The Land

Mary Austin (1868–1934)
From Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology

Interesting Links
“The Loneliest Land”: Mary Hunter Austin and the California desert (Lisa Selin Davis, National Parks)

“How a Nineteenth-Century Painting Transformed California’s Desert World” (Susanna Newbury, KCET)

Previous Story of the Week selection by Mary Austin
“The Scavengers”

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In 1932 sixty-four-year-old Mary Austin published her autobiography Earth Horizon, which uses alternating third-person and first-person narration to describe what she thought of as her various selves, public and private, creative and unexceptional, “assured” and insecure. Her account recalls when she was twenty and her Illinois family settled as homesteaders in Tejon, north of Bakersfield, California, in 1888:

. . . Mary was consumed with interest as with enchantment. Her trouble was that the country failed to explain itself. If it had a history, nobody could recount it. Its creatures had no known life except such as she could discover by unremitting vigilance of observation; its plants no names that her Middlewestern botany could supply.

To help her family make ends meet, she took a job as schoolteacher in Mountain View (on the southern edge of the San Francisco Bay), and it was here that she realized she could become a writer:

. . . Mary found that not only was the ancient art of story-telling going on in the Mountain View district, but she could definitely profit by it. . . . At Tejon she had already picked up a number of animal stories such as men seldom think of telling to women, not because they are untellable, but because they seem perhaps to belong so exclusively to the male life. . . . These she filed for reference.

The landscape, people, and animals of the Southwest would become the subjects of Austin’s nearly two dozen books and hundreds of periodical publications—novels, stories, essays, plays, poetry, travel writing, ethnography, religious works, and even a collaboration with Ansel Adams (a copy of which, in the morocco-bound limited edition signed by Austin, will set you back $60,000).

“The Land” opens her 1909 collection Lost Borders, which evokes Austin’s characteristically tense relationship with the Southwest. The narrator, a writer of stories about the California desert, describes the people she will depict in the book’s subsequent stories: “a motley collection of drifters, prospectors, explorers, entrepreneurs, and sheepherders,” summarizes literary scholar Esther F. Lanigan, “most of whom demonstrate an astonishing insensitivity in their dealings with the women closest to them.” Austin describes the arid landscape as a place where the borders separating fact and fiction often blur. In this introductory sketch she remarks that her readers refused to believe “some elementary matters” in her fiction, yet “you can get anybody to believe any sort of a tale that has gold in it.” She even heard one of her imaginative forays repeated around campfires as if it actually happened, to the point where, she quips, “I had begun to believe the story myself.”

This week’s selection is preceded by a prescient headnote written by David L. Ulin thirteen years ago, when Austin’s sketch was included the Library of America anthology Writing Los Angeles.

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When the Paiute nations broke westward through the Sierra wall they cut off a remnant of the Shoshones, and forced them south as far as Death Valley and the borders of the Mojaves, they penned the Washoes in and around Tahoe, and passing between these two, established themselves along the snow-fed Sierra creeks. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Scavengers

Mary Austin (1868–1934)
From American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Interesting Links
California Landmark #229: Mary Austin Home (Independence, CA)

Mary Austin, Isidro (1905): an appreciation of her first novel (Buddies in the Saddle)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Wind-Storm in the Forests,” John Muir
• “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” William James

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American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
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Raised in Illinois, Mary Hunter Austin moved west at the age of twenty, homesteaded near Fort Tejon in California, and then settled with her husband to the east in the arid Owens Valley, which she dubbed “The Land of Little Rain.” In 1903, following years of various hardships, she published under that title a collection of stories and essays about the American Southwest, which remains to date her most well-known work among her two dozen books. (It topped a 1999 readers poll by the San Francisco Chronicle of the top 100 books “west of the Rockies.”) One of its most celebrated pieces, “The Scavengers,” describes the splendor and squalor of the vultures, buzzards, ravens, coyotes, and other species that make their living from death.

Soon after the success of The Land of Little Rain, in March 1906, Austin separated from her husband—they would divorce in 1914—and joined the fledgling circle of literary Californians in Carmel. Only a month later, while she was visiting San Francisco, the legendary earthquake struck. Austin’s move to Carmel could not have been more propitiously timed; after the quake, dozens of shell-shocked and displaced Bay Area artists and writers migrated to her new neighborhood. Two decades later, she wrote a nostalgic essay about life in Carmel for The American Mercury magazine:

We achieved, all of us who flocked there within the ensuing two or three years, especially after the fire of 1906 had made San Francisco uninhabitable to the creative worker, a settled habit of morning work. . . . There was beauty and strangeness; beauty of Greek quality, but not too Greek, “green fires, and billows tremulous with light,” not wanting the indispensable touch of grief; strangeness of bearded men from Tassajara with bear meat and wild-honey to sell; great teams from the Sur, going by on the high road with the sound of bells; and shadowy recesses within the wood, white with the droppings of night-haunting birds. But I think that the memorable and now vanished charm of Carmel lay, perhaps, most in the reality of the simplicity attained, a simplicity factually adjusted to the quest of food and fuel and housing as it can never be in any “quarter” of city life.

The colony would eventually attract such visitors and residents as Jack London, John Galsworthy, Upton Sinclair, Robinson Jeffers, Clark Ashton Smith, and Ambrose Bierce; although Austin was an admirer of Bierce’s writing, they didn’t think much of each other after they’d met. (This seems to be a recurring theme in Bierce’s biography; he had a similarly chilly relationship with another area resident, Gertrude Atherton.)

In 1923, after living in New York City for a decade, Austin was convinced by the heiress and arts patron Mabel Dodge to relocate to the new artist colony in Taos, New Mexico. In 1930, she collaborated with neighbor Ansel Adams on Taos Pueblo, a 108-copy, hand-produced photographic essay, a copy of which can be yours today for a mere $85,000. One of Austin’s friends who stayed at her home in Taos was Willa Cather, who inscribed a copy of Death Comes for the Archbishop, “For Mary Austin, in whose lovely study I wrote the last chapters of this book.”

Note: Nearly all the place names mentioned by Austin are located in the southern Sierra and desert areas of central California and southern Nevada. For example, Canada de los Uvas is now known more commonly by its English name, Grapevine Canyon (at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley); the modern spelling for Haiwai is Haiwee (in Inyo Country, California); etc.

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Fifty-seven buzzards, one on each of fifty-seven fence posts at the rancho El Tejon, on a mirage-breeding September morning, sat solemnly while the white tilted travelers’ vans lumbered down the Canada de los Uvas. After three hours they had only clapped their wings, or exchanged posts. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.