California Wild Summer 1998

By God, that woman is the only one who has brains enough to see where this is going." William Mulholland, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, muttered these words as he watched author Mary Hunter Austin retreat angrily from his office. Austin, he knew, had realized that in the vicious struggle for water rights in the Owens Valley, the city of Los Angeles would never stop until it owned all the Owens River water, and, in the process, ruined a rich and verdant valley.

Austin also realized that this was only the beginning. She followed her visit to Mulholland with an article in the San Francisco Chronicle in September 1905. "Every considerable city in the State," she wrote, "is about to be confronted with a water problem.... It is worthwhile for other cities to consider that as this case proceeds their own water problems are likely to be shaped by it more or less. Shall the question of domestic water in California be determined by craft and graft and bitterness and long drawn wasteful struggles, or conducted with rightness and dignity to an equal conclusion?"

In this confrontation between Mulholland, a colorful, pugnacious, bear-like man, and Austin, a short, stocky, and righteous woman, there is no question as to the immediate victor. Mulholland built the aqueduct that took the water of the Owens Valley and, in time, that of the Mono Basin. He went on to design the complicated and far-reaching water system that became the Metropolitan Water District.

But he paid a high price. A decade later, his career ended ignominiously after the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which he built to impound Owens Valley water. When the dam failed, a 200-foot wall of water killed 450 people and destroyed three towns.

After it became clear that her cause was defeated, Austin left the Owens Valley, where she had lived for 12 years. She left behind a disintegrating marriage and the source and setting of her widely acclaimed book, The Land of Little Rain.

The book, published in 1903, was an immediate success in this country and abroad, and gave character to the desert land east of the Sierra. She describes the "long brown land that lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of spring..." Her book gave beauty and value to a land that was both feared and neglected, and history to a natural history that was soon to be radically changed. What John Muir did for the Sierra, Austin did for the California desert. Together they gave a strong, early voice to Western nature writing.

The Land of Little Rain has been in print almost continuously since it was written, and if we take Mark Twain's definition of literary immortality as "about 30 to 35 years," Austin qualifies for those Olympian heights. Carl Van Doren wrote years after her death, "Her books were wells driven into America to bring up water for her countrymen, though they might not have realized their thirst." Wallace Stegner called writers who take natural history and the environment as their palate "witnesses." Austin, throughout her life, was a witness.

Owens Valley continued to be her creative wellspring long after she left the region. She went on to write some 30 books, over two hundred articles, much poetry, and several plays. The Ford, a fictionalized account of the Owens Valley water struggle first published in 1917, was recently republished along with A Mary Austin Reader.

She moved first to Carmel to become a part of the emerging artist's colony there (poet George Sterling, Jack London, Jimmy Hopper). She then spent time in Europe before settling in New York and finally in Santa Fe. She used her influence to try to stop the damming of the Colorado River (again unsuccessfully), and in support of environmental causes and of Indian arts and crafts.

She collaborated with Ansel Adams on a book about the Taos Pueblo. He remained a close and loyal friend until the end of her life, bearing with grace her sometimes difficult personality. Responding to a portrait that Adams took of her--one he thought would give her great pleasure--she requested that he take away "that dreadful smirk, that drawn look about the mouth." In 1950, Adams published a commemorative edition of The Land of Little Rain with a group of his photographs of the eastern Sierra, captioned by quotations from the book. He wrote of her after her death, "Seldom have I met and known anyone of such intellectual and spiritual power and discipline."

I first became acquainted with Mary Austin after a trip to Death Valley to look for its evanescent spring wildflowers. A friend told me, "If you really want to understand this country, read The Land of Little Rain." Austin tells us, "In that country...it is possible to live with great zest, to have red blood and delicate joys...." Yet, I was tantalized by the frequent note of sadness in it. "The origins of mountain streams is like the origin of tears, patent to the understanding, but mysterious to the sense."

I didn't have to look far for clues to her sadness. Austin's life had not been a happy one, and a sequence of unquiet events had led to the writing of The Land of Little Rain. Born Mary Hunter in Carlinville, Illinois in 1868, she was disliked and emotionally abused by her mother, but she adored her father. When he died, she was ten years old and the family fell on hard times. A few months after her father's death, her younger sister and closest friend, Jennie, died of diphtheria, which she had caught from Mary. In contrast to the plain Mary, Jennie was a beautiful child, and Austin always believed that her mother blamed her for Jennie's death. Perhaps as punishment, her mother discouraged her all-consuming interests. In her autobiography, Earth Horizons, writing of herself in the third person, she describes her mother's attitude: "Susie [Austin's mother] had taken pains to impress on her the childish character of her interest in nature and the inexpedience of talking about it. Especially you must not talk appreciatively about landscapes and flowers and the habits of little animals and birds to boys; they didn't like it.... A very little experience demonstrated that Susie was right."

Austin's early education was skimpy. She squeezed her college education into two-and-a-half years spent at Blackburn College, a small Presbyterian school near Carlinville (today, home of The Mary Austin Society). To the astonishment and consternation of her mother, she chose science as a major rather than English. As she explained in Earth Horizons: "English I can study by myself; for science I have to have laboratories and a teacher."

After graduating from college, Austin moved with her mother and brothers to California, homesteading in the Tejon, an area southeast of Bakersfield. It was a waterless and inhospitable country. Life was difficult, and Austin did not adapt well. She describes her despair in her autobiography: "Mary would sit out among the dunes in the moonlight...watching the frisking forms of field mouse and kangaroo rat, the noiseless passage of the red fox and the flitting of the elf owls at their mating. By day she would follow a bobcat to its lair in the bank of the Wash, and, lying down before its den, the two would contemplate each other wordlessly for long times...."

She compared herself to a wild animal shut up in a strange place, refusing to eat or drink. Her problem, she said, was that she was "plagued with an anxiety to know." She explained that she "was spellbound in an effort not to miss any animal behavior, any birdmarking, any weather signal, any signature of tree or flower." The spell was broken by her discovery of wild grapes, and after eating them exclusively for two weeks, she began to recover.

When she was well again, she took a teaching position near Bakersfield. In this slightly broader setting, she met and married Stafford Wallace Austin. The marriage was a nightmare. While she was turbulent, egocentric, and abrasive, he was mild, often insensitive to his wife's needs, and inept. After financial failure in southern California, Wallace Austin moved with Mary to the Owens Valley to work on a private irrigation scheme. Things continued to go badly. At one point, with Austin well along in pregnancy, they were evicted for failure to pay the rent. She returned from a walk one morning to find their possessions out on the sidewalk and the room locked.

The irrigation scheme soon failed and they tried homesteading in the Alabama Hills, a bleak and strangely beautiful place at the foot of Mt. Whitney. In a land of weird rock formations, strange cacti, and frequent sandstorms, the homestead was not a viable one, nor was it an easy place to live. It was, however, grist for Mary Austin's mill. At the isolated homestead and at George's Creek, she befriended the resident Indians and migrating sheepherders and soaked up their knowledge of the land. When the homestead failed, the couple returned to Lone Pine, then later moved to Independence, where Wallace Austin took a job as the registrar of federal lands.

Soon after their eviction, Austin gave birth to a daughter, but not the much hoped for brilliant child. The infant, named Ruth, was severely retarded, and Austin's mother blamed Mary for Ruth's condition. "I don't know what you have done, daughter," she told her, "to bring such a judgment upon you."

While Austin was recovering from the birth, her first published short story appeared in the Overland Monthly. With this encouragement, she stepped up her writing efforts and later, to supplement the family income, took a teaching position as well. She would leave Ruth locked in a room, unattended and uncared for, and return at the end of the day to find her screaming and hungry. At night, concerned neighbors, hearing the child's continuous crying, would come to find Austin busy writing and the hapless toddler tied to a chair. Later, when money became more available, Ruth was cared for by a nearby family. Austin explained: "I'm not good for Ruth, and Ruth is not good for me." After the publication of The Land of Little Rain, the child was placed in an institution in Santa Clara, California. Austin never saw her daughter again. Ruth died in the 1918 flu epidemic at age 26.

Her treatment of her child coupled with her eccentric behavior scandalized the neighborhood, and pushed Austin into closer relationships with the Indians, miners, and sheepherders. Such friendships were considered unacceptable for a woman of her time, but they became very close. Once when Austin was sick, an Indian friend began surreptitiously nursing Ruth. Austin only became aware of it when she noticed the child's remarkable weight gain. Later, when Ruth failed to talk properly, the same woman brought dried meadowlark's tongues, which, she said, would make the girl's speech nimble and quick. Austin, in turn, protested "mahala chasing," the assault on Indian women by white men as the women returned home from work at night.

Austin scholars have suggested that the arid, unrelenting desert was a metaphor for her life. She wrote The Land of Little Rain at a time when her personal life was deeply troubled, and her Owens Valley home was under assault. She sought solace by exploring the beauty of the desert, often with the companionship of its alienated people. Her experience, she said, had its origin in intellectual curiosity made personal by desperate need. She describes the desert as feminine and refers to it as tawny, a word she often used to describe herself. Her description of the country is not just an acutely observed landscape, but a fabric of her daily life into which she wove coyotes, Indians, sheepherders, vultures, gamblers, lupine, vaqueros, and pocket hunters (miners).

In her book, she forewarns us: "A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love, yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably." In search of both the beauty and the sadness of which she wrote, I (and many others) have come back to the desert again and again. Sometimes my trips have been made to take in the grandeur of the land, sometimes to learn what happens when you change the water distribution in a fragile place.

Austin's "long brown land" is often obscured by clouds of choking alkali dust blowing off the dry bed of the Owens Lake and the exposed shores of Mono Lake. The flocks of waterfowl that once fed at Owens Lake are gone. Migratory birds--grebes, avocets, phalaropes, plovers, gulls--that depend on Mono Lake for its rich supply of food have been threatened. Fortunately, the 1994 decision to raise the water level in the lake is reversing environmental damage there. The lake has breathed a sigh of relief, and once dry streams are running again, a welcome victory over the ghost of William Mulholland.

The water wars of the Owens Valley--a struggle still ongoing--shaped the way water is allocated in California and the West. The bitterness that developed between the people of the Owens Valley and Los Angeles remains, though it is no longer expressed in the bombing of aqueducts or the seizing of water gates. The County of Origin law, passed in 1931, is intended to protect other rural areas from the fate of the Valley. The law prohibits the draining of one county to benefit another when the source county needs the water for future development. Nevertheless, whenever a transfer of water rights in the state is considered, the specter of the Owens Valley tragedy arises. Today, when the distribution of water in the West is discussed or the stewardship of the deserts pondered, the name of Mary Austin is still cited--her poetic words even more relevant.

In The Land of Little Rain she foreshadows our concerns: "It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the West to become an irrigation ditch. It would seem the streams are willing." She talks about the changes in wildlife and vegetation that occur along a stream when it becomes a canal, and goes on to say, "It is difficult to come into intimate relations with appropriated waters; like very busy people they have no time to reveal themselves."

She alerts us to the hidden sources of water in the desert and to the creatures that depend on them. "By the end of the dry season the water trails of the Ceriso are worn to a white ribbon in the leaning grass, spread out faint and fan wise toward the homes of gopher and ground rat and squirrel.... It needs but a slender thread of barrenness to make a mouse trail in the forest of the sod. To the little people the water trails are as country roads, with scents as signboards." Again: "The coyote is your true water-witch, one who snuffs and paws, snuffs and paws again at the smallest spot of moisture-scented earth until he has freed the blind water from the soil. Many water holes are no more than this detected by the lean hobo of the hills..."

In a letter to her editor at Houghton Mifflin, Mary Austin explained how she came to write her classic. "I have just looked, nothing more...by and by I got to know when looking was most worthwhile. Then I got so full of looking that I had to write to get rid of some of it and make room for more. I was only a month writing The Land of Little Rain but I spent twelve years peeking and prying before I began it."

Of the struggle for water in the Owens Valley, she wrote in Earth Horizons, "Mary did what she could. And that was too little.... She knew that the land of Inyo would be desolated, and the cruelty and deception smote her beyond belief.... She sold her house in Inyo. She meant not to go there again."

Mary Austin died in New Mexico in 1935. Her personal tragedy and the tragedy of the Owens Valley water struggles had changed her feelings toward this "land that once visited must be come back to inevitably." She requested that her remains not be taken to California under any circumstances. She meant not to go there again.

Elizabeth Rush is a natural history writer. She profiled botanist Katherine Brandegee in the Winter 1997 issue.