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.
Many of them have not. What we are interested in is life in the Southwest, and any interpreter of that life, foreign or domestic, ancient or modern, is of value. The term Southwest is variable because the boundaries of the Southwest are themselves fluid, expanding and contracting according to the point of view from which the Southwest is viewed and according to whatever common denominator is taken for defining it. 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.