A Paradoxical Legacy: Some New Contexts for John C. Van Dyke’s The Desert

Abstract

D A V I D T E A G U E University ofDelaware AParadoxical Legacy: SomeNew Contexts forJohn C.VanDyke’s TheDesert The United States’ deserts have traditionally looked, to AngloAmericans , like unredeemed wastelands. In 1811, one of the first Anglo desert explorers, Zebulon Pike, characterized New Mexico as “a barren wild of poor land, scarcely to be improved by culture” (302). By midcentury , in 1861, Horace Greeley was proclaiming against the desert in more hyperbolic tones, asserting that in what would later become Ne­ vada, “famine sits enthroned, and waves his scepter over a dominion expressly made for him” (231), and as late as 1899, John Burroughs, crossing the Great Basin by train to rendezvous with George Harriman’s Alaskan expedition, was appalled by a badlands in Utah where the “earth seem[ed] to have been flayed alive” and which presented “a spectacle strange and in many ways repellent” (7, 8). But since indigenous cultures had sustained themselves in these “deserts”for as many as 10,000 years, and Hispanic cultures had survived for 300 before Anglos began passing such judgments, the idea of arid land as “barren” and “repellent” appears to be as much culturally as geographically defined. The nineteenth-century American perception of desert as irredeemable wasteland was only one of a long series of human conceptions of the land, and such ideas are subject to radical change. These progressions of ideas are driven, as David Lowenthal has argued, by the fact that “[l]andscapes are formed by landscape tastes. People see their surroundings through preferred and accustomed glasses and tend to make the world over as they see it” (61). The arid landscape of the West and Southwest to which Greeley, Pike, Burroughs, and thousands of other Americans objected was no exception. It had the potential to be “made over” into something more attractive, and at the turn of the twentieth century, John C. Van Dyke 164 Western American Literature undertook this re-making. His The Desert, purportedly written during a three-year solo trek across the Mojave, Colorado, and Sonoran deserts,1 became greatly influential in the United States’ relationship to the arid regions of the Southwest. As the first extended aesthetic treatment of the American deserts written in English, it has provided the model for artistic treatments of the region up to this day. Lawrence Clark Powell goes so far as to posit that “All Southwestern book trails lead to TheDesert byJohn C. Van Dyke” (315). If Powell has overstated the case, he has not done so by much. Years after TheDesertwas published, Edward Everett Ayer, who had first traveled through the Southwest in 1862 as part of Major Fergusson’s California Column, remarked in ajournal entry forJune 9, 1918, “I had been on the desert 30 years before I really had any idea of its grandeur or its beauty” (Ayer “Reminiscences”). Ayer had written Van Dyke a letter two years before advising him that TheDeserthad not only affected him profoundly, it had also struck home with his friend Benjamin Winchell, “Vice President and Traffic Manager of the Union Pacific.” Winchell had sat up until two o’clock reading it and was anxious to go on the Desert again. He had often recognized the feeling that [Van Dyke] expressed, but never had known himself how to express it or put it together. (Van Dyke Scrapbook) It had taken Van Dyke’s book, which came out years after both men’s first desert experiences, to enable them to realize their feelings for the place. TheDesert seems to have affected thousands ofAmericans similarly. It was reprinted fourteen times between 1901 and 1930. It was reprinted in 1976 by the Arizona Historical Society, and in 1980 Peregrine Smith included the book in its “literary naturalists” series, in which form it remains in print, selling about a thousand copies a year (Smith). The book’s influence during its first series of imprints was quite remarkable. It was reviewed not only in the United States, in such magazines as Critic and TheDial (which reviewed both the original 1901 edition and the photographically illustrated 1918 edition), but it was also reviewed in England, in the Athenaeum. The Dial treatments exem...