A great deal of chronicle writing that makes no pretense at being belles-lettres is really superior literature to much that is so classified. I will vote three times a day and all night for John C. Duval's _Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace_, Charlie Siringo's _Riata and Spurs_, James B. Gillett's _Six Years with the Texas Rangers_, and dozens of other straightaway chronicles of the Southwest in preference to "The Culprit Fay" and much other watery "literature" with which anthologies representing the earlier stages of American writing are padded. Ike Fridge's pamphlet story of his ridings for John Chisum--chief provider of cattle for Billy the Kid to steal--has more of the juice of reality in it and, therefore, more of literary virtue than some of James Fenimore Cooper's novels, and than some of James Russell Lowell's odes. The one thing essential to writing if it is to be read, to art if it is to be looked at, is vitality. No critic or professor can 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 certain phenomena along the trail human beings of the Southwest are going up today, some thing to awaken observation and to enrich with added meaning this corner of the earth of which we are the temporary inheritors.