To The Last Man | Page 4

spending they lay waste their
powers, with never a breath of the free and wonderful life of the open!
So I come back to the main point of this foreword, in which I am trying
to tell why and how I came to write the story of a feud notorious in
Arizona as the Pleasant Valley War.
Some years ago Mr. Harry Adams, a cattleman of Vermajo Park, New
Mexico, told me he had been in the Tonto Basin of Arizona and
thought I might find interesting material there concerning this Pleasant
Valley War. His version of the war between cattlemen and sheepmen
certainly determined me to look over the ground. My old guide, Al
Doyle of Flagstaff, had led me over half of Arizona, but never down
into that wonderful wild and rugged basin between the Mogollon Mesa
and the Mazatzal Mountains. Doyle had long lived on the frontier and
his version of the Pleasant Valley War differed markedly from that of
Mr. Adams. I asked other old timers about it, and their remarks further
excited my curiosity.
Once down there, Doyle and I found the wildest, most rugged, roughest,
and most remarkable country either of us had visited; and the few
inhabitants were like the country. I went in ostensibly to hunt bear and
lion and turkey, but what I really was hunting for was the story of that
Pleasant Valley War. I engaged the services of a bear hunter who had
three strapping sons as reserved and strange and aloof as he was. No
wheel tracks of any kind had ever come within miles of their cabin. I
spent two wonderful months hunting game and reveling in the beauty
and grandeur of that Rim Rock country, but I came out knowing no

more about the Pleasant Valley War. These Texans and their few
neighbors, likewise from Texas, did not talk. But all I saw and felt only
inspired me the more. This trip was in the fall of 1918.
The next year I went again with the best horses, outfit, and men the
Doyles could provide. And this time I did not ask any questions. But I
rode horses--some of them too wild for me--and packed a rifle many a
hundred miles, riding sometimes thirty and forty miles a day, and I
climbed in and out of the deep canyons, desperately staying at the heels
of one of those long-legged Texans. I learned the life of those
backwoodsmen, but I did not get the story of the Pleasant Valley War. I
had, however, won the friendship of that hardy people.
In 1920 I went back with a still larger outfit, equipped to stay as long as
I liked. And this time, without my asking it, different natives of the
Tonto came to tell me about the Pleasant Valley War. No two of them
agreed on anything concerning it, except that only one of the active
participants survived the fighting. Whence comes my title, TO THE
LAST MAN. Thus I was swamped in a mass of material out of which I
could only flounder to my own conclusion. Some of the stories told me
are singularly tempting to a novelist. But, though I believe them myself,
I cannot risk their improbability to those who have no idea of the
wildness of wild men at a wild time. There really was a terrible and
bloody feud, perhaps the most deadly and least known in all the annals
of the West. I saw the ground, the cabins, the graves, all so darkly
suggestive of what must have happened.
I never learned the truth of the cause of the Pleasant Valley War, or if I
did hear it I had no means of recognizing it. All the given causes were
plausible and convincing. Strange to state, there is still secrecy and
reticence all over the Tonto Basin as to the facts of this feud. Many
descendents of those killed are living there now. But no one likes to
talk about it. Assuredly many of the incidents told me really occurred,
as, for example, the terrible one of the two women, in the face of
relentless enemies, saving the bodies of their dead husbands from being
devoured by wild hogs. Suffice it to say that this romance is true to my
conception of the war, and I base it upon the setting I learned to know

and love so well, upon the strange passions of primitive people, and
upon my instinctive reaction to the facts and rumors that I gathered.
ZANE GREY. AVALON, CALIFORNIA, April, 1921
CHAPTER I
At the end of a dry, uphill ride over barren country Jean Isbel unpacked
to camp at the edge of the cedars where a little rocky canyon green with
willow and cottonwood, promised water and grass.