" a story of human destiny. She reveals the essential nature of
Range Templeton more distinctly, more mordantly, than history
has revealed the essential nature of Sam Houston or any of his
contemporaries. The wife and daughter of Range Templeton are the most
plausible women in any historical novel of Texas that I have read. The
created world here is more real than the actual.

Among the early tale-tellers of the Southwest are Jeremiah Clemens, who
wrote _Mustang Gray_, Mollie E. Moore Davis, of plantation tradition,
Mayne Reid, who dared convey real information in his romances, Charles
W. Webber, a naturalist, and T. B. Thorpe, creator of "The Big Bear of
Arkansas."

Fiction that appeared before World War I can hardly be called modern.
No fiction is likely to appear, however, that will do better by certain
types of western character and certain stages of development in western
society than that produced by Bret Harte, with his gamblers; stage
drivers, and mining camps; O. Henry with his "Heart of the West" types;
Alfred Henry Lewis with his "Wolfville" anecdotes and characters; Owen
Wister, whose _Virginian_ remains the classic of cowboy novels without
cows; and Andy Adams, whose _Log of a Cowboy_ will be read as long as
people want a narrative of cowboys sweating with herds.

The authors listed below are in alphabetical order. Those who seem to me
to have a chance to survive are not exactly in that order.

FRANK APPLEGATE (died 1932) wrote only two books, _Native Tales of New
Mexico_ and _Indian Stories from the Pueblos_, but as a delighted and
delightful teller of folk tales his place is secure.

MARY AUSTIN seems to be settling down as primarily an expositor. Her
novels are no longer read, but the simple tales in _One-Smoke Stories_
(her last book, 1934) and in some nonfiction collections, notably _Lost
Borders_ and _The Flock_, do not recede with time.

While the Southwest can hardly claim Willa Cather, of Nebraska, her
_Death Comes for the Archbishop_ (1927), which is made out of New
Mexican life, is not only the best-known novel concerned with the
Southwest but one of the finest of America.

Despite the fact that it is not on the literary map, Will Levington
Comfort's _Apache_ (1931) remains for me the most moving and incisive
piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest that I have found.

If a teller of folk tales and plotless narratives belongs in this
chapter, then J. Frank Dobie should be mentioned