In Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (1992), historian Donald Worster argues that the actual history of the American West has yet to be written because American in general and historians in particular have yet to "see" the West. Rather what we know of the West is encrusted in a national mythology of the West as "frontier" and its story as nothing more than the reductionist frontier conquest plot--"us versus nature," or "white people against native people, or "good guys in white hats against bad guys in black hats." To remedy this, Worster calls for a "new western history" that sees the American West as regional in nature--the Western mining and agricultural frontiers are not the same--and ecologically informed. Worster dismisses most writers of the American West as hopelessly informed by the romance of the frontier but fails to take into account the work of Mary Austin.
Mary Austin went to southern California as a young adult to homestead in 1888 and spend most of her productive life traveling and writing about the Far West. She came to the American West with all the typical European American's mythology of that strange, arid land. However, she found in the landscape and native cultures of the West a grounding for her life and art that she had never found in the East and in so doing gave expression to a radically different version of the Western frontier than that found in the traditional American mythology about the West.
In the Land of Little Rain, published in 1905, Austin responds to the West from a regional perspective, and she presents characters who respond to the romance of the West--seeking in it the "rebirth" and "progress" literary conventions of westering had promised stretching back through Cooper and the Puritan narratives--without reducing their human complexity. Moreover, in the final chapter of LOLR, "The Little Town of Grape Vines," Austin presents a regionally and ecologically informed picture of life in the American West prior to its mythological transformation in the national consciousness and its actual re-engineering by European-Americans. Austin's work gives us perhaps the clearest picture of what the West might be like had it actually been "seen" and treated as Worster directs. Thus Austin's work offers us not only an invaluable picture of a "lost West" but also gives us a way to gauge the possibility of writing the history of the West as Worster and other historians would have it.
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