The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 70, July 1966 - April, 1967 Page: 521

Book Reviews

East Texas State Teachers College to permit him to take a special
entrance examination. He placed second in a group of one hun-
dred and forty.
This summary of the farm-to-college theme, though it indi-
cates the general narrative trend, does not reveal the richness
and emotional value of Mr. Owens' book. This Stubborn Soil
has much to say to the social historian, the folklorist, and the
student of American dialect. Picking cotton, "muddying" for
fish, making poke pickles, building a clay chimney, maturing
cider by burying it, cooking hoecake, being saved at camp meet-
ings-all of these and many other aspects of life around Pin
Hook have their place. An unstrained poetical overtone is pres-
ent at all times. Mr. Owens' own language is simple and dig-
nified, with no heightened effects, and the fine idiomatic tongue
of his people always rings true and is often poetical.
University of Texas WILSON M. HUDSON
The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest. By Charles C. Alexander.
Lexington (University of Kentucky Press), 1965. Pp. xvi
+288. Bibliographical notes and index. $6.00.
Like most subterranean movements the history of the twentieth-
century Klan must remain forever in large part unknown. It left
few manuscript records, and most of its surviving members now
refuse to talk. Thus we can hardly blame Professor Alexander
if the story he tells is less complete at some points than we might
wish, for he has had to rely mainly on general newspapers and
court records for the facts that comprise this sordid tale. Few
files of Klan publications in the Southwest were preserved, the
author discovered-an unfortunate circumstance that should
cause present-day librarians and archivists to examine their own
criteria for the collection of historical materials, lest they follow
their shortsighted predecessors in neglecting to keep the source
materials historians someday are certain to want.
A chief purpose of this book, the author states, is to test the
validity of generalizations hitherto made about the Klan. Be-
cause of Alexander's work some of these now appear to be un-
tenable so far as the Southwest is concerned. There the Klan

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