Publication: California History - Volume 85 - Number 1 - 2007
Article Title: Mary Austin and Andrew Forbes: Poetry, Photography, and the Eastern Sierra
Author: Karen S. Langlois
Synopsis: A 20-page article including photographs from Vol. 85, No. 1 of California History.
Notes: I ordered a print of this article from AbeBooks.com on 2/7/2014. I did so primarily to get access to the photos in the article, not knowing whether they would be photos by A. A. Forbes or not. I also ordered 2 books by Mary Austin: "The Land of Little Rain" and "Earth Horizon" (her autobiography). Though they were contemporaries in the Owens Valley from approximately 1902 to 1906 (until Mary Austin left Owens Valley in 1906), it is not clear whether they knew each other.
Andrew Alexander Forbes (1862-1921) is remembered for his dramatic photographs of the fourth Oklahoma land run in September 1893, when 100,000 homesteaders dashed for free land in the "Cherokee Strip." A collection of his western images includes hundreds of panoramic views, photographs, and postcards made during his years in the Eastern Sierra, a small percentage of which have ever been published. To date, there is somewhat limited biographical data available on Forbes. This study is the first published essay integrating some of Forbes' photographs taken between 1902 and 1916 with the published details of his life. (3)
In addition to their artistic merit, Forbes' photographs and Austin's poems are significant in their focus on the Eastern Sierra. In pursuing their creative interests and livelihoods, Forbes and Austin increased public awareness for this unique landscape and its inhabitants. Forbes' photographs were sold to local residents, businesses, and tourists, while Austin, who as a teacher in the Owens Valley composed nature poetry "to have something for my pupils about the land they lived in," (4) sold her verse to regional magazines such as The Land of Sunshine (renamed Out West in 1902) and to eastern periodicals.
Inspired by the dramatic beauty of the Eastern Sierra, Austin and Forbes made lasting contributions to the cultural history of California and the West.
Forbes was in his late thirties when he made his way to the Owens Valley, documenting his long, winding route through his camera lens. He was born in Ottawa, Wisconsin, on April 21, 1862, one of eight children, to James McLaren Forbes, of Scotland, and Lucinda Parmelia Sanders Forbes, of New York. (7) In 1867 the Forbes family traveled from Wisconsin to California via the Isthmus of Panama, returning to the Midwest the following year and settling near Sioux City, Iowa. In 1878 they relocated to Bazine, Kansas, where they prospered as cattle ranchers until a grasshopper plague destroyed the feed and a blizzard smothered the cattle in gullies of drifting snow. They came to southern California in 1890, first settling in Riverside County and then in Santa Ana in Orange County.
Forbes developed an interest in photography during the late 1870s or early 1880s while he was working on his family's cattle ranch; a relative observed that he inherited his artistic talent from his Mary Austin and Andrew Forbes: poetry, photography, and the Eastern Sierra | California History | Find Articles 1/6/12 11:54 AM http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb1446/is_1_85/ai_n29402069/?tag=content;col1 Page 3 of 4 mother. He began his professional career in the late 1880s as an itinerant photographer, working the western territories with other skilled cameramen such as William Pretty-man, George B. Cornish, and Thomas Croft; he may have learned his trade from one of them. The limited equipment of his day was the large format camera, which was cumbersome to use but produced high-quality prints using 8 x 10 inch negatives on color-blind plates. As an itinerant photographer, Forbes obtained bed and board in ranch bunkhouses and traveled by buckboard across rough terrain, sometimes going by horse or mule to isolated locations. He traveled to Dodge City, Kansas, and Stillwater, Oklahoma, capturing images of railroad construction workers, settlers beside their sod houses, and teachers and Indian children at a mission school. He took pictures of buffalo herds and cattle roundups and created memorable images of weathered cowboys in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles roping their saddle horses, branding steer, and gathering around a chuck wagon. Isolated cowhands paid him fifty cents to a dollar for a souvenir picture. (8)
Traveling through the Southwest, Forbes photographed Native Americans in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in northern Arizona. He then worked his way along the eastern Rocky Mountains, arriving in the late 1890s at Santa Ana, where he joined his parents and sister. During his four-year stay in southern California, he produced images of communities, farms, and missions. He also traveled north to photograph Death Valley and the Eastern Sierra. In 1902, he settled in the town of Bishop.
"THE LAND HAD CALLED HIM"
In 1902, Andrew Forbes settled in Bishop, north of Independence. Originally called Bishop Creek, it was named after Samuel Bishop, one of the first cattle ranchers in the valley. Forbes traveled around the region, earning his living by taking pictures of the local inhabitants; towns, farms, ranches, and mines; the Owens Valley; and the surrounding mountains.
By the late 1880s, factory-made dry plate negatives, less messy than hand-coated wet plates, were available and by the turn of the century cameras were slightly less bulky. With his "photographic outfit," which included his tent, camera, glass negatives, paper stock, and other equipment in his wagon, Forbes rode from town to town. His tent functioned as a portable makeshift studio. Each summer from mid-June through August, after the winter snow had melted at the lower elevations, he packed his gear and headed for the mountains, seeking the ideal vistas and perfect lighting for his memorable images of the Eastern Sierra. He photographed in the early morning and late afternoon, when the light produced deeper shadows and more dramatic scenes.
The Eastern Sierra, especially the sublime vistas of Yosemite Valley, north of the Owens Valley, captured the imagination of many nineteenth-century landscape photographers. Charles L. Weed (1824-1903) produced the first photographic images of Yosemite in 1859, using large ii x 15 inch glass negatives hand-coated with light-sensitive chemicals; his work was followed in 1861 by that of Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916), whose scenic views were produced from mammoth 18 x 22 inch glass negatives. Ansel Adams (1902-1984), the most famous Yosemite photographer, first photographed Yosemite in 1916 with a Kodak Brownie box camera. He later used an 8 x 10 inch view camera to make the negatives for his prints. Forbes' black-and-white images of the Eastern Sierra--generally recognized as the 125-mile-long region extending from Mount Whitney in the south to Yosemite National Park in the north--taken from 1900 to 1916, precede Adams' work; Adams photographed many of the same vistas, including the Owens Valley, Alabama Hills, and Kearsarge Pinnacles. (20)
Shooting from across the Owens Valley, Forbes captured the scenic grandeur of snow-covered Mount Humphreys, at 13,986 feet the highest peak in the Sierra National Forest. He photographed the rugged beauty of the Owens River canyon, with white water swirling past granite boulders. His lens focused on a sweeping image of the Owens River, flowing through mountain woodlands to the valley below. He portrayed Bishop Creek Canyon, with tumbling water cascading downward for 6,000 feet, and Bishop Creek, flowing past fir trees on the mountain slopes. Of the eighty lakes within a few miles of the creek, Forbes photographed the lake at the north fork of the creek near Piute Pass and the one at the head of the creek's south fork. Some of Forbes' photographs document the heavy imprint of human activity on this once-unspoiled landscape, revealing severed trees and stumps, abandoned structures, cabins, and well-worn mountain trails.
Forbes envisioned the exciting prospect of establishing the first successful photography studio in the Owens Valley. He began his venture sometime between 1902 and 1904, opening his studio in Bishop on West Line Street. (The first photography studio in Yosemite Valley had opened in 1870, and by 1902 several businesses were competing for Yosemite's studio trade.) He ran a weekly advertisement in the Inyo Independent, noting his expertise in "mountain, stock, and Indian views" and in "portrait work in any style." To promote his photography business he offered a free enlargement with every dozen portraits. (21)
Although he sold numerous portraits, Forbes' main source of revenue was from scenic prints and picture postcards, which were easily reproduced from glass plate negatives. He maintained an index to his postcards, which noted the subject and date. Postcards, originally called mailing cards and used for advertising, were introduced in 1861. Forbes' picture postcards predate those of Burton Frasher, who began photographing the West, including the region around Bishop, in the 1920s. The originator of Frashers Fotos, black-and-white postcards sold nationwide, Frasher would become the West's leading producer of picture postcards.
A frequent visitor to towns, farms, and ranches, Forbes rode through the basin taking pictures and marketing his prints and postcards. His photographs captured the transition of small, dusty towns into thriving communities with picket-fenced, wood-framed houses; streets lined with poplars; and increasing numbers of people putting down roots in the valley soil. On October 17, 1902, the Inyo Independent announced that Forbes was in Independence, "so give him a call soon." A week later, he was doing a "rushing business" in pictures. In November he was photographing in Lone Pine and returned to Independence in December. In February 1903, the newspaper noted, he was in Big Pine with his tent, where he would remain for a few weeks. The following May he was back in Independence. He visited again in November and stayed a week. In early December, he "returned to Bishop," but "took quite a number of beautiful views of the Sierra Nevadas while here which he will have finished up soon." (22)
Forbes created an illustrated catalog to market his photographs. Orders, "unless otherwise specified," were filled in black and white. Photographs were also available in "cepia [sic], green and firelight tones." His 10-inch-wide panoramas averaged seventy-five cents per foot. His breathtaking 32-foot panorama of the Sierra Nevada in thirteen sections was listed at $15.00. Other panoramic views of the Sierra cost between $1.75 and $4.00. Black-and-white 8 x 10 inch photographs sold for five cents. Forbes also sold lantern slides, which could be projected onto a large screen, and stereo cards, which provided three-dimensional images. His catalog was arranged by subject, among them clouds and lightning, mountains, desert, cattle, horses, sheep, and goats. There was also a section on the different groups of Indians. He sold photographs of picturesque locales, such as the Keeler depot east of Owens Lake. Expanding his photography trips, he began marketing a broader range of landscape photography, including scenes of Mammoth and Yosemite. In addition to his photographs, he rented cameras and sold them, along with photographic supplies, to local residents and tourists who stopped by his Bishop studio. (23)
Like tourists to the region, Forbes was drawn to the 12,618-foot Kearsarge Peak at the edge of the Owens Valley, and he photographed it, snow-covered, with the little town of Independence in the foreground. Kearsarge Pass was originally a Paiute trading route. When gold and silver were discovered in 1864, miners flocked to the mountain. It became a successful mining district until an avalanche destroyed it in 1867. There is a string of alpine lakes in Kearsarge, resting in granite basins. Forbes photographed small, picturesque Kearsarge Lake above Onion Valley and Sunset Lake near Kearsarge Pass. Austin noted how most lakes in the Eastern Sierra are green, not blue. As she observed, "The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid, unwinking, also unfathomable." (26)
While photographing in the southern part of the valley, Forbes stayed in Independence at the Norman House on the corner of Edwards and Market streets, down the block from Austin's house. It was a first-class hotel with thirty bedrooms, where one could board by the day, week, or month. The hotel's register indicates that visitors frequently came to Independence from Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Reno. Hundreds of tourists a year visited the region, arriving, increasingly, from as far away as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. (27)
Forbes photographed one of Inyo's most popular tourist sites, Winnedumah Paiute Monument, an 80-foot granite monolith in the White-Inyo Mountains, immortalized in a Native American legend. In one version of the tale, Winnedumah, a medicine man, travels into the mountains to find his brother, Tinemaha, who has been slain in a battle with the Shoshones. The god Taupee turns Winnedumah into a granite spire to watch over the Paiute tribe. Like Forbes, Austin recognized the popular appeal of the striking granite formation, which could be seen from Kearsarge Pass. She appropriated the legend for her poem "Winnedumah," which recounts the medicine man's transformation into "the granite boulder high above the white-pine wood." (28)
"THE CLANS WHO HAD OWNED THE EARTH"
In 1900, approximately one thousand Native Americans lived in the Owens Valley. The influx of ranchers and homesteaders had destroyed half their population and their original way of life. "The Paiutes," Austin wrote, "had made their last stand at the border of the Bitter Lake" in the 1860s when thirty-five Indians were killed or driven into Owens Lake to drown. (29) In 1902, a federal grant created reservation land for Indian settlement at Independence Camp. Paiute men worked on local farms and ranches; women found jobs as household help in local homes. The children attended the Indian schools in the valley.
In response to the relegation of the Indians to reservations and the destruction of their way of life, there was a growing movement to preserve what remained of Native American culture. Some Americans held a romantic image of Indians living in harmony with nature. But, Austin observed, in the Owens Valley "the clans who owned the earth, [had] fallen into the deplorable condition of hangers-on." Burdened with household chores and worries about her disabled daughter, Austin employed a Paiute housekeeper and befriended the local Indian women. She attended some of the Paiute ceremonies and celebrations and recorded their songs with a home phonograph using wax cylinders. Visiting their camps, she watched as Paiute women dug wild hyacinth roots, gathered seeds, and crafted their willow baskets. She listened to their "folk tales, famine tales, love and longsuffering," and wove their words into her stories and poetry. (30) In "The Song-Makers," she penned one of her "re-expressions" of Native American "song".
Oh, a long time
The snow is over all the mountain.
The deer have come down and the big-horn,
They have passed over Waban.
A long time now we have eaten seeds
And dried flesh of the summer's killing,
We are wearied of our huts.
The mists have come down like a tent,
They have hid the mountain.
And on a day suddenly comes the sun.
The mists are withered away,
The grass is seen on the mountain! (31)
Forbes was equally attracted to the native culture and photographed the Paiute encampments in the valley. The houses, "brown wickiups in the chaparral," as Austin called them, had changed little over time; only a few Owens Valley Indians owned their own land and worked their own farms. Forbes, who had photographed a wide range of Native American groups as he traveled across the country, made friends with the local Indians who "would gather to sit and socialize on the edge of the boardwalk in front of his studio." In his portrait work he created numerous artistic poses of Paiute women in their maternal role. The recurrent image of a mother and child, thought-provoking in the universality of its underlying themes, proved a popular subject. Forbes also photographed Paiute women with their beautiful willow baskets decorated with intricate patterns; Austin described one as "a design in colored bark of the procession plumed crests of the valley quail." (32)
Like Austin, Forbes frequently focused on the feminine and artistic aspects of Paiute culture. Taken out of their larger context, removed from time and place, these images were sold as decorative art, sentimental souvenirs, and picture postcards to be sent to family and friends. Nevertheless, they captured the resilience and dignity of native people displaced in the valley of the Eastern Sierra.
"THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS"
When his horse or mule reached the end of a trail during his forays into the mountains, Forbes carried his photographic equipment on his back to get the scenic views he wanted. On mountain summits, he began using a large, panoramic Circuit camera, rotating on a turntable mounted on a tripod. He created scenic panoramas described by one author as "technical tours de ford' and experimented with "aerial photography by suspending the camera from a series of large kites." (33) He photographed hundreds of different panoramic scenes of the mountains and valley. One huge panorama, showing 250 miles of the Sierra Nevada, measured 32 feet. (34)
Packing into the mountains, Forbes photographed Lone Pine Lake, elevation 9,940 feet, with a sunlit cloud overhead. As Austin observed, in the mountains "the clouds came walking on the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray beneath, rounded and pearly white above." Forbes also photographed the waterfalls on Lone Pine Creek with their "incessant white and tumbling waters." A mountain range without streams, Austin wrote, is "forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God." (35)
Forbes also was knowledgeable about many aspects of the region, having photographed much of it, including the lakes and streams that formed the watersheds of the Eastern Sierra. As a result of his expertise, in 1905 he received a new assignment: photographing the valley's water sources. The Inyo Register, published in Bishop, and the Inyo Independent, published in Independence, both remarked on Forbes' photographic mission. William A. Chalfant, editor of the Inyo Register, announced that "Photographer Forbes is out picturing the water supply sources of the valley under arrangement with Fred Eaton. What it's for no one knows." The Independent reported that Forbes "went to Cottonwood" and was "making a thorough collection of photographic views of all the mountain streams and camping places along the Sierra from Olancha to Long Valley for Fred Eaton." The reference to Fred Eaton, who was credited with spearheading the controversial diversion of water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles County, involved Forbes in a controversy over the region's water rights that is still addressed today. (43)
As part of his documentation for Eaton, Forbes photographed Cottonwood Creek, named for the cottonwood trees, which leads to the Cottonwood Lakes, a string of thirteen lakes northwest of Olancha. But it is unlikely that these or any other "camping places" were of much interest to Eaton; Forbes may have been taken in by Eaton's disingenuous explanation for his curiosity about the mountain streams.
Fred Eaton came from a prominent Los Angeles family that helped found the city of Pasadena. At age fifteen, he went to work for the Los Angeles City Water Company; he became superintendent of the company and then mayor of Los Angeles. Ironically, it was Wallace Austin's brother Frank who first interested Eaton in the Owens River water. In 1892, Eaton traveled to the valley at Frank's invitation to investigate Austin's irrigation project. He visited the Owens Valley several times afterward, bringing his good friend William Mulholland, superintendent of the newly created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, to the area in September 1904. Traveling by buckboard, they camped out along the way. Eaton developed a scheme with Mulholland to divert Owens River water to Los Angeles and began buying properties and water rights on the Owens River. To identify locations to purchase, he made use of the records and plat maps in the General Land Office. Only later was it disclosed that he was representing Los Angeles and working for Mulholland to secure properties and water rights to build an aqueduct to Los Angeles. (44)
Across the West towns were growing as people relocated from rural areas. By 1900, the population of the city of Los Angeles was more than 100,000; thirty years earlier, it was less than 6,000. In the decade between 1890 and 1900, the population had doubled. The city's balmy climate and golden orange groves lured new residents. As the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and other organizations stressed the importance of growth, bankers, newspaper publishers, politicians, and real estate developers became boosters for Los Angeles' virtues.
But the city faced a serious water shortage. The Los Angeles River and groundwater from rain were inadequate and unreliable. An effort to conserve water through a metering program proved insufficient. The city required an additional source of water to sustain its expanding population and allow for future growth. To meet those needs, Eaton proposed a 233-mile aqueduct, at a cost of $23 million, to supply Owens Valley water to Los Angeles.
When the Los Angeles press released news of the proposed aqueduct, the headlines of the Inyo Register protested, "Los Angeles Plots Destruction: Would Take Owens River, Lay Lands Waste." Forbes joined a Bishop committee to fight the aqueduct. He worked with Chalfant, editor of the Inyo Register since 1887, to oppose the project. Chalfant used Forbes' photographs as propaganda to publicize the importance of the Owens Valley as a farming and ranching community. He ran articles and advertisements in the Inyo Register to increase support for the area and published a twentyfive- page special edition in July 1907 extolling the benefits of living in the Owens Valley. (45)
Forbes' life was not impacted as forcefully as was the Austins'. His home and studio were in Bishop, which unlike Independence was north of the Owens River aqueduct intake and thus unaffected by the impending diversion of water to Los Angeles. Furthermore, Forbes' ability to earn a living was not in jeopardy. He remained in Bishop during the construction of the aqueduct and continued his photographic trips around the valley and in the mountains. In early 1906, the Inyo Independent reported that Forbes would be in Independence until February 20, and that he had "pitched his big tent near the drug store and [was] ready for work." (52) The city of Bishop had developed an electrical power plant and the Bishop Light and Power Company featured a Forbes' landscape photograph on its annual calendar.
Forbes continued to participate in community activities and organizations, such as the local theater group. In 1909, he married Mary Rozette Prutsman, who helped run his photography business, often accompanying him on his monthlong summer pack trips into the mountains. They had one son, J. McLaren Forbes, born in 1910. But over time Forbes became discouraged by the changes in the valley wrought by the construction of the aqueduct. In 1916, three years after the aqueduct was completed, he sold his Bishop house and studio and moved to Lompoc, California, where he died of a heart attack on March 21, 1921.
In Forbes' photographs, the scenic pageantry of the forests enhances majestic mountain views. The trees in the Eastern Sierra include cottonwood, quaking aspen, white fir, and red fir, and seven species of pine grow in the mountains above Independence. Austin captured a telling detail of the forest when she wrote about "pine trees [that] creak although there is no wind." In another passage, she described the mournful sound of a Jeffrey pine "sighing its soul away upon the wind."
One of Forbes' intriguing images is a lone pinon pine on a rocky slope, silhouetted against a clear sky. In her unpublished poem "The Procession of the Pines," Austin suggests a dramatic view of pines on the Sierra slopes:
The willows follow the white-foot streams
And grow at the water's will;
But ever and always the pines keep on
Marching over the hill.
Darkly they troop by butte and pass,
Riving great racks for place
And the foremost ones are bent and bowed
Like runners stretched in a race.
(1) Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), 205; Mary Austin, Earth Horizon (New York: The Literary Guild, 1932), 233.
(2) Ann H. Zwinger, ed., Mary Austin and John Muir: Writing the Western Landscape (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), ix-x. The Mary Austin Collection at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, contains 5,500 pieces by and about Austin. Among them is a 5 x 9 inch red and black composition notebook with lined paper, of the type students used at the turn of the century. On the front appears the inscription, "This book was used by me in Inyo. Poems being copied in it as they were written. M.A." (AU 381) Some of the twenty-six poems in the notebook have never appeared in print. The Mary Austin Collection also includes other published and unpublished poems from this period that complement Austin's depictions of the Eastern Sierra in The Land of Little Rain and in her autobiography, Earth Horizon. In addition, microfilm issues of the Eastern Sierra newspaper of the period, the Inyo Independent, located at the Inyo County Library in Independence, contain new information about Austin's life.
(3) See Sheldon Russell, Dreams to Dust: A Tale of the Oklahoma Land Rush (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), William Willard Howard, "The Rush to Oklahoma," Harper's Weekly 33 (May 18, 1889): 391-94, and Seth K. Humphrey, Following the Prairie Frontier (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1931). Some of Forbes' images of the Cherokee Strip Land Run are housed in the Robert E. Cunningham Oklahoma History Collection at the Donald C. & Elizabeth M. Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City.
There are 2,800 negatives of western subjects in the Forbes Collection at the Seaver Center for Western History Research at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. One thousand of them are glass plate negatives, including Forbes' 6 x 8 inch and 8 x 10 inch glass negatives of the Eastern Sierra; 400 are Forbes' panoramic views; and there are hundreds of photographs and postcards. All of Forbes' panoramas, prints, postcards, and negatives may total as many as 5,000 images, but there is a significant amount of duplication. Although the Seaver Center has processed prints of some of the negatives, less than 1 percent of the photographs in the Forbes collection have been published.
There is no published biography on Forbes. The most complete biographical information about Forbes is in a dissertation by Sharon E. Dean, "Vision, Social Change, and the American West: The Photographs of Andrew A. Forbes (1862-1921)," New School University, 2002.
(4) Mary Austin, The Children Sing in the Far West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928), vii.
(5) Austin, Earth Horizon, 233.
(6) Sue Irwin, California's Eastern Sierra: A Visitor's Guide (Los Olivos, CA: Cachuma Press, 1992), 38-39, 41-42.
(7) Dean, "Vision, Social Change, and the American West," 61. Dean notes Forbes' date of birth as April 21, 1862 as does Ion Bosak, "Andrew A. Forbes--Photographs of the Owens Valley Paiute," The Journal of California Anthropology 2, no. 1 (Summer 1975): 38-59. "A Genealogy of the Descendants of John Forbes who came to America in 1840," located in the Andrew A. Forbes' file at the Eastern California Museum (unpublished, no date), notes the date as April 18, 1862.
(8) "A Genealogy of the Descendants of John Forbes," 9; the photographer I. H. Bonsall had a studio in Arkansas City, Kansas, near the Oklahoma border; Dean, "Vision, Social Change, and the American West," 62; "Forbes, Andrew Alexander 1862-1921," The Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association website, http://www. tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online, accessed September 24, 2007.
(9) Austin, Earth Horizon, 231.
(10) Austin, Earth Horizon, 234; The Land of Little Rain, 205. Austin spells the Paiute name for Lone Pine Mountain "Opopago" in Earth Horizon and "Oppapago" in The Land of Little Rain.
(11) Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 257.
(12) The 1894 poem "The Coming of the Snow" was revised and copied into Austin's composition notebook as "Sierra Snows." It was published as "Snow" in The Children Sing in the Far West, 47- 49.
(13) Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 159, 158, 146, 148.
(14) "A Twilight Hill" was revised for publication in The Land of Sunshine 14, no. 3 (March 1901): 181. It also appeared in Austin's composition notebook.
(15) Esther Lanigan Stineman, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 64.
(16) Austin, Earth Horizon, 112-13; The Land of Little Rain, 219.
(17) "Blue-Eyed Grass," written in 1904, was published in The Children Sing in the Far West, 86. Blue-Eyed Grass actually is not a grass, but its stalks resemble strands of grass with tiny blue buds at the tips. White yarrow has clusters of white flowers. There are many varieties of milkweed, some with creamy-white and maroon blossoms. Thousands of monarch butterflies come to the Eastern Sierra each year to deposit their eggs under the leaves.
(18) Austin, Earth Horizon, 284.
(19) Karen S. Langlois, "Mary Austin and Houghton Mifflin Company: A Case Study in the Marketing of a Western Writer," Western American Literature 23, no. 1 (May 1988): 41.
(20) Examples of Yosemite images by Charles L. Weed and Carleton E. Watkins are in the Early Landscape Photography of the American West collection at the New York Public Library.
(21) Kate Nearpass Ogden, "Sublime Vistas and Scenic Backdrops: Nineteenth-Century Painters and Photographers at Yosemite, California History 69, no. 2 (Summer 1990), 147; Inyo Independent, vol. 36, no. 8 (29 July 1904) and vol. 37, no. 36 (9 February 1906).
(22) Inyo Independent, vol. 34, no. 19 (17 Octo ber 1902); vol. 34, no. 20 (24 October 1902); vol. 34, no. 22 (7 November 1902); vol. 34, no. 37 (20 February 1903); vol. 34 no. 47 (1 May 1903); vol. 35, no. 23 (13 November 1903); and vol. 35, no. 26 (4 December 1903).
(23) "Illustrated Catalog of Forbes Studio," Andrew A. Forbes Collection (n.d.), Seaver Center for Western History Research.
(24) Austin, Earth Horizon, 296.
(25) "We'll Get Our Share," Inyo Independent, vol. 31, no. 39 (9 March 1900).
(26) Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 207.
(27) Inyo Independent, vol. 33, no. 49 (16 May 1902) and vol. 34, no. 20 (24 October 1902).
(28) Austin, The Children Sing in the Far West, 25.
(29) Harry W. Lawton, Philip J. Wilke, Mary DeDecker, and William M. Mason, "Agriculture Among the Paiute of Owens Valley," Journal of California Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1976): 13-50, cited in Sharon E. Dean, Peggy S. Ratcheson, Judith W. Finger, Ellen F. Daus with Craig D. Bates, Weaving a Legacy: Indian Baskets & the People of Owens Valley, California (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004), 1; Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 163.
(30) Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 174, 177; Karen S. Langlois, "A Fresh Voice from the West: Mary Austin, California, and American Literary Magazines," California History 69, no. 1 (Spring 1990), 28-32.
(31) Mary Austin, "The Song-Makers," North American Review 194 (August 1911): 239-47. In the poem, according to Austin, "Waban" is the Paiute word for "mountain."
(32) Austin, Earth Horizon, 246; Bosak, "Andrew A. Forbes," 42; Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 168.
(33) Bosak, "Andrew A. Forbes," 41. (34) In 2002, two of Forbes' panoramic photographs were put up at auction; the Fred Holabird Americana's Reno Coin & Stamp Show Auction #13, June 14-15, 2002. One, an unsigned panorama of the Bishop area circa 1910, shows cowboys herding cattle on a ranch against a backdrop of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada. At the right is the town of Bishop; at the left is Lone Pine. The view is to the west-southwest. The other, a signed panorama of the Bishop area circa 1910, shows a herd of grazing sheep on a ranch with Bishop and the White Mountains in the background. It was taken west of Bishop with Boundary Peak, the highest mountain in Nevada (elevation 14,242 feet), at the left and Westgard Pass at the right. In addition, three picture postcards were put up at auction at the
Fred Holabird Americana's Auction #15 on September 13, 2002.
(35) Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 258, 205, 184.
(36) Inyo Independent, vol. 36, no. 6 (15 July 1904) and vol. 36, no. 8 (29 July 1904).
(37) Mary Austin to Eve Lummis, 27 July [1905], University of Arizona, Tucson Special Collections Library; Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 186-87, 212.
(38) Mary Austin Collection, AU 57.
(39) Austin, Earth Horizon, 235.
(40) Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 157; Earth Horizon, 250.
(41) Austin, The Children Sing in the Far West, 62-65. In the poem, "Southland" refers not to
southern California, but to the Owens Valley. Austin observed that "The carrion crow is larger and glossier than the common crow. Both he and the buzzard will hang on the trail of a flock or a herd for days, on the chance of one falling out to die" (Austin, The Children Sing in the Far West, 179).
(42) "Hallowe'en Party," Inyo Independent, vol. 35, no. 22 (6 November 1903).
(43) Inyo Register (20 July 1905) and Inyo Independent, vol. 37, no. 7 (21 July 1905), cited in Dean, "Vision, Social Change, and the American West," 218. Following decades of litigation, in December 2006 Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stood at the now bone-dry banks of the Owens River as water flowed into the river, part of a court-mandated river and wetland restoration project.
(44) For further discussion of the events leading up to and following the building of the aqueduct, see Catherine Mulholland, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); R. A. Sauder, The Lost Frontier: Water Diversion in the Growth and Destruction of Owens Valley Agriculture (Tucson: The University of Arizona, 1994); William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles' Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
(45) Inyo Register (3 August 1905); Dean, "Vision, Social Change, and the American West," 220-21.
(46) Austin, Earth Horizon, 307.
(47) Kahrl, Water and Power, 131. For further discussion of Mary and Wallace Austin's protest of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project, see Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Water Controversy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981).
(48) Helen McKnight Doyle, Mary Austin: Woman of Genius (New York: Gotham House, 1939), 218.
(49) Wallace S. Austin to George C. Pardee, 24 September 1905, National Archives, Reclamation Service, General File 1902-1919, Record Group 115, File 63-B, "Correspondence re Right of Way Applications in Owens River Valley," quoted in Kahrl, Water and Power, 134.
(50) Inyo Independent, vol. 37, no. 41 (16 March 1906).
(51) Kahrl, Water and Power, 146.
(52) Inyo Independent, vol. 37, no. 36 (9 February 1906).
(53) From "Snow," in Austin, The Children Sing in the Far West, 47-49. In the poem, "hoar pine" refers to a pine that is covered with silvery, frozen dew or "hoarfrost." The tamarack is a lodgepole pine, and spruce and mountain hemlock are also trees that grow in the Eastern Sierra.
KAREN S. LANGLOIS is Professor of Liberal Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She specializes in American literary and cultural history. Her previous articles on Mary Austin have appeared in Huntington Library Quarterly, Western American Literature, Theatre History, California History, and the Journal of American Culture. She received a PhD in American History from Claremont Graduate University.
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(35) Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 258, 205, 184.
(36) Inyo Independent, vol. 36, no. 6 (15 July 1904) and vol. 36, no. 8 (29 July 1904).
(37) Mary Austin to Eve Lummis, 27 July [1905], University of Arizona, Tucson Special Collections Library; Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 186-87, 212.
(38) Mary Austin Collection, AU 57.
(39) Austin, Earth Horizon, 235.
(40) Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 157; Earth Horizon, 250.
(41) Austin, The Children Sing in the Far West, 62-65. In the poem, "Southland" refers not to
southern California, but to the Owens Valley. Austin observed that "The carrion crow is larger and glossier than the common crow. Both he and the buzzard will hang on the trail of a flock or a herd for days, on the chance of one falling out to die" (Austin, The Children Sing in the Far West, 179).
(42) "Hallowe'en Party," Inyo Independent, vol. 35, no. 22 (6 November 1903).
(43) Inyo Register (20 July 1905) and Inyo Independent, vol. 37, no. 7 (21 July 1905), cited in Dean, "Vision, Social Change, and the American West," 218. Following decades of litigation, in December 2006 Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stood at the now bone-dry banks of the Owens River as water flowed into the river, part of a court-mandated river and wetland restoration project.
(44) For further discussion of the events leading up to and following the building of the aqueduct, see Catherine Mulholland, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); R. A. Sauder, The Lost Frontier: Water Diversion in the Growth and Destruction of Owens Valley Agriculture (Tucson: The University of Arizona, 1994); William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles' Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
(45) Inyo Register (3 August 1905); Dean, "Vision, Social Change, and the American West," 220-21.
(46) Austin, Earth Horizon, 307.
(47) Kahrl, Water and Power, 131. For further discussion of Mary and Wallace Austin's protest of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project, see Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Water Controversy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981).
(48) Helen McKnight Doyle, Mary Austin: Woman of Genius (New York: Gotham House, 1939), 218.
(49) Wallace S. Austin to George C. Pardee, 24 September 1905, National Archives, Reclamation Service, General File 1902-1919, Record Group 115, File 63-B, "Correspondence re Right of Way Applications in Owens River Valley," quoted in Kahrl, Water and Power, 134.
(50) Inyo Independent, vol. 37, no. 41 (16 March 1906).
(51) Kahrl, Water and Power, 146.
(52) Inyo Independent, vol. 37, no. 36 (9 February 1906).
(53) From "Snow," in Austin, The Children Sing in the Far West, 47-49. In the poem, "hoar pine" refers to a pine that is covered with silvery, frozen dew or "hoarfrost." The tamarack is a lodgepole pine, and spruce and mountain hemlock are also trees that grow in the Eastern Sierra.
KAREN S. LANGLOIS is Professor of Liberal Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She specializes in American literary and cultural history. Her previous articles on Mary Austin have appeared in Huntington Library Quarterly, Western American Literature, Theatre History, California History, and the Journal of American Culture. She received a PhD in American History from Claremont Graduate University.
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