The Land of Little Rain

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Mary Hunter Austin. The Land of Little Rain

PREFACE

NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

THE SCAVENGERS

THE POCKET HUNTER

SHOSHONE LAND

JIMVILLE. A BRET HARTE TOWN

MY NEIGHBOR’S FIELD

THE MESA TRAIL

THE BASKET MAKER

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

WATER BORDERS

OTHER WATER BORDERS

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

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The Publishers feel that they have been peculiarly fortunate in securing Mr. E. Boyd Smith as the illustrator and interpreter of Mrs. Austin’s charming sketches of the “Land of Little Rain.” His familiarity with the region and his rare artistic skill have enabled him to give the very atmosphere of the desert, and graphically to portray its life, animal and human. This will be felt not only in the full-page compositions, but in the delightful marginal sketches, which are not less illustrative, although, from their nature, it is impracticable to enumerate them in a formal list.

Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil.

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Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. Tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the Sierras and coastwise hills where the first swings across the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. The yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age, tipped with panicles of fetid, greenish bloom. After death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes the moonlight fearful. Before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a creamy cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap, the Indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast it for their own delectation. So it is that in those parts where man inhabits one sees young plants of Yucca arborensis infrequently. Other yuccas, cacti, low herbs, a thousand sorts, one finds journeying east from the coastwise hills. There is neither poverty of soil nor species to account for the sparseness of desert growth, but simply that each plant requires more room. So much earth must be preëmpted to extract so much moisture. The real struggle for existence, the real brain of the plant, is underground; above there is room for a rounded perfect growth. In Death Valley, reputed the very core of desolation, are nearly two hundred identified species.

Above the lower tree-line, which is also the snow-line, mapped out abruptly by the sun, one finds spreading growth of piñon, juniper, branched nearly to the ground, lilac and sage, and scattering white pines.

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