From the author's foreword when the book was originally published in 1925: "For nearly forty years I have been writing in and of the million square miles which include New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California, and adjoining parts of Colorado, Utah, Texas, and Northern Mexico - an area to which I was first to apply, over a third of a century ago, the generic christening by which it is now commonly known - The Southwest. My books were the first to make widely known most of the marvels of that incomparable Wonder Land, which I began to explore eagerly on my Tramp Across the Continent in 1884. Through the decades since, I have made the Southwest a study, not only by exploration but in documentary research - and hope never to know it all!" Charles Lummis (1859-1928) was an author, journalist, editor, photographer, Los Angeles city librarian, adventurer, close friend and Harvard classmate of Theodore Roosevelt, and champion of the American Indian. He walked from Cincinnati to Los Angeles in the winter of 1884-1885 to accept a job on the then three-year old Los Angeles Times.