| I was a good deal surprised. Max Crawford's writing was underappreciated then (and is now, which is one reason I'm writing this foreword). His politics, had I been able to describe them accurately, would no doubt have given Michael Deaver pause, but the receiving line loomed and I couldn't. I made do with a few generalities. |
| "Well," Mr. Deaver said, "I gave copies of your Lonesome Dove and Crawford's Lords of the Plain to the President, and he sat up all night reading Lords of the Plain. Mrs. Reagan gave me quite a tongue-lashing the next day for giving him a book that would keep him up." |
| When I reported this exchange to Max, then living in what he described as a "one-tractor town" in France (he comes from Floydada, Texas, where there are hundreds if not thousands of tractors), his response to the President's compliment was restrained, as usual. |
| "Oh well," he wrote. "He's probably the most dangerous man in the world, but nobody's all bad." |
| Though probably true of President Reagan, that's not necessarily the philosophic sense (Hobbes strained through the blackest Marx) one gets from reading Max's fiction, where some characters, if not all bad, come too close for comfortand that goes for the landscape too. |
| Lords of the Plain is not just a book about a peoplethe Comanchesor about the white soldiers who pursued and finally broke themin this case, the 2nd Cavalry. It is also about one of the most powerful and least hospitable landscapes on earth, the llano estacado, the great Staked Plain of Texas and New Mexico. It is (or was) a plain so dry, so featureless, and so forbidding that even the Comanches went there warily, and then only because there was no place else where they could remain a free people. Yet the tenacious whites pursued them even there, killed their horses, and broke their power in the campaigns of the mid-1870s, here so richly and vividly recreated. The llano estacado is a place where, in the phrase of the writer Ross Calvin, "sky determines"; and there's no fiction where the power of that sky is better described than Lords of the Plain. The events are from history, but the charactersChapman, McSwain, Rife, Tehana |
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![Chris Crawford [Chris Crawford] - Chris Crawford on Game Design](/uploads/posts/book/119438/thumbs/chris-crawford-chris-crawford-chris-crawford-on.jpg)
