Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 9

EVANS, WILL G. _Border Skylines_, published in Dallas, 1940, for Bloys Campmeeting a.s.sociation, Fort Davis, Texas. Chronicles of the men and women--cow people--and cow country responsible for the best known campmeeting, held annually, Texas has ever had. OP.

GRAVIS, PETER W. _25 Years on the Outside Row of the Northwest Texas Annual Conference_, Comanche, Texas, 1892. Another one of those small personal records, privately printed but full of juice. OP.

LIDE, ANNA A. _Robert Alexander and the Early Methodist Church in Texas_, La Grange, Texas, 1935. OP.

MORRELL, Z. N. _Fruits and Flowers in the Wilderness_, 1872. Though reprinted three times, last in 1886, long OP. In many ways the best circuit rider's chronicle of the Southwest that has been published.

Morrell fought Indians and Mexicans in Texas and was rich in other experiences.

MORRIS, T. A. _Miscellany_, 1884. The "Notes of Travel"--particularly to Texas in 1841--are what makes this book interesting.

PARISOT, P. F. _Reminiscences of a Texas Missionary_, 1899. Mostly the Texas-Mexican border.

POTTER, ANDREW JACKSON, commonly called the Fighting Parson. _Life_ of him by H. A. Graves, 1890, not nearly so good as Potter was himself.

THOMASON, JOHN W. _Lone Star Preacher_, Scribner's, New York, 1941.

Fiction, true to humanity. The moving story of a Texas chaplain who carried a Bible in one hand and a captain's sword in the other through the Civil War.

14. Lawyers, Politicians, J. P.'s

STEPHEN F. AUSTIN wanted to exclude lawyers, along with roving frontiersmen, from his colonies in Texas, and hoped thus to promote a utopian society. The lawyers got in, however. Their wit, the anecdotes of which they were both subject and author, and the political stories they made traditional from the stump, have not been adequately set down.

As criminal lawyers they stood as high in society as corporation lawyers stand now and were a good deal more popular, though less wealthy. The code of independence that fostered personal violence and justified killings--in contradistinction to murders--and that ran to excess in outlaws naturally fostered the criminal lawyer. His type is now virtually obsolete.

Keen observers, richly stored in experience and delightful in talk, as many lawyers of the Southwest have been and are, very few of them have written on other than legal subjects. James D. Lynch's _The Bench and the Bar of Texas_ (1885) is confined to the eminence of "eminent jurists" and to the mastery of "masters of jurisprudence." What we want is the flavor of life as represented by such characters as witty Three-Legged Willie (Judge R. M. Williamson) and mysterious Jonas Harrison. It takes a self-lover to write good autobiography. Lawyers are certainly as good at self-loving as preachers, but we have far better autobiographic records of circuit riders than of early-day lawyers.

Like them, the pioneer justice of peace resides more in folk anecdotes than in chroniclings. Horace Bell's expansive _On the Old West Coast_ so represents him. A continent away, David Crockett, in his _Autobiography_, confessed, "I was afraid some one would ask me what the judiciary was. If I knowed I wish I may be shot." Before this, however, Crockett had been a J. P. "I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life."

COOMBES, CHARLES E. _The Prairie Dog Lawyer_, Dallas, 1945. OP.

Experiences and anecdotes by a lawyer better read in rough-and-ready humanity than in law. The prairie dogs have all been poisoned out from the West Texas country over which he ranged from court to court.

HAWKINS, WALACE. _The Case of John C. Watrous, United States Judge for Texas: A Political Story of High Crimes and Misdemeanors_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1950. More technical than social.

KITTRELL, NORMAN G. _Governors Who Have Been and Other Public Men of Texas_, Houston, 1921. OP. Best collection of lawyer anecdotes of the Southwest.

ROBINSON, DUNCAN W. _Judge Robert McAlpin Williamson, Texas'

Three-Legged Willie_, Texas State Historical a.s.sociation, Austin, 1948.

This was the Republic of Texas judge who laid a Colt revolver across a Bowie knife and said: "Here is the const.i.tution that overrides the law."

SONNICHSEN, C. L. _Roy Bean, Law West of the Pecos_, Macmillan, New York, 1943. Roy Bean (1830-1903), justice of peace at Langtry, Texas, advertised himself as "Law West of the Pecos." He was more picaresque than picturesque; folk imagination gave him notoriety. The Texas State Highway Department maintains for popular edification the beer joint wherein he held court. Three books have been written about him, besides scores of newspaper and magazine articles. The only biography of validity is Sonnichsen's.

SLOAN, RICHARD E. _Memories of an Arizona Judge_, Stanford, California, 1932. Full of humanity. OP.

SMITH, E. F. _A Saga of Texas Law: A Factual Story of Texas Law, Lawyers, Judges and Famous Lawsuits_, Naylor, San Antonio, 1940.

Interesting.

15. Pioneer Doctors

BEFORE the family doctors came, frontiersmen sawed off legs with handsaws, tied up arteries with horsetail hair, cauterized them with branding irons. Before homemade surgery with steel tools was practiced, Mexican _curanderas_ (herb women) supplied _remedios_, and they still know the medicinal properties of every weed and bush. Herb stores in San Antonio, Brownsville, and El Paso do a thriving business. Behind the _curanderas_ were the medicine men of the tribes. Not all their lore was superst.i.tion, as any one who reads the delectable autobiography of Gideon Lincec.u.m, published by the Mississippi Historical Society in 1904, will agree. Lincec.u.m, learned in botany, a sharply-edged individual who later moved to Texas, went out to live with a Choctaw medicine man and wrote down all his lore about the virtues of native plants. The treatise has never been printed.

The extraordinary life of Lincec.u.m has, however, been interestingly delineated in Samuel Wood Geiser's _Naturalists of the Frontier_, Southern Methodist University Press, 1937, 1948, and in Pat Ireland Nixon's _The Medical Story of Early Texas_, listed below. No historical novelist could ask for a richer theme than Gideon Lincec.u.m or Edmund Montgomery, the subject of I. K. Stephens' biography listed below.

BUSH, I. J. _Gringo Doctor_, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939. OP. Dr. Bush represented frontier medicine and surgery on both sides of the Rio Grande. Living at El Paso, he was for a time with the Maderistas in the revolution against Diaz.

COE, URLING C. _Frontier Doctor_, New York, 1939. OP. Not of the Southwest but representing other frontier doctors. l.u.s.ty autobiography full of characters and anecdotes.

DODSON, RUTH. "Don Pedrito Jaramillo: The Curandero of Los Olmos," in _The Healer of Los Olmos and Other Mexican Lore_ (Publication of the Texas Folklore Society XXIV), edited by Wilson M. Hudson, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1951. Don Pedrito was no more of a fraud than many an accredited psychiatrist, and he was the opposite of offensive.

NIXON, PAT IRELAND. _A Century of Medicine in San Antonio_, published by the author, San Antonio, 1936. Rich in information, diverting in anecdote, and tonic in philosophy. Bibliography. _The Medical Story of Early Texas, 1528-1835_ [San Antonio], 1946. Lightness of life with scholarly thoroughness; many character sketches.

RED, MRS. GEORGE P. _The Medicine Man in Texas_, Houston, 1930.

Biographical. OP.

STEPHENS, I. K. _The Hermit Philosopher of Liendo_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1951. Well-conceived and well-written biography of Edmund Montgomery--illegitimate son of a Scottish lord, husband of the sculptress Elisabet Ney--who, after being educated in Germany and becoming a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London, came to Texas with his wife and sons and settled on Liendo Plantation, near Hempstead, once known as Sixshooter Junction. Here, in utter isolation from people of cultivated minds, he conducted scientific experiments in his inadequate laboratory and thought out a philosophy said to be half a century ahead of his time. He died in 1911. His life was the drama of an elevated soul of complexities, far more tragic than any life a.s.sociated with the lurid "killings" around him.

WOODHULL, FROST. "Ranch Remedios," in _Man, Bird, and Beast_, Texas Folklore Society Publication VIII, 1930. The richest and most readable collection of pioneer remedies yet published.

16. Mountain Men

AS USED HERE, the term "Mountain Men" applies to those trappers and traders who went into the Rocky Mountains before emigrants had even sought a pa.s.s through them to the west or cattle had beat out a trail on the plains east of them. Beaver fur was the lodestar for the Mountain Men. Their span of activity was brief, their number insignificant.

Yet hardly any other distinct cla.s.s of men, irrespective of number or permanence, has called forth so many excellent books as the Mountain Men. The books are not nearly so numerous as those connected with range life, but when one considers the writings of Stanley Vestal, Sabin, Ruxton, Fer gusson, Chittenden, Favour, Garrard, Inman, Irving, Reid, and White in this Seld, one doubts whether any other form of American life at all has been so well covered in ballad, fiction, biography, history.

See James Hobbs, James O. Pattie, and Reuben Gold Thwaites under "Surge of Life in the West," also "Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail."

ALTER, J. CECIL. _James Bridger_, Salt Lake City, 1925. A hogshead of life. Bibliography. OP. Republished by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio.

BONNER, T. D. _The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, 1856_; reprinted in 1931, with an illuminating introduction by Bernard DeVoto.

OP. Beckwourth was the champion of all western liars.

BREWERTON, G. D. _Overland with Kit Carson_, New York, 1930. Good narrative. OP.

CHITTENDEN, _H. M. The American Fur Trade of the_ _Far West_, New York, 1902. OP. Basic work. Bibliography.

CLELAND, ROBERT GLa.s.s. _This Reckless Breed of Men: The Trappers and Fur Traders of the Southwest_, Knopf, New York, 1950. Fresh emphasis on the California-Arizona-New Mexico region by a knowing scholar. Economical in style without loss of either humanity or history. Bibliography.

CONRAD, HOWARD L. _Uncle d.i.c.k Wootton_, 1890. Primary source. OP.