Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 8

REID, SAMUEL C. _Scouting Expeditions of the Texas Rangers_, 1859; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. Texas Rangers in Mexican War.

ROBERTS, DAN W. _Rangers and Sovereignty_, 1914. OP. Roberts was better as ranger than as writer.

ROBERTS, MRS. D. W. (wife of Captain Dan W. Roberts). A _Woman's Reminiscences of Six Years in Camp with The Texas Rangers_, Austin, 1928. OP. Mrs. Roberts was a sensible and charming woman with a seeing eye.

SOWELL, A. J. _Rangers and Pioneers of Texas_, San Antonio, 1884. A graphic book down to bedrock. OP.

WEBB, WALTER PRESCOTT. _The Texas Rangers_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1935. The beginning, middle, and end of the subject. Bibliography.

12. Women Pioneers

ONE REASON for the ebullience of life and rollicky carelessness on the frontiers of the West was the lack--temporary--of women. The men, mostly young, had given no hostages to fortune. They were generally as free from family cares as the buccaneers. This was especially true of the first ranches on the Great Plains, of cattle trails, of mining camps, logging camps, and of trapping expeditions. It was not true of the colonial days in Texas, of ranch life in the southern part of Texas, of homesteading all over the West, of emigrant trails to California and Oregon, of backwoods life.

Various items listed under "How the Early Settlers Lived" contain material on pioneer women.

ALDERSON, NANNIE T., and SMITH, HELENA HUNTINGTON. A _Bride Goes West_, New York, 1942. Montana in the eighties. OP.

BAKER, D. W. C. A _Texas Sc.r.a.pbook_, 1875; reprinted, 1936, by Steck, Austin.

BROTHERS, MARY HUDSON. A _Pecos Pioneer_, 1943. OP. The best part of this book is not about the writer's brother, who cowboyed with Chisum's Jinglebob outfit and ran into Billy the Kid, but is Mary Hudson's own life. Only Ross Santee has equaled her in description of drought and rain. The last chapters reveal a girl's inner life, amid outward experiences, as no other woman's chronicle of ranch ways--sheep ranch here.

CALL, HUGHIE. _Golden Fleece_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1942. Hughie Call became wife of a Montana sheepman early in this century. OP.

CLEAVELAND, AGNES MORLEY. _No Life for a Lady_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1941. Bright, witty, penetrating; anecdotal. Best account of frontier life from woman's point of view yet published. New Mexico is the setting, toward turn of the century. People who wished Mrs.

Cleaveland would write another book were disappointed when her _Satan's Paradise_ appeared in 1952.

ELLIS, ANNE. _The Life of An Ordinary Woman_, 1929, and _Plain Anne Ellis_, 1931, both OP. Colorado country and town. Books of disillusioned observations, wit, and wisdom by a frank woman.

FAUNCE, HILDA. _Desert Wife_, 1934. OP. Desert loneliness at a Navajo trading post.

HARRIS, MRS. DILUE. Reminiscences, in _Southwestern Historical Quarterly_, Vols. IV and VII.

KLEBERG, ROSA. "Early Experiences in Texas," in _Quarterly of the Texas State Historical a.s.sociation_ (initial t.i.tle for _Southwestern Historical Quarterly_), Vols. I and II.

MAGOFFIN, SUSAN SHELBY. _Down the Santa Fe Trail_, 1926. OP. She was juicy and a bride, and all life was bright to her.

MATTHEWS, SALLIE REYNOLDS. _Interwoven_, Houston, 1936. Ranch life in the Texas frontier as a refined and intelligent woman saw it. OP.

MAVERICK, MARY A. _Memoirs_, San Antonio, 1921. OP. Essential.

PICKRELL, ANNIE DOOM. _Pioneer Women in Texas_, Austin, 1929. Too much lady business but valuable. OP.

POE, SOPHIE A. _Buckboard Days_, edited by Eugene Cunningham, Caldwell, Idaho, 1936. Mrs. Poe was there--New Mexico.

RAK, MARY KIDDER. _A Cowman's Wife_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1934. The external experiences of an ex-teacher on a small Arizona ranch.

RHODES, MAY D. _The Hired Man on Horseback_, 1938. Biography of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, but also warm-natured autobiography of the woman who ranched with "Gene" in New Mexico. OP.

RICHARDS, CLARICE E. _A Tenderfoot Bride_, Garden City, N. Y., 1920. OP.

Charming.

STEWART, ELINOR P. _Letters of a Woman Homesteader_, Boston, 1914. OP.

WHITE, OWEN P. _A Frontier Mother_, New York, 1929. OP. Overdone, as White overdid every subject he touched.

WILBARGER, J. W. _Indian Depredations in Texas_, 1889; reprinted by Steck, Austin, 1936. A glimpse into the lives led by families that gave many women to savages--for death or for Cynthia Ann Parker captivity.

WYNN, AFTON. "Pioneer Folk Ways," in _Straight Texas_, Texas Folklore Society Publication XIII, 1937. Excellent.

13. Circuit Riders and Missionaries

NOTWITHSTANDING both the tradition and the facts of hardshooting, hard-riding cowboys, of bad men, of border lawlessness, of inhabitants who had left some other place under a cloud, of frontier towns "west of G.o.d," hard layouts and conscienceless "courthouse crowds"--notwithstanding all this, the Southwest has been and is religious-minded. This is not to say that it is spiritual-natured.

It belongs to H. L. Mencken's "Bible Belt." "Pa.s.s-the-Biscuits"

Pappy O'Daniel got to be governor of Texas and then U.S. senator by advertising his piety. A politician as "ignorant as a Mexican hog" on foreign affairs and the complexities of political economy can run in favor of what he and the voters call religion and leave an informed man of intellect and sincerity in the shade. The biggest campmeeting in the Southwest, the Bloys Campmeeting near Fort Davis, Texas, is in the midst of an enormous range country away from all factories and farmers.

Since about 1933 the United States Indian Service has not only allowed but rather encouraged the Indians to revert to their own religious ceremonies. They have always been religious. The Spanish colonists of the Southwest, as elsewhere, were zealously Catholic, and their descendants have generally remained Catholic. The first English-speaking settlers of the region--the colonists led by Stephen F. Austin to Texas--were overwhelmingly Protestant, though in order to establish Mexican citizens.h.i.+p and get t.i.tles to homestead land they had, technically, to declare themselves Catholics. One of the causes of the Texas Revolution as set forth by the Texans in their Declaration of Independence was the Mexican government's denial of "the right of wors.h.i.+pping the Almighty according to the dictates of our own conscience." A history of southwestern society that left out the Bible would be as badly gapped as one leaving out the horse or the six-shooter.

See chapter ent.i.tled "On the Lord's Side" in Dobie's _The Flavor of Texas_. Most of the books listed under "How the Early Settlers Lived"

contain information on religion and preachers. Church histories are about as numerous as state histories. Virtually all county histories take into account church development. The books listed below are strong on personal experiences.

ASBURY, FRANCIS. Three or more lives have been written of this representative pioneer bishop.

BOLTON, HERBERT E. _The Padre on Horseback_, 1932. Life of the Jesuit missionary Kino. OP.

BROWNLOW, W. G. _Portrait and Biography of Parson Brownlow, the Tennessee Patriot_, 1862. Brownlow was a very representative figure.

Under the t.i.tle of _William G Brownlow, Fighting Parson of the Southern Highland_, E. M Coulter has brought out a thorough life of him, published by University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1937.

BURLESON, RUFUS C. _Life and Writings_, 1901. OP. The autobiographical part of this amorphously arranged volume is a social doc.u.ment of the first rank.

CARTWRIGHT, PETER. _Autobiography_, 1857. Out of Kentucky, into Indiana and then into Illinois, where he ran against Lincoln for Congress, Cartwright rode with saddlebags and Bible. Sandburg characterizes him as "an enemy of whisky, gambling, jewelry, fine clothes, and higher learning." He seems to me more unlovely in his intolerance and sectarianism than most circuit riders of the Southwest, but as a militant, rough-and-ready "soldier of the Lord" he represented southwestern frontiers as well as his own.

CRANFILL, J. B. _Chronicle, A Story of Life in Texas_, 1916. Cranfill was a lot of things besides a Baptist preacher--trail driver, fiddler, publisher, always an observer. OP.

DEVILBISS, JOHN WESLEY. _Reminiscences and Events_ (compiled by H. A.

Graves), 1886. The very essence of pioneering,

DOMENECH, ABBE. _Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico_ (translated from the French), London, 1858. OP. The Abbe always had eyes open for wonders. He saw them. Delicious narrative.