re of the Southwest" I mean writings that interpret the
region, whether they have been produced by the Southwest or not. Many of
them have not. What we are interested in is life in the Southwest, and
any interpreter of that life, foreign or domestic, ancient or modern, is
of value.

The term Southwest is variable because the boundaries of the Southwest
are themselves fluid, expanding and contracting according to the point
of view from which the Southwest is viewed and according to whatever
common denominator is taken for defining it. The Spanish Southwest
includes California, but California regards itself as more closely akin
to the Pacific Northwest than to Texas; California is Southwest more in
an antiquarian way than other-wise. From the point of view of the most
picturesque and imagination-influencing occupation of the Southwest,
the occupation of ranching, the Southwest might be said to run up into
Montana. Certainly one will have to go up the trail to Montana to finish
out the story of the Texas cowboy. Early in the nineteenth century the
Southwest meant Tennessee, Georgia, and other frontier territory now
regarded as strictly South. The men and women who "redeemed Texas from
the wilderness" came principally from that region. The code of conduct
they gave Texas was largely the code of the booming West. Considering
the character of the Anglo-American people who took over the Southwest,
the region is closer to Missouri than to Kansas, which is not Southwest
in any sense but which has had a strong influence on Oklahoma. Chihuahua
is more southwestern than large parts of Oklahoma. In _Our Southwest_,
Erna Fergusson has a whole chapter on "What is the Southwest?" She finds
Fort Worth to be in the Southwest but Dallas, thirty miles east, to be
facing north and east. The principal areas of the Southwest are, to have
done with air-minded reservations, Arizona, New Mexico, most of Texas,
some of Oklahoma, and anything else north, south, east, or west that
anybody wants to bring in. The boundaries of cultures and rainfall never
follow survey lines. In talking about the Southwest I naturally incline
to emphasize the Texas part of it.

Life is fluid, and definitions that would apprehend it must also be. Yet
I will venture one definition--not the only one--of an educated person.
An educated person is one who can view with interest and intelligence
the phenomena of life about him. Like people elsewhere, the people of
the South