Mary Austin's Desert: The Woman Who Wrote the Valley Before Los Angeles Took It

Mary Austin arrived in the Owens Valley in eighteen ninety-one with her husband, who had come on a government land reclamation assignment near Lone Pine. She had not asked to come. The valley she found was not what she expected, and she spent twelve years trying to say what it was.

The book she published in nineteen oh three is called "The Land of Little Rain." It is a collection of essays about the Mojave and the Owens Valley, and it became one of the founding texts of American nature writing. What made it unusual, then and now, is that Austin did not write about the desert the way writers usually wrote about places that weren't comfortable. She did not write about what was absent. She wrote about what was there: the specific light, the specific soil, the specific creatures that had figured out exactly how to live in conditions that looked, to outside eyes, like deprivation.

She also wrote about the Paiute people she observed and befriended in the valley. Her accounts reflect the limitations of her time and her outsider status, and they should be read that way. But she wrote about them at all, which most Anglo writers in that period did not do.

Austin left the valley after the water war was lost and the valley's agricultural future was gone. Before she left, she publicly opposed the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's land-buying campaign. She understood what was coming. The valley she wrote about, the specific, demanding, alive place she spent twelve years trying to describe, was gone within a decade of her departure.

"The Land of Little Rain" is still in print.