nce,
though sheeplike makers of textbooks and sheeplike pedagogues of
American literature have until recently, either wilfully or ignorantly,
denied that right to the Southwest. Tens of thousands of students of the
Southwest have been assigned endless pages on and listened to dronings
over Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Bradstreet,
and other dreary creatures of colonial New England who are utterly
foreign to the genius of the Southwest. If nothing in written form
pertaining to the Southwest existed at all, it would be more profitable
for an inhabitant to go out and listen to coyotes singing at night in
the prickly pear than to tolerate the Increase Mather kind of thing. It
is very profitable to listen to coyotes anyhow. I rebelled years ago
at having the tradition, the spirit, the meaning of the soil to which I
belong utterly disregarded by interpreters of literature and at the
same time having the Increase Mather kind of stuff taught as if it were
important to our part of America. Happily the disregard is disappearing,
and so is Increase Mather.

If they had to be rigorously classified into hard and fast categories,
comparatively few of the books in the lists that follow would be rated
as pure literature. Fewer would be rated as history. A majority of them
are the stuff of history. The stuff out of which history is made is
generally more vital than formalized history, especially the histories
habitually forced on students in public schools, colleges, and
universities. There is no essential opposition between history and
literature. The attempt to study a people's literature apart from their
social and, to a less extent, their political history is as illogical
as the lady who said she had read Romeo but had not yet got to Juliet.
Nearly any kind of history is more important than formal literary
history showing how in a literary way Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac
begat Jacob. Any man of any time who has ever written with vigor has
been immeasurably nearer to the dunghill on which he sank his talons
while crowing than to all literary ancestors.

A great deal of chronicle writing that makes no pretense at being
belles-lettres is really superior literature to much that is so
classified. I will vote three times a day and all night for John C.
Duval's _Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace_, Charlie Siringo's _Riata and
Spurs_, James B. Gillett's _Six Years with the Texas Rangers_, and
dozens of other straigh