Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 21

HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman_, 1936.

Goodnight killed and also helped save the buffalo. Haley has preserved his observations.

HORNADAY, W. T. _Extermination of the American Bison_ (Smithsonian Reports for 1887, published in 1889, Part II). Hornaday was a good zoologist but inferior in research.

INMAN, HENRY. _Buffalo Jones Forty Years of Adventure_, Topeka, Kansas, 1899. A book rich in observations as well as experience, though Jones was a poser. OP.

LAKE, STUART N. _Wyatt Earp_, Boston, 1931. Early chapters excellent on buffalo hunting.

MCCREIGHT, M. I. _Buffalo Bone Days_, Sykesville, Pa., 1939. OP. A pamphlet strong on buffalo bones, for fertilizer.

PALLISER, JOHN (and others). _Journals, Detailed Reports, and Observations, relative to Palliser's Exploration of British North America, 1857-1860_, London, 1863. According to Frank Gilbert Roe, "a mine of inestimable information" on the buffalo.

_Panhandle-Plains Historical Review_, Canyon, Texas. Articles and reminiscences, _pa.s.sim_.

PARKMAN, FRANCIS. _The Oregon Trail_, 1847. Available in various editions, this book contains superb descriptions of buffaloes and prairies.

POE, SOPHIE A. _Buckboard Days_ (edited by Eugene Cunningham), Caldwell, Idaho, 1936. Early chapters. OP.

ROE, FRANK GILBERT. _The North American Buffalo_, University of Toronto Press, 1951. A monumental work comprising and critically reviewing virtually all that has been written on the subject and supplanting much of it. No other scholar dealing with the buffalo has gone so fully into the subject or viewed it from so many angles, brought out so many aspects of natural history and human history. In a field where ignorance has often prevailed, Roe has to be iconoclastic in order to be constructive. If his words are sometimes sharp, his mind is sharper. The one indispensable book on the subject.

RYE, EDGAR. _The Quirt and the Spur_, Chicago, 1909. Rye was in the Fort Griffin, Texas, country when buffalo hunters dominated it. OP.

SCHULTZ, JAMES WILLARD. _Apauk, Caller of Buffalo_, New York, 1916.

OP. Whether fiction or nonfiction, as claimed by the author, this book realizes the relations.h.i.+ps between Plains Indian and buffalo.

WEEKES, MARY. _The Last Buffalo Hunter_ (as told by Norbert Welsh), New York, 1939. OP. The old days recalled with upspringing sympathy.

Canada--but buffaloes and buffalo hunters were pretty much the same everywhere.

West Texas Historical a.s.sociation (Abilene, Texas) _Year Books_.

Reminiscences and articles, _pa.s.sim_.

WILLIAMS, O. W. A privately printed letter of eight unnumbered pages, dated from Fort Stockton, Texas, June 30, 1930, containing the best description of a buffalo stampede that I have encountered. It is reproduced in Dobie's _On the Open Range_.

28. Bears and Bear Hunters

THE BEAR, whether black or grizzly, is a great American citizen. Think of how many children have been put to sleep with bear stories! Facts about the animal are fascinating; the effect he has had on the minds of human beings a.s.sociated with him transcends naturalistic facts. The tree on which Daniel Boone carved the naked fact that here he "Killed A. Bar In the YEAR 1760" will never die. Davy Crockett killed 105 bars in one season, and his reputation as a bar hunter, plus ability to tell about his exploits, sent him to Congress. He had no other reason for going.

The grizzly was the hero of western tribes of Indians from Alaska on down into the Sierra Madre. Among western white men who met him, occasionally in death, the grizzly inspired a mighty saga, the cantos of which lie dispersed in homely chronicles and unrecorded memories as well as in certain vivid narratives by Ernest Thompson Seton, Hittell's John Capen Adams, John G. Neihardt, and others.

For all that, neither the black bear nor the grizzly has been amply conceived of as an American character. The conception must include a vast amount of folklore. In a chapter on "Bars and Bar Hunters" in _On the Open Range_ and in "Juan Oso" and "Under the Sign of Ursa Major,"

chapters of _Tongues of the Monte_, I have indicated the nature of this dispersed epic in folk tales.

In many of the books listed under "Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists" and "Mountain Men" the bear "walks like a man."

ALTER, J. CECIL. _James Bridger_, Salt Lake City, 1922 reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Contains several versions of the famous Hugh Gla.s.s bear story.

HITTELL, THEODORE H. _The Adventures of John Capen Adams_, 1860; reprinted 1911, New York. OP. Perhaps no man has lived who knew grizzlies better than Adams. A rare personal narrative.

MILLER, JOAQUIN. _True Bear Stories_, Chicago, 1900. OP. Truth questionable in places; interest guaranteed.

MILLER, LEWIS B. _Saddles and Lariats_, Boston, 1909. OP. The chapter "In a Grizzly's Jaws" is a wonderful bear story.

MILLS, ENOS A. _The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1919. Some naturalists have accused Mills of having too much imagination. He saw much and wrote vividly.

NEIHARDT, JOHN G. _The Song of Hugh Gla.s.s_, New York, 1915. An epic in vigorous verse of the West's most famous man-and-bear story. This imagination-rousing story has been told over and over, by J. Cecil Alter in _James Bridger_, by Stanley Vestal in _Mountain Men_, and by other writers.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Hunting Adventures_ in the {ill.u.s.t. caption = Charles M. Russell, in _Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage_ by Carrie Adell Strahorn (1915 ) _West_ (1885) and _The Wilderness Hunter_ (1893)--books reprinted in parts or wholly under varying t.i.tles. Several narratives of hunts intermixed with baldfaced facts.

SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. _The Biography of a Grizzly_, 1900; now published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York. _Monarch, the Big Bear of Tallac_, 1904. Graphic narratives.

SKINNER, M. P. _Bears in the Yellowstone_, Chicago, 1925. OP. A naturalist's rounded knowledge, pleasantly told.

STEVENS, MONTAGUE. _Meet Mr. Grizzly_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943. Montague Stevens graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1881 and came to New Mexico to ranch. As respects deductions on observed data, his book is about the most mature yet published by a ranchman. Goodnight experienced more, had a more ample nature, but he lacked the perspective, the mental training, to know what to make of his observations. Another English rancher, R. B. Townshend, had perspective and charm but was not a scientific observer. So far as sense of smell goes, _Meet Mr. Grizzly_ is as good as W. H. Hudson's _A Hind in Richmond Park_. On the nature and habits of grizzly bears, it is better than _The Grizzly_ by Enos Mills.

WRIGHT, WILLIAM H. _The Grizzly Bear: The Narrative of a Hunter-Naturalist, Historical, Scientific and Adventurous_, New York, 1928. OP. This is not only the richest and justest book published on the grizzly; it is among the best books of the language on specific mammals.

Wright had a pa.s.sion for bears, for their preservation, and for arousing informed sympathy in other people. Yet he did not descend to propaganda.

_His The Black Bear_, London, n.d., is good but no peer to his work on the grizzly. Also OP.

29. Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers

I SEPARATE COYOTES, lobos, and panthers from the ma.s.s of animals because they, along with bears, have made such an imprint on human imagination.

White-tailed deer are far more common and more widely dispersed. Men, women also, by the tens of thousands go out with rifles every fall in efforts to get near them; but the night-piercing howl and the cunning ways of the coyote, the panther's track and the rumor of his scream have inspired more folk tales than all the deer.

Lore and facts about these animals are dispersed in many books not cla.s.sifiable under natural history. Lewis and Clark and nearly all the other chroniclers of Trans-Mississippi America set down much on wild life. James Pike's _Scout and Ranger_ details the manner in which, he says, a panther covered him up alive, duplicating a fanciful and delightful tale in Gerstaecker's _Wild Sports in the Far West_. James B. O'Neil concludes _They Die but Once_ with some "Bedtime Stories"

that--almost necessarily--bring in a man-hungry panther.

COYOTES AND LOBOS

The two full-length books on Brother Coyote listed below specify most of the printed literature on the animal. (He is "Brother" in Mexican tales and I feel much more brotherly toward him than I feel toward character a.s.sa.s.sins in political power.) It would require another book to catalogue in detail all the writings that include folk tales about Don Coyote. Ethnologists and scientific folklorists recognize what they call "the Coyote Circle" in the folklore of many tribes of Indians. Morris Edward Opler in _Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache Indians_, 1940, and in _Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians_, 1942 (both issued by the American Folklore Society, New York) treats fully of this cycle. Numerous tales that belong to the cycle are included by J.

Gilbert McAllister, an anthropologist who writes as a humanist, in his extended collection, "Kiowa-Apache Tales," in _The Sky Is My Tipi_, edited by Mody C. Boatright for the Texas Folklore Society (Publication XXII), Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1949.

Literary retellers of Indian coyote folk tales have been many. The majority of retellers from western Indians include Coyote. One of the very best is Frank B. Linderman, in _Indian Why Stories_ and _Indian Old-Man Stories_. These t.i.tles are substantive: _Old Man Coyote_ by Clara Kern Bayliss (New York, 1908, OP), _Coyote Stories_ by Mourning Dove (Caldwell, Idaho, 1934, OP); _Don Coyote_ by Leigh Peck (Boston, 1941) gets farther away from the Indian, is more juvenile. The _Journal of American Folklore_ and numerous Mexican books have published hundreds of coyote folk tales from Mexico. Among the most pleasingly told are _Picture Tales frown Mexico_ by Dan Storm, 1941 (Lippincott, Philadelphia). The first two writers listed below bring in folklore.

CUs.h.i.+NG, FRANK HAMILTON. _Zuni Breadstuff_, Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, 1920. This extraordinary book, one of the most extraordinary ever written on a particular people, is not made up of coyote lore alone. In it the coyote becomes a character of dignity and destiny, and the telling is epic in dignity as well as in prolongation. Frank Hamilton Cus.h.i.+ng was a genius; his sympathy, insight, knowledge, and mastery of the art of writing enabled him to reveal the spirit of the Zuni Indians as almost no other writer has revealed the spirit of any other tribe. Their att.i.tude toward Coyote is beautifully developed. Cus.h.i.+ng's _Zuni Folk Tales_ (Knopf, New York, 1901, 1931) is climactic on "tellings" about Coyote.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Voice of the Coyote_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1949.

Not only the coyote but his effect on human imagination and ecological relations.h.i.+ps. Natural history and folklore; many tales from factual trappers as well as from Mexican and Indian folk. This is a strange book in some ways. If the author had quit at the end of the first chapter, which is on coyote voicings and their meaning to varied listeners, he would still have said something. The book includes some, but by no means all, of the material on the subject in _Coyote Wisdom_ (Publication XIV of the Texas Folklore Society, 1938) edited by J. Frank Dobie and now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas.