"In his library on the ranch Theodore Roosevelt kept his favorite books - Fenimore Cooper, Mayne Reid, Irving, Hawthorne, Lowell, and Poc." -The Review of Reviews "On this wonderful Sunday, I found the opening of a serial story called 'The War Trail,' by Captain Mayne Reid. I did not know what a war-trail might be; I looked at the beginning: and then suddenly found that I was in a world of beauty of romance, a world that I understood from of old, where the landscape led on and on, and men rode with comrades seeking, and villainy tried to thwart, and savagery tried to scalp, but how could either triumph over comrades and beauty? I was in an extraordinary world that would be mine forever." -John Masefield, "So Long To Learn" "Melville had never seen mustangs or talked with mustangers; he had the transporting power of imagination. Mayne Reid, on the contrary, had firsthand experience with the mustang world. he was an Irish Protestant twenty years old when he landed at New Orleans in 1838. He went out on the plains with traders, served as soldier of fortune with the American army in the Mexican War, and then, according to report, spent some time in southwestern Texas. Before he became an exceedingly popular inventor of adventure stories, he was well fortified with frontier traditions and with knowledge of native plant and animal life. In 1861, twenty-nine years after Washington Irving heard the first 'anecdotes' of record concerning the Pacing Stallion, Reid published 'The War Trail, or the Hunt of the Wild Horse. The scene is laid more or less along the Rio Grande, and the story of the book-long chase is told in the first person." -J. Frank Dobie, "The Mustangs"