be hired to pump vitality into any kind of human expression,
but professors and critics have taken it out of many a human
being who in his attempts to say something decided to be
correct at the expense of being himself--being natural,
being alive. The priests of literary conformity never had a
chance at the homemade chronicles of the Southwest.

The orderly way in which to study the Southwest would
be to take up first the land, its flora, fauna, climate, soils,
rivers, etc., then the aborigines, next the exploring and
settling Spaniards, and finally, after a hasty glance at the
French, the English-speaking people who brought the Southwest
to what it is today. We cannot proceed in this way, however.
Neither the prairies nor the Indians who first hunted
deer on them have left any records, other than hieroglyphic,
as to their lives. Some late-coming men have written about
them. Droughts and rains have had far more influence on
all forms of life in the Southwest and on all forms of its
development culturally and otherwise than all of the Coronado
expeditions put together. I have emphasized the literature
that reveals nature. My method has been to take up
types and subjects rather than to follow chronology.

Chronology is often an impediment to the acquiring of
useful knowledge. I am not nearly so much interested in
what happened in Abilene, Kansas, in 1867--the year that
the first herds of Texas Longhorns over the Chisholm Trail
found a market at that place--as I am in picking out of
Abilene in 1867 some thing that reveals the character of the
men who went up the trail, some thing that will illuminate