Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 10

COYNER, D. H. _The Lost Trappers_, 1847.

DAVIDSON, L. J., and BOSTWICK, P. _The Literature of the Rocky Mountain West 1803-1903_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939. Davidson and Forrester Blake, editors. _Rocky Mountain Tales_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1947.

DEVOTO, BERNARD. _Across the Wide Missouri_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1947. Superbly ill.u.s.trated by reproductions of Alfred Jacob Miller.

DeVoto has amplitude and is a master of his subject as well as of the craft of writing.

FAVOUR, ALPHEUS H. _Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man_, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1936. Flavor and facts both. Full bibliography.

FERGUSSON, HARVEY. _Rio Grande_, 1933, republished by Tudor, New York.

The drama and evolution of human life in New Mexico, written out of knowledge and with power. _Wolf Song_, New York, 1927. OP. Graphic historical novel of Mountain Men. It sings with life.

GARRARD, LEWIS H. _Wah-toyah and the Taos Trail_, 1850. One of the basic works.

GRANT, BLANCHE C. _When Old Trails Were New--The Story of Taos_, New York, 1934. OP. Taos was rendezvous town for the free trappers.

GUTHRIE, A. B., JR. _The Big Sky_, Sloane, New York, 1947 (now published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston). "An unusually original novel, superb as historical fiction."--Bernard DeVoto. I still prefer Harvey Fergusson's _Wolf Song_.

HAMILTON, W. T. _My Sixty Years on the Plains_, New York, 1905. Now published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio.

INMAN, HENRY. _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, 1897.

IRVING, WASHINGTON. _The Adventures of Captain Bonneville_ and _Astoria_. The latter book was founded on Robert Stuart's Narratives. In 1935 these were prepared for the press, with much illuminative material, by Philip Ashton Rollins and issued under the t.i.tle of _The Discovery of the Oregon Trail_.

LARPENTEUR, CHARLES. _Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri_, edited by Elliott Coues, New York, 1898. As Milo Milton Quaife shows in an edition of the narrative issued by the Lakeside Press, Chicago, 1933, the indefatigable Coues just about rewrote the old fur trader's narrative. It is immediate and vigorous.

LAUT, A. C. _The Story of the Trapper_, New York, 1902. A popular survey, emphasizing types and characters.

LEONARD, ZENAS. _Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard_, Clearfield, Pa., 1839. In 1833 the Leonard trappers reached San Francis...o...b..y, boarded a Boston ship anch.o.r.ed near sh.o.r.e, and for the first time in two years varied their meat diet by eating bread and drinking "Coneac." One of the trappers had a gun named Knock-him-stiff.

Such earthy details abound in this narrative of adventures in a brand new world.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _Arizona Characters_, Los Angeles, 1928. Very readable biographic sketches. OP.

MILLER, ALFRED JACOB. _The West of Alfred Jacob Miller_, with an account of the artist by Marvin C. Ross, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1950. Although Miller painted the West during 1837-38, only now is he being discovered by the public. This is mainly a picture book, in the top rank.

PATTIE, JAMES OHIO. _The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky_, Cincinnati, 1831. Pattie and his small party went west in 1824. For grizzlies, thirst, and other features of primitive adventure the narrative is primary.

REID, MAYNE. _The Scalp Hunters_. An antiquated novel, but it has some deep-dyed pictures of Mountain Men.

ROSS, ALEXANDER. _Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River_ (1849) and _The Fur Hunters of the Far West_ (1855). The trappers of the Southwest can no more be divorced from the trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company than can Texas cowboys from those of Montana.

RUSSELL, OSBORNE. _Journal of a Trapper_, Boise, Idaho, 1921. In the winter of 1839, at Fort Hall on Snake River, Russell and three other trappers "had some few books to read, such as Byron, Shakespeare and Scott's works, the Bible and Clark's Commentary on it, and some small works on geology, chemistry and philosophy." Russell was wont to speculate on Life and Nature. In perspective he approaches Ruxton.

RUXTON, GEORGE F. _Life in the Far West_, 1848; reprinted by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen.

No other contemporary of the Mountain Men has been so much quoted as Ruxton. He remains supremely readable.

SABIN, EDWIN L. _Kit Carson Days_, 1914. A work long standard, rich on rendezvous, bears, and many other a.s.sociated subjects. Bibliography.

Republished in rewritten form, 1935. OP.

VESTAL, STANLEY (pseudonym for Walter S. Campbell). _Kit Carson_, 1928. As a clean-running biographic narrative, it is not likely to be superseded. _Mountain Men_, 1937, OP; _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, 1939.

Vestal's "Fandango," a tale of the Mountain Men in Taos, is among the most spirited ballads America has produced. It and a few other Mountain Men ballads are contained in the slight collection, _Fandango_, 1927.

Houghton Mifflin, Boston, published the aforementioned t.i.tles. _James Bridger, Mountain Man_, Morrow, New York, 1946, is smoother than J.

Cecil Alter's biography but not so savory. _Joe Meek, the Merry Mountain Man_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1952.

WHITE, STEWART EDWARD. _The Long Rifle_, 1932, and _Ranchero_, 1933, Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, N. Y. Historical fiction.

17. Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail

THERE WAS Independence on the Missouri River, then eight hundred miles of twisting trail across hills, plains, and mountains, all uninhabited save by a few wandering Indians and uncountable buffaloes. Then there was Santa Fe. On west of it lay nearly a thousand miles of wild broken lands before one came to the village of Los Angeles. But there was no trail to Los Angeles. At Santa Fe the trail turned south and after crawling over the Jornada del Muerto--Journey of the Dead Man--threading the great Pa.s.s of the North (El Paso) and crossing a vast desert, reached Chihuahua City.

Looked at in one way, Santa Fe was a mud village. In another way, it was the solitary oasis of human picturesqueness in a continent of vacancy.

Like that of Athens, though of an entirely different quality, its fame was out of all proportion to its size. In a strong chapter, ent.i.tled "A Caravan Enters Santa Fe," R. L. Duffus _(The Santa Fe Trail)_ elaborates on how for all travelers the town always had "the lure of adventure."

Josiah Gregg doubted whether "the first sight of the walls of Jerusalem were beheld with much more tumultuous and soul-enrapturing joy" than Santa Fe was by a caravan topping the last rise and, eight hundred miles of solitude behind it, looking down on the town's shining walls and cottonwoods.

No other town of its size in America has been the subject of and focus for as much good literature as Santa Fe. Pittsburgh and dozens of other big cities all put together have not inspired one tenth of the imaginative play that Santa Fe has inspired. Some of the transcontinental railroads probably carry as much freight in a day as went over the Santa Fe Trail in all the wagons in all the years they pulled over the Santa Fe Trail. But the Santa Fe Trail is one of the three great trails of America that, though plowed under, fenced across, and cemented over, seem destined for perennial travel--by those happily able to go without tourist guides. To quote Robert Louis Stevenson, "The greatest adventures are not those we go to seek." The other two trails comparable to the Santa Fe are also of the West--the Oregon Trail for emigrants and the Chisholm Trail for cattle.

For additional literature see "Mountain Men," "Stagecoaches, Freighting," "Surge of Life in the West."

CATHER, WILLA. _Death Comes for the Archbishop_, Knopf, New York, 1927.

Historical novel.

CONNELLEY, W. E. (editor). _Donithan's Expedition_, 1907. Saga of the Mexican War. OP.

DAVIS, W. W. H. _El Gringo, or New Mexico and Her People_, 1856; reprinted by Rydal, Santa Fe, 1938. OP. Excellent on manners and customs.

DUFFUS, R. L. _The Santa Fe Trail_, New York, 1930. OP. Bibliography.

Best book of this century on the subject.

DUNBAR, SEYMOUR. _History of Travel in America_, 1915; revised edition issued by Tudor, New York, 1937.

GREGG, JOSIAH. _Commerce of the Prairies_, two vols., 1844. Reprinted, but all OP. Gregg wrote as a man of experience and not as a professional writer. He wrote not only the cla.s.sic of the Santa Fe trade and trail but one of the cla.s.sics of bedrock Americana. It is a commentary on civilization in the Southwest that his work is not kept in print. Harvey Fergusson, in _Rio Grande_, has written a penetrating criticism of the man and his subject. In 1941 and 1944 the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, issued two volumes of the _Diary and Letters of Josiah Gregg_, edited by Maurice G. Fulton with Introductions by Paul Horgan. These volumes, interesting in themselves, are a valuable complement to Gregg's major work.

INMAN, HENRY. _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, 1897. A mine of lore.

LAUGHLIN, RUTH (formerly Ruth Laughlin Barker). _Caballeros_, New York, 1931; republished by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1946. Essayical goings into the life of things. Especially delightful on burros. A book to be starred. _The Wind Leaves No Shadow_, New York, 1948; Caxton, 1951. A novel around Dona Tules Barcelo, the powerful, beautiful, and silvered mistress of Santa Fe's gambling _sala_ in the 1830's and '40's.

MAGOFFIN, SUSAN SHELBY. _Down the Santa Fe Trail_, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1926. Delectable diary.

PILLSBURY, DOROTHY L. _No High Adobe_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950. Sketches, pleasant to read, that make the _gente_ very real.

RUXTON, GEORGE FREDERICK. _Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains_, London, 1847. In 1924 the second half of this book was reprinted under t.i.tle of _Wild Life in the Rocky Mountains_. In 1950, with additional Ruxton writings discovered by Clyde and Mae Reed Porter, the book, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen, was reissued under t.i.tle of _Ruxton of the Rockies_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Santa Fe is only one incident in it. Ruxton illuminates whatever he touches. He was in love with the wilderness and had a fire in his belly. Other writers add details, but Ruxton and Gregg embodied the whole Santa Fe world.

VESTAL, STANLEY. _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1939.