Editing Southwestern United States (section)

===Cultural===
[[File:Apache Wickiup, Edward Curtis, 1903.jpg|thumb|The [[Wigwam]]. A dwelling used by various Native American tribes among the Southwestern US.]]
[[File:Drawing of a country store by Marguerite Martyn.jpg|thumb|Fanciful drawing by [[Marguerite Martyn]] in the ''[[St. Louis Post-Dispatch]]'' of October 21, 1906, headed "Passing of the Country Store in the Southwest"]]
Lawrence Clark Powell, a major bibliographer whose emphasis is on the Southwest, defined the American Southwest in a 1958 ''[[Arizona Highways]]'' article as, "the lands lying west of the Pecos, north of the [Mexican] Border, south of the Mesa Verde and the Grand Canyon, and east of the mountains which wall off Southern California and make it a land in itself."<ref name=UAtpncd>{{cite web | url=http://jsw.library.arizona.edu/3403/problem.html | publisher=University of Arizona | title=Land, Sky, and People: The Southwest Defined – The Problem: No Consistent Definition | last=Byrkit | first=James W. | editor-last=Wilder | editor-first=Joseph Carlton | year=1992 | access-date=July 11, 2015}}</ref>

Texas has long been the focal point of this dichotomy, and is often considered, as such, the ''core area'' of "the South's Southwest."<ref name="ReferenceA"/> While the [[Trans-Pecos]] area is generally acknowledged as part of the ''desert Southwest'',<ref>"The Southwest Defined. Edited by Joseph Carlton Wilder. University of Arizona Press</ref> most of Texas and large parts of Oklahoma are often placed into a sub-region of the [[Southern United States|South]], which some consider southwestern in the general framework of the original application, meaning the "Western South." This is an area containing the basic elements of Southern [[Confederate States of America|history]], [[Culture of the Southern United States|culture]], [[Solid South|politics]], [[Bible Belt|religion]], and [[Southern American English|linguistic]] and settlement patterns, yet blended with traits of the frontier West. While this particular Southwest is notably different in many ways from the classic "Old South" or [[Southeastern United States|Southeast]], these features are strong enough to give it a separate southwestern identity quite different in nature from that of the interior southwestern states to the west.

One of these distinguishing characteristics in Texas—in addition to having been a [[Confederate States of America|Confederate state]] during the Civil War—is that Indigenous and Spanish American culture never played a central role in the development of this area in relative comparison to the others, as the vast majority of settlers were Anglo and blacks from the South.<ref name="ReferenceB">Cultural Regions of the United States. Raymond Gastil. University of Washington Press 1975</ref> Although the present-day state of Oklahoma was [[Indian Territory]] until the early 20th century, many of these American Indians were from the southeastern United States and became culturally assimilated early on. The majority of members of these tribes also allied themselves with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Combined with that, once the territory was open for settlement, southeastern pioneers made up a disproportionate number of these newcomers. All this contributed to the new state having a character that differed from other parts of the Southwest with large American Indian populations.<ref name="ReferenceB"/>

The fact that a majority of residents of Texas and Oklahoma—unlike those in other "southwestern" states—self-identify as living in the South and consider themselves southerners rather than the West and westerners—also lends to treating these two states as a somewhat distinct and separate entity in terms of regional classification.<ref>Southern Focus Poll 1992–1999. Odom Institute; Center for the Study of the American South.</ref>

[[File:A026, Joshua Tree National Park, California, USA, 1998.jpg|thumb|upright|A Joshua tree (''[[Yucca brevifolia]]'')]]