Part 19 (1/2)

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _Coronado's Children_, Dallas, 1930; reprinted by Grosset and Dunlap, New York. Legendary tales of lost mines and buried treasures of the Southwest. _Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1939. More of the same thing.

EMRICH, DUNCAN, editor. _Comstock Bonanza_, Vanguard, New York, 1950.

A collection of writings, garnered mostly from West Coast magazines and newspapers, bearing on mining in Nevada during the boom days of Mark Twain's.

{ill.u.s.t. caption = Tom Lea, in _Santa Rita_ by Martin W. Schwettmann (1943)}

_Roughing It_. James G. Gally's writing is a major discovery in a minor field.

FORBES, GERALD. _Flush Production: The Epic of Oil in the Gulf-Southwest_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942.

GILLIS, WILLIAM R. _Goldrush Days with Mark Twain_, New York, 1930. OP.

GLa.s.sc.o.c.k, LUCILLE. _A Texas Wildcatter_, Naylor, San Antonio, 1952.

The wildcatter is Mrs. Gla.s.sc.o.c.k's husband. She chronicles this player's main moves in the game and gives an insight into his energy-driven ambition.

HOUSE, BOYCE. _Oil Boom_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. With Boyce House's earlier _Were You in Ranger?_, this book gives a contemporary picture of the gus.h.i.+ng days of oil, money, and humanity.

LYMAN, GEORGE T. _The Saga of the Comstock Lode_, 1934, and _Ralston's Ring_, 1937. Both published by Scribner's, New York.

MCKENNA, JAMES _A. Black Range Tales_, New York, 1936. Reminiscences of prospecting life. OP.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. _Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E. W.

Marland_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. Mature in style and in interpretative power, John Joseph Mathews goes into the very life of an oilman who was something else.

RISTER, C. C. _Oil! t.i.tan of the Southwest_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Facts in factual form. Plenty of oil wealth and taxes; nothing on oil government.

s.h.i.+NN, CHARLES H. _Mining Camps_, 1885, reprinted by Knopf, New York, 1948. Perhaps the most competent a.n.a.lysis extant on the behavior of the gold hunters, with emphasis on their self-government. _The Story of the Mine as Ill.u.s.trated by the Great Comstock Lode of Nevada_, New York, 1896. OP. s.h.i.+nn knew and he knew also how to combine into form.

STUART, GRANVILLE. _Forty Years on the Frontier_, Cleveland, 1925.

Superb on California and Montana hunger for precious metals. OP.

TAIT, SAMUEL W. _Wildcatters: An Informal History of Oil-Hunting in America_, Princeton University Press, 1946. OP.

TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_. The mining boom itself.

26. Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists

”NO MAN,” says Mary Austin, ”has ever really entered into the heart of any country until he has adopted or made up myths about its familiar objects.” A man might reject the myths but he would have to know many facts about its natural life and have imagination as well as knowledge before entering into a country's heart. The history of any land begins with nature, and all histories must end with nature.

”The character of a country is the destiny of its people,” wrote Harvey Fergusson in _Rio Grande_. Ross Calvin, also of New Mexico, had the same idea in mind when he ent.i.tled his book _Sky Determines_. ”Culture mocks at the boundaries set up by politics,” Clark Wissler said. ”It approaches geographical boundaries with its hat in its hand.” The engineering of water across mountains, electric translation of sounds, refrigeration of air and foods, and other technical developments carry human beings a certain distance across some of nature's boundaries, but no cleverness of science can escape nature. The inhabitants of Yuma, Arizona, are destined forever to face a desert devoid of graciousness.

Technology does not create matter; it merely uses matter in a skilful way--uses it up.

Man advances by learning the secrets of nature and taking advantage of his knowledge. He is deeply happy only when in harmony with his work and environments. The backwoodsman, early settler, pioneer plainsman, mountain man were all like some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at its own vitals. Driven by an irrational energy, they seemed intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the power of the soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear killer, was ”wrathy to kill a bear,” and as respects bears and other wild life, one may search the chronicles of his kind in vain for anything beyond the incidents of chase and slaughter. To quote T. B. Thorpe's bl.u.s.terous bear hunter, the whole matter may be summed up in one sentence: ”A bear is started and he is killed.” For the average American of the soil, whether wearing out a farm, shotgunning with a headlight the last doe of a woodland, shooting the last buffalo on the range, trapping the last howling lobo, winging the last prairie chicken, running down in an automobile the last antelope, making a killer's target of any hooting owl or flying heron that comes within range, poisoning the last eagle to fly over a sheep pasture for him the circ.u.mstances of the killing have expressed his chief intellectual interest in nature.

A sure sign of advancing civilization has been the rapidly changing popular att.i.tude toward nature during recent years. People are becoming increasingly interested not merely in conserving game for sportsmen to shoot, but in preserving all wild life, in observing animals, in cultivating native flora, in building houses that harmonize with climate and landscape. Roger Tory Peterson's _Field Guide to the Birds_ has become one of the popular standard works of America.

The story of the American Indian is--despite taboos and squalor--a story of harmonizations with nature. ”Wolf Brother,” in _Long Lance_, by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, is a poetic concretion of this harmony. As much at ease with the wilderness as any Blackfoot Indian was George Frederick Ruxton, educated English officer and gentleman, who rode horseback from Vera Cruz to the Missouri River and wrote _Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains_. In this book he tells how a lobo followed him for days from camp to camp, waiting each evening for his share of fresh meat and sometimes coming close to the fire at night. Any orthodox American would have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton had the civilized perspective on nature represented by Th.o.r.eau and Saint Francis of a.s.sisi. Primitive harmony was run over by frontier wrath to kill, a wrath no less barbaric than primitive superst.i.tions.