Mary Hunter Austin

It's the one that's in November. We'll be talking more about this at the end of the episode today, but I wanted to go ahead and put it out there at the beginning.

for clarity in the title of the episode. I was initially drawn to her story because one of the things that she became known for was walking, and I do love a walk. I usually walk in the woods, though, and Austin's walks were mostly through the deserts of the American Southwest, which she came to just deeply love. She's been compared to people like John Muir, but she doesn't have nearly that kind of name recognition today. Mary Austin was a complicated person with a complicated life.

like the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Meanwhile, Mary was simultaneously intelligent, sensitive, stubborn, and rebellious. Punishment, for example, was just not really a deterrent to her. She would sort of do whatever she wanted and deal with the consequences later. She felt like her family didn't really understand her, and she was also awkward and didn't have a lot of friends except for her younger sister Jenny, who she was very close to.

At Jenny's funeral, Mary overheard her mother ask someone why it couldn't have been Mary who died rather than her sister.

to learn about literature and science. After reading a Chautauqua course in geology, she became particularly fascinated with fossils and started collecting them. Mary was bright and a good student when she first started school. She was so far ahead of her peers that she was placed in third grade. In eighteen eighty four, at the age of sixteen, she enrolled at Blackburn College in Carlonville, Illinois. She started out

studying art, but then changed to science. While she wanted to be a writer, she thought she could master english and writing on her own, and she wanted to dedicate her college education to something else. Mary had a series of illnesses, some of them pretty serious really, throughout her life, and her college education was interrupted after she got a

cold that she couldn't seem to recover from. She had to withdraw from Blackburn, and then once she was better, she enrolled at the State Normal School in Bloomington, Illinois. Quickly realized that she did not like the curriculum there, so she went back to Blackburn and she graduated in

eighteen eighty eight. She had to get extra tutoring to make up for these interruptions in her coursework because her mother had given her a deadline she was going to cut off Mary's financial support for her education if she missed that deadline.

was waiting to be occupied. It was the traditional and ancestral homelands of indigenous nations and peoples who had been stripped of that land through wars, treaties, and forestry locations. Jim asked his mother for permission to file a claim on her behalf as well, and without really talking to Mary about it, Susannah and Jim decided that Mary should go to California too, with the hope that she would claim land of her own. It might seem surprising that

Mary agreed to go. She didn't really even think that her mother should go. She thought Jim should have the opportunity to have his own life rather than going back to being the head of his mother's household, which is

what he had done after their father's death. Mary's relationships with both Susannah and Jim had also really gone downhill after George's death, but Mary went and became both physically and emotionally unwell during the trip west, to the point that Susannah's letters to her friends described the trip as almost killing her. Although Mary was struck by the beauty of some of the landscapes that they traveled through, her

condition got worse after arriving in California. Living in a barely furnished cabin without enough food to live on, Mary was tasked with hunting rabbits and other small game, which she did, but she hated killing animals, and she could barely tolerate eating what she.

was eventually abandoned. A neighbor offered the family the chance to run an inn out of an existing building on his land, and that helped them all make ends meet enough for Jim and Susanna to keep their land claims. As they started to have a little more money, Mary started to physically recover, and she started to make connections to the other people living in the area homesteaders, sheep herders,

and ranchers. The people she felt most at home with were often Indigenous or Mexican, not the people her family thought she should be associating with. She was interested in the ways that people outside the world of white homesteaders lived and in a landscape around her, and in how they lived with it. In eighteen eighty nine, she tried to get a job teaching, but failed the California Teaching

Exam twice. She finally got a job at a private school, and she found lodgings with a family that she felt a deeper affinity for than she did. Her own.

getting married. But Mary really didn't have the family support that she would need to get started with that. Her mother and her brother had their own plans, and they weren't really including Mary in their decisions or in things like the proceeds from the sale of their house back in Illinois. Getting married probably seemed like the only option for her to have some financial stability.

goals as a writer. They had direct conversations about these goals before getting married, and his wedding present to her was a gold pen with a pearl handle. Agreeing to marry him seemed like the only thing her family thought she had ever done right. They got married on May eighteenth, eighteen ninety one, when Mary was twenty one.

role in their situation too. While they'd had candid conversations about her ambitions as a writer, Wallace hadn't expected her to just abandon most of the domestic tasks that a wife typically handled, which is what she did. While they'd had into actual conversations during their courtship as a married couple, they really didn't seem to be able to talk through what was going on in their lives.

roughly between Fresno, California and Las Vegas, Nevada. Mary went out for a walk one day and came back to find that they had been evicted for not paying the bills. On the advice of an acquaintance, she went to a boarding house that was primarily being used by mine workers who had developed lead poisoning, which wasn't on the job has. She offered to do things there like cook, clean, and

mend in exchange for a place to stay. When Wallace got back, she learned that the irrigation project had failed and that Wallace was now in debt because of it. On top of that, he had known they were going to be evicted and he had not told her, and she found out that he had also turned down paying work as a school principal. Mary kept working at the boarding house, and she started seriously trying to publish enough work to make ends meet, like short pieces like essays

and short stories. As her pregnancy made it increasingly difficult to do the more physical parts of her job at the boarding house, she decided to go to Bakersfield, where her mother lived, to have the baby. On October thirtieth of that year, she gave birth to her daughter, Ruth, after a very difficult labor that lasted for more than

forty eight hours. While Mary was still recovering from giving birth, Wallace told her that his finances had totally collapsed and that he was facing legal action and that she should handle his remaining property as she saw fit. She did this by selling everything that could be sold and arranging to pay off the rest of his debts in installments. When Mary and Ruth joined Wallace back in the Owens Valley,

their relationship continued to be rocky. He had finally resigned himself to teaching, so they had a small but steady income, but he was angry that she had made arrangements to pay off his debts rather than just filing for bankruptcy. Mary and Ruth were also sick a lot of the time, and sometimes Mary needed a wet nurse. Her nurse was a Piute woman from a nearby settlement, as she was able. Though, Mary kept writing and kept exploring the valley where they lived.

She really fell in love with the arid landscape, and she formed relationships with many of the payute women who were living in the area, voting one named Saab, whom Mary became particularly close to. She started learning Pyute methods for doing things like making baskets and identifying and gathering local plants. Wallace eventually became the Inyo County school superintendent, and Mary kept working on selling short pieces of writing so they had a little more income, but they faced

some new struggles. Mary's lack of attention to typical homemaking duties raised eyebrows as did her friendships outside of the community of white homesteaders. As we said earlier, many of her friends were Mexican or indigenous, and she frequently visited mining camps and saloons and other places that were not considered appropriate for a white woman to be.

ungovernable spells. Another doctor who examined Ruth said that her condition was incurable. Some more modern historians have concluded that Ruth may have been injured during her birth, or that she may have had a genetic disorder known as rhet syndrome, or that she may have been autistic.

have harmed Ruth somehow. When doctors and friends assured her that she wasn't at fault, she turned her blame to Wallace. At this point, the eugenics movement dominated conversations on things like health and disability, and Mary held some of these ideas herself. She concluded that Wallace must have had bad blood that she had then passed on to her child. Her family, unsurprisingly did not really help. By Mary's account, Wallace was not very involved in raising their daughter, and

socially he really wouldn't have been expected to be. Mary's mother was of the belief that hardships were a punishment from God. After hosting Ruth for a visit, Susannah wrote Mary a letter that said in part quote, I don't know what you've done, daughter, to have such judgment upon you you. Mary largely cut off contact with her mother after that, and Susannah died in eighteen ninety six. Although their relationship had always been difficult, Mary was really heartbroken

that they had not reconciled before her death. Beyond the lack of family support, there were really no other support systems in place for disabled children or their families at this point. We don't know Ruth's own thoughts about herself, but it is very clear that in today's terminology she

had high support needs. Mary didn't have much money for doctors or to hire help, and while there were neighbors who offered to watch Ruth from time to time, these offers could be short lived when people couldn't figure out how to interact with her. When she got a little bit older, Ruth repeatedly tried to run away.

the point of neglect. When Mary later found a teaching job and had nobody to look after Ruth while she was gone, she would sometimes leave Ruth by herself. People understandably judged Mary for all of this, but then when the Frager family offered to take Ruth in on their ranch, those same people, including her husband, accused Mary of abandoning her child, Even though the Fragger family was kind to

Ruth and really seemed to look after her well. A lot of people were already really judgmental of Mary's defiance of social norms and when she didn't seem like an attentive mother. On top of all that, people thought she was monstrous. Wallace did not face similar judgment. People were more likely to feel sympathy for him for being married to someone that they thought was such a terrible wife and mother. Mary's critics initially included Helen McKnight doyle, who

later became her friend. At one point, while Ruth was living with the Fraggers, doctor Nelly heard that she was ill, and she went to get Mary, she assumed that she would want to be with her daughter. Mary's response was quote,

Ruth makes me nervous and I make her nervous. It is not good for us to be together, which doctor Nelly described as an offense against all motherhood, But she eventually came to the conclusion that Mary could provide the best home for her child by earning enough to pay for her care, rather than trying to abandon her work and care for her daughter without any resources to do so. In nineteen o three, when Ruth was eleven, Mary Austin published her first and best known book, The Lamb of

Little Rain. It's a set of lyrical sketches about the Owens Valley and the Mojave Desert and the indigenous people living there. The pieces had appeared serially in the Atlantic before being published by Houghton Mifflin Books. It's not a straightforward nonfiction piece. Many of the places that Mary describes in it are amalgamations or composites of places in the real world. She started writing it after recovering from an illness during which she had a vision of two angel

like beings in the room with her. She said that it had taken her twelve years to research, but only a month to craft it. With the money she earned from the Land of Little Rain, Mary was able to place Ruth in a small private hospital in Santa Clara, California, run by doctor R. E.

and it became permanent in nineteen oh five. Austin worried about her daughter for the rest of Ruth's life, but she never visited after this. She found the whole idea devastating, and the prevailing wisdom at the time was often that family visits to hospitals and institutions would disrupt the care that children were receiving there and would actually make things worse for them. When people asked about Ruth, Mary would answer, quote,

we have lost her. Austin's life from this point combines travel, writing, and activism, and we'll talk about that after a sponsor break. Around the same time that Mary Austin published The Land of Little Rain, she separated from her husband, although their divorce was not finalized until nineteen fourteen. She does seem to have had some other relationships, but she never remarried.

After their separation, Mary visited San Francisco and met writer George Sterling and went to Carmel also called Carmel by the Sea on the Monterey Peninsula, where there was an artist colony. She started expanding her network of other writers, including Jack London and past podcast subject Ambrose Bierce, and she started writing and publishing a book roughly every year.

and that came out in nineteen oh four. It's clear that she was trying to be respectful and how she discussed Indigenous people in the land that they lived on, but this was definitely something that was filtered through her own lens, and she wasn't really aware of how that lens affected her impressions and interpretations of what was around her. It's also not clear how much permission she had to

share these stories, if any. She also incorporated Indigenous art and dress and language into her life in a way that could be appropriative, and in her autobiography she described herself as having a quote slightly mythical Indian ancestor, even though she did not have indigenous ancestry. And while she advocated for Indigenous rights, white people started regarding her as the expert in these issues rather than the people she was advocating for.

Local people initially thought this was related to a federal land reclamation project, and so that's the use of irrigation to turn arid or semi arid land into farmland. When an article in the La Times announced that the plan was actually to build an aqueduct that would drain water out of the valley and carry it to Los Angeles, more than two hundred miles away, people in Owens Valley were outraged. Whileas Austin was a huge part of the advocacy against this project, but a lot of Mary's writing

about it really leaves his workout. She kind of claims most of the credit.

Saturday Classic in May of twenty twenty four. Austin's books from these years include The Flock, which was a successor to the Land of Little Rain about sheep herding, and Santa Lucia, which was focused on an unhappy marriage that was similar to her own. Lost Borders was.

was the Walking Woman. That was it. She had walked off all sense of society, made values, and knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it.

she considered herself to be cured. The books that came out of her time in Italy include Christ in Italy being The Adventures of a Maverick among Masterpieces, and The Man Jesus being a brief account of the life and teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth. After leaving Italy, Austin went to France, and before returning to the United States, she visited London, where she met writers like H. G.

Ruth Farwell. By the time this novel came out, Austin's daughter, Ruth, had died at the age of twenty six. That happened on October sixth, nineteen eighteen. Some sources attribute Ruth's death to the pandemic flu, but her death certificate listed her cause of death as acute asthma. In the nineteen teens, Austin started visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico, and she moved into a house there called Casakarita in nineteen twenty four.

She continued to travel extensively, including lecture tours and book tours, but this was her primary home for the rest of her life. While living in New Mexico, she became a more vocal proponent of indigenous rights, including advocating for the preservation of indigenous traditions and arts. She also worked with Arthur leon Kampa of the University of New Mexico to

collect Spanish language folklore, transcribing it from oral accounts. In nineteen twenty seven, Austin became involved in a second water rights controversy. This one connected to the building of Hoover Dam, which is sometimes called the Boulder Dam depending on when things about it were written. The plan was to build a dam across the Colorado River in the Black Canyon, which would provide hydroelectric power, flood control, and a water

supply for irrigation and other uses. The Colorado River drains water from seven states, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California, so this project required agreement among all of these states on how the water would be used and distributed.

Austin was against the building of Hoover Dam. She advocated not for a project that would provide massive amounts of water to big cities, but one that could bring irrigation and flood control to small, self sufficient communities that could live within the constraints of what the land around them could support. She thought these communities might gradually industrialize, but that they would do so in a way that would allow them to maintain their traditions and their connections to

the past, rather than just becoming huge and homogenized. She advocated for local control of water resources and preservation and conservation of an area's land and heritage.

Austin's death. In nineteen twenty nine, Austin met Ansel Adams, who was at the very start of his career as a photographer. They collaborated on his first book, Taos Pueblo, which paired his photographs with her text. With the help of Tony Luhan, who is from the pueblo, Adams got permission from the Pueblo Council to take photographs there. This book was a limited edition of one hundred signed, numbered, and hand bound copies. Adams printed the photographs by hand.

Across those one hundred books, it totaled nearly thirteen hundred prints. A facsimile edition of this book was published in nineteen seventy seven, and both editions are very expensive and hard to find today, but you can see the twelve prints it includes online at the Two Red Roses Foundation. In nineteen thirty two, Austin published her autobiography called Earth Horizon. It's written primarily in the third person, although it occasionally

shifts into first. It sort of continues that idea of Mary and I Mary that she had first come to in her childhood. This book led H. G. Wells to threaten to sue her over a brief mention of an affair that he had in which he had fathered a child out of wedlock. Austin rewrote the paragraph in question, but during all of the stress surrounding all of this, she had a heart attack.

and spiritual power and discipline. She is a future person, one who will a century from now appear as a writer of major stature in the complex matrix of American culture. That turned out not to be true. Helen McKnight doyle published a biography of her in nineteen thirty nine, but Mary Austin was largely forgotten about after her death. Although there was some rediscovery of her work starting in the nineteen eighties, it is mostly taught today in the context

of environmental literature. She's sometimes described as an early ecofeminist, although that term was not coined until the nineteen seventies. She said of herself quote, I may not know how to write, nor how to delineate character, nor even how to tell a story. The one thing I am sure about myself that I know the relation of letters and landscape,

of life and environment. Some of the land that Austin wrote about in works like The Land of Little Rain is now part of a number of parks and preserves, including Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve. Her home in Inno County is now California Historical Landmark

two twenty nine. This is where she wrote most of the land of Little Rain, and the marker includes a quote from it quote, but if you ever come beyond the borders as far as the town that lies in a hill temple at the foot of Kearsarge, never leave it until you have knocked at the door of the brown house under the willow tree at the end of the village street. And there you shall have such news of the land of its trails, and what is a stir in them, as one lover of it can give to another.

It feels a little weird to be talking about going on a trip in the kind of chaotic times that we're living in currently, but still excited about It is something that we started planning last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, not able to announce until just now.

for the show have been to Europe. So I'm interested in going to a place that is, you know, culturally and in terms of the landscape, like quite different from where we have traveled to before. The photos of some of the places that we are going to be visiting are just so beautiful. I don't know, I can't, I don't know what else to say about it. I'm very excited about it. I think on the spectrum of trips that we have gone on, this is probably toward the more active trip.

I don't know if I have anything else to add with that other than very excited for the twelfth time.