The Desert Odyssey of John C. Van Dyke

T The desert has gone a-begging for a word of praise these many years. It never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover!" -John C. Van Dyke The Desert, 1901

During several centuries, the great sweep of Southwestern deserts was a perilous obstacle to man's efforts to reach the golden lands that bordered the Pacific. Not until late in the 18th century did Spain succeed in sending colonists overland to the coast from what is now southern Arizona. That first expedition went on upcoast from southern California to Monterey and the founding of San Francisco. Its success came from good planning, able leadership, and travel in the cool of winter. This was the heroic Anza expedition of 1775-76, composed of 240 men, women, and children, their supplies and livestock. In the annals of the American West only the Lewis and Clark expedition can rival it. Desert, river, dunes, and mountains were vanquished without the loss of life, yet so unattractive was the route that none tarried there nor returned to colonize the wastes. Today in California, descendants of those first immigrants still bear the proud names of their mother country. Those Americans who rushed overland by the thousands, following the discovery of gold in California, were pitifully unprepared to cross the desert. Many perished from winter's cold or summer's heat or from Indian attack, Whatever route was taken, it was a place to cross as quickly as possible. The deadliest passages lay along the California-Nevada border, centered on what was aptly named Death Valley, and on the Arizona-Sonora border from Sonoita, southwest of Tucson, to Yuma on the Colorado, a 200-mile stretch of virtually waterless sandy waste christened by the first Spaniards El Camino del Diablo, (The Road of the Devil). Even to this day, grave sites may be seen along this deadly way which Anza wisely avoided in leading his colonists along the Gila River trail to the north. Thus the desert won the bad name it long held. Only a few hardy prospectors ventured to roam its expanse. The sole inhabitants were the native Indians, from the Paiutes in the north and the Mojaves and Yumas of the Colorado River to the Pimas and Papagos of southern Arizona and Sonora. Only in modern times was the desert made comfortably habitable. Desert literature consisted of explorers' and trappers' diaries, the reports of government expeditions, and railroad surveys. A hundred years lay between the Anza

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expedition and the first railways. Not until the turn of the century was the desert seen as a place of beauty - a stern and dangerous place, it is true, and armed with thorn, fang, and thirst, yet still a vast expanse of beauty, wonder, and healing. Such a first celebrant was John C. Van Dyke, art critic and author, whose book, The Desert, was published in September 1901. It was a small edition that went through many reprints to win a readership far beyond the expectations of author or publisher. For more than 30 years this modest volume of 233 pages, containing only a single photographic illustration and no map or index, maintained its place as the cornerstone on which subsequent desert literature has been based. So many editions of The Desert were published that it has always been readily found in second-hand bookstores and libraries. A new edition appeared in 1976, followed in 1980 by a paperback edition. Of the things that keep a book alive past the time of its first publication, the vitality of its prose is probably the most important. The desert's impact of form and color stirred Van Dyke to his depths and lent his writing the strength and passion that the reader feels to this day: "...what tongue shall tell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it, the poetry of its wide-spread chaos, the sublimity of its lonely desolation! And who shall paint the splendor of its light; and from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the moon over the iron mountains, the glory of its wondrous coloring! It is a gaunt land of splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies. And at every step there is the suggestion of the fierce, the defiant, the defensive.... "The desert air is practically colored air. Several times from high mountains I have seen it lying below me like an enormous tinted cloud or veil. A similar veiling of pink, lilac, or pale yellow is to be seen in the gorges of the Grand Canyon; it stretches across the Providence Mountains at noonday and is to be seen about the peaks and packed in the valleys at sunset; it is dense down in the Coahuila Basin; it is denser from range to range across the hollow of Death Valley; and it tinges the whole face of the Painted Desert in Arizona. In its milder manifestations it is always present, and during the summer months its appearance is often startling....

"I was already ill [with a respiratory ailment in 1898]" Van Dyke wrote in his unpublished biography, "and went into the open of the desert to get well. Many of my days in there were ill days. But I kept busy making notes and studying vegetation and animals. Why did I go alone? Because I could find no one to go with me. They were all afraid of-nothing!" Twenty years later, he remembered that first summer on the desert as one of strange wanderings "... the memory of them comes back to me now mingled with halfobliterated impressions of white light, lilac air, heliotrope mountains, blue sky. I cannot well remember the exact route of the odyssey, for I kept no record of my movements. I was not travelling by map. I was wandering for health and desert information. I was just drifting with the wind, but even drifting in southwest Arizona I found

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rather difficult. The hills held mighty little water, and the desert valleys stretched out into enormous wastes. More than once I was tempted to turn north and make a bee-line for the Southern Pacific Railroad. But we worried on a little further, with short rations of food and water, picking up rabbits and quail and slashing into cactus for wet pulp. Even the dog finally tackled the bitter pulp and the horse ate the joints of cholla after I had beaten off the spines. But the region was too dry, and in less than a week, I made a push north for the railway. We got there pretty well exhausted, and after following along it for I know not how many miles, we found a siding with some tank cars upon it. We topped the tanks and camped in the shade of the cars for twenty-four hours. Then we moved on along the line to Casa Grande and Tucson."

The book was roughed out, Van Dyke recalled, during that first summer of 1898 "...when I lay with my back against a rock or propped up in the sand." It was finished after he had made other trips deep into Sonora and as far south as Oaxacawith backtracking to northern Arizona and the Mojave Desert where his older brother Theodore had begun ranching near Barstow and where the younger man first met John Muir. He even wandered up the redwood coast into Oregon with only his dog for company. He confessed to a profound need to get away from the herd. His odyssey covered parts of the four years 1898-1901.

In spite of the odds against him, Van Dyke survived to experience and complete his book, and it lives and is read to this day. It was done because he obeyed the basic laws of desert survival: abstinence and endurance. We can see now from our long look back why so few have come near his achievement, its authority, grace, and lasting readership.

To go back, on that first visit to Tucson while resting up, Van Dyke consulted authorities at the new Arizona Territorial University for verification of his own observations. They were Robert H. Forbes, professor of agricultural chemistry, and William P. Blake, head of the School of Mines and Territorial Geologist. Thanks to them appear in a footnote to The Desert. Upon receiving a copy, Professor Forbes sent several corrections to Van Dyke. They appear in all subsequent printings.

By February, 1901, Van Dyke had finished the book, having added materials from his observations in northern Arizona and in the high Mojave Desert of California. At a Sonoran ranchería 30 miles north of Hermosillo called La Noria Verde (green well-pump), where he was wont to board his horse, he dated his Preface-Dedication, then went on over the Sierra Madre into Chihuahua. Beyond the Rio Grande at Del Rio in Texas, he mailed the manuscript to his publisher in New York, with these prophetic words: "It's a whole lot better than the swash which today is being turned out as 'literature.' And it will sell too, but not up in the hundreds of thousands. It is not so bad as that. My audience is only a few thousand, thank God!" Today, 81 years later, that audience is still growing.

Thus far I have accounted for how The Desert resulted from its author's long preparation in living and skill in writing. What of the book itself, its form, content, and style? Van Dyke judged his accomplishment in these words: "The writing was done under difficulties of heat, wind, dust-done with my back against a rock in a double sense. I was still far from well, and suffered greatly from depression. To write cheerfully under the circumstances was not easy. Readers and reviewers told me it was my best work, was a prose poem, and praised it for its style. If they had in mind the definition that style is the order and movement of one's sentences, then I suppose I paid some attention to its style, but I take it they meant 'fine writing' and an occasional purple patch. What really was of value in the book was the material which I had gathered at first hand. I knew my subject. When one has that, it is not necessary to bother about style. The book tells itself, and because of its peculiar knowledge, it dictates its own style."

(Right) Wind-spawned desert dunes near Yuma. Common in most of the great deserts of the world, they absorb rainfall which helps raise the level of the water table, producing oases in some areas. Josef Muench (Below) Shaded areas indicate that much of Arizona is desert land, one distinctly different from the other. (Following panel, pages 8-9) With all its fury unleashed, a summer thunderstorm explodes over the desert. Josef Muench

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Let's sample the book's 12 short chapters. From the opening, "The Approach," Van Dyke's vision of the land appears to be determined by the configuration and lay of the land, by its essential form. "What was the attraction, wherein the fascination?" he asks and answers his own question: "There is a simplicity about large masses-simplicity in breadth, space and distance that is inviting and ennobling. And there is something very restful about the horizontal line. Things that lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peaceful with them. Furthermore, the waste places of the earth, the barren deserts, the tracts forsaken of men and given over to loneliness, have a peculiar attraction of their own. The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love."

Although the Indians and the first Jesuit missionaries of the 17th and 18th centuries are referred to, people play no part in Van Dyke's scenario. Today's desert urbanization would send him running for the Sahara. Although ill, he was not a social refugee nor a misanthrope. John Van Dyke and Joseph Wood Krutch share a belief that the desert does not need people to enhance its appeal. Both believed that wildness and society are incompatible, as evidenced today in such once-remote places as Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon.

In his second chapter, "The Make of the Desert," Van Dyke observes that the sands of the desert come from the wearing down of the mountain ranges, chiefly by the wind and blowing sand. "Grain by grain," he continues, "the vast foundations, the beetling escarpments, the high domes in air are crumbled away and drifted into valleys. Nature heaved up these mountains at one time to fulfil a purpose: she is now taking them down to fulfil another purpose. If she has not water to work with here as elsewhere she is not baffled of her purpose. Wind and sand answer quite as well."

What at first seems to him to be a silent land at repose appears at closer study to be a place of fierce struggle. "The feeling of fierceness grows upon you as you come to know the desert better. The sun-shafts are falling in a burning shower upon rock and dune, the winds blowing with the breath of far-off fires are withering the bushes and the grasses, the sands drifting higher and higher are burying the trees and reaching up as though they would overwhelm the mountains, the cloud-bursts are rushing down the mountain's side and through the torn arroyos as though they would wash the earth into the sea. The life, too, on the desert is peculiarly savage. It is a show of teeth in bush and beast and reptile. At every turn one feels the presence of the barb and thorn, the jaw and paw, the beak and talon, the sting and the poison thereof. There is no living in concord or brotherhood here. Everything is at war with its neighbor, and the conflict is unceasing."

Van Dyke's sense of color is equally strong with his feeling for form. Here his art background is the most apparent. "Plain upon plain leads up and out to the horizon-far as the eye can see-in undu-lations of gray and gold; ridge upon ridge melts into the blue of the distant sky in lines of lilac and purple; fold upon fold over the mesas the hot air drops its veil-ings of opal and topaz. Yes; it is the kingdom of sun-fire. For every color in the scale is attuned to the key of flame, every air-wave comes with the breath of flame, every sunbeam falls as a shaft of flame. There is no questioning who is sovereign in these dominions."

Today's travelers to the Colorado Desert from Southern California follow the route taken by Van Dyke. Through the windswept pass of San Gorgonio they are funneled into the Coachella Valley dominated by the new urban communities of Palm Springs, Indio and their satellites, and by the Salton Sea.

Although when Van Dyke first came, the great 1906 breakthrough of the Colorado River that reformed the immemorial Salton Sea was not anticipated, he observed in "The Bottom of the Bowl" where earlier breakthroughs had left their water-marks on the mountains' feet.

In 1898 what proved a disastrous diversion project was already in the first stag-es. Van Dyke took a dim view of all rec-lamation projects, believing (mistakenly, as it proved) that desert irrigation would change the climate of Southern Califor-nia. The change came years later with people and industry.

Patterns of desert life: The ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens) is a thorny, scarlet-flowered member of the sandal-wood family. The scorpion, an arachnid of the order Scorpionida, has a painful sting not usually fatal to man. The Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum) is slow and clumsy and, though venomous, rather shy and retiring.

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Van Dyke spoke out eloquently against the destruction of our natural resources by unbridled development. His was the long view of history. "Nothing human is of long duration," he wrote. "Men and their deeds are obliterated, the race itself fades; but Nature goes calmly on with her projects. She works not for man's enjoyment but for her own satisfaction and her own glory. She made the fat lands of the earth with all their fruits and flowers and foliage; and with no less care she made the desert with its sands and cacti. She intended that each should remain as she made it. When the locust swarm has passed, the flowers and grasses will return to the valley; when man is gone, the sand and the heat will come back to the desert. The desolation of the kingdom will live again, and down in the Bottom of the Bowl the opalescent mirage will waver skyward on wings of light, serene in its solitude, though no human eye sees nor human tongue speaks its loveliness." From such somber thoughts he turned in his next chapter to "The Silent River." From the clear water of the upper basin, through the Grand Canyon to the siltladen water of the lower reaches and the delta, the Colorado awed Van Dyke by its sullen power.

(Left and below) Faunal dwellers in the desert find the region's spiney plants excellent homesites: A mourning dove (Zenaidura macroura) has built its nest in a giant saguaro (Cereus giganteus), while a roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) has selected a chain-fruit cholla to rest in. (Right) A rising sun illuminates a hedgehog cactus bloom (Echinocereus).

He met its challenge when he came to cross the river near the Mexican border below Yuma. "There I met a few Yuma Indians living along the river. We 'howed' and I talked a good deal of sign language about water east of the river. After some miles of river surveying, I found a place where we could cross with a little swimming. I made a raft of reeds and driftwood, and took all of my supplies over on that, and then swam back for the horse. The river was very low, but I would not risk my supplies on the horse's back. The route then lay down toward the mouth of the river, and then east along the Arizona boundary lines."

When he came to write on "Light, Air, and Color," Van Dyke was completely in his element. No one has matched Van Dyke's sensitivity and vocabulary in writing of what makes the desert so instantly recognizable.

"Desert air is not quite like the plateau air of Wyoming," he began his argument, "though one can see through it for many leagues. It is not thickened by moisture particles, for its humidity is almost nothing; but the dust particles, carried upward by radiation and the winds, answer a similar purpose. They parry the sunshaft, break and color the light, increase the density of the envelope. Dust is always present in the desert air in some degree, and when it is at its maximum with the heat and winds of July, we see the air as a blue, yellow, or pink haze. This haze is not seen so well at noonday as at evening when the sun's rays are streaming through the canyons, or at dawn when it lies in the mountain shadows and reflects the blue sky. Nor does it muffle or obscure so much as the moisture-laden mists of Holland, but it thickens the air perceptibly and decreases in measure the intensity of the light. Those who would describe day's end on the desert had best not read Van Dyke in passages such as this: "I have seen at sunset, looking north from Sonora some twenty miles, the whole tower-like shaft of Baboquívari change from blue to topaz and from topaz to glowing red in the course of a half hour. I do not mean edgings or rims or spots of these colors upon the peak, but the whole upper half of the mountain completely changed by them. The red color gave the peak the appearance of hot iron, and when it finally died out the dark dull hue that came after was like that of a clouded garnet."

Desert Odyssey

"Desert Sky and Clouds" follows naturally, and here again we encounter the prose of a master: "The more brilliant sunsets are only seen when there are broken translucent clouds in the west. There are cloudy days even on the desert. After many nights of heat, long skeins of white stratus will gather along the horizons, and out of them will slowly be woven forms of the cumulus and the nimbus. And it will rain in short squalls of great violence on the lomas, mesas, and bordering mountains. But usually the cloud that drenches a mountain top eight thousand feet up will pass over an intervening valley, pouring down the same flood of rain, and yet not a drop of it reaching the ground. The air is always dry and the raindrop that has to fall through eight thousand feet of it before reaching the earth, never arrives. It is evaporated and carried up to its parent cloud again. During the so-called 'rainy season' you may frequently see clouds all about the horizon and overhead that are 'raining' -letting down long tails and sheets of rain that are plainly visible; but they never touch the earth. The sheet lightens, breaks, and dissipates two thousand feet up. It rains, true enough, but there is no water, just as there are desert rivers, but they have no visible stream." Thus, Van Dyke observed, the desert is both terrestrial and aerial. In "Illusions" Van Dyke writes of desert mirages, then leads on to chapters on vegetation, animal and bird life, all acutely witnessed and described. Adapt or perish is his recurrent theme. Even as Krutch, half a century later, was intrigued by desert creatures' ability to survive on minute amounts of moisture, so Van Dyke marveled at the way each species has adapted to survive in the fierce competition of desert life.

Yet there is one quality more general than special since almost everything possesses it," he concludes, "and that is ferocity-fierceness. The strife is desperate; the supply of food and moisture is small, the animal is very hungry and thirsty. What wonder then that there is the determination of the starving in all desert life! Everything pursues or is pursued. Every muscle is strung to the highest tension. The bounding deer must get away; the swift-following wolf must not let him. The gray lizard dashes for a ledge of rock like a flash of light; but the bayonet bill of the road-runner must catch him before he gets there. Neither can afford to miss his mark. And that is perhaps the reason why there is so much development in special directions, so much fitness for a particular purpose, so much equipment for the doing or the avoiding of death. Because the wild cat cannot afford to miss his quarry, therefore is he made a something that seldom does miss."

This account of desert animals is concluded by a peroration on desert beauty: "Even the classic idea of beauty, which regards only the graceful in form or movement or the sensuous in color, finds types among these desert inhabitants. The dullest person in the arts could not but see fine form and proportion in the panther, graceful movement in the antelope, and charm of color in all the pretty rock squirrels. For myself, being somewhat prejudiced in favor of this drear waste and its savage progeny, I may confess to having watched the flowing movements of snakes, their coil and rattle and strike, many times and with great pleasure; to having stretched myself for hours upon granite bowlders (sic) while following the play of indigo lizards in the sand; to having traced with surprise the slightly changing skin of the horned toad produced by the reflection of different colors held near him. I may also confess that common as is the jack-rabbit he never bursts away in speed before me without being followed by my wonder at his graceful mystery of motion; that the crawl of a wild cat upon game is something that arrests and fascinates by its masterful skill; and that even that desert tramp, the coyote, is entitled to admiration for the graceful way he can slip through patches of cactus. The fault is not in the subject. It is not vulgar or ugly. The trouble is that we perhaps have not the proper angle of vision. If we understood all, we should admire all."

tion for the graceful way he can slip through patches of cactus. The fault is not in the subject. It is not vulgar or ugly. The trouble is that we perhaps have not the proper angle of vision. If we understood all, we should admire all."

Whether conducting a gallery tour in the museums of Europe, as he was wont to do in summers before and after his desert years, or expanding on the beauty of nature as observed on his desert odyssey, Van Dyke looked upon beauty with objective impartiality: "We may prefer the sunlight to the starlight, the evening primrose to the bisnaga, the antelope to the mountain lion, the mocking-bird to the lizard; but to say that one is good and the other bad, that one is beautiful and the other ugly, is to accuse Nature herself of preference-something which she never knew. She designs for the cactus of the desert as skillfully and as faithfully as for the lily of the garden."

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His final chapters, "Mesas and Foothills" and "Mountain-Barriers," frame the middle parts on the lower lands, together with his opening sections on the approach and the making of the desert. His perception of the desert's configuration is crystalline, derived always from firsthand observation and not from topographic (Below) Vulpes macrotis, or kit fox, is a dog-shaped carnivore with a bushy tail. It is 31 inches in length and may weigh up to three pounds when fully grown. (Bottom) The peccary (Dicotyles tajacu), also called javelina, is a pig-like artiodactyle (hooved mammal) that lives in bands of three to 20, and may grow to 37 inches in length and weigh 60 pounds fully grown. (Opposite page) A giant saguaro forest in the Rincon Mountains east of Tucson.

maps. Here is how he perceives the land: "The word mesa (table), by local usage in Mexico and in the western United States, is applied to any flat tract of ground that lies above an arroyo or valley, as well as to the flat top of a mountain. In a broad, if somewhat strained use of the word, it also means the great table-lands and elevated plains lying between a river-valley and the mountain confines on either side of it. The mesas are the steps or benches that lead upward from the river to the mountain, though the resemblance to benches is not always apparent because of the cuttings and washings of intermittent streams and the breakings and crossings of mountain-spurs."

And he continues, "As you rise up from the Colorado Desert, crossing the river to the east, you meet with a great plain or so-called mesa that extends far across Southern Arizona and Sonora almost up to the Continental Divide. It is broken by short ranges of barren mountains that have the general trend of the main Sierra Madre, and it looks so much like the country to the west of the river that it is usually recognized as a part of the desert, or at the least 'desert country.'"

His odyssey gave Van Dyke a new perspective on his profession as an art critic, and a better evaluation of the Old World romantic view of nature: "Doctor Johnson, who occasionally went into the country to see his friends, but never to see the country, who thought a man demented who enjoyed living out of town; and who cared for a tree only as firewood or lumber, what would he have had to say about the desert and its confines? In his classic time, and in all the long time before him, the earth and the beauty thereof remained comparatively unnoticed and unknown. Scott, Byron, Hugo-not one of the old romanticists ever knew Nature except as in some strained way symbolic of human happiness or misery. Even when the naturalists of the last half of the 19th century took up the study, they were impressed at first only with the large and more apparent beauties of the world-the Alps, the Niagaras, the Grand Canyons, the panoramic views from mountain-tops. They never would have tolerated the desert for a moment."

Nevertheless, Van Dyke ended The Desert with a grand look from on high, an ending which again reveals the sense of form which he gave his book. As he began by coming to the desert from the higher elevation of the San Gorgonio Pass, so does he end by an ascent of the great granite mountain of San Jacinto, toiling up from the Bottom of the Bowl through the successive life zones of creosote (which he calls greasewood), juniper, and pine to snow flowers and a vast view over the coastal plain to the blue ocean. And a farewell look back from whence he came: "Come to the eastern side of the peak and look out once more upon the desert while yet there is time. The afternoon sun is driving its rays through the passes like the sharp-cut shafts of search-lights, and the shadows of the mountains are lengthening in distorted silhouette upon the sands below. Yet still the San Bernardino range, leading off southeast to the Colorado River, is glittering with sunlight at every peak. You are above it and can see over its crests in any direction. The vast sweep of the Mojave lies to the north; the Colorado with its old sea-bed lies to the south. Far away to the east you can see the faint forms of the Arizona mountains melting and mingling with the sky; and in between lie the long pink rifts of the desert valleys and the lilac tracery of the desert ranges."

Recognition of how it was that John C. Van Dyke came to be the first and best writer to praise the desert began in 1951 with Franklin Walker's A Literary History of Southern California which led in turn to the present writer's research published in Westways in 1972 and in his book Southwest Classics two years later. What had long puzzled many readers as to how an eastern art critic could have written such a landmark book was no longer a mystery.

years. It never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover." Here was a new voice from the wastes!

In the early 1950s, when talking with Edwin Corle about the introduction I was to write to a new edition of his Fig Tree John, an enduring novel of the Coachella Valley, he remarked, "We desert writers are forever in the debt of John Van Dyke. He saw it first and said it best. The mys-tery is how a tenderfoot dude could have come out here from the east and broken a trail the rest of us have been following every since." At that time, I had no answer for him.

Soon after that, I had a similar testimonial from Dr. Ross Calvin, an Episcop-al minister and author of Sky Determines, a beautiful book about New Mexico's heavenly weather. "You must know," he wrote, "although few others do nowadays, the grand book which gave me my first introduction to the desert. It was the work of an eastern art critic-of all people-who lectured long ago at Harvard and Prince-ton. His name? John C. Van Dyke. The book? Simply The Desert, Scribner, 1901. What a color vocabulary he had! And he knew with surprising accuracy many of the plants and animals of the wastes. But above all, how sensitive he was to desert light and air!"

These pages could be filled with similar testimony to Van Dyke's achievement. Two more examples are especially pertinent. In a single day, I heard tributes by two dissimilar Arizonans who share a love for the desert. Dr. William G. McGinnies, director emeritus of the University of Ari-zona's Arid Lands Studies, underlined Van Dyke's botanical authority, while Joseph

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Stacey, then editor of Arizona Highways, declared that he looked upon Van Dyke as the most inspirational of desert writers. All of this made me determined to find out how come? How did such unlikely qualifications enable a writer to produce a masterpiece of Southwestern desert literature which has never been surpassed in authority and beauty?

Well known is Doctor Johnson's assertion that a man will turn over an entire library in order to write a single book. This I was prepared to do if necessary; and it was a mighty big library in which I found myself! At that time the UCLA library had already exceeded 3 million volumes.

As an old library hand, I was prepared to cope with cobwebs, dust, and cranky readers. I went first to Who Was Who in America, figuring that by 1972 Professor Van Dyke was undoubtedly deceased. There I read that he had died in 1932 at the age of 76. He was born in New Jersey of a Dutch colonial family (dike-dwellers in the old country), was educated at Rutgers and Columbia (law degree); professor of art history and librarian of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary; author of 35 books on art, nature, and such diverse subjects as New York City, the evils of money, and the editorship (ghost writing?) of Andrew Carnegie's autobiography, plus travel books on the West Indies, Egypt, and Java.

There is only one basic test to administer a library: does it have the book you want when you want it? I found UCLA held virtually all of Van Dyke's prolific output, lacking only a privately-printed family history which I obtained from the Library of Congress in a Xerox copy.

After a week's reading spree, I sorted out my notes and brought them into focus. They reconfirmed what I had long known: no authoritative, lasting work is ever a casual, chance product. Written in the prime of Van Dyke's early 40s, The Desert was the result of long preparation and wide experience as a writer and observer - it was the 11th of his 35 volumes - and its desert fieldwork had been made possible by Van Dyke's youth having been spent in strenuous outdoor experiences in Minnesota, Wyoming, and MinMinnesota, Wyoming, and Montana.

"There is a simplicity about large masses-simplicity in breadth, space and distancethat is inviting and ennobling. And there is something very restful about the horizontal line. Things that lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peaceful with them. Furthermore, the waste places of the earth, the barren deserts, the tracts forsaken of men and given over to loneliness, have a peculiar attraction of their own. The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love!"

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prairie, river, and mountain, making real what a childhood atlas had labeled "Unexplored." From the Sioux he learned things of nature-hunting, fishing, canoeing -that proved invaluable years later when he set out on his desert odyssey.

Thus did John Van Dyke prove to be far from the dude described by Edwin Corle. Although subsequently schooled in aesthetics and the law, he was no unseasoned newcomer to the frontier. His outdoor preparation was similar to that experienced by Theodore Roosevelt on his way to the presidency via the Dakota Badlands.

When Van Dyke fell ill with a respiratory ailment, his oldest brother, Theodore, who had settled in Southern California and become a writer and water engineer, persuaded John to join him in Los Angeles. "The city was not much of a city in 1898," we read in the unpublished autobiography preserved at Rutgers, "and it did not impress me in any way. In a few days I went out toward the Cahuenga Pass so as to be nearer the wild of the Santa Monica mountains. From my brother I got some buckskin of his own shooting and tanning and made some moccasins after a Sioux pattern which I had not forgotten. It proved too close to civilization for me, not wild enough, and as spring came on, I went up to Hemet, at the foot of the San Jacinto mountains."

Even that proved too tame for Van Dyke, and after picking up a fox terrier and an Indian pony, he succumbed to the lure of the desert. Let him tell it in his own words: "Not far away was the San Gorgonio Pass, leading out to the Colorado Desertthe desert that everyone talked about but very few had ever seen. Tales came in from every quarter about its heat, its drifty sand, its dust storms; about its few wells and they poisoned by copper, its lost mines and miners, its human skeletons and bleached bones of horses found in the sand; about perils of prospectors and emigrants who had perished in the waste coming over from Yuma. It was a place to be avoided. Everyone that went in there eventually got caught up with. At least that was the warning that came to me when I talked of exploring the region. I would never come out, either alive or dead.

"But I was just ill enough not to care about perils and morbid enough to prefer dying in the sand, alone, to passing out in a hotel with a room-maid weeping at the foot of the bed. I laughed at all of the tales and set to work preparing a light outfit for desert travel. This consisted of a 30-30 rifle for large game, and a small Chicopee .22 calibre pistol for small game; a camping kit of light blankets, hatchet, small shovel, a few pans and tin cups, a gallon of water in a canvas bottle, and several sacks of condensed food. I made my condensation by grinding bunches of parched corn, beans, coffee, chocolate, and dried venison. I packed this closely in shot sacks. This was my mainstay in case of disaster. It would last me for weeks without another item of any sort. Except water. But, in addition, I took along with me some tablets of chocolate, some flour and bacon, salt, tea, and a small bottle of saccharine. My whole outfit, to last me for weeks, weighed less than fifty pounds."

In addition to my discovery of his autobiography, a book of Van Dyke's nature essays, The Open Spaces, published 20 years after The Desert, also proved a rich source of information about the background of his masterpiece. Both were obviously unknown to those who had puzzled over Van Dyke's achievement.

I found myself reflecting upon the sad fate of a writer whose books are soon forgotten, even in his lifetime. Today, save for The Desert, the many works of Van Dyke's lifetime of study, travel, lecturing, and writing are unread save by zealots such as I. Even a subsequent book on the Grand Canyon has been all but washed away in the flood of Canyon literature with its emphasis on the photographic.

I turned to a microfilm of the New York Times for December 6, 1932, the day after John Van Dyke's death in St. Luke's Hospital after an emergency operation. The obituary of the lifelong bachelor waslong and generous, and marked by testimonials from Walter Damrosch, Governor Wilbur Cross of Connecticut, Professors Brander Mathews of Columbia and William Lyon Phelps of Yale, and the painter Childe Hassam, although most of the space was given to the international sensation caused by Van Dyke's recent book on Rembrandt in which he declared that of a thousand examples of the artist's work held by museums, no more than 50 were genuine. Of Van Dyke's masterpiece there was no mention. Forty-four years were to pass before The Desert came back into print.

Desert Odyssey

Author's note: The Desert was first published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York in 1901. Subsequent editions contain the author's corrections.

Beginning with the edition of 1915, The Desert was illustrated from desert photographs by J. Smeaton Chase. The last edition in Van Dyke's lifetime appeared in 1930 with additional "Desert Notes" by his nephew Dix Van Dyke, son of Theodore.

In 1976 the Arizona Historical Society, 949 East Second Street, Tucson, AZ 85719, published a facsimile of the corrected edition of 1903, with an Introduction by Lawrence Clark Powell and map by Don Bufkin. This hardbound edition is in print at $10.00.

In 1980 Peregrine Smith, Inc. of Salt Lake City, Utah, fascimiled the uncorrected first edition of 1901, with an Introduction by Richard Shelton. This paperback is in print at $3.45 and is one of that publisher's series on the Literature of the American Wilderness.

Heaved up, faulted, torn, and inundated by one of the greatest floods of the prehistoric Mesozoic era, Monument Valley today is a magic land of timelessness, color, and legend.