The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 62, July 1958 - April, 1959 Page: 295

Book Reviews

of his estate, after which the wife renewed many of her shady
acquaintances of the past and returned to a life of sordid excesses
which eventually led her to her commitment to an insane asylum.
The author has done a skillful job of telling this story, at once
interesting and depressing, of a man whose life was a tragedy
compounded of equal parts of violence and passion.
OTIS A. SINGLETARY
University of Texas
Indians of the Southwest. By Mary Jourdan Atkinson. San Antonio
(Naylor Company), 1958. Pp. xix+333. Illustrations, bib-
liography. $5.oo.
In 1935 the Naylor Company published Mary Jourdan Atkin-
son's The Texas Indians. The present volume is essentially that
same book-with only a few superficial changes-under a new title.
Dr. Atkinson states in a note to the reader that the scope of the
original book was "never confined to present-day Texas bound-
aries." Modern political borders meant nothing to the aboriginal
inhabitants of the area. Hence, to discuss the "Texas Indians"
is impossible, for they wandered over many states. In an attempt
to solve her problem of nomenclature, the author decided to
substitute a regional name for that of the state. Thus, the new
book becomes Indians of the Southwest.
The problem which Dr. Atkinson now faces is more difficult
than the first. In anthropological circles the American "South-
west" refers to that culture area encompassing the southwestern
section of the United States from West Texas to the Pacific and
including northern Mexico. Occupying this area are three rather
diverse Indian groups: the Pueblos (Hopi, Zuni, and so on), the
Desert Tribes (Pima, Papago, and so on), and the Athabaskan
Nomads (Navajo, Apache). Of these, only a few groups of
Apache resided within the present boundaries of Texas.
If Dr. Atkinson had expanded the scope of the book to
concur with the broadened title, all might have been well. In
the revised version, as in the first, however, she is dealing with
those tribes using Texas as a base for operations. Dr. Atkinson
mentions the Navajo only in passing, the Pueblos in less than half

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