I. What was the environment like that you grew up in?
January 21 |
Describe the place you grew up in and how that environment influenced you. |
Write about your reactions to Chapter 1 in Mary Austin's description of Eastern California.
|
Do you have questions from her writings to post as a Journal entry electronically submitted on Wiki by the end of the week? |
Class Method
Write for five minutes without stopping:
What were the surroundings like that you grew up in?
prompts | graphics | maps | historical dates | commentary | outline | sources | vocabulary
Prompt
What does Mary Austin tell you about the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains, Owen's Valley, and the area around Bishop California? Can you detect in specific phrases the respect and the value she has for this regions settlers?
Internet
Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain: Owen's Valley
- Text for the class.
- available on Blackboard™.
- Post a response to on class Wiki
- dates to know
Backgrounds
"this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections"
Mary Austin , 1903.
The character of the high desert in Eastern California is described in exquisite detail by Mary Austin who wanted to defend this region from the City of Los Angeles. The City engineers wanted to use the area as a source for their water supply. The federal government wanted to create an irrigated farm project in the valley. These three groups fought from 1900 to 1907 over the limited amount of water that is derived from the melting snow of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
The wall of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains.
Land of Little Rain is a focus reading because this landscape was a formative influence on Mary Austin's concern for the environment she described.
- She found meaning and value in this place.
- Do you find meaning and value in places you grew to appreciate?
"The Landscape They Fought Over"
California; relief map and an aerial photo of the Central Valley Project aqueduct from north to Southern California.
prompts | graphics | maps | historical dates | commentary | outline | sources | vocabulary
Concepts to look for:
"Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas." (Yucca arborensis)
"Tormented thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas . . . " The "Yucca tree" page 4.
aqueducts
Nationalities of Native and Immigrant peoples
high frontier
land-use
Forests and water as primary resources
Denver looking from east to west or from the High plains to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.
Contrasting dates:
1620, English settlers land in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
1785 The Land Ordinance of the United States established by the Articles of Confederation
1820, The United States Land Ordinance is reformed due to the panic of 1819 caused by land speculation that weakened the banking system.
1903, President Theodore Roosevelt & John Muir meet in Yosemite National Park.
1903, Mary Austin published Land of Little Rain, her attempt to document & protect her valley in Eastern California.
1909, President Theodore Roosevelt call the Governor's Conference o Conservation at the White House to set new national policy priorities to protect rivers, forests & wildlife.
prompts | graphics | maps | historical dates | commentary | outline | sources | vocabulary
Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 1903 (New York: Dover Press, 1996) pp. 1 - 16.