d their few neighbors,
likewise from Texas, did not talk. But all I saw and felt only
inspired me the more. This trip was in the fall of 1918.

The next year I went again with the best horses, outfit, and men the
Doyles could provide. And this time I did not ask any questions. But I
rode horses--some of them too wild for me--and packed a rifle many a
hundred miles, riding sometimes thirty and forty miles a day, and I
climbed in and out of the deep canyons, desperately staying at the
heels of one of those long-legged Texans. I learned the life of those
backwoodsmen, but I did not get the story of the Pleasant Valley War.
I had, however, won the friendship of that hardy people.

In 1920 I went back with a still larger outfit, equipped to stay as
long as I liked. And this time, without my asking it, different
natives of the Tonto came to tell me about the Pleasant Valley War. No
two of them agreed on anything concerning it, except that only one of
the active participants survived the fighting. Whence comes my title,
TO THE LAST MAN. Thus I was swamped in a mass of material out of which
I could only flounder to my own conclusion. Some of the stories told
me are singularly tempting to a novelist. But, though I believe them
myself, I cannot risk their improbability to those who have no idea of
the wildness of wild men at a wild time. There really was a terrible
and bloody feud, perhaps the most deadly and least known in all the
annals of the West. I saw the ground, the cabins, the graves, all so
darkly suggestive of what must have happened.

I never learned the truth of the cause of the Pleasant Valley War, or
if I did hear it I had no means of recognizing it. All the given
causes were plausible and convincing. Strange to state, there is still
secrecy and reticence all over the Tonto Basin as to the facts of this
feud. Many descendents of those killed are living there now. But no
one likes to talk about it. Assuredly many of the incidents told me
really occurred, as, for example, the terrible one of the two women, in
the face of relentless enemies, saving the bodies of their dead
husbands from being devoured by wild hogs. Suffice it to say that this
romance is true to my conception of the war, and I base it upon the
setting I learned to know and love so well, upon the strange passions
of primitive people, and upon my instinctive reaction to the facts and
rumors that I gathered.

ZANE GREY.
AVALON, CALIF