Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest | Page 8

clouds in the night.
No informed person would hold that the Southwest can claim any
considerable body of PURE LITERATURE as its own. At the same
time, the region has a distinct cultural inheritance, full of life and drama,
told variously in books so numerous that their very existence would
surprise many people who depend on the Book-of-the-Month Club for
literary guidance. Any people have a right to their own cultural
inheritance, though sheeplike makers of textbooks and sheeplike
pedagogues of American literature have until recently, either wilfully
or ignorantly, denied that right to the Southwest. Tens of thousands of
students of the Southwest have been assigned endless pages on and
listened to dronings over Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, Jonathan
Edwards, Anne Bradstreet, and other dreary creatures of colonial New
England who are utterly foreign to the genius of the Southwest. If
nothing in written form pertaining to the Southwest existed at all, it
would be more profitable for an inhabitant to go out and listen to
coyotes singing at night in the prickly pear than to tolerate the Increase
Mather kind of thing. It is very profitable to listen to coyotes anyhow. I
rebelled years ago at having the tradition, the spirit, the meaning of the
soil to which I belong utterly disregarded by interpreters of literature
and at the same time having the Increase Mather kind of stuff taught as
if it were important to our part of America. Happily the disregard is
disappearing, and so is Increase Mather.
If they had to be rigorously classified into hard and fast categories,

comparatively few of the books in the lists that follow would be rated
as pure literature. Fewer would be rated as history. A majority of them
are the stuff of history. The stuff out of which history is made is
generally more vital than formalized history, especially the histories
habitually forced on students in public schools, colleges, and
universities. There is no essential opposition between history and
literature. The attempt to study a people's literature apart from their
social and, to a less extent, their political history is as illogical as the
lady who said she had read Romeo but had not yet got to Juliet. Nearly
any kind of history is more important than formal literary history
showing how in a literary way Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat
Jacob. Any man of any time who has ever written with vigor has been
immeasurably nearer to the dunghill on which he sank his talons while
crowing than to all literary ancestors.
A great deal of chronicle writing that makes no pretense at being
belles-lettres is really superior literature to much that is so classified. I
will vote three times a day and all night for John C. Duval's Adventures
of Bigfoot Wallace, Charlie Siringo's Riata and Spurs, James B.
Gillett's Six Years with the Texas Rangers, and dozens of other
straightaway chronicles of the Southwest in preference to "The Culprit
Fay" and much other watery "literature" with which anthologies
representing the earlier stages of American writing are padded. Ike
Fridge's pamphlet story of his ridings for John Chisum-- chief provider
of cattle for Billy the Kid to steal--has more of the juice of reality in it
and, therefore, more of literary virtue than some of James Fenimore
Cooper's novels, and than some of James Russell Lowell's odes.
The one thing essential to writing if it is to be read, to art if it is to be
looked at, is vitality. No critic or professor can be hired to pump
vitality into any kind of human expression, but professors and critics
have taken it out of many a human being who in his attempts to say
something decided to be correct at the expense of being himself--being
natural, being alive. The priests of literary conformity never had a
chance at the homemade chronicles of the Southwest.
The orderly way in which to study the Southwest would be to take up

first the land, its flora, fauna, climate, soils, rivers, etc., then the
aborigines, next the exploring and settling Spaniards, and finally, after
a hasty glance at the French, the English-speaking people who brought
the Southwest to what it is today. We cannot proceed in this way,
however. Neither the prairies nor the Indians who first hunted deer on
them have left any records, other than hieroglyphic, as to their lives.
Some late-coming men have written about them. Droughts and rains
have had far more influence on all forms of life in the Southwest and
on all forms of its development culturally and otherwise than all of the
Coronado expeditions put together. I have emphasized the literature
that reveals nature. My method has been to take up types and subjects
rather than to follow chronology.
Chronology is often an impediment