Southwest United States

“ During the latter part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries, people in the Southwest continued to seek new ways to satisfy their water needs, which by that time were increasing rapidly as new settlers moved into this fast-developing region. ”

“ We would follow the old trails, immigrant trails, cattle trails, traders’ routes,—mountain roads which a long procession of cliff dwellers, Spanish friars, gold seekers, Apache marauders, prospectors, Mormons and scouts had trod in five centuries, and left as they found them, mere footprints in the dust. The Southwest has been explored afoot and on horse, by prairie schooners, burro, and locomotive; the modern pioneer rattles his weather beaten flivver on business between Gallup and Santa Fe, Tucson and El Paso, and thinks nothing of it, but the country is still new to the motoring tourist. ”

“ The history of the American occupation of the Southwest is as complex and diverse as its predecessors. Its ingredients include cattle, mining, railroads, agriculture, science, and the Indian. All these, and others, combined to give an Anglo-American slant to the Southwest. The Indian culture did not disappear, nor did the Spanish, but rather a new stratum was cast that was to complete the mosaic.
When the American arrived in New Mexico, he found a poor, backward area, hungry for trade and outside contacts. He found the Indians of the Southwest in open rebellion against the white men. ”

“ To the Eastern and Northern mind the Southwest raises a dim picture of hot desert, bare mountain, and monotonous plain sparsely grown up to cactus, sage, greasewood, or bunch-grass, and sown with the white bones of animals which have perished from hunger and thirst; a land of wild Indians, of lazy Mexicans, of rough cow-boys, of roving, half-wild cattle, of desperate mining ventures, of frequent train-robberies. ”

“ The settlement of the West had followed parallels of latitude. The men of the Lake Plains were transplanted New Englanders, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians; the men of the Gulf Plains came from south of Mason and Dixon's line,—pioneers both, aggressive, bold in initiative, but alienated by circumstances of tremendous economic significance. If ever North should be arrayed against South, the makeweight in the balance would be these pioneers of the Northwest and Southwest. ”

“ The European rudely confronted with the pitiless conditions of the wilderness soon discovered that his maintenance, indeed his existence, was conditioned upon his individual efficiency and his resourcefulness in adapting himself to his environment. The very history of the human race, from the age of primitive man to the modern era of enlightened civilization, is traversed in the Old x Southwest throughout the course of half a century. ”

“ The Spanish Southwest includes California, but California regards itself as more closely akin to the Pacific Northwest than to Texas; California is Southwest more in an antiquarian way than other-wise. From the point of view of the most picturesque and imagination-influencing occupation of the Southwest, the occupation of ranching, the Southwest might be said to run up into Montana. Certainly one will have to go up the trail to Montana to finish out the story of the Texas cowboy. ”

“ WEST OF A WAVERING line along the western edge of the central parts of Texas and Oklahoma the Negro is not an important social or cultural element of the Southwest, just as the modern Indian hardly enters into Texas life at all and the Mexican recedes to the east. Negro folk songs and tales of the Southwest have in treatment been blended with those of the South. ”

“ In Our Southwest, Erna Fergusson has a whole chapter on "What is the Southwest?" She finds Fort Worth to be in the Southwest but Dallas, thirty miles east, to be facing north and east. The principal areas of the Southwest are, to have done with air-minded reservations, Arizona, New Mexico, most of Texas, some of Oklahoma, and anything else north, south, east, or west that anybody wants to bring in. The boundaries of cultures and rainfall never follow survey lines. In talking about the Southwest I naturally incline to emphasize the Texas part of it. ”

“ From the cross-fertilization of the ideas of two social groups—this back-country gentry, of innate qualities of leadership, democratic instincts, economic independence, and expansive tendencies, and the primitive pioneer society of the frontier, frugal in taste, responsive to leadership, bold, ready, and thorough in execution—there evolved the militant American expansion in the Old Southwest. ”

“ You can't go halfway across the Atlantic for that, unless you go steerage; and if you go West "colonist," you can go to the backbone of the Rockies for a good deal less than thirty dollars. Now comes the crucial point! If you land in a Western city and stay at a good hotel, expenses are going to out-sprint Europe; and you will not see any more of the West than if you had gone to Europe. Choose your holiday stamping ground, Sundance Cañon, South Dakota; or the New Glacier Park; or the Pecos, New Mexico; or the White Mountains, Arizona; or the Indian Pueblo towns of the Southwest ”

“ During half a century the people of the South had been in control of the Government, but Nature and advancing civilization had been steadily against them. They had won a brilliant victory in the Southwest, but found it barren. The only remaining territory in which they could hope to plant slavery was that stretching westward from Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota to the borders of Utah and Oregon. ”

“ There is something infectious about the magic of the Southwest. Some are immune to it, but there are others who have no resistance to the subtle virus and who must spend the rest of their lives dreaming of the incredible sweep of the desert, of great golden mesas with purple shadows, and tremendous stars appearing at dusk from a turquoise sky. Once infected there is nothing one can do but strive to return again and again. ”

“ Initiative, self-reliance, boldness in conception, fertility in resource, readiness in execution, acquisitiveness, inventive genius, appreciation of material advantages—these, shot through with a certain fine idealism, genial human sympathy, and a high romantic strain—are the traits of the American national type as it emerged from the Old Southwest. ”

“ The northwest was changing to a land of farmers and town-builders, anxious for a market for their grain and cattle; while the southwest was becoming increasingly a cotton-raising section, swayed by the same impulses in respect to staple exports as those which governed the southern seaboard. Economically, the northern portion of the valley tended to connect itself with the middle states, while the southern portion came into increasingly intimate connection with the south. ”

“ These men were the highest type of the pioneers of the Old Southwest, inspired with the instinct of home-makers in a land where, if idle rumor were to be credited, "the people lived like wild men, never hearing of God or His Word." In one hand they bore the implement of agriculture, in the other the book of the gospel of Jesus Christ. ”

“ I have met a great many very odd and strange characters in the Southwest. The peculiar life of the people developed their originality. They were not restrained by the laws and customs that control older and more established communities. Every man was a law unto himself. All that was unusual and peculiar in their natural characters grew in unrestrained luxuriance like the wild vines on their hill-sides and in their valleys. What any man or community might think of their actions or mode of life had the least possible influence in deciding what they should do or not do. ”

“ Revised from Munsey's Magazine and brought up to date by the author for The Scrap Book.
Editor's Note.—In the growth of interest in the great States west of the Mississippi River the Southwest has until lately been commonly neglected. Gold sent men rushing first to the mountain States. Then grain led them to the prairie States. With the more fertile wheat lands fully occupied, there has of late been a tendency to the Canadian Northwest. But at the same time a remarkable development, commercial and industrial, as well as agricultural, has been going on in 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. ”

“ In any civilized land, birds, trees, flowers, animals, places, human contributors to life out of the past, all are richer and more significant because of representations through literature and art. No literate person can listen to a skylark over an English meadow without hearing in its notes the melodies of Chaucer and Shelley. As the Southwest advances in maturity of mind and civilization, the features of the land take on accretions from varied interpreters. ”

“ To the archaeologist, that is, to the scientist who studies and seeks to interpret the life and times of prehistoric man, the Southwest usually means New Mexico, Arizona, southern Utah, and the southwestern corner of Colorado. Interpreting the term in its broadest sense, he may include the remainder of Utah, southeastern Nevada, southwestern Texas, and northern Mexico. ”

“ The sandstone mesas of the Southwest, the terracing of canyon walls, the castellation, battlementing, and cliff making, the cutting down of a whole landscape except its precipitous islands of flat-topped rock, the thin lava table-cloths on tables 100 feet high—these are a few of the things which make the Southwest wonderful alike to the scientist and the mere sight-seer. ”

“ The vast and varied resources of the great Southwest will also, as they are developed, increasingly affect the economic aspects of the country.
To the traveller one fact stands out in especial prominence, and that is that the traditional primitive conditions in this region hardly continue to exist. The picturesque aspects of nature form the stage setting to very-much-up-to-date life. The opportunities and advantages already offered and constantly increasing are greater than would at first be considered possible. ”

“ From the gold camps of the Rockies to the shrieking towns of the coast, where wantonness stalked unchecked; from the vast stretches of the cattle ranges to the ever-advancing terminals of the persistent railroads, to the cow towns, boiling and seething in the loosed passions of men who brooked no restraint in their revels, no one section of country ever boasted of such numbers of genuine bad-men of both classes as the great, semi-arid Southwest. ”

“ It is designed primarily to help people of the Southwest see significances in the features of the land to which they belong, to make their environments more interesting to them, their past more alive, to bring them to a realization of the values of their own cultural inheritance, and to stimulate them to observe. It includes most of the books about the Southwest that people in general would agree on as making good reading. ”

“ Texas, with its plentiful rainfall, its forests, and its fine plantations of cotton and corn, is quite a different country from western Texas, and must be classed with the South. In extent of territory the Southwest is an empire more than twice as large as Germany, and greater in area than the thirteen original States of the American Union. ”

“ Any people have a right to their own cultural inheritance, though sheeplike makers of textbooks and sheeplike pedagogues of American literature have until recently, either wilfully or ignorantly, denied that right to the Southwest. Tens of thousands of students of the Southwest have been assigned endless pages on and listened to dronings over Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Bradstreet, and other dreary creatures of colonial New England who are utterly foreign to the genius of the Southwest. ”

“ To the Southwest, as the tract of country between the sea-coast and the Missisipi becomes narrower, the mountains converge into a single ridge, which, as it approaches the Gulf of Mexico, subsides into plain country, and gives rise to some of the waters of that Gulf, and particularly to a river called the Apalachicola, probably from the Apalachies, an Indian nation formerly residing on it. ”

“ The laborers in the Southern shops and mills today are not only native born but almost altogether Southern born. The South has been a great loser through interstate migration. Other sections also have lost but the excess of those departing has been replaced by the immigration of foreign born. Comparatively few have come to the South from other sections except in Florida, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and fewer foreign born have settled in the South. As a result, the percentage of increase of population is less for the South, if Oklahoma be omitted, than for the United States as a whole. ”

“ This tells us a great deal about the cultural relationships of ancient people, for trade implies contact between people which will affect other 13 phases of their culture. In prehistoric times, when people lacked rapid means of transportation and communication, human groups were naturally isolated as they can never be again, but even then cultural units were affected by the activities of the inhabitants of other regions. Accordingly, we cannot see the ancient life of the Southwest in true perspective if we do not know something of the inter-relations of the various cultures. ”

“ But when the boundless resources that now lie hidden in its hills and mountains shall have become developed—when the vast plains shall have been settled—and towns, villages and farm houses arise in the lonely wilderness, and the teeming soil be cultivated—who then will be able to estimate the value of this great territory of the West? In ten years, the West will have a majority in the United States Congress; in a century, a large portion of it will contain a population as dense, perhaps, as that of the Atlantic States. ”