Mary Austin : The Land of Little Rain 1903

• Biography
• Encyclopædia Britannica Article
• born Sept. 9, 1868, Carlinville, Ill., U.S.
• died Aug. 13, 1934, Santa Fe, N.M.

• Mary Hunter graduated from Blackburn College in 1888 and soon afterward moved with her family to Bakersfield, California. She married Stafford W. Austin in 1891, and for several years they lived in various towns in California's Owens Valley. Mary Austin soon learned to love the desert and the Native Americans who lived in it, andboth figured in the sketches that constituted her first book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), which was a great and immediate success. It was followed by a collection ofstories, The Basket Woman (1904), a romantic novel, Isidro (1905), and a collection of regional sketches, The Flock (1906).
• In 1905 Austin separated from her husband and moved to Carmel, California. She later traveled to Italy, France, and England, where meeting H.G. Wells and other intellectuals strengthened her feminist ideas and added a strong commitment to socialism to her own deeply personal and sustaining form of mysticism. Returning to NewYork City, she became associated with John Reed, Walter Lippmann, and others of the group of writers and artists whose centre was Mabel Dodge Luhan. A play, The Arrow Maker (1911), and her best novel, A Woman of Genius (1912), were the product of those New York years, as were scores of rather didactic articles on socialism,women's rights, and a variety of other topics and such novels as The Ford (1917) and No. 26 Jayne Street (1920).
• In 1924 Austin settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That year she published The Land of Journeys' Ending and followed it with, among other books, Everyman's Genius(1925), The Children Sing in the Far West (1928; like her earlier The American Rhythm [1923], a collection of Native American songs and original poems inspired by them), Starry Adventure (1931), Experiences Facing Death (1931), and an autobiography, Earth Horizon (1932).
• Austin's best writing, which is concerned with nature or Native American life, is reminiscent of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir in its transcendental toneand occasional primitivist leaning. She was active in movements to preserve Native American arts, crafts, and culture.
• http://www.schweich.com/imagehtml/maryaustinhouse.html
• http://www.owensvalleyhistory.com/stories2/mary_austin_biography.pdf
• Format
• Illustrations—see original website—UV text archive
• Relation to Thoreau and Muir
• Adventurer; rebel; originator
• Preface
• Short pages
• Theme of naming; loving the land; romancing it
• Her sense of location—special place; too coy to describe it explicitly; personal ownership; intimacy—at the same time advertising it
• Demanding quality of knowing and loving the land
• Macabre and morbid
• Courageous and adventurous
• What kind of female?
• The Land of Little Rain
• Country of Lost Borders
• Relate to naming in preface—God names things and creates them—nameless and lawless and borderless
• nameless place—desert; not the law but the land sets the limit
• contrast to Genesis and the garden—eden vs biblical wilderness—desert fathers
• Grand Canyon as the center—the great maw or hell’s levels down
• the not human; hard pastoral
• duke senior speech
• What are attractions
• preciousness of water
• Lost rivers, no springs—
• Three seasons—word rain p3
• Deadly and cruel absence of water p.4
• Desert Floras—adaptation and poverty—rigor
• Foliage preventing evaporation; wind and sand protecct and bury
• Aspect and plant life
• Tree The creosote
• yuccas [tiny units of composition]
• Ugly appearance
• Twisting off the buds [transitions are casual]
• Plant’s territorial need
• Variety of life despite the harshness of conditions
• Wildlife adaptation
• Secrets—the wildlife at night; the traces in their paths
• Birds providing shade for their eggs and nests—shadows of fenceposts—p8; see picture
• Seductiveness of the awful place 9
• Cleanest air
• Striking it rich with minerals
• Return of Salty
• Heroic men
• Brutal conditions
• Dangerous snakelike lure of treasure
• Live with zest
• She’s "drunk from spring" that makes fact romance
• Final sentence: "no account" [Buddhist nothing]12
• The stars…make world-fret of no account; and you and coyote
• Water Trails of the Ceriso; relation between this and last chapter
• From nothingness to water; fountains in eden; spring imagery
• One spring in the dry Ceriso
• New perspectives—the mice, foxes and hawks 14--observation
• Seeing the trails; reading the writing in the landscape
• Coyote as water witch 14
• Trails in the chapparal—trails of cows and of deer; deer above me last week
• Trails to spring above grand ave—coyotes on Sunday morning in the mist
• More signs—trails; writing; water trails—animals reading and hers
• Hawks are sign that little people are going about their business 16
• Animal navigation—animals as great hunters; she trails coyote
• Coyotes reading signs—mountain peaks or vultures in the air—cf. Biomimicry
• Deer adapting to human incursions, finding new fords, but being surprised by the moon(!) 17
• Observing rabbits—they don’t drink, but go to the springs—springs in summer here; sit and watch 18
• Drinking patterns—cattle
• The spring attracting predators—predation: her attitude—a stalking 20—tale of the lost calf hunted by cougar and coyotes
• Watching the elf owls; shifting the point of view from victim to prey 21—predation as spectator sport—her preferences
• Description of quail—22
• Water mark of Shoshones—
• All about trails and codes and reading
• indian evidences—the code for water and finding it.
• Why end like this; relate to beginning of chapter—this is the human perspective: contrast of the unknown symbols with the known
• Pointing again to the spring…life
• Life always intermixed with death
• The Scavengers
• Horrific description of buzzards—love of the macabre—contrast to water trail
• Drought kills other creatures, but good for buzzards—funny passage about their clannishness 25
• A squalid tragedy [words!]—long drawn out description of long drawn out death…and the carrion watching
• The scavenger’s point of view
• Buzzard behavior and family life—vs. vulture
• Raven=carrion crow
• Appreciation of animal behavior—bad year for the scavengers when grass is green 28
• Animals’ fascination with the hunt of the antelope—the macabre 29
• Scavengers gorge in bad year—sense of terrible prosperity
• Clean and handsome clark’s crow—opposite of previous description; scale of fastidiousnesss
• Ending: the economy of nature is cleaning up, except nothing can clean up tin cans! 42—disfigurement—irony of human intrusion—compare to opening of chapter, with fenceposts