By "literature of the Southwest" I mean writings that
interpret the region, whether they have been produced by
the Southwest or not. 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. 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.
Early in the nineteenth century the Southwest meant
Tennessee, Georgia, and other frontier territory now regarded
as strictly South.
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