somewhat regarded as a disguised blessing—in limiting production.

A man dependent on cotton for a living and having that living threatened by the boll weevil will not be much interested in ballads, but for the generality of people this boll weevil ballad—the entirety of which is a kind of life history of the insect—is, while delightful in itself, a veritable story-book on the weevil. Without the ballad, the weevil's effect on economic history would be unchanged; but as respects mind and imagination, the ballad gives the weevil all sorts of significances. The ballad is a part of the literature of the Southwest.

But I am assigning too many motives of self-improvement to reading. People read for fun, for pleasure. The literature of the Southwest affords bully reading.

"If I had read as much as other men, I would know as little," Thomas Hobbes is credited with having said. A student in the presence of Bishop E. D. Mouzon was telling about the scores and scores of books he had read. At a pause the bishop shook his long, wise head and remarked, "My son, when DO you get time to think?" Two of the best educated men I have ever had the fortune of talking with were neither schooled nor widely read. They were extraordinary observers. One was a plainsman, Charles Goodnight; the other was a borderer, Don Alberto Guajardo, in part educated by an old Lipan Indian.

But here are the books. I list them not so much to give knowledge as to direct people with intellectual curiosity and with interest in their own land to the sources of knowledge; not to create life directly, but to point out where it has been created or copied. On some of the books I have made brief observations. Those observations can never be nearly so important to a reader as the development of his own powers of observation. With something of an apologetic feeling I confess that I have read, in my way, most of the books. I should probably have been a wiser and better informed man had I spent more time out with the grasshoppers, horned toads, and coyotes. November 5, 1942 J. FRANK DOBIE

2. Interpreters of the Land

"HE'S FOR A JIG or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps." Thought employs ideas, but having an idea is not the same thing as thinking. A rooster in a pen of hens has an idea. Thought has never been so popular with mankind as horse opera, horse play, the main idea behind sheep's eyes. Far be it from me to feel contempt for people who cannot and do not want to think. The human species has not yet evolved to the stage at which thought is natural. I am far more at ease lying in grass and gazing without thought process at clouds than in sitting in a chair trying to be logical. Just the same, free play of mind upon life is the essence of good writing, and intellectual activity is synonymous with critical interpretations.

To the constant disregard of thought, Americans of the mid-twentieth century have added positive opposition. Critical ideas are apt to make any critic suspected of being subversive. The Southwest, Texas especially, is more articulately aware of its land spaces than of any other feature pertaining to itself. Yet in the realm of government, the Southwest has not produced a single spacious thinker. So far as the cultural ancestry of the region goes, the South has been arid of thought since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the much talked-of mind of John C. Calhoun being principally casuistic; on another side, derivatives from the Spanish Inquisition could contribute to thought little more than tribal medicine men have contributed.

Among historians of the Southwest the general rule has been to be careful with facts and equally careful in avoiding thought-provoking interpretations. In the multitudinous studies on Spanish-American history all padres are "good" and all conquistadores are "intrepid," and that is about as far as interpretation goes. The one state book of the Southwest that does not chloroform ideas is Erna Fergusson's New Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples (Knopf, New York, 1952). Essayical in form, it treats only of the consequential. It evaluates from the point of view of good taste, good sense, and an urbane comprehension of democracy. The subject is provincial, but the historian transcends all provincialism. Her sympathy does not stifle conclusions unusable in church or chamber of commerce propaganda. In brief, a cultivated mind can take pleasure in this interpretation of New Mexico—and that marks it as a solitary among the histories of neighboring states.

The outstanding historical interpreter of the Southwest is Walter Prescott Webb, of the University of Texas. The Great Plains utilizes chronology to explain the presence of man on the plains; it is primarily a study in cause and effect, of water and drought, of adaptations and lack of adaptations, of the land's growth into human imagination as well as economic institutions. Webb uses facts to get at meanings. He fulfils Emerson's definition of Scholar: "Man Thinking." In Divided We Stand he goes into machinery, the feudalism of corporation-dominated economy, the economic supremacy of the North over the South and the West. In The Great Frontier (Houghton Mifilin, Boston, 1952) he considers the Western Hemisphere as a frontier for Europe—a frontier that brought about the rise of democracy and capitalism and that, now vanished as a frontier, foreshadows the vanishment of democracy and capitalism.

In Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and a Myth (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950) Henry Nash Smith plows deep. But the tools of this humanistic historian are of delicate finish rather than of horsepower. To him, thinking is a joyful process and lucidity out of complexity is natural. He compasses Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought and Beadle's Dime Novels along with agriculture and manufacturing. Excepting the powerful books by Walter Prescott Webb, not since Frederick Jackson Turner, in 1893, presented his famous thesis on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" has such a revealing evaluation of frontier movements appeared As a matter of fact, Henry Nash Smith leaves Turner's ideas on the dependence of democracy upon farmers without more than one leg to stand upon. Not being a King Canute, he does not take sides for or against social evolution. With the clearest eyes imaginable, he looks into it. Turner's The Frontier in American History (1920) has been a fertile begetter of interpretations of history.

Instead of being the usual kind of jokesmith book or concatenation of tall tales, Folk Laughter on the American Frontier by Mody C. Boatright (Macmillan, New York, 1949) goes into the human and social significances of humor. Of boastings, anecdotal exaggerations, hide-and-hair metaphors, stump and pulpit parables, tenderfoot baitings, and the like there is plenty, but thought plays upon them and arranges them into patterns of social history.

Mary Austin (1868-1934) is an interpreter of nature, which for her includes naturally placed human beings as much as naturally placed antelopes and cacti. She wrote The American Rhythm on the theory that authentic poetry expresses the rhythms of that patch of earth to which the poet is rooted. Rhythm is experience passed into the subconscious and is "distinct from our intellectual perception of it." Before they can make true poetry, English-speaking Americans will be in accord with "the run of wind in tall grass" as were the Pueblo Indians when Europeans discovered them. But Mary Austin's primary importance is not as a theorist. Her spiritual depth is greater than