Into the Plaza of the Alamo in the city of San Antonio de Bexar, in the year 1845, with fifes and drums, marched the troops of the United States of America. The people wept. For the Long Star Flag of Texas was being lowered, and the Stars and Stripes were being put in its place.

But the weeping was of joy; it was a family reunion, it meant an end of Mexican invasions and Indian forays, and the beginning of peace. Then nine years later, in a home built literally over the crumbled walls of the church-fortress of the Alamo, my father, Albert Maverick, was first to blink his little eyes in the bright sun of Texas.

For a full century, we Mavericks have been the blood brothers and a born part of the Southwest Soil. For in the year 1836 my grandfather, Samuel Augustus Maverick, late of South Carolina, riding hard in the mud and cold rain to reach the blacksmith shop where the Texas Declaration of Independence was adopted, was among the last three delegates to sign it. And if you walk into our great capitol in Austin you can see it displayed there, just as you can see the American Declaration displayed in the Library of Congress in Washington.

The Great Southwest then, is the land of my fathers. The old South, on the other hand, seems to me to be the land of my forefathers, a strange and distant illusion.

And Sam Maverick of Texas became a member of Congress in the Republic, representing the district of Bexar, where I still live. This district flung itself down to the Gulf of Mexico, over to the Rio Grande, north, north, through New Mexico and the Panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, with a tiny tip of Kansa, up into Colorado and Wyoming, all vague and never occupied, but a mighty dream. These lands are the symbols of the Southwest. And one must never forget that had it not been for Texas, the western lands would not now be a part of our country.

Texas as we now know it really had its beginning in the colony of the impresario, Stephen F. Austin. Many of the descendants of the people he brought to this famous deep soil of the Black Bottoms still live there. But much of it has been flooded and silted. There is land decline, and it is a deathly picture in comparison to its past.

Two hundred miles from there, in the truly Mexican part, in rolling hills on the edge of the West Texas plains, I lived as a child. We rode long distances from our farm, on ponies. There, at the turn of the century, and nearly everywhere else over the State, with every type of land in America, the destruction of the land had begun. It was real virgin territory compared to what it is now.

This Texas of mine is historically the beginning of the Southwest. I have roamed and ranged around it ever since I was born. Now the Southwest includes, in addition to Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Colorado, Utah, and California.

I know less of Oklahoma than I do of the rest of the region, but I do know that it has the Dust Bowl, which runs over into Texas; has great oil and gas problems like my own state; and has the problem of the Indians.

Soldiering in the Colorado—New Mexico—California regions during the war, I naturally noticed little of anything worth while, for I was a youngster involved in the business of war. But I have seen it since, and surely as I have eyes to see, the land has less that is green, and more of gulies and torn lands.

In the last few years I have gone out in New Mexico and Arizon on the lands of the Indians. Standing on the plain, I have seen the wind grinding and whirling on the dead body of the earth, with sheep bleating and crying and running for a stray blade of grass or weed. Where every drop of water is sacred, and where no one can afford to waste a single cell of plant life, everything has been done to destroy both.

Here have always lived and still live, all types of the Indians. There are nomads, hunters and warriors. There are also the people of the pueblos.

Which makes me think of Boston—a long way off, and where I visited to see the "Hub of the Universe." In the State House, a sort of lady guide told me of the great man, John Hancock, who signed the Declaration of Independence.

"The smuggler?" I asked respectfully.

"Sir!" she snapped.

We argued it out, for all she had to do was to talk with tourists, and I had a couple of hours. I felt resentful over her ignorance and her unwarranted exaggeration of John Hancock's unselfishness.

So I told her, and it is true, that the roots of civilization in the Southwest go back no one knows how many centuries. And we are quite the oldest in point of civilization in the United States. Indeed pueblo or village and house-living Indians have been known there in my Southwest thousands of years. New Spain, of which the Southwest was a part, had flourishing universities before there were even common schools in the Thirteen Colonies.

Over the great Painted Deserts of the Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona I have seen the devilish destruction. These tribes have land twice the size of Holland. Holland has a population of around eight or nine million; the Indians have around fifty thousand!

I do not mean by this that the land could support eight or nine million Hollanders, for the land in this part of Southwest has always been arid. But there is sufficient to show that there was high grass and greater vegetation—and that the land in the past has supported an abundance of human and animal life.

Here on this vast tract of land one can drive for miles and never get relief from the gritty dust. Dust blows in the air, ruining the crops and the range. Since the land is grazed to the last blade of grass, it is less and less productive—starving the herds. And since the Indians are dependent on the herds, they too starve. And if you want to see redskins—fifty thousand of them, bite the dust, here you see it, for the dust is loose, and flies in the air.

There is history behind this. For the Pale Face forced the Navajos there. Then sheep were given them. The sheep increased. In 1934 the Government found there were a million and a half of them, where there should only have been some five hundred thousand.

What was happening? Too many sheep, land declines; more sheep, more eating. Then an effect from the outside world: prices spiralling down. Water evaporates, lands grow drier. Lands generally dry: rain-time, great gully washing. Instead of water seeping into the ground and moving slowly, it rushes over the slick soil carrying good top dirt away with it—to Boulder Dam and other places. More choking of streams. Wind-storms again blow dust in the air.

The government ordered the number of sheep reduced to protect the land. Results show a little advance. But more must be done.

Even rabbits cannot live here. Here in the "Wild Southwest," among the Indians, is less game than anywhere in the rest of the United States. Looking at the hills I can only think of a series of Dead Man's hills in France—pot-holes like the great shell craters, no trees at all, or only dead ones. Snakeweed itself, a criminal of the vegetative world which sneaks in when soil is bad, is even killed out.

In some places as much as a foot of the soil has been blown or washed away. One can see shrubs and bushes standing on "stilts," their lower roots exposed from six inches to a foot above what is left of the subsoil. Solid rock has been exposed in countless places where grass and trees grew a generation ago.

Taking the Navajo lands by themselves, they affect areas far away. One is the Boulder Reservoir near Los Angeles, another is Elephant Butte Dam near El Paso. Either of these will be damaged by silting—and generally affect the lives of millions of people in the cities and rural areas as well. In one New Mexico area, for instance, where there were once 130,000 irrigable acres, there are now only 40,000.

What is the point? Answer: Land policies of the whole nation are bound together, and a misuse in one part of the country may do serious damage thousands of miles away. We must think of our country as one storehouse of nature, as natural regional areas, and not as areas bounded by the artificial lines of the states.

I have learned one thing, governmentally, in the Southwest. Because these were Federal lands, and the last to become states, there is more public domain. Also, here are the Indians, the small Spanish farmers and the big ranchers. As a result, agencies of the Government pretty much tumble over each other. The Bureau of Reclamation works side by side with the Soil Conservation. National Park Rangers of the Interior are side by side with National Forest Rangers. Where a park begins and a forest ends I do not know—it all looks alike to me. Resettlement bumps up against the Soil Service, and WPA bumps in between; Indian agents are all around. Although it is a confused picture, there is evidence of co-operation.

A single national land policy must be evolved. It must be in two divisions: First, Soil and Drainage; second, Human Use. This will necessitate drastic reorganization of all the various departments and bureaus now operating.

Here in the Southwest one is able to think beyond one's prejudices, one's emotions, and one's ideas based on inheritance. The black picture is not without a tiny ray of light.

Not all the land is bad and worn and lost forever. There is still sufficient good land around these Bad Lands. Much of the Bad Lands can be saved. And though Government agencies do tumble over each other, most them are trying, and such services as the Indian and Conservation are doing exceedingly well. It is impossible to relate here the dozens of projects where intelligent, planned work is being done.

There in the Southwest, then, is hope, and some vision for the nation. It is the spirit the nation must acquire, casting off false symbols and empty political wrangling, and thinking of the land.

Land! People, politicians, poets—and professors! For into Washington came the professors, books and knowledge in hand. Among these professors was one who caused more tantrums and rage to be spilled into printer's ink than any doctor ever did, not excepting Dr. Faustus, who sold his soul to the Devil.