This paean to the high California desert consists of fourteen sketches based on personal observation following solitary sojourns tramping through desert trails and “the streets of the mountains.” Mary Austin, naturalist, feminist, mystic, and poet, wrote thirty-five books and hundreds of articles during her lifetime, but The Land of Little Rain, her first book, is regarded as her masterpiece. Her nature writings have been compared to those of John Muir (q.v.), John Burroughs, and Henry David Thoreau. Living in the little town of Independence, Inyo County, she, more than anyone, succeeded in conveying the beauty of this simultaneously forbidding yet magnetic landscape with its hardy mixture of plants, animals, and human beings. Lawrence Clark Powell summed up the beauty of her words, writing: “With her feet on earth and her head in the sky, she gave voice in singing prose to the soul of a hitherto unsung land.” Through her carefully crafted essays, she conveyed to her readers the feel of the soil, the inherent beauty of the desert flora, the graceful movements of the rattlesnake, and the pleasant aromas emanating from a Native American cooking bowl. Importantly, Austin painted a word picture of an Owens Valley that would soon be changed forever when a thirsty Los Angeles siphoned off the life-giving water from this “land of little rain.”
          Living in the Mojave Desert represented an acquired taste and her sense of place dominates the book. Austin develops wonderful portraits of the people she encountered and befriended, in addition to the landscape and flora. Miners, ranchers, and Native Americans all struggled to scratch out a living. In describing this grudging coexistence, she wrote, “For all the toil the desert takes of a man, it gives compensations, deep breath, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.” While not claiming to be an authority on the various tribes, she acquired a keen insight and respect for the ways of the first people. They knew how to make peace with the land. Her best essay, “The Basket-Maker,” focused on the heroic life of Seyavi, one of the surviving Paiutes who lost her husband and had to somehow support her baby boy alone in this desert land. Austin strongly identified with her independence, writing “how much more easily one can do without a man than might at first be supposed.” Gaining strength, Seyavi returns to her art of making baskets for both love and money until age takes over, her skills diminish, and she becomes blind, patiently awaiting death. Austin reflected: “Indian women do not often live to great age, though they look incredibly steeped in years. They have the wit to win sustenance from the raw material of life without intervention.”
          A number of Austin’s desert sketches were first published in the Atlantic Monthly. Bliss Perry, editor at both the Atlantic Monthly and Houghton Mifflin, was so impressed that he agreed to publish these and others as a book. It was published in October 1903 and succeeded in bringing the author a comfortable income and launched her career as a serious writer. Houghton Mifflin embellished The Land of Little Rain with handsome full-page and marginal line drawings by Elmer Boyd Smith. The publisher proudly noted that “His familiarity with the region and his rare artistic skill have enabled him to give the very atmosphere of the desert.” An otherwise laudatory review of the book by George Hamlin Fitch for the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle (November 1, 1903), unbelievably called Smith’s illustrations “an impertinence” believing that Austin’s powerful verbal pictures were quite enough. Smith’s illustrations, however, added considerably to the overall charm of the book and, with its generous page margins, superbly complement Austin’s prose and make it a classic of book illustration. Apparently Smith pleased the author as he illustrated three more of her books.
          The Land of Little Rain was one of several California desert books published in the first decade of the twentieth century, demonstrating that writers of merit were finding this vast barren land an appealing subject. John C. Van Dyke’s The Desert (1901), Ida Strobridge’s In Miner’s Mirage Land (1904), and George Wharton James’s The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (1906) all deserve recognition. James’s elegant two-volume work closely contests The Land of Little Rain for inclusion in this elite listing.

——Gary F. Kurutz

Additional sources consulted: Augusta Fink, I—Mary: A Biography of Mary Austin (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1983); Jacqueline D. Hall, “Mary Hunter Austin,” in A Literary History of the American West (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987), pp. 359-69; Lawrence Clark Powell, California Classics (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1971), pp. 44-52.