Cabeza de Vaca's Narrative, the chronicles of A. J. Sowell, and O. Henry's story are just three samples of southwestern literature that bring in prickly pear. No active-minded person who reads any one of these three samples will ever again look at prickly pear in the same light that he looked at it before he read. Yet prickly pear is just one of hundreds of manifestations of life in the Southwest that writers have commented on, told stories about, dignified with significance.
Cotton no longer has the economic importance to Texas that it once had. Still, it is mighty important. In the minds of millions of farm people of the South, cotton and the boll weevil are associated. The boll weevil was once a curse; then it came to be somewhat regarded as a disguised blessing—in limiting production.
De first time I seen de boll weevil,
He was a-settin' on de square.
Next time I seen him, he had all his family dere—
Jest a-lookin' foh a home, jest a-lookin' foh a home.
A man dependent on cotton for a living and having that living threatened by the boll weevil will not be much interested in ballads, but for the generality of people this boll weevil ballad—the entirety of which is a kind of life history of the insect—is, while delightful in itself, a veritable story-book on the weevil. Without the ballad, the weevil's effect on economic history would be unchanged; but as respects mind and imagination, the ballad gives the weevil all sorts of significances. The ballad is a part of the literature of the Southwest.
But I am assigning too many motives of self-improvement to reading. People read for fun, for pleasure. The literature of the Southwest affords bully reading.
"If I had read as much as other men, I would know as little," Thomas Hobbes is credited with having said. A student in the presence of Bishop E. D. Mouzon was telling about the scores and scores of books he had read. At a pause the bishop shook his long, wise head and remarked, "My son, when DO you get time to think?" Two of the best educated men I have ever had the fortune of talking with were neither schooled nor widely read. They were extraordinary observers. One was a plainsman, Charles Goodnight; the other was a borderer, Don Alberto Guajardo, in part educated by an old Lipan Indian.
But here are the books. I list them not so much to give knowledge as to direct people with intellectual curiosity and with interest in their own land to the sources of knowledge; not to create life directly, but to point out where it has been created or copied. On some of the books I have made brief observations. Those observations can never be nearly so important to a reader as the development of his own powers of observation. With something of an apologetic feeling I confess that I have read, in my way, most of the books. I should probably have been a wiser and better informed man had I spent more time out with the grasshoppers, horned toads, and coyotes. November 5, 1942 J. FRANK DOBIE
2. Interpreters of the Land
"HE'S FOR A JIG or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps." Thought employs ideas, but having an idea is not the same thing as thinking. A rooster in a pen of hens has an idea. Thought has never been so popular with mankind as horse opera, horse play, the main idea behind sheep's eyes. Far be it from me to feel contempt for people who cannot and do not want to think. The human species has not yet evolved to the stage at which thought is natural. I am far more at ease lying in grass and gazing without thought process at clouds than in sitting in a chair trying to be logical. Just the same, free play of mind upon life is the essence of good writing, and intellectual activity is synonymous with critical interpretations.