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(A talk given on September 27, 2008 for the conference “Spirit of Landscape: California’s Lower Owens River Valley” on behalf of the California Garden and Landscape History Society, by Paula Panich.)
In October 1888, a few days shy of 120 years ago, Mary Hunter, who would become Mary Hunter Austin soon enough, started out from Pasadena on horseback.
Her mother and younger brother were along too, tucked in under the bonnet of a Prairie schooner; their sights were set on a sparse homestead in the southern San Joaquin Valley colonized by an older brother.
The small family had come to southern California by train from their home in Carlinville, Illinois, where Mary had been born barely twenty years before.
She was not exactly keen on coming to California. She was a new graduate of Blackburn College in Carlinville; staying put in Illinois seemed fine with her.
She was slight, small-boned, never in robust health. She carried with her to California what would be lifelong grief --- at ten years old, she lost, within a few months, her beloved father, George Hunter, and Jennie, her younger sister.
The fruit of that trip from Pasadena to the San Joaquin Valley was an 1889 article “100 Miles on Horseback.” published in her college magazine. Those hundred miles would prove, in fact, to be a map to her own life.
She would be a writer, and her finest work, and the work for which she is remembered, would be about the landscape and the people of the West.
She would follow this map in the almost five decades to follow, writing 30 books and about 200 articles, essays, short stories, poems and plays.
That’s taking a broad leap, though ,from that girl on horseback. Yet she was, at that moment 120 years ago already a writer, in the sense that Henry James spoke about – that is, that rare someone on whom nothing is lost.
She writes, in that first published piece of 1889:
“Below us lay the green panorama of the canyon, while round about us peak after peak rose into view, violet, purple, and rose, outlined against the flaming gold of the sunset sky. The whole arch of the heavens was suffused with flowing rose color save where the ridge on which we stood intercepted the waning light, leaving a broad band of deepest blue along the eastern horizon, where the stars were already gleaming.”
Mary Hunter had not only found her subject but her voice – the steady, sure, rhythmic, almost oracular voice that would ripen into the incantation-like tone praising beauty heard in Mary Austin’s most enduring piece of work, her first book, The Land of Little Rain. Its subject is the Owens Valley, “none other than this long brown land [that] lays such a hold on the affection,” she writes. It was published 15 long, hard years after she arrived in California, in 1903, when she was 35.
It is the book that brings us together today to wonder about Mary Austin and her passion for this land and its people.
But before I speak of that difficult and defining decade-and-a half of Austin’s life, it is important to understand how many ways one can bring her into focus.
For a half-century after her death, he work was forgotten. Surveys of the literature of her time included her contemporaries --- Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather --- but omitting Mary Austin.
In the 1980s, with the growing environmental movement, the rediscovery of many proto-feminist and feminist writers, and a sharper evaluation of the history of the American West, the time was ripe for a resurrection of Austin’s passionate and prolific work.
She writes, according to one recent critic, “mark[ing] the landscape with concentric circles of the feminine and of beauty.”
Passionate, literary, lyrical writers of the West and its delicate landscape as different as Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams have written introductions to editions of The Land of Little Rain. (Tempest Williams keeps a photograph of Austin on her writing desk, by the way.)
And Gary Snyder – if you don’t know the work of this poet, prose writer and environmentalist, consider getting to know him . In a 1990 essay, “Ancient Forests of the Far West,” he suggests a context for Austin’s time and work.
He writes:
“Daoist philosophers tell us that surprise and subtle instruction might come from the useless. So it was with the wastelands of the American West --- inaccessible, inhospitable, arid and forbidding to the eyes of most early Euro-Americans.
“The Useless Lands became the dreaming place of a few nineteenth and early twentieth-century men and women (John Wesley Powell on matters of water and public lands, Mary Austin on Native Americans, deserts, women) who went out into the space and loneliness and returned from their quests not only to criticize the policies and assumptions of the expanding United States, but, in the name of wilderness and the commons, to hoist the sails that are filling with wind today.”
But look at this young woman of exquisite sensibility getting on and off that horse, seeing edenic California for the first time, and shaping her response to it.
The elder Hunter brother’s homesteading effort went bust. But Mary Hunter learned the land, daily walking out into the desert alone, and tried to make her own living.
For her the desert and mountains had a mystical presence, something she was predisposed, from childhood, to see in nature --a gift that had come unbidden but welcomed.
This new land had a Something – and that something she writes with an upper case “S” --- she would later call “lurking, evasive, wistful, cruel, ardent --- insistent on being noticed.” She saw, felt, and heard, and jotted it all down in small notebooks.
In 1891, at 23, she married Stafford Wallace Austin. He seemed a good enough match; she was expected to marry. He was a University of California engineering graduate, but rather feckless.
She would write in her 1932 autobiography, Earth Horizon, that she had been warned not to marry a man with a past --- but heard not a word about wedding a man without a future.
The double portrait taken the year they married doesn’t inspire confidence. Wallace Austin looks well-brushed but distant, vacuous, staring off into space. The petite Mary Austin ---- her blonde hair swept up over her head --- looks past her husband. Her face seems set with what might be resigned terror; her eyes are glassy, some might say, but to me look full of tears.
Wallace was as closed as Mary was open, and her shock at trying to engage with someone who did not share her intellectual interests and depth of mind was reflected for years in marriages portrayed in short stories and novels. She tried to support the family with teaching and later with writing, but the marriage would not endure.
The fourth great tragedy of Mary Austin’s life --- after the early family deaths and her sharply disappointing marriage --- was the birth, in 1892, of an exceptionally beautiful baby, Ruth, who was profoundly mentally disabled.
Austin had no idea the costs that would accrue with marriage and motherhood. She had assumed her writing and thinking would go on as before. She had no one to guide her, she said decades later. How was she to know? She had never met a writer.
The Austin's and their baby moved from the San Joaquin to the Owens Valley in the 1890s. They lived, as far as is known, in a succession of raw frontier towns, including Lone Pine and Independence. Wallace Austin worked at a number of jobs. Mary filled in with teaching --- even once baking pies for their keep.
Look long and hard at the photographs dating from about 1894 to 1906 in Chris Langley’s book about Lone Pine – roughly the span of time Mary Austin spent in the Owens Valley.
(It is a very fine book, by the way, written with sharp observation, compassion, and a point of view honed by long experience and study in this valley.)
Try to imagine her here.
Winters were cold and wet, the streets of Lone Pine saturated and muddy --- and summers were its opposite, hot and dusty. Farms abounded. Grain was produced, cattle grazed. The people of Lone Pine until 1900 were a lively mix of Native American, Mexican, and Anglo settlers --- the latter two groups attracted by the silver mines after 1849 – until the boom ended in ten years later. Many stayed on to settle the Valley. As Chris Langley writes, silver “in the Eastern Sierra drove settlement, conflict, and greed. It left a few people rich and many people older.”
Mary Austin would prove to be a shrewd, gifted observer of the folkways of the Native American and the Mexican friends she made in the Owens Valley.
She walked out into the desert, her baby tied to her back. In the early evening, in the bruised and dying light, she would hurry to the campoodie --- the Indian camp --- to speak with her friend Seyavi. It was unseemly behavior for a “white woman.”
But she kept writing, her pencil flying through those black notebooks. It wasn’t easy. The marriage was miserable. She struggled to take care of Ruth; and the “required subservience” to her husband’s “frequent job changes” as one of her biographers put it, caused her tremendous stress.
When the Austin's settled here in Independence, Wallace Austin was registrar of federal lands.
Both Austin's were all too aware of Los Angeles’ lust for the water of the Owens River to feed the fast-growing city, and spoke up to protest the biggest water grab in history. In 1905, Wallace Austin wrote letters to the General Land Office to complain, as Chris Langley has written, that the former mayor of Los Angeles was buying up farms and ranches with water rights --- and, as it turned out, secretly conveying property titles to the city.
The determined Mary Austin had been seeking literary advice and friendships in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland. The California writer and librarian Ina Coolbrith advised her on preparing a manuscript for publication; in Los Angeles she befriended Charles Lummis and his wife, who included the young writer into their literary and artistic circle.
At the end of the Nineties she began publishing in magazines her first California short fiction. She went to Los Angeles to teach --- a trial separation from Wallace. But all along labored on the manuscript that would become The Land of Little Rain.
She was a meticulous, focused writer devoted to the precise word.
Puzzling and worrying over a sentence, she paced her desert haunts, awaiting clarity.
I had the privilege, thanks to the Huntington Library, to have a good long thirsty look at the manuscript of Austin’s autobiography, Earth Horizon. In the mss. box are three typed, completely viable versions of some sections, each with autograph additions. No one can guess at the labor that came before.
And I can’t resist admiring so much of her lyrical, rhythmic prose just for its own sake. Here is a sentence from the first of 14 essays in The Land of Little Rain – the title of the book having been taken from the essay itself:
“These are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermillion, painted, aspiring to the snow line . . .”
This line brings great pleasure with its active verbs, verbs as adjectives, onomatopoeia, and the absolutely crisp and precise “chrome and vermillion.” Those enchanting hills are rising up from the forces of the Earth before our very eyes.
Mary Austin is in love with the world --- and at this moment her love is particular, local, and surrounds us as we breathe in this beautiful place.
The Land of Little Rain is a book about nature and people centered on the California desert, almost the first on the subject. It is a book about – and here I am borrowing from Ed Abbey --- “earth, sky, weather, about some of the plants and animals that survive and reproduce among these elemental and elementary events, and about a few of the human beings who once lived in what now seems, from our urbanized point of view, like something close to an original state of nature. Austin’s root-digging Indians, single-blanket jackass prospectors, wagon drivers, pastoral village Mexicans seem as remote from our regular and regulated anthill lives as the flight of an eagle, the love-charge of a wild stallion.”
(Don’t you wish you could hear “Cactus Ed’s” opinion on aerial hunting and the governor of the state who occupies herself with the same? I do.)
Two essays of the 14 in this first book are the most excerpted and anthologized, “The Basket Maker,” about her wise, independent Paiute friend, Seyavi; and “The Little Town of the Grape Vines.” Austin’s affectionate summing up of the life of the Mexican and Mexican-Americans in Lone Pine, where grape arbors once flourished.
Both essays are close anthropological and folkway readings of the people she lived among, cared about, and who immeasurably enriched her own life and community.
“The Basket Maker” begins with a famous line, which was the first of many pieces to advance Austin’s then-radical thinking about the rearrangement of roles for women.
“’A man,” says Seyavi of the campoodie, “must have a woman, but a woman who has a child will do very well
Her man had been killed at the “last stand at the border of the Bitter Lake; battle-driven they died in its waters . . .” The incident
refers to the Massacre of 1863, where Piaute men, women, and children had run into Owens Lake to flee for their lives --- but were brutally shot as they returned dry land.
But Seyavi’s story isn’t tragic – it is a celebration of her wisdom, “mother wit,” love of her land and culture.
“The Little Town of the Grapevines” is a more objective look at a Mexican community --- an invocation of a well-knit caring group of people, with equally famous opening lines:
“There are still some places in the west where the quails cry “cuidado”; where all the speech is soft, all the manners gentle; where all the dishes have chile in them, and they make more of the Sixteenth of September than they do of the Fourth of July.”
“My Neighbor’s Field” is a five-and-a-half page close observation worthy of Thoreau. (I love this essay.) Imagine her looking out the window of her house here in Independence, day after day, month after month, looking at this field, eventually knowing it as a one does a much-loved face.
She writes much about the lakes and streams of her beloved land in three or four essays – “Water Trails of the Ceriso,” “Water Borders,” and “Other Water Borders,” and “The Streets of the Mountains.”
She writes, in the latter: “All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep gorges where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness, and death and God.”
Beauty and madness and death and God: She confronted all four in the desert and gives it back to us in this exquisite rhythm.
Austin was famously vague about the location of the places she writes about in The Land of Little Rain. It was one of her rhetorical devices along with her ornate prose that might cause a 21st-century reader to go a little mad. In the Preface to the book (not all editions carry this preface, but you can easily find it online).
She writes of her house on Market Street, within spitting distance of us now:
“But if ever you come beyond the borders as far as the town that lies in a hill dimple at the foot of Kearsarge, never leave it until you have knocked at the door of the brown house under the willow-tree at the end of the village street, and there you shall have such news of the land, of its trails and what is astir in them, as one lover of it can give to another.”
Imagine her sitting in an upstairs bedroom of this brown house under the willow tree, writing, and looking west at where “the white-fanged Sierra comb[ed] the cloudless blue . . .”
In 1906, armed with the financial and critical success of a book that marked a beginning for the literature of the West, she would leave her marriage and with unfathomable sorrow known only to her, committed her eight-year-old daughter to an asylum, where she died a decade later of the Spanish Influenza.
Mary Austin went to live in the artists’ colony of Carmel, seeking at last to find her intellectual and spiritual equals. She went on to a prolific and brilliant literary career, to live in New York, to travel and live abroad, and to return to the American West in the 1920s, to Santa Fe, where she would live until her death in 1934. With an inner effort we can only imagine, she against all odds birthed an intellectual and spiritual climate and the material means to allow her talent to bear fruit.
But that girl on horseback --- her keen senses, swift mind, sensibilities, compassion, and lyricism --- existed before she was defined by a later age: environmentalist, suffragist, folklorist, anthropologist, metaphysician, eco-feminist, multi-culturist, historian, novelist, political commentator, manifest destiny critic.
And to be fair, or not, by a few 21st-century critics as an Anglo-centric condescending opportunist.
One late cold night in March of this year I listened to wind howl in the San Jacinto Mountains as I read a short story of Austin’s, “The Coyote-Spirit and the Weaving Woman.”
She wrote a number of stories based on Native American tales and legends.
The weaving woman lives in a “stony wash that cut through the country of mesquite dunes.” She lives alone, happily. She is an outsider, an odd woman --- but her baskets are exquisitely beautiful and desired by her people. She has an “infirmity of the eyes” that is, she saw everything with “rainbow fringes, bigger and brighter and better than it was.”
In other words, she was blind to all except beauty.
She heals a man of an evil spirit that causes him to walk the earth as a devouring coyote. She can’t see his evil, she only sees his handsome humanity.
I think this is how Austin sees herself: She is a weaver of stories, a singer of transformative tales.
She wants you to see the beauty she sees. She wants us, her readers, to awaken to the Something – with that upper case S --- that lies at the heart of the world.
It’s the song that young woman on horseback exactly 120 years ago was just beginning to sing.
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