One of the things that can make California desert look inconsequential from freeways is that much of it doesn’t even support bushes and lizards. Wide basins of dirty white salts that fill most of the large valleys seem about as close as earthly nature can get to nonentity. Even a big hole in the ground has more character, more promise of life, than desert alkali flats. Their present vacuity makes it hard to credit the fact, proved by the bathtub rings of extinct beaches around them, that they were once freshwater lakes full of fish and waterfowl and surrounded by pine forests.
In the Mojave’s center, archaeologists have found traces of the people who inhabited southeast California toward the end of the lakes’ time. Fluted projectile points like those of the Clovis culture that appeared in the Southwest twelve thousand years ago suggest that their makers were hunting sizeable herds of large mammals. They lived around Lake Mohave, an immense body of water whose dried, salted corpse now stares at the sky along parts of I-15 between Barstow and Las Vegas. The age of the artifacts is unclear, but radiocarbon dating of mussel shells shows that the lake existed ten thousand years ago.
During the next three thousand years, as the lakes shrank and the landscape shifted from grasslands and pine woods to alkaline basins and thorny bushes, those people’s descendants must have wondered about the changes. It’s hard to imagine what they wondered, but the little we know of their distant successors’ complex mythologies perhaps hints at their thoughts.
According to anthropologists Robert Heizer and William Wallace, the origin myths in California’s drier areas differed in a fundamental way from those in the humid northwest, which “began with the assumption that the earth was already in existence and looked much as it did in aboriginal times.” Since the northwest probably was forested when humans arrived, this suggests that those myths reflected a stable environment. Central and southern California origin myths “reflected a greater interest in the genesis of the world,” suggesting that landscapes in those places were more volatile. The latter myths, in fact, have similarities to ones that arose with the spread of Middle Eastern deserts at about the same time.
Origin myths vary from place to place in the California desert, but they fall into two general categories. In the Great Basin and northern Mojave, a divine being created the world from a primeval flood. According to George Laird of the Chemehuevi tribe who lived from the Colorado River to the Tehachapi Mountains, Ocean Woman made the land by rubbing dried skin from her body and sprinkling it overboard while riding a basket boat on the Immortal Water. Two brothers, Mountain Lion and Coyote, helped her to stretch it out and survey its extent, bickering in the process. Mountain Lion, a modest, sensible, straightforward Creator, tried to do things properly but Coyote, a vain, foolish, devious one, kept making a mess of them.
In the southern Mojave and Sonoran deserts, two quarreling Creators also had a hand in making the world, although they emerged not from the Immortal Water but from an atmospheric void. According to Francisco Patencio of the Cahuillas, a tribe that lived from the San Bernardino Mountains to just west of the Colorado River, brothers who emerged from a floating egg made the world in the course of sibling rivalry. The Tupai-Ipai who lived south of the Cahuillas also told stories of bickering Creator brothers but thought they were the sons of older beings, an earthly mother and a celestial father. Sensible Mountain Lion and foolish Coyote also featured in southern desert myths although as culture heroes rather than Creators.
According to many Indian myths, Coyote was largely if ambiguously responsible for the creation of humans (in some stories, by defecating us), which seems realistic. One might expect him to be blamed for the problematic phenomenon of desert as well. But there seems to be no such myth. In fact, there seems not to be any Native American origin myth that features the desert as such. Many natural phenomena participate in origins, not only water, sky, and animals but celestial bodies, mountains, and plants. But I have seen no origin myth in which “the desert” takes an active part or is even mentioned.
It is not that ancient Californians lacked words for desert. On The Land of Little Rain’s first page, Mary Austin declares: “Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s is the better word.” She doesn’t say what Indians she means or what their word is, but they were probably the Paiutes she knew in Owens Valley. That word may have been like the Chemehuevis’, who also spoke a Ute dialect. According to Laird, their word for desert, tiiravi, although “a concept of immense importance to Chemehuevi thought,” was “never personified or treated as an active noun.”
I’ve seen no explanation of this apparent failure to personify desert in highly anthropomorphic myths. One possibility might be that it was newer than other phenomena. The Immortal Water in many stories hints at the lakes that once existed, some recently. A lake caused by a change in the Colorado’s course covered much of the Cahuillas’ territory until soon before Europeans arrived. The spreading vacuity of desert might have evoked a more abstract way of thinking than older things. Laird said that tiiravi also means the space between one mountain range and another, so it is a unit of measurement as well as a descriptive noun. Austin’s English translation of the “better word”—“the country of lost borders”—also seems abstract.
Maybe a reluctance to personify desert had a darker side as well. Prehistoric people often didn’t speak of things they feared, like the dead. Of course, southeast California was their home. “To a white man, the desert is a wasteland,” a Chemehuevi told Laird’s Anglo wife, Carobeth. “To us it is a supermarket.” But markets are tricky things, and most fatal accidents occur in or near the home. Folklore tells of people who, expecting water or food, find only dry springs or empty caches, for which misfortunes, as Austin wrote, there was “no help.”
Austin’s “country of lost borders” implies anxiety as well as abstraction. The Owens Valley Paiutes feared the “Shoshone Land” to the southeast of their borders. Laird thought that the Chemehuevis, who held territory on the reliable Colorado River, had a more relaxed attitude than “certain other tribes,” who found the world a “dark and terrifying place.” Anthropologists described the Cahuillas of the drier, hotter desert farther south as having an “all pervasive and intense feeling of apprehension . . . toward the present and the future.”
I can relate to that. It is curiously easy to get lost in desert—or simply to feel lost—because it is so open. The way looks clear but distances are deceptive and if the mind wanders during a morning’s walk, it can suddenly seem not clear anymore. Then it is noon, and the sun is startlingly hot and there is no shade in sight. I have a recurrent dream of walking through a desert colored garnet, topaz, and beryl like Red Rock Canyon, although it isn’t a picturesque badland, just flats, washes, foothills, and peaks. I have a destination but I’m not sure what it is. Sometimes, crossing a ridge, I think I’ll reach it on the other side, but then the dream changes. Sometimes I decide to turn back but then I’m unsure of the way.
Mythological speculations are hazy, but I’ve encountered one material vestige of ancient California that seemed to evoke the Sphinx’s ambiguities. Mitchell Caverns State Park in the eastern Mojave does have caves, although I was too absorbed with lizards and bushes on my first visit there to notice. During another trip I took the guided tour. The caves have beautiful limestone formations like nondesert caves except that the underground streams that formed them are dry. They share another feature with caves in more populated places such as Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. They contain a mummy.
As we climbed a metal stairway, the guide pointed to a deep recess and said that the shrouded body of a man left by ancient people lay there. It was the only one in the cave, and the reason for its presence was unknown. It might have been a shaman or other powerful individual placed there so the spirit would continue to preside. The guide speculated further that the man might have inhabited the cave while living, perhaps, like the Delphic oracles, kept there by an anxious society to enhance his prophetic gift.
An early historical visitor to the desert encountered something oddly reminiscent of this. William Manly, a member of a wagon train that wandered into Death Valley in 1849, went hunting one morning and found a cave “which had the appearance of being continuously occupied by Indians.” Seeing a “very strange looking track upon the ground,” he followed it to “where a small well-like hole had been dug, and in this excavation was a kind of Indian mummy curled up like a dog. He was not dead, for I could see him move as he breathed, but his skin looked very much like the surface of a well-dried venison ham. I should think by his looks he must be two or three hundred years old—indeed he might be Adam’s brother and not look any older than he did.”