Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 19

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.

{ill.u.s.t. 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.

GLa.s.sc.o.c.k, LUCILLE. _A Texas Wildcatter_, Naylor, San Antonio, 1952.

The wildcatter is Mrs. Gla.s.sc.o.c.k'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 gus.h.i.+ng 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! t.i.tan of the Southwest_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Facts in factual form. Plenty of oil wealth and taxes; nothing on oil government.

s.h.i.+NN, CHARLES H. _Mining Camps_, 1885, reprinted by Knopf, New York, 1948. Perhaps the most competent a.n.a.lysis extant on the behavior of the gold hunters, with emphasis on their self-government. _The Story of the Mine as Ill.u.s.trated by the Great Comstock Lode of Nevada_, New York, 1896. OP. s.h.i.+nn 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.

26. Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists

"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 ent.i.tled 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 bl.u.s.terous 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 circ.u.mstances of the killing have expressed his chief intellectual interest in nature.

A sure sign of advancing civilization has been the rapidly changing popular att.i.tude 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 Th.o.r.eau and Saint Francis of a.s.sisi. Primitive harmony was run over by frontier wrath to kill, a wrath no less barbaric than primitive superst.i.tions.

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 Gra.s.shopper'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 Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C.; _The Living Wilderness_, also from Was.h.i.+ngton; _Journal of Mammalogy_, a quarterly, Baltimore, Maryland; _Audubon Magazine_ (formerly _Bird Lore_), published by the National Audubon Society, New York; _American Forests_, Was.h.i.+ngton, 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, Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Th.o.r.eau wrote.

The t.i.tle of Bedichek's second book, _Karankaway Country_ (Garden City, 1950), is misleading. The Karankawa Indians start it off, but it goes to c.o.o.n 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 relations.h.i.+ps between predators and game animals. His thick, delightfully ill.u.s.trated 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 G.o.d 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle 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.

Ill.u.s.trated; 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."