Book Review: Land of Little Rain

Title: Land of Little Rain

Author: Mary Austin

Date: 1903

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

ISBN: none

Quote: “The county where you may have sight and touch of that which is written lies between the high Sierras south from Yosemite—east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert.”

I downloaded this book from Gutenberg.org. If you’re online, you can read, print, or download it too, paying only printing expenses. If you’re not, I’ll print a copy for you at cost.

Mary Austin wrote several novels and is usually remembered for her poetry. (She dared to be trendy, writing poems patterned with thoughts but not sounds, like the translations of Native American poems she had studied.) Gutenberg.org has made several of her books available again, and after comparison, this is the one of her e-books I like best. It’s a nonfiction account of the stories Mary Austin collected in the Southwest—“Western” adventure stories, Native American stories, and Austin’s own stories of what she saw—coyotes, cattle, quail, buzzards, wildflowers. Frantic topophilia.

Austin’s intended audience were “armchair travellers,”and if you like a book that takes your mind on a tour of a different time and place, this is one. If you’ve never been through this part of the continent you may recognize places and wildlife from the old “Bonanza” TV series; no Cartwrights, who were later inventions, but canyons (Austin wrote “cañon”) and bighorns, chamiso and Shoshones. If you don’t care for the melodramas, shootouts, and boy-clique orientation of “Western” movies and TV shows but enjoy watching them for the landscapes and horses, this book is for you.