Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest | Page 9

to the acquiring of useful
knowledge. I am not nearly so much interested in what happened in
Abilene, Kansas, in 1867--the year that the first herds of Texas
Longhorns over the Chisholm Trail found a market at that place--as I
am in picking out of Abilene in 1867 some thing that reveals the
character of the men who went up the trail, some thing that will
illuminate certain phenomena along the trail human beings of the
Southwest are going up today, some thing to awaken observation and to
enrich with added meaning this corner of the earth of which we are the
temporary inheritors.
By "literature of the Southwest" I mean writings that interpret the
region, whether they have been produced by the Southwest or not.
Many of them have not. What we are interested in is life in the
Southwest, and any interpreter of that life, foreign or domestic, ancient
or modern, is of value.
The term Southwest is variable because the boundaries of the
Southwest are themselves fluid, expanding and contracting according
to the point of view from which the Southwest is viewed and according
to whatever common denominator is taken for defining it. The Spanish
Southwest includes California, but California regards itself as more
closely akin to the Pacific Northwest than to Texas; California is
Southwest more in an antiquarian way than other- wise. From the point

of view of the most picturesque and imagination-influencing
occupation of the Southwest, the occupation of ranching, the Southwest
might be said to run up into Montana. Certainly one will have to go up
the trail to Montana to finish out the story of the Texas cowboy. Early
in the nineteenth century the Southwest meant Tennessee, Georgia, and
other frontier territory now regarded as strictly South. The men and
women who "redeemed Texas from the wilderness" came principally
from that region. The code of conduct they gave Texas was largely the
code of the booming West. Considering the character of the Anglo-
American people who took over the Southwest, the region is closer to
Missouri than to Kansas, which is not Southwest in any sense but
which has had a strong influence on Oklahoma. Chihuahua is more
southwestern than large parts of Oklahoma. In Our Southwest, Erna
Fergusson has a whole chapter on "What is the Southwest?" She finds
Fort Worth to be in the Southwest but Dallas, thirty miles east, to be
facing north and east. The principal areas of the Southwest are, to have
done with air-minded reservations, Arizona, New Mexico, most of
Texas, some of Oklahoma, and anything else north, south, east, or west
that anybody wants to bring in. The boundaries of cultures and rainfall
never follow survey lines. In talking about the Southwest I naturally
incline to emphasize the Texas part of it.
Life is fluid, and definitions that would apprehend it must also be. Yet I
will venture one definition--not the only one--of an educated person.
An educated person is one who can view with interest and intelligence
the phenomena of life about him. Like people elsewhere, the people of
the Southwest find the features of the land on which they live blank or
full of pictures according to the amount of interest and intelligence with
which they view the features. Intelligence cannot be acquired, but
interest can; and data for interest and intelligence to act upon are
entirely acquirable.
"Studies perfect nature," Bacon said. "Nature follows art" to the extent
that most of us see principally what our attention has been called to. I
might never have noticed rose- purple snow between shadows if I had
not seen a picture of that kind of snow. I had thought white the only
natural color of snow. I cannot think of yew trees, which I have never

seen, without thinking of Wordsworth's poem on three yew trees.
Nobody has written a memorable poem on the mesquite. Yet the
mesquite has entered into the social, economic, and aesthetic life of the
land; it has made history and has been painted by artists. In the homely
chronicles of the Southwest its thorns stick, its roots burn into bright
coals, its trunks make fence posts, its lovely leaves wave. To live
beside this beautiful, often pernicious, always interesting and highly
characteristic tree--or bush--and to know nothing of its significance is
to be cheated out of a part of life. It is but one of a thousand factors
peculiar to the Southwest and to the land's cultural inheritance.
For a long time, as he tells in his Narrative, Cabeza de Vaca was a kind
of prisoner to coastal Indians of Texas. Annually, during the season
when prickly pear apples (tunas, or Indian figs, as they are called in
books) were ripe, these Indians would go upland to feed on the fruit.
During