Desert Passages: Encounters With the American Deserts

Rating:
Summary: The Literary Desert
Review: *Desert Passges,* Patricia Nelson Limerick's first book, surveys a cast of American characters who wrote about their encounters with the deserts of the American Southwest. Her subjects fall into two broad groups: those who hated the desert, and by extension wanted to redeem it by settlement and irrigation, and those who -- however conditionally -- loved it, and by extension wanted to preserve it. The turning point between these two groups fell in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, when the railroads and the obliteration of independent Native American cultures had rendered the desert a scene out of the carriage window, traversed in ease, instead of a horrible wasteland waiting to destroy the naive traveler.

Limerick's subjects range from the famous -- Mark Twain, whose reaction to the desert inspires some of Limerick's sharpest prose -- to the famous in their own day but now obscure -- like William Ellsworth Smythe. She's pretty hard on almost everybody she treats -- especially Edward Abbey, who comes across as something of a charlatan -- except William Manly. Manly survived a harrowing trek in 1849 through Death Valley to California; he recorded his adventures in sincere and plain prose that repays reading today.

This book is a revision of Limerick's Ph.D. dissertation, and suffers from some of the faults of the genre -- for which it would be entirely unfair to blame her! Her choice of subjects left me somewhat puzzled, especially the omission, until the very end, of the most important figure in working out our relations to the desert: John Wesley Powell. Powell is a big figure, famously treated in Wallace Stegner's massive biography (the last chapter of Donald Worster's *Rivers of Empire* makes for inspiring reading too); no doubt Limerick felt he had had enough attention, and it was time to turn toward less well-known, but arguably important, persons. Yet his ghost hangs unacknowledged around the text, and the story of America's relations with its arid West just isn't complete without his tangled, contradictory presence.

Much of the material and indeed many of the same authors treated in *Desert Passges* recur with a somewhat more literary bent in Peter Wild's *The Opal Desert,* which appeared in 1999. A third edition of *Desert Passages* has been announced but hadn't appeared as of this writing.

Rating:
Summary: The Literary Desert
Review: *Desert Passges,* Patricia Nelson Limerick's first book, surveys a cast of American characters who wrote about their encounters with the deserts of the American Southwest. Her subjects fall into two broad groups: those who hated the desert, and by extension wanted to redeem it by settlement and irrigation, and those who -- however conditionally -- loved it, and by extension wanted to preserve it. The turning point between these two groups fell in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, when the railroads and the obliteration of independent Native American cultures had rendered the desert a scene out of the carriage window, traversed in ease, instead of a horrible wasteland waiting to destroy the naive traveler.

Limerick's subjects range from the famous -- Mark Twain, whose reaction to the desert inspires some of Limerick's sharpest prose -- to the famous in their own day but now obscure -- like William Ellsworth Smythe. She's pretty hard on almost everybody she treats -- especially Edward Abbey, who comes across as something of a charlatan -- except William Manly. Manly survived a harrowing trek in 1849 through Death Valley to California; he recorded his adventures in sincere and plain prose that repays reading today.

This book is a revision of Limerick's Ph.D. dissertation, and suffers from some of the faults of the genre -- for which it would be entirely unfair to blame her! Her choice of subjects left me somewhat puzzled, especially the omission, until the very end, of the most important figure in working out our relations to the desert: John Wesley Powell. Powell is a big figure, famously treated in Wallace Stegner's massive biography (the last chapter of Donald Worster's *Rivers of Empire* makes for inspiring reading too); no doubt Limerick felt he had had enough attention, and it was time to turn toward less well-known, but arguably important, persons. Yet his ghost hangs unacknowledged around the text, and the story of America's relations with its arid West just isn't complete without his tangled, contradictory presence.

Much of the material and indeed many of the same authors treated in *Desert Passges* recur with a somewhat more literary bent in Peter Wild's *The Opal Desert,* which appeared in 1999. A third edition of *Desert Passages* has been announced but hadn't appeared as of this writing.