Mary Austin

What women have to stand on squarely is not their ability to see the world in the way men see it, but the importance and validity of their seeing it in some other way.

Cactus Thorn

In the small California farm town where I grew up, streets were named after one of three things: fruits, grapes, or women. We lived on Lemon Avenue. Friends lived on Deborah Circle. My newspaper route wound along Zinfandel Drive. Our town planners unwittingly instilled in me the childhood belief that places were feminine and fertile in name and nature.

When I was young, I wove my candy-apple-red bike down the center yellow lines on Lemon Avenue past the heady blossoms of almond orchards in spring and ripening peaches in summer. To the west, I saw undulating Coast Ranges. To the east, the long spine of the Sierra Nevada. As I grew up and explored beyond the confines of home, I was miffed to learn most geographical features—mountains and rivers, valleys and counties, gulches and creeks—were named for the European male geologists, surveyors, homesteaders, and military officers who measured, climbed, and claimed them. Tranquil lakes and cascading waterfalls, embodiments of idealized feminine virtues, seemed the only exceptions. However, while climbing mountains in my twenties, I discovered another: 150 miles south of Yosemite’s granite cliffs, among Mount Whitney, Mount Muir, and Mount Humphreys, one peak stands out for more than its 13,057 feet of elevation.

It’s Mount Mary Austin.

Well known in her time, less so now, Mary Hunter Austin was not a geologist, scientist, or soldier, but an explorer of new terrain: an ethnographer and feminist, activist and mystic, speaker and writer, whose life still haunts and inspires me decades after I first read her debut title, The Land of Little Rain (1903). Austin found an enthusiastic audience for her first authorial effort, a collection of fourteen vivid and meditative essays detailing the landscape and diverse inhabitants of the Owens Valley. She experienced spiritual transcendence and liberation in the sagebrush wilderness there—and in its alkali meadows, broad bajadas, and riparian forests. She herself was a force of nature and overcame great personal trials to make a name for herself. Austin’s story is dizzying, a personal trajectory carved from an audacious determination to claim authorship of her own life and become one of America’s great writers.

She was born in 1868 in Carlinville, Illnois, the fourth of six children. In her 1932 autobiography, Earth Horizon, Austin describes her charming eighteen-year-old self as “under the average height, not well filled out, with the slightly sallow pallor of the malaria country.” With slightly more charity, she says her tawny hair was “brown with coppery glints, thick and springy, falling below her knees when loosed, and difficult to get under any sort of hat suitable to her years.” She studied natural science at Blackburn College and was named class poet by fellow students. An aspiring suitor there informed her she had the very good fortune of meeting all his requirements for a preacher’s wife; soon, he said, she should expect a marriage proposal! In her head, she said she would rather be dead—and she politely declined.

In 1888, Mary’s family traveled west from Illinois to settle in the Owens Valley, a high-desert region of California in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada. Pioneer life was never easy, no matter where the homestead, but building a life from the ground up was excruciating in this unyielding desert. Mary suffered from malnourishment and a nervous breakdown from abrupt life changes. It was harsh and unfamiliar, and she had no sense of place nor understanding of the region’s seasons, migrations, people, plants, and animals. Though dislocated, she saw beauty everywhere and yearned to learn the natural and human history of her new home, becoming an acute observer of flora and fauna and befriending Paiute and Shoshone who lived in the valley. She was fascinated by their deep knowledge of native foods and animal husbandry, which had been nearly wiped out by the Spanish Franciscans whose missions dotted the California coast and the introduced livestock that had replaced wild herds.

By the time she married the irresponsible, Berkeley-educated spendthrift Stafford Wallace Austin in 1891, she was teaching art and literature in local Owens Valley schools and had committed herself to the idea that she would write about the West. She describes her early writing life in Earth Horizon.

[My] interior energies were set on sorting [my] really voluminous notes about strange growths and unfamiliar creatures, flocks, herders, vaqueros, Henry Miller, pelicans dancing on Buena Vista, Indians, phylloxera, and a vast dim valley between great swinging ranges . . . collections of colloquial phrases, Spanish folklore, intensively pondered adjectives for the color and form of natural things, the exact word for a mule’s cry—”maimed noises”—the difference between the sound of ripe figs dropping and the patter of olives shaken down by the wind.

In marrying, a person hopes for stability and security, but for Mary, life just seemed to get harder. Her twenties and thirties were one agonizing trial after another. The couple’s one child, Ruth, was born developmentally disabled. Family blamed Mary for Ruth’s condition. For ten years, on the shoestring salary of a teacher and artist, she pulled Stafford out of debt and near-bankruptcy from ill-planned dreams. In Earth Horizon, she wrote that despite her attempts to support him, he had “no well-defined way of life to which she could tender a confirming devotion.” Family also criticized her for questioning his financial schemes. Mary’s life could be described as a whirlwind and dust devil: finding work for her husband, paying off his debts, taking care of their daughter, maintaining a home, and teaching others. She eventually left Stafford and institutionalized their daughter, who died in 1914.

In the midst of this pressure, Austin did something remarkable. She began writing. Her novel Outland (1910) is probably an account of her unfortunate marriage. Her Can Prayer Be Answered? (1934) is a slim visionary book that begins during this difficult personal time, in which she explored the nature of prayer—from Paiute Indian traditions to those in Italy, where she traveled and studied Greek and Roman invocations and the lives of early Christian saints. It might also be said that writing, an act of creation for herself, gave her peace of mind. An amateur naturalist, she walked and watched and talked to people of the valley. She submitted her writing for publication, too, landing the articles that would become The Land of Little Rain in the Atlantic Monthly. Her audience was urban readers who knew little about desert biodiversity, but Austin was a highly visual writer who conveyed a well-sculpted sense of place, as she wrote of “hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted” and “the rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring . . . the lotus charm.” As the city of Los Angeles surreptitiously bought land in the Owens Valley to divert the Owens River—a time known as the California Water Wars, made famous by the film Chinatown—Austin captured, with nuance and wit, the desert ecology and cultural traditions of both settlers and native people before the collapse of the valley’s economy.

It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the west to become an irrigating ditch. It would seem the streams are willing. They go as far as they can, or dare, toward the tillable lands of their own boulder fenced gullies—but how much farther in the man-made waterways. It is difficult to come into intimate relations with appropriated waters; like very busy people they have no time to reveal themselves. One needs to have known an irrigating ditch when it was a brook, and to have lived by it, to mark the morning and evening tone of its crooning, rising and falling to the excess of snow water; to have watched far across the valley, south to the Eclipse and north to the Twisted Dyke, the shining wall of the village water gate; to see still blue herons stalking the little glinting weirs across the field.

Perhaps to get into the mood of the waterways one needs to have seen old Amos Judson asquat on the headgate with his gun, guarding his water-right toward the end of a dry summer. Amos owned the half of Tule Creek and the other half pertained to the neighboring Greenfields ranch. Years of a “short water crop,” that is, when too little snow fell on the high pine ridges, or falling, melted too early, Amos held that it took all the water that came down to make his half, and maintained it with a Winchester and a deadly aim. Jesus Montaña, first proprietor of Greenfields—you can see at once that Judson had the racial advantage—contesting the right with him, walked into five of Judson’s bullets and his eternal possessions on the same occasion. That was the Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition. Twelve years later one of the Clarks, holding Greenfields, not so very green by now, shot one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped that also might become classic, but the jury found for manslaughter.

Austin’s early defense of Spanish Americans and Native Americans and their rights to their land and their livelihoods set her apart from other Western writers, who too often and too easily saw these groups as impediments to “progress.” It is a theme in many of Austin’s books, including California: Land of the Sun (1914), which opens: “For a graphic and memorable report of the contours of any country, see always the aboriginal account of its making.” She emphasizes the value of this way of understanding geography, and her detailed prose (whether in this book or in passages like the following from The Land of Little Rain) expresses the deep-felt sesnse of place that infuses all her writing.

With the water runs a certain following of thirsty herbs and shrubs. The willows go as far as the stream goes, and a bit farther on the slightest provocation. They will strike root in the leak of a flume, or the dribble of an overfull bank, coaxing the water beyond its appointed bounds. Given a new waterway in a barren land, and in three years the willows have fringed all its miles of banks; three years more and they will touch tops across it. It is perhaps due to the early usurpation of the willows that so little else finds growing-room along the large canals. . . .

Wild fowl, quacking hordes of them, nest in the tulares. Any day’s venture will raise from open shallows the great blue heron on his hollow wings. Chill evenings the mallard drakes cry continually from the glassy pools, the bittern’s hollow boom rolls along the water paths. Strange and far-flown fowl drop down against the saffron, autumn sky. All day wings beat above it hazy with speed; long flights of cranes glimmer in the twilight. By night one wakes to hear the clanging geese go over. One wishes for, but gets no nearer speech from those the reedy fens have swallowed up. What they do there, how fare, what find, is the secret of the tulares.

A prolific author, Austin wrote about more than physical landscapes: she composed poetry about the metaphysical and the mystic, essays and novels about women’s rights, plays and children’s literature about Native Americans, and science fiction about utopian societies. Her 1912 novel, A Woman of Genius, drawn from her own life, is about a talented actress in the socially restrictive Midwest, who leaves her dull husband to pursue a life in theater. Her most popular play, The Arrow Maker, a three-act piece about Paiute life in the Sierras, was produced in New York in 1911. Her 1918 political monograph, The Young Woman Citizen, stood out by asserting gender equality through women’s intellects—rather than through virtue, as advocated by mainstream suffragettes. She travelled throughout the world giving lectures and cultivated friendships with a roster of notable modern-era Americans: President Theodore Roosevelt, conservationist John Muir, writer Willa Cather, dancer Isadora Duncan, anarchist Emma Goldman, painter Georgia O’Keeffe, photographer Ansel Adams, and countless other movers and shakers. She died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1934.

Today, the trailhead to Mount Mary Austin begins in the eastern Sierras on the high and dry desert floor at an elevation of 6,000 feet. The first steps are a sharp ascent up a former cattle trail through rocks and sagebrush. Terrain is dusty and rough, the trail unmaintained. Obstacles complicate the way. Slippery, burnt, and fallen trees—remnants of the Inyo Complex Fire of 2007—crisscross a stream like a game of pick-up sticks. It is prickly, dry, dangerous—full of thorns, nettles, and rattlesnakes. At 10,000 feet, there’s an open area to camp in view of Diamond Peak. If you look closely, you can see bighorn sheep settling into rocky perches for the night. In the morning, there’s a field of rubble to traverse and an upward scramble across rocks. Climbing higher into the bluer-than-blue sky, you take a few more breaths in the thin air, and arrive, finally, at the summit of this California mountain named for one of early America’s first female nature writers. The view across the valley is sweetly ironic—there’s the little town where she lived for her first seventeen years in California—a place she left behind for good in 1905 yet always wanted to be.

Its name? Independence.

Works by Mary Austin

Nonfiction

The Land of Little Rain (1903)

California: Land of the Sun (1914)

The Young Woman Citizen (1918)

The American Rhythm: Studies and Reëxpressions of Amerindian Songs (1923)

The Land of Journeys’ Ending (1924)

Everyman’s Genius (1925)

Taos Pueblo (1930), photography by Ansel Adams

Experiences Facing Death (1931)

Earth Horizon (1932)

Can Prayer Be Answered? (1934)

Beyond Borders: The Selected Essays of Mary Austin (1996)

Novels

Isidro (1905)

The Flock (1906)

Santa Lucia: A Common Story (1908)

Lost Borders (1909)

A Woman of Genius (1912)

The Ford (1917)

No. 26 Jayne Street (1920)

Cactus Thorn (1927)

Starry Adventure (1931)

drama, FolkTales, and children’s books

The Arrow Maker: A Drama in Three Acts (1911)

Fire: A Drama in Three Acts (1914)

One-Smoke Stories (1934)

The Basket Woman: A Book of Indian Tales for Children (1904)

The Trail Book (1918)