Pancho Villa by Tom Lea, from Southwest Review, Winter, 1951 Frontispiece by Tom Lea, from Santa Rita by Martin W. Schwettmann Illustration by Charles M. Russell, from The Blazed Trail by Agnes C. Laut Buffaloes by Harold D. Bugbee Illustration by Charles M. Russell, from Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage by Carrie Adell Strahorn Coyote Head by Olaus J. Murie, from The Voice of the Coyote by J. Frank Dobie Paisano A Preface With Some Revised Ideas IT HAS BEEN ten years since I wrote the prefatory "Declaration" to this now enlarged and altered book. Not to my generation alone have many things receded during that decade. To the intelligent young as well as to the intelligent elderly, efforts in the present atmosphere to opiate the public with mere pictures of frontier enterprise have a ghastly unreality. The Texas Rangers have come to seem as remote as the Foreign Legion in France fighting against the Kaiser. Yet this _Guide_, extensively added to and revised, is mainly concerned, apart from the land and its native life, with frontier backgrounds. If during a decade a man does not change his mind on some things and develop new points of view, it is a pretty good sign that his mind is petrified and need no longer be accounted among the living. I have an inclination to rewrite the "Declaration," but maybe I was just as wise on some matters ten years ago as I am now; so I let it stand. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I have heard so much silly bragging by Texans that I now think it would be a blessing to themselves--and a relief to others--if the braggers did not know they lived in Texas. Yet the time is not likely to come when a human being will not be better adapted to his environments by knowing their nature; on the other hand, to study a provincial setting from a provincial point of view is restricting. Nobody should specialize on provincial writings before he has the perspective that only a good deal of good literature and wide history can give. I think it more important that a dweller in the Southwest read _The Trial and Death of Socrates_ than all the books extant on killings by Billy the Kid. I think this dweller will fit his land better by understanding Thomas Jefferson's oath ("I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man") than by reading all the books that have been written on ranch lands and people. For any dweller of the Southwest who would have the land soak into him, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," "The Solitary Reaper," "Expostulation and Reply," and a few other poems are more conducive to a "wise passiveness" than any native writing.