Preface
Our interest in folk and primitive poetry of the American West stems from a broad and sustained interest in all of the folk expressions of Anglo-American pioneers on the frontier: tales and anecdotes of pioneer experience; sayings, proverbial expressions, jingles, and rhymes transformed and transplanted to the West by its European intruders; arts, crafts, and the folk technology used to establish, sustain, and enrich life in a vast and lonely environment; beliefs, superstitions, rites, practices, and other aspects of personal or social life which gave cohesiveness to an otherwise chaotic society; and especially the ballads, songs, and other verse which westerners transplanted and reshaped to the needs of the unique experience and new modes of being, imposed upon them by a unique environment.