w leading to the soul. How strange indeed to
find that the realists have ideals and dreams! To read them one would
think their lives held nothing significant. But they love, they hope,
they dream, they sacrifice, they struggle on with that dream in their
hearts just the same as others. We all are dreamers, if not in the
heavy-lidded wasting of time, then in the meaning of life that makes us
work on.

It was Wordsworth who wrote, "The world is too much with us"; and if I
could give the secret of my ambition as a novelist in a few words it
would be contained in that quotation. My inspiration to write has
always come from nature. Character and action are subordinated to
setting. In all that I have done I have tried to make people see how
the world is too much with them. Getting and spending they lay waste
their powers, with never a breath of the free and wonderful life of the
open!

So I come back to the main point of this foreword, in which I am trying
to tell why and how I came to write the story of a feud notorious in
Arizona as the Pleasant Valley War.

Some years ago Mr. Harry Adams, a cattleman of Vermajo Park, New
Mexico, told me he had been in the Tonto Basin of Arizona and thought I
might find interesting material there concerning this Pleasant Valley
War. His version of the war between cattlemen and sheepmen certainly
determined me to look over the ground. My old guide, Al Doyle of
Flagstaff, had led me over half of Arizona, but never down into that
wonderful wild and rugged basin between the Mogollon Mesa and the
Mazatzal Mountains. Doyle had long lived on the frontier and his
version of the Pleasant Valley War differed markedly from that of Mr.
Adams. I asked other old timers about it, and their remarks further
excited my curiosity.

Once down there, Doyle and I found the wildest, most rugged, roughest,
and most remarkable country either of us had visited; and the few
inhabitants were like the country. I went in ostensibly to hunt bear
and lion and turkey, but what I really was hunting for was the story of
that Pleasant Valley War. I engaged the services of a bear hunter who
had three strapping sons as reserved and strange and aloof as he was.
No wheel tracks of any kind had ever come within miles of their cabin.
I spent two wonderful months hunting game and reveling in the beauty
and grandeur of that Rim Rock country, but I came out knowing no more
about the Pleasant Valley War. These Texans an