BOOKPATHS

The Southwest, United States

The Land of Journeys’ Ending, by Mary Austin (Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2007, and previous editions; first published in 1924)

In the 1970s, bookman extraordinaire Lawrence Clark Powell chose The Land of Journeys’ Ending as “the book that best embodies the essences of the region whose heartland is Arizona and New Mexico.”  Mary Austin came to the southwest late in her life, arriving in 1918 and then settling in Santa Fe in 1923.  She spent the remainder of her days there, embracing the region, until her death at age 66 in 1934.  Now, opening The Land of Journeys’ Ending in 2009, you’ll still “find landscape, history, piñon, juniper, sheep, an eagle, a bluebird – and the spirit of that indomitable woman.”

Between the Rio Colorado and the upper course of the Rio Grande lies the Land of Journeys’ Ending.

No such natural boundaries, but the limits of habitableness, define it north and south.  About the sources of its inclosing rivers the ranges of the continental axis draw to a head in the Colorado Rockies.  Southward they scatter, like travelers who have lost their heads in terror of desertness, among the vast unwatered plateaus of Old Mexico.  But all the country east of the Grand Cañon, west and north of the Jornada del Muerto, is like the middle life of a strong man, splendidly ordered.  This is the first sense of the land striking home to the traveler who gives himself up to it.  Go far enough on any of its trails, and you begin to see how the world was made. – from The Land of Journeys’ Ending, by Mary Austin

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

The Land of Journeys’ Ending, by Mary Austin -- Online edition

Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, U.S.

Geologically speaking, Navajoland lies within the Colorado Plateau.  The Colorado Plateau is characterized by horizontal, sedimentary formations, deeply incised drainage systems, aridity, and sparse vegetation.  It is a physiographic province bordered by the Great Basin to the west and the Rocky Mountains to the north and east. – from Pieces of White Shell, by Terry Tempest Williams

Pieces of White Shell, by Terry Tempest Williams (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987; first published in 1984)

Terry Tempest Williams’s small pouch of mementos -- a sprig of sage; rocks, sand, and seeds; turquoise, obsidian, coral; pieces of white shell; yucca; a bouquet of feathers bound by yarn; coyote fur; a bone from Black Mountain; deerskin; wool; potshard; corn pollen; and a clay Storyteller figurine from Jemez -- transport her, and her readers, into the stories, rituals, and landscape of “Navajoland,” “stretching across thousands of miles” in the four corners area of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.  Through their stories, Williams hopes all of us will find our own “unique relationship with landscape” and the stories it holds.

Navajo stories have been my guides across the desert.  I have trusted them because I could find no others.  They are rooted in native soil.  To these people they are scared.  Truth.  To me, they are beacons in a nation suspicious of nature. – from Pieces of White Shell, by Terry Tempest Williams

Related Websites

Terry Tempest Williams Website

Publisher’s Website

BOOKPATH: Southwestern United States and Mexico

The Power Within Us : Cabeza de Vaca's Relation of His Journey from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536. New York : Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944; previously published as Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca. (Out of print. Available used or, perhaps, through your Library.)

"My account of Nuñez is not the account he sent the King, apart of course from the actual facts. But I believe it to be the account he wished to send the King." -- Haniel Long

When Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca reached Mexico City, after eight years of wandering, he wrote La Relación, a report for the King of Spain. In it, he shared what happened during an expedition meant to bring prestige and fortune to the King. From the King's point of view, the expedition was a disaster, but for Cabeza de Vaca it was a story of spiritual triumph.

Believing that Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca had something to say to "us four hundred years later, in this world of ours where human relation is still the difficult problem, and exploitation the cancer," Haniel Long composed a short Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca, a reading between the lines of La Relación, reflecting on what Cabeza de Vaca might had shared had he felt free to do so.

Readers follow Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca on an expedition led by the greedy and ignorant Pámfilo Narvaez. Six hundred men dwindle to 400, then 40, and finally only a "handful...crawled ashore" near present day Galveston, Texas. The native people care for the starving, depleted men, even though they have little themselves. The more the Spaniards lose, however, the more they gain spiritually. At first, Cabeza de Vaca feels that the worst loss is "in parting little by little with the thoughts that clothe the soul of a European, and most of all of the idea that a man attains strength through dirk and dagger, and serving in your Majesty's guard." Gradually, though, they "surrender such fantasies." "Several years went by," Nuñez recalls, "before I could relax in that living plexus for which even now I have no name; but only when at last I relaxed, could I see the possibilities of a life in which to be deprived of Europe was not to be deprived of too much."

Reduced to four, they move farther westward -- "no trails," "lost," healing the native people who ask for help, feeling a "power to render life and happiness to others." It is a new thought to them, this helping, "but," he tells the King, "after one accustoms oneself to the idea, it is good to be able to give out health and joy...." "Your Majesty," Cabeza de Vaca writes, "I found myself treating all human beings alike."

Haniel Long, following the "core" of La Relación, ends Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca's eight years of deprivation with "a sign of our countrymen," countrymen who had "burnt all the villages." Back in "civilization," Cabeza de Vaca begins to feel a "reluctance...to do good to others." And, so, he ends his letter to the King by writing: "If one lives where all suffer and starve, one acts on one's own impulse to help. But where plenty abounds, we surrender our generosity, believing that our country replaces us each and several. This is not so, and indeed a delusion. On the contrary the power of maintaining life in others, lives within each of us, and from each of us does it recede when unused."

Haniel Long, a poet as well as a prose writer, considered The Power Within Us : Cabeza de Vaca's Relation of His Journey from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536, "the dearest of all my books and I believe that it expresses best the key idea of all my writing, namely: that each of us has, in a degree, the power of giving health and happiness to others." Haniel Long's book still speaks to us today, during a time when "human relation" remains "the difficult problem."

"My attention wanders from the perfunctory narrative to the thing he refrains from confiding to the royal ear. That thing is a mystical feeling about the increase of life in a man from effort and from taking thought of his fellows." -- Haniel Long

Websites

Both websites contain information on Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and the text of La Relación.

The Center for the Study of the Southwest Texas State University and The Witte Museum in San Antonio
http://www.english.swt.edu/CSS/Vacaindex.HTML

Southwestern Writers Collection
http://www.library.txstate.edu/swwc/cdv/