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Article Excerpt
The origin of mountain streams is like the origin of tears, patent to the understanding but mysterious to the sense," Mary Austin wrote of the snow-fed rivers that cascaded down the sheer gorges of the Eastern Sierra. The haunting beauty of the pristine streams and dramatic crests "blotched dark with pines and white with snow" provided the aesthetic inspiration for the poetry she composed while living in the shadow of the mountains. The compelling landscape also drew the photographer Andrew Forbes to the area. He recorded many exceptional scenes in a stunning collection of photographic views taken after his arrival at the turn of the century. From 1902 to 1906, the lives of Austin and Forbes overlapped in the Owens Valley; each documented the natural beauty of the Eastern Sierra south of Yosemite as they pursued their art. (1)
Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) is best known today for her 1903 classic, The Land of Little Rain, story sketches describing and interpreting the Eastern Sierra region. On the basis of this book and other nature writing, she is often ranked with Henry David Thoreau and John Muir as a naturalist. In all, she authored some thirty books and wrote in a wide variety of forms, including poems, plays, novels, short stories, articles, and reviews. Many of her most important works are currently in print, but much of the poetry written during the period when she lived in the Owens Valley is little known. This essay adds to the published record--set down in Austin's autobiography, Earth Horizon, and in subsequent biographies--and includes a number of her previously unpublished poems. It is the first attempt to integrate some of the poems written during this time with the biographical information. (2)
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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. Paired together, their word pictures and photographic images offer a modern audience the opportunity to experience creative expressions linked by historical period, subject matter, and artistic sensibility.
THE LURE OF THE VALLEY
Both Austin and Forbes were transplanted Midwesterners to the Owens Valley, an arid ranching valley in eastern California sided by two mountain ranges. The Eastern Sierra skyline--great blocks of gray with opal shadows--lies to the west, dominated by the towering 14,496-foot summit of Mount Whitney. The stark White-Inyo Mountains rise to the east. At the foot of Mount Whitney are the Alabama Hills, rust-brown outcrops of weathered granite. Owens Lake, once a hundred square miles in size, lay in the 1890s "like a vast lidless eye" in the desert basin. (5) Eighty miles east is Death Valley, 282 feet below sea level. The hundred-mile-long Owens Valley runs between the crest of the highest mountain in the contiguous United States and the stark, desert desolation of the lowest elevation.
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The explorer General John Charles Fremont named the Owens Valley, and its river and lake, for Richard Owens, with whom he crossed the Sierra in 1845 during an expedition in the Sierra Nevada. During the 1860s, settlers arrived in the valley to establish farms and ranches along the Owens River. Mining camps soon dotted the Eastern Sierra, operated by miners who were lured to the mountain regions by the discovery of gold in 1857. In 1861, cattlemen first grazed their cattle in the valley before driving the herds through the Sierra. After an Indian uprising, U.S. soldiers arrived to provide protection for the settlers and prospectors. The troops built Camp Independence on Oak Creek in 1862. Four years later, Independence, the location of the valley's first homestead, became the seat of the newly organized Inyo County. (6)
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.
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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 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)
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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.
Austin was a young wife in her mid-twenties when she arrived in the Owens Valley. Born on September 9, 1868, in Carlinville, Illinois, she was the third of four children. Her father, George Hunter, a Civil War veteran, was from England; her mother, Susanna Savilla Graham Hunter, was from Illinois. Austin graduated from Blackburn College in Carlinville, where she studied science. After her father's death, she came West in 1888 with her mother and brothers to homestead in California. Arriving in Los Angeles by train, they traveled one hundred miles by buckboard and horseback across Tejon Pass to settle in Kern County. Their tiny one-room cabin, surrounded by knee-high sagebrush, was a two-day wagon ride from Bakersfield, the main source of supplies. A severe drought soon undermined their homesteading venture.
Discouraged by the turn of events, Austin found employment as a teacher at a dairy ranch school in Mountain View in Kern County. There she met Stafford Wallace Austin, a graduate of the University of California and an aspiring viticulturalist, whom she married in 1891. After a failed attempt at fruit farming, the Austins settled in Bakersfield, where Wallace obtained employment supervising the construction of an irrigation ditch. The following year, when his brother Frank offered him a job managing an irrigation site in the Owens Valley, they moved to Lone Pine in the Eastern Sierra.
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From childhood, when she read the work of Byron, Keats, and Shelley in her father's book-lined study, Austin nurtured a lifelong interest in poetry. She began to write poems as a college student in...
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