taway chronicles of the Southwest in preference
to "The Culprit Fay" and much other watery "literature" with which
anthologies representing the earlier stages of American writing
are padded. Ike Fridge's pamphlet story of his ridings for John
Chisum--chief provider of cattle for Billy the Kid to steal--has more of
the juice of reality in it and, therefore, more of literary virtue than
some of James Fenimore Cooper's novels, and than some of James Russell
Lowell's odes.

The one thing essential to writing if it is to be read, to art if it
is to be looked at, is vitality. No critic or professor can be hired
to pump vitality into any kind of human expression, but professors and
critics have taken it out of many a human being who in his attempts
to say something decided to be correct at the expense of being
himself--being natural, being alive. The priests of literary conformity
never had a chance at the homemade chronicles of the Southwest.

The orderly way in which to study the Southwest would be to take up
first the land, its flora, fauna, climate, soils, rivers, etc., then
the aborigines, next the exploring and settling Spaniards, and finally,
after a hasty glance at the French, the English-speaking people who
brought the Southwest to what it is today. We cannot proceed in this
way, however. Neither the prairies nor the Indians who first hunted
deer on them have left any records, other than hieroglyphic, as to their
lives. Some late-coming men have written about them. Droughts and rains
have had far more influence on all forms of life in the Southwest and
on all forms of its development culturally and otherwise than all of the
Coronado expeditions put together. I have emphasized the literature that
reveals nature. My method has been to take up types and subjects rather
than to follow chronology.

Chronology is often an impediment to the acquiring of useful knowledge.
I am not nearly so much interested in what happened in Abilene, Kansas,
in 1867--the year that the first herds of Texas Longhorns over the
Chisholm Trail found a market at that place--as I am in picking out of
Abilene in 1867 some thing that reveals the character of the men who
went up the trail, some thing that will illuminate certain phenomena
along the trail human beings of the Southwest are going up today, some
thing to awaken observation and to enrich with added meaning this corner
of the earth of which we are the temporary inheritors.

By "literatu