it. A first-class bibliography that is also readable is almost a new genre.
Pat F. Garrett, sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, killed the Kid about midnight, July 14, 1881. The next spring his Authentic Life of Billy the Kid was published at Santa Fe, at least partly written, according to good evidence, by a newspaperman named Ash Upton. This biography is one of the rarities in Western Americana. In 1927 it was republished by Macmillan, New York, under title of Pat F. Garrett's Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, edited by Maurice G. Fulton. This is now OP but remains basic. The most widely circulated biography has been The Saga of Billy the Kid by Walter Noble Burns, New York, 1926. It contains a deal of fictional conversation and it has no doubt contributed to the Robin-Hoodizing of the lethal character baptized as William H. Bonney, who was born in New York in 1859 and now lives with undiminished vigor as Billy the Kid. Walter Noble Burns was not so successful with The Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga of Joaquin Murrieta (1932), or, despite hogsheads of blood, with Tombstone (1927).
CANTON, FRANK M. Frontier Trails, Boston, 1930.
COE, GEORGE W. Frontier Fighter, Boston, 1934; reprinted by University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. The autobiography of one of Billy the Kid's men as recorded by Nan Hillary Harrison.
COOLIDGE, DANE. Fighting Men of the West, New York, 1932. Biographical sketches. OP.
CUNNINGHAM, EUGENE. Triggernometry, 1934; reprinted by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. Excellent survey of codes and characters. Written by a man of intelligence and knowledge. Bibliography.
FORREST, E. R. Arizona's Dark and Bloody Ground, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1936.
GARD, WAYNE. Sam Bass, Boston, 1936. Most of the whole truth. OP.
HALEY, J. EVETTS. Jeff Milton—A Good Man with a Gun, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Jeff Milton the whole man as well as the queller of bad men.
HENDRICKS, GEORGE. The Bad Man of the West, Naylor, San Antonio, 1941. Analyses and classifications go far toward making this treatment of old subjects original. Excellent bibliographical guide.
HOUGH, EMERSON. The Story of the Outlaw, 1907. OP. An omnibus carelessly put together with many holes in it.
LAKE, STUART. Wyatt Earp, Boston, 1931. Best written of all gunmen biographies. Earp happened to be on the side of the law.
LANKFORD, N. P. Vigilante Days and Ways, 1890, 1912. OP. Full treatment of lawlessness in the Northwest.
LOVE, ROBERTUS. The Rise and Fall of Jesse James, New York, 1926. Excellently written. OP.
RAINE, WILLIAM MCLEOD. Famous s and Western Outlaws, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1929. A rogues' gallery. Guns of the Frontier, Boston, 1940. Another miscellany. OP.
RASCOE, BURTON. Belle Starr, New York, 1941. OP.
RIPLEY, THOMAS. They Died with Their Boots On, 1935. Mostly about John Wesley Hardin. OP.
SABIN, EDWIN L. Wild Men of the Wild West, New York, 1929. Biographic survey of killers from the Mississippi to the Pacific. OP.
WILD BILL HICKOK. The subject of various biographies, among them those by Frank J. Wilstach (1926) and William E. Connelley (1933). The Nebraska History Magazine (Volume X) for April-June 1927 is devoted to Wild Bill and contains a "descriptive bibliography" on him by Addison E. Sheldon.
WOODHULL, FROST. Folk-Lore Shooting, in Southwestern Lore, Publication IX of the Texas Folklore Society, 1931. Rich. Humor.
DURING the twentieth century oil has brought so much money to the Southwest that the proceeds from cattle have come to look like tips. This statement is not based on statistics, though statistics no doubt exist—even on the cost of catching sun perch. Geological, legal, and economic writings on oil are mountainous in quantity, but the human drama of oil yet remains, for the most part, to be written. It is odd to find such a modern book as Erna Fergusson's Our Southwest not mentioning oil. It is odd that no book of national reputation comes off the presses about any aspect of oil. The nearest to national notice on oil is the daily report of transactions on the New York Stock Exchange. Oil companies subsidize histories of themselves, endow universities with money to train technicians they want, control state legislatures and senates, and dictate to Congress what they want for themselves in income tax laws; but so far they have not been able to hire anybody to write a book about oil that anybody but the hirers themselves wants to read. Probably they don't read them. The first thing an oilman does after amassing a few millions is buy a ranch on which he can get away from oil—and on which he can spend some of his oil money.
People live a good deal by tradition and fight a good deal by tradition also, voting more by prejudice. When one considers the stream of cow country books and the romance of mining living on in legends of lost mines and, then, the desert of oil books, one realizes that it takes something more than money to make the mare of romance run. Geology and economics are beyond the aim of this Guide, but if oil money keeps on buying up ranch land, the history of modern ranching will be resolved into the biographies of a comparatively few oilmen.
BOATRIGHT, MODY C. Gib Morgan: Minstrel of the Oil Fields. Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1945. Folk tales about Gib rather than minstrelsy. OP.
BOONE, LALIA PHIPPS. The Petroleum Dictionary, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1952. "More than 6,000 entries: definitions of technical terms and everyday expressions, a comprehensive guide to the language of the oil industry."
CAUGHEY, JOHN WALTON. Gold Is the Cornerstone (1948). Adequate treatment of the discovery of California gold and of the miners. Rushing for Gold (1949). Twelve essays by twelve writers, with emphasis on travel to California. Both books published by University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
CENDRARS, BLAISE. Sutter's Gold, London, 1926. OP.
CLARK, JAMES A., and HALBOUTY, MICHEL T. Spindletop, Random House, New York, 1952. On January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher, near Beaumont, Texas, roared in the oil age. This book, while it presumes to record what Pat Higgins was thinking as he sat in front of a country store, seems to be "the true story." The bare facts in it make drama.
DE QUILLE, DAN (pseudonym for William Wright). The Big Bonanza, Hartford, 1876. Reprinted, 1947. OP.
DOBIE, J. FRANK. Coronado's Children, Dallas, 1930; reprinted by Grosset and Dunlap, New York. Legendary tales of lost mines and buried treasures of the Southwest. Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, Little, Brown, Boston, 1939. More of the same thing.
EMRICH, DUNCAN, editor. Comstock Bonanza, Vanguard, New York, 1950. A collection of writings, garnered mostly from West Coast magazines and newspapers, bearing on mining in Nevada during the boom days of Mark Twain's.
{illust. caption = Tom Lea, in Santa Rita by Martin W. Schwettmann (1943)}
Roughing It. James G. Gally's writing is a major discovery in a minor field.
FORBES, GERALD. Flush Production: The Epic of Oil in the Gulf-Southwest, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942.
GILLIS, WILLIAM R. Goldrush Days with Mark Twain, New York, 1930. OP.
GLASSCOCK, LUCILLE. A Texas Wildcatter, Naylor, San Antonio, 1952. The wildcatter is Mrs. Glasscock's husband. She chronicles this player's main moves in the game and gives an insight into his energy-driven ambition.
HOUSE, BOYCE. Oil Boom, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. With Boyce House's earlier Were You in Ranger?, this book gives a contemporary picture of the gushing days of oil, money, and humanity.
LYMAN, GEORGE T. The Saga of the Comstock Lode, 1934, and Ralston's Ring, 1937. Both published by Scribner's, New York.
MCKENNA, JAMES A. Black Range Tales, New York, 1936. Reminiscences of prospecting life. OP.
MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E. W. Marland, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. Mature in style and in interpretative power, John Joseph Mathews goes into the very life of an oilman who was something else.
RISTER, C. C. Oil! Titan of the Southwest, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Facts in factual form. Plenty of oil wealth and taxes; nothing on oil government.
SHINN, CHARLES H. Mining Camps, 1885, reprinted by Knopf, New York, 1948. Perhaps the most competent analysis extant on the behavior of the gold hunters, with emphasis on their self-government. The Story of the Mine as Illustrated by the Great Comstock Lode of Nevada, New York, 1896. OP. Shinn knew and he knew also how to combine into form.
STUART, GRANVILLE. Forty Years on the Frontier, Cleveland, 1925. Superb on California and Montana hunger for precious metals. OP.
TAIT, SAMUEL W. Wildcatters: An Informal History of Oil-Hunting in America, Princeton University Press, 1946. OP.
TWAIN, MARK. Roughing It. The mining boom itself.
"NO MAN," says Mary Austin, "has ever really entered into the heart of any country until he has adopted or made up myths about its familiar objects." A man might reject the myths but he would have to know many facts about its natural life and have imagination as well as knowledge before entering into a country's heart. The history of any land begins with nature, and all histories must end with nature.
"The character of a country is the destiny of its people," wrote Harvey Fergusson in Rio Grande. Ross Calvin, also of New Mexico, had the same idea in mind when he entitled his book Sky Determines. "Culture mocks at the boundaries set up by politics," Clark Wissler said. "It approaches geographical boundaries with its hat in its hand." The engineering of water across mountains, electric translation of sounds, refrigeration of air and foods, and other technical developments carry human beings a certain distance across some of nature's boundaries, but no cleverness of science can escape nature. The inhabitants of Yuma, Arizona, are destined forever to face a desert devoid of graciousness. Technology does not create matter; it merely uses matter in a skilful way—uses it up.
Man advances by learning the secrets of nature and taking advantage of his knowledge. He is deeply happy only when in harmony with his work and environments. The backwoodsman, early settler, pioneer plainsman, mountain man were all like some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at its own vitals. Driven by an irrational energy, they seemed intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the power of the soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear killer, was "wrathy to kill a bear," and as respects bears and other wild life, one may search the chronicles of his kind in vain for anything beyond the incidents of chase and slaughter. To quote T. B. Thorpe's blusterous bear hunter, the whole matter may be summed up in one sentence: "A bear is started and he is killed." For the average American of the soil, whether wearing out a farm, shotgunning with a headlight the last doe of a woodland, shooting the last buffalo on the range, trapping the last howling lobo, winging the last prairie chicken, running down in an automobile the last antelope, making a killer's target of any hooting owl or flying heron that comes within range, poisoning the last eagle to fly over a sheep pasture for him the circumstances of the killing have expressed his chief intellectual interest in nature.
A sure sign of advancing civilization has been the rapidly changing popular attitude toward nature during recent years. People are becoming increasingly interested not merely in conserving game for sportsmen to shoot, but in preserving all wild life, in observing animals, in cultivating native flora, in building houses that harmonize with climate and landscape. Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds has become one of the popular standard works of America.
The story of the American Indian is—despite taboos and squalor—a story of harmonizations with nature. "Wolf Brother," in Long Lance, by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, is a poetic concretion of this harmony. As much at ease with the wilderness as any Blackfoot Indian was George Frederick Ruxton, educated English officer and gentleman, who rode horseback from Vera Cruz to the Missouri River and wrote Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains. In this book he tells how a lobo followed him for days from camp to camp, waiting each evening for his share of fresh meat and sometimes coming close to the fire at night. Any orthodox American would have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton had the civilized perspective on nature represented by Thoreau and Saint Francis of Assisi. Primitive harmony was run over by frontier wrath to kill, a wrath no less barbaric than primitive superstitions.
But the coyote's howl is more tonic than all theories about nature; the buck's whistle more invigorating; the bull's bellow in the canyon more musical; the call of the bobwhite more serene; the rattling of the rattlesnake more logical; the scream of the panther more arousing to the imagination; the odor from the skunk more lingering; the sweep of the buzzard in the air more majestical; the wariness of the wild turkey brighter; the bark of the prairie dog lighter; the guesses of the armadillo more comical; the upward dartings and dippings of the scissortail more lovely; the flight of the sandhill cranes more fraught with mystery.
There is an abundance of printed information on the animal life of America, to the west as well as to the east. Much of it cannot be segregated; the earthworm, on which Darwin wrote a book, knows nothing of regionalism. The best books on nature come from and lead to the Grasshopper's Library, which is free to all consultants. I advise the consultant to listen to the owl's hoot for wisdom, plant nine bean rows for peace, and, with Wordsworth, sit on an old gray stone listening for "authentic tidings of invisible things." Studies are only to "perfect nature." In the words of Mary Austin, "They that make the sun noise shall not fail of the sun's full recompense."
Like knowledge in any other department of life, that on nature never comes to a stand so long as it has vitality. A continuing interest in natural history is nurtured by Natural History, published by the American Museum of Natural History, New York; Nature, published in Washington, D. C.; The Living Wilderness, also from Washington; Journal of Mammalogy, a quarterly, Baltimore, Maryland; Audubon Magazine (formerly Bird Lore), published by the National Audubon Society, New York; American Forests, Washington, D. C., and various other publications.
In addition to books of natural history interest listed below, others are listed under "Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters," "Bears and Bear Hunters," "Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers," "Birds and Wild Flowers," and "Interpreters." Perhaps a majority of worthy books pertaining to the western half of America look on the outdoors.
ADAMS, W. H. DAVENPORT (from the French of Benedict Revoil). The Hunter and the Trapper of North America, London, 1875. A strange book.
ARNOLD, OREN. Wild Life in the Southwest, Dallas, 1936. Helpful chapters on various characteristic animals and plants. OP.
BAILEY, VERNON. Mammals of New Mexico, United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Biological Survey, Washington, D. C., 1931. Biological Survey of Texas, 1905. OP. The "North American Fauna Series," to which these two books belong, contains or points to the basic facts covering most of the mammals of the Southwest.
BAILLIE-GROHMAN, WILLIAM A. Camps in the Rockies, 1882. A true sportsman, Baillie-Grohman was more interested in living animals than in just killing. OP.
BEDICHEK, ROY. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1947. To be personal, Roy Bedichek has the most richly stored mind I have ever met; it is as active as it is full. Liberal in the true sense of the word, it frees other minds. Here, using facts as a means, it gives meanings to the hackberry tree, limestone, mockingbird, Inca dove, Mexican primrose, golden eagle, the Davis Mountains, cedar cutters, and many another natural phenomenon. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist is regarded by some good judges as the wisest book in the realm of natural history produced in America since Thoreau wrote.
The title of Bedichek's second book, Karankaway Country (Garden City, 1950), is misleading. The Karankawa Indians start it off, but it goes to coon inquisitiveness, prairie chicken dances, the extinction of species to which the whooping crane is approaching, browsing goats, dignified skunks, swifts in love flight, a camp in the brush, dust, erosion, silt—always with thinking added to seeing. The foremost naturalist of the Southwest, Bedichek constantly relates nature to civilization and human values.
BROWNING, MESHACH. Forty-Four Years of the Life of a Hunter, 1859; reprinted, Philadelphia, 1928. Prodigal on bear and deer.
CAHALANE, VICTOR H. Mammals of North America, Macmillan, New York, 1947. The author is a scientist with an open mind on the relationships between predators and game animals. His thick, delightfully illustrated book is the best dragnet on American mammals extant. It contains excellent lists of references.
CATON, JUDGE JOHN DEAN. Antelope and Deer of America, 1877. Standard work. OP.
DOBIE, J. FRANK. The Longhorns (1941) and The Mustangs (1952), while hardly to be catalogued as natural history books, go farther into natural history than most books on cattle and horses go. On the Open Range (1931; reprinted by Banks Upshaw, Dallas) contains a number of animal stories more or less true. Ben Lilly of The Ben Lilly Legend (Boston, 1950) thought that God had called him to hunt. He spent his life, therefore, in hunting. He saw some things in nature beyond targets.
DODGE, RICHARD I. The Hunting Grounds of the Great West, London, 1877. Published in New York the same year under title of The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants. Outstanding survey of outstanding wild creatures.
DUNRAVEN, EARL OF. The Great Divide, London, 1876; reprinted under title of Hunting in the Yellowstone, 1925. OP.
ELLIOTT, CHARLES (editor). Fading Trails, New York, 1942. Humanistic review of characteristic American wild life. OP.
FLACK, CAPTAIN. The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the Backwoods, 1866; another form of A Hunter's Experience in the Southern States of America, by Captain Flack, "The Ranger," London, 1866.
GANSON, EVE. Desert Mavericks, Santa Barbara, California, 1928. Illustrated; delightful. OP.
GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. Naturalists of the Frontier, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1937; revised and enlarged edition, 1948. Biographies of men who were characters as well as scientists, generally in environments alien to their interests.
GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. Wild Sports in the Far West, 1854. A translation from the German. Delightful reading and revealing picture of how backwoodsmen of the Mississippi Valley "lived off the country."
GRAHAM, GID. Animal Outlaws, Collinsville, Oklahoma, 1938. OP. A remarkable collection of animal stories. Privately printed.
GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Between 1893 and 1913, Grinnell, partly in collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt, edited five volumes for The Boone and Crockett Club that contain an extraordinary amount of information, written mostly by men of civilized perspective, on bears, deer, mountain sheep, buffaloes, cougars, elk, wolves, moose, mountains, and forests. The series, long out of print, is a storehouse of knowledge not to be overlooked by any student of wild life in the West. The titles are: American Big-Game Hunting, 1893; Hunting in Many Lands, 1895; Trail and Camp-Fire, 1897; American Big Game in Its Haunts, 1904; Hunting at High Altitudes, 1913.
GRINNELL, JOSEPH; DIXON, JOSEPH S.; and LINSDALE, JEAN M. Fur-Bearing Mammals of California: Their Natural History, Systematic Status, and Relation to Man, two volumes, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1937. The king, so far, of all state natural histories.
HALL, E. RAYMOND. Mammals of Nevada, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946. So far as my knowledge goes, this is the only respect-worthy book extant pertaining to the state whose economy is based on fees from divorces and gambling and whose best-known citizen is Senator Pat McCarran.
HARTMAN, CARL G. Possum, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. This richly illustrated book comprehends everything pertaining to the subject from prehistoric marsupium to baking with sweet potatoes in a Negro cabin. It is the outcome of a lifetime's scientific investigation not only of possums but of libraries and popular talk. Thus, in addition to its biographical and natural history aspects, it is a study in the evolution of man's knowledge about one of the world's folkiest creatures.
{illust. caption = Charles M. Russell, in The Blazed Trail of the Old Frontier by Agnes C. Laut (1926)}
HORNADAY, WILLIAM T. Camp Fires on Desert and Lava, London, n.d. OP. Dr. Hornaday, who died in 1937, was the first director of the New York Zoological Park. He was a great conservationist and an authority on the wild life of America.
HUDSON, W. H. The Naturalist in La Plata, New York, 1892. Not about the Southwest or even North America, but Hudson's chapters on "The Puma," "Some Curious Animal Weapons," "The Mephitic Skunk," "Humming Birds," "The Strange Instincts of Cattle," "Horse and Man," etc. come home to the Southwest. Few writers tend to make readers so aware; no other has written so delightfully of the lands of grass.
INGERSOLL, ERNEST. Wild Neighbors, New York, 1897. OP. A superior work. Chapter II, "The Father of Game," is on the cougar; Chapter IV, "The Hound of the Plains," is on the coyote; there is an excellent essay on the badger. Each chapter is provided with a list of books affording more extended treatment of the subject.
JAEGER, EDMUND C. Denizens of the Desert, Boston, 1922. OP. "Don Coyote," the roadrunner, and other characteristic animals. Our Desert Neighbors, Stanford University Press, California, 1950.
LOCKE, LUCIE H. Naturally Yours, Texas, Naylor, San Antonio, 1949. Charm must never be discounted; it is far rarer than facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo, sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list to which it is akin is Eve Ganson's Desert Mavericks.
LUMHOLTZ, CARL. Unknown Mexico, New York, 1902. Nearly anything about animals as well as about Indians and mountains of Mexico may be found in this extraordinary two-volume work. OP.
MCILHENNY, EDWARD A. The Alligator s Life History, Boston, 1935. OP. The alligator got farther west than is generally known—at least within reach of Laredo and Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. McIlhenny's book treats—engagingly, intimately, and with precision—of the animal in Louisiana. Hungerers for anatomical biology are referred to The Alligator and Its Allies by A. M. Reese, New York, 1915. I have more to say about McIlhenny in Chapter 30.
MARCY, COLONEL R. B. Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border, New York, 1866. Marcy had a scientific mind and a high sense of values. He knew how to write and what he wrote remains informing and pleasant.
MARTIN, HORACE T. Castorologia, or The History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver, London, 1892. OP. The beaver is a beaver, whether on Hudson's Bay or the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. Much has been written on this animal, the propeller of the trappers of the West, but this famous book remains the most comprehensive on facts and the amplest in conception. The author was humorist as well as scientist.
MENGER, RUDOLPH. Texas Nature Observations and Reminiscences, San Antonio, 1913. OP. Being of an educated German family, Dr. Menger found many things in nature more interesting than two-headed calves.
MILLS, ENOS. The Rocky Mountain Wonderland, Wild Life on the Rockies, Waiting in the Wilderness, and other books. Some naturalists have taken exception to some observations recorded by Mills; nevertheless, he enlarges and freshens mountain life.
MUIR, JOHN. The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, and other books. Muir, a great naturalist, had the power to convey his wise sympathies and brooded-over knowledge.
MURPHY, JOHN MORTIMER. Sporting Adventures in the Far West, London, 1879. One of the earliest roundups of game animals of the West.
NEWSOME, WILLIAM M. The Whitetailed Deer, New York, 1926. OP. Standard work.
PALLISER, JOHN. The Solitary Hunter; or Storting Adventures in the Prairies, London, 1857.
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, with a chapter entitled "Books on Big Game"; Hunting Adventures in the West; The Wilderness Hunter; Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail; A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open; The Deer Family (in collaboration).
SEARS, PAUL B. Deserts on the March, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1935. Dramatic picturization of the forces of nature operating in what droughts of the 1930's caused to be called "the Dust Bowl." "Drought and Wind and Man" might be another title.
SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. Wild Animals I Have Known; Lives of the Hunted. Probably no other writer of America has aroused so many people, young people especially, to an interest in our wild animals. Natural history encyclopedias he has authored are Life Histories of Northern Animals, New York, 1920, and Lives of Game Animals, New York, 1929. Seton's final testament, Trail of an Artist Naturalist (Scribner's, New York, 1941), has a deal on wild life of the Southwest.
THORPE, T. B. The Hive of the Bee-Hunter, New York, 1854. OP. Juicy.
WARREN, EDWARD ROYAL. The Mammals of Colorado, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942. OP.