Land Of Little Rain
Mary Austin; Photgraphs by Ansel Adams; Introduction by Carl Van Doren
- Boston Houghton Mifflin Company 1950
- 133 p
"Halftone engravings by the Walter J. Mann Company, San Francsico. Endpaper map by Milton Cavagnaro, San Francisco."--Page [iv].
Introduction -- Preface to The land of little rain -- 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 -- Photographs by Ansel Adams -- Appendix.
Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) moved with her family from Illinois to the desert on the edge of the San Joaquin Valley in 1888. In the next fifteen years she moved from one desert community to another, working on her sketches of desert and Indian life. Spending the last years of her life in Santa Fe, Austin remained a lifelong defender of Native Americans and was recoginzed as an expert in Native American poetry. The Land of little rain (1903), Austin's first book, focused on the arid and semi-arid regions of California between the High Sierras south of Yosemite: the Ceriso, Death Valley, the Mojave Desert; and towns such as Jimville, Kearsarge, and Las Uvas. She wrote of the region's climate, plants, and animals and of its people: the Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone tribes; European-American gold prospectors and borax miners; and descendants of Hispanic settlers.
Frontier and pioneer life --California Manners and customs--California Pictorial works--California Social life and customs--California Description and travel--California