the truly clever know enough to make books of a country by a few days of pullman and hotel—or even by skimming the public library at home, without the bother and expense of travel at all.
but the few dullards now left can arrive in knowledge only by plodding; not “as on wings of eagles” and inspiration, but by the drudgery of learning.
it has taken more than twenty-five arduous years to beat into me what little i hope i know about the frontiers of the three americas. to learn several new languages and digest innumerable old chronicles was but one side of the task: everywhere, and among many peoples, i had to win slow adoption from stranger to friend; to travel footsore or saddleweary; to share their beds, their feasts, their famine, their speech, their ideas, their pleasures and their hardships—in fact, to live their life. and it was life—human and warm, even at its rudest.
part of these stories, under this same title, were published in 1897 by an amateur firm which very presently succumbed—post hoc, indeed, but i trust not propter. so the book has been out of print for a dozen years. it was very gently entreated by critics and public while its young godfathers lasted.
i now add five stories and 4,000 miles of geography—clear back to my venerable boyhood. born and bred a yankee, i escaped in time (at 23), and have become a much better indian, new mexican, mexican, peruvian, californian and composite paisano of the frontier. it may be that other graduate new englanders will find here some echo to memory of what they and i used to think we knew of the stern and rockbound, so long ago; and that the unremoved will pardon my lapses, in view of my enduring alibi.
as to anything this side of new england, i won’t “either apologize or fight.” this part is not remote and precarious memory of the only true golden age—the age when we haven’t any—but the indelible autograph of thirty older years, scarred and wrinkled upon me inside and out. it can take care of itself.
most of these stories, in both instances, are of episodes in which i had some part. not all are “true stories,” but all are truthful. i hope that makes them no duller than if they had been guessed out of whole cloth and innocence.
c. f. l.
los angeles, cal.
