To Eve “The Comfortress of Unsuccess.”...

I confess to a great liking for the Indian fashion of name-giving: every man known by that phrase which best expresses him to whoso names him. Thus he may be Mighty-Hunter, or Man-Afraid-of-a-Bear, ac...

East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders. Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far...

By the end of the dry season the water trails of the Carrizo are worn to a white ribbon in the leaning grass, spread out faint and fanwise toward the homes of gopher and ground rat and squirrel. But h...

Fifty-seven buzzards, one on each of fifty-seven fence posts at the rancho El Tejon, on a mirage-breeding September morning, sat solemnly while the white tilted travelers’ vans lumbered down the Cañad...

I remember very well when I first met him. Walking in the evening glow to spy the marriages of the white gilias, I sniffed the unmistakable odor of burning sage. It is a smell that carries far and ind...

It is true I have been in Shoshone Land, but before that, long before, I had seen it through the eyes of Winnenap’ in a rosy mist of reminiscence, and must always see it with a sense of intimacy in th...

When Mr. Harte found himself with a fresh palette and his particular local color fading from the West, he did what he considered the only safe thing, and carried his young impression away to be worked...

It is one of those places God must have meant for a field from all time, lying very level at the foot of the slope that crowds up against Kearsarge, falling slightly toward the town. North and south i...

The mesa trail begins in the campoodie at the corner of Naboth’s field, though one may drop into it from the wood road toward the canyon, or from any of the cattle paths that go up along the streamsid...

“A man,” says Seyavi of the campoodie, “must have a woman, but a woman who has a child will do very well.” That was perhaps why, when she lost her mate in the dying struggle of his race, she never too...

All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel; steep or slow they go up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes otherwhere must dip and cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of the hills open ...

I like that name the Indians give to the mountain of Lone Pine, and find it pertinent to my subject⁠—Oppapago, The Weeper. It sits eastward and solitary from the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and ab...

It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the west to become an irrigating ditch. It would seem the streams are willing. They go as far as they can, or dare, toward the tillable lands i...

Choose a hill country for storms. There all the business of the weather is carried on above your horizon and loses its terror in familiarity. When you come to think about it, the disastrous storms are...

There are still some places in the west where the quails cry “cuidado”; where all the speech is soft, all the manners gentle; where all the dishes have chile in them, and they make more of the Sixteen...