Mere Humans no longer read History--except in school where they have to, or in study clubs where it is also Required. But a plain personal narrative is interesting now as it has been for five thousand years. The world's greatest book is of course compulsory; but what is the _interesting_ part of it? Why, the stories--Adam and Eve; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Saul and David and Samson and Delilah; Solomon, Job, and Jesus the Christ! And if anyone thinks Moses worked-in a little too much of the Family Tree--he doesn't know what biblical archæology is doing. For it is thanks to these same "petty" details that modern Science, in its excavations and decipherings, has verified the Bible and resolved many of its riddles!
Greece had one Herodotus. America had _four_, antedating the year 1600. All these truly great historians built from all the "sources" they could find. But none of them quite give us the homely, vital picture of life and feeling that one untaught and untamed soldier, Bernal Diaz, wrote for us three hundred years ago when he was past ninety, and toothless--and angry "because the historians didn't get it straight." The student of Spanish America has often to wish there had been a Bernal Diaz for every decade and every province from 1492 to 1800. His unstudied gossip about the conquest of Mexico is less balanced and less authoritative, but far more illuminative, than the classics of his leader, Cortez--a university man, as well as a great conqueror.
For more than a quarter of a century it was one of my duties to study and review (for the _Nation_ and other critical journals) all sorts of local chronicles all over Spanish and English America--particularly of frontier times. In this work I have read searchingly many hundreds of volumes; and have been brought into close contact with our greatest students and editors of "History-Material," and with their standards.
I have read no other such book with so unflagging interest and content as these memoirs of Harris Newmark. My personal acquaintance with Southern California for more than thirty years may color my interest in names and incidents; but I am appraising this book (whose proofs I have been permitted to read thoroughly) from the standpoint of the student of history anywhere. Parkman and Fiske and Coues and Hodge and Thwaites would join me in the wish that every American community might have so competent a memorandum of its life and customs and growth, for its most formative half-century.