Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, with a Few Observations

udde - J. Frank (James Frank) Dobie

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105 pages

English

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Publié par	udde
Publié le	08 décembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	48
Langue	English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, by J. Frank Dobie This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Author: J. Frank Dobie Release Date: November 10, 2009 [EBook #314] Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND LITERATURE OF THE SOUTHWEST *** Produced by Charles Keller, and David Widger GUIDE TO LIFE AND LITERATURE OF THE SOUTHWEST Revised And Enlarged In Both Knowledge And Wisdom By J. Frank Dobie Dallas. 1952 Southern Methodist University Press Not copyright in 1942 Again not copyright in 1952 Anybody is welcome to help himself to any of it in any way LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 52-11834 S.M.U. PRESS Contents A Preface With Some Revised Ideas 1. A Declaration 2. Interpreters of the Land 3. General Helps 4. Indian Culture; Pueblos and Navajos 5. Apaches, Comanches, and Other Plains Indians 6. Spanish-Mexican Strains 7. Flavor of France 8. Backwoods Life and Humor 9. How the Early Settlers Lived 10. Fighting Texians 11. Texas Rangers 12. Women Pioneers 13. Circuit Riders and Missionaries 14. Lawyers, Politicians, J. P.'s 15. Pioneer Doctors 16. Mountain Men 17. Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail 18. Stagecoaches, Freighting 19. Pony Express 20. Surge of Life in the West 21. Range Life: Cowboys, Cattle, Sheep 22. Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads 23. Horses: Mustangs and Cow Ponies 24. The Bad Man Tradition 25. Mining and Oil 26. Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists 27. Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters 28. Bears and Bear Hunters 29. Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers 30. Birds and Wild Flowers 31. Negro Folk Songs and Tales 32. Fiction—Including Folk Tales 33. Poetry and Drama 34. Miscellaneous Interpreters and Institutions 35. Subjects for Themes A Preface With Some Revised Ideas IT HAS BEEN ten years since I wrote the prefatory "Declaration" to this now enlarged and altered book. Not to my generation alone have many things receded during that decade. To the intelligent young as well as to the intelligent elderly, efforts in the present atmosphere to opiate the public with mere pictures of frontier enterprise have a ghastly unreality. The Texas Rangers have come to seem as remote as the Foreign Legion in France fighting against the Kaiser. Yet this Guide, extensively added to and revised, is mainly concerned, apart from the land and its native life, with frontier backgrounds. If during a decade a man does not change his mind on some things and develop new points of view, it is a pretty good sign that his mind is petrified and need no longer be accounted among the living. I have an inclination to rewrite the "Declaration," but maybe I was just as wise on some matters ten years ago as I am now; so I let it stand. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I have heard so much silly bragging by Texans that I now think it would be a blessing to themselves—and a relief to others—if the braggers did not know they lived in Texas. Yet the time is not likely to come when a human being will not be better adapted to his environments by knowing their nature; on the other hand, to study a provincial setting from a provincial point of view is restricting. Nobody should specialize on provincial writings before he has the perspective that only a good deal of good literature and wide history can give. I think it more important that a dweller in the Southwest read The Trial and Death of Socrates than all the books extant on killings by Billy the Kid. I think this dweller will fit his land better by understanding Thomas Jefferson's oath ("I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man") than by reading all the books that have been written on ranch lands and people. For any dweller of the Southwest who would have the land soak into him, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," "The Solitary Reaper," "Expostulation and Reply," and a few other poems are more conducive to a "wise passiveness" than any native writing. There are no substitutes for nobility, beauty, and wisdom. One of the chief impediments to amplitude and intellectual freedom is provincial inbreeding. I am sorry to see writings of the Southwest substituted for noble and beautiful and wise literature to which all people everywhere are inheritors. When I began teaching "Life and Literature of the Southwest" I did not regard these writings as a substitute. To reread most of them would be boresome, though Hamlet, Boswell's Johnson, Lamb's Essays, and other genuine literature remain as quickening as ever. Very likely I shall not teach the course again. I am positive I shall never revise this Guide again. It is in nowise a bibliography. I have made more additions to the "Range Life" chapter than to any other. I am a collector of such books. A collector is a person who gathers unto himself the worthless as well as the worthy. Since I did not make a nickel out of the original printing of the Guide and hardly expect to make enough to buy a California "ranch" out of the present printing, I have added several items, with accompanying remarks, more for my own pleasure than for benefit to society. Were the listings halved, made more selective, the book might serve its purpose better. Anybody who wants to can slice it in any manner he pleases. I am as much against forced literary swallowings as I am against prohibitions on free tasting, chewing, and digestion. I rate censors, particularly those of church and state, as low as I rate character assassins; they often run together. I'd like to make a book on Emancipators of the Human Mind—Emerson, Jefferson, Thoreau, Tom Paine, Newton, Arnold, Voltaire, Goethe.... When I reflect how few writings connected with the wide open spaces of the West and Southwest are wide enough to enter into such a volume, I realize acutely how desirable is perspective in patriotism. Hundreds of the books listed in this Guide have given me pleasure as well as particles for the mosaic work of my own books; but, with minor exceptions, they increasingly seem to me to explore only the exteriors of life. There is in them much good humor but scant wit. The

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