To The Last Man | Page 3

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To The Last Man
by Zane Grey

FOREWORD
It was inevitable that in my efforts to write romantic history of the great
West I should at length come to the story of a feud. For long I have
steered clear of this rock. But at last I have reached it and must go over
it, driven by my desire to chronicle the stirring events of pioneer days.
Even to-day it is not possible to travel into the remote corners of the
West without seeing the lives of people still affected by a fighting past.
How can the truth be told about the pioneering of the West if the
struggle, the fight, the blood be left out? It cannot be done. How can a
novel be stirring and thrilling, as were those times, unless it be full of
sensation? My long labors have been devoted to making stories
resemble the times they depict. I have loved the West for its vastness,
its contrast, its beauty and color and life, for its wildness and violence,
and for the fact that I have seen how it developed great men and
women who died unknown and unsung.
In this materialistic age, this hard, practical, swift, greedy age of
realism, it seems there is no place for writers of romance, no place for
romance itself. For many years all the events leading up to the great
war were realistic, and the war itself was horribly realistic, and the
aftermath is likewise. Romance is only another name for idealism; and
I contend that life without ideals is not worth living. Never in the
history of the world were ideals needed so terribly as now. Walter Scott
wrote romance; so did Victor Hugo; and likewise Kipling, Hawthorne,
Stevenson. It was Stevenson, particularly, who wielded a bludgeon
against the realists. People live for the dream in their hearts. And I have
yet to know anyone who has not some secret dream, some hope,
however dim, some storied wall to look at in the dusk, some painted
window leading to the soul. How strange indeed to find that the realists
have ideals and dreams! To read them one would think their lives held

nothing significant. But they love, they hope, they dream, they sacrifice,
they struggle on with that dream in their hearts just the same as others.
We all are dreamers, if not in the heavy-lidded wasting of time, then in
the meaning of life that makes us work on.
It was Wordsworth who wrote, "The world is too much with us"; and if
I could give the secret of my ambition as a novelist in a few words it
would be contained in that quotation. My inspiration to write has
always come from nature. Character and action are subordinated to
setting. In all that I have done I have tried to make people see how the
world is too much with them. Getting and