Mary Austin: Kern County Days, 1888-1892

Abstract

Following in the footsteps of the transplanted Midwesterner Mark Twain and Easterners Bret Harte and Charles E Lummis, Mary Austin (1868-1934) attained distinction in American letters by writing of the California frontier. After the death of the father, George Hunter, in 1878, the widow Susan Savilla Hunter put her two older children, James and Mary through Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois, the birthplace of the Hunter children. James Hunter moved to Pasadena in 1887, to be followed the next year by the remainder of his family his mother, his sister, Mary, who graduated from Blackburn in 1888, and a younger brother, George. That same summer the family took up two desolate homesteads in southern Kern County, one mile south and four miles east of the present community of Mettler Station. MaryAustin stayed at the homestead and at Rose Station, seven miles south of Mettler Station, one year. Then leaving the family, she moved to Mountain View Dairy, fifteen miles southwest of Bakersfield, where she served as a private tutor. In May, 1891, she married Stafford Wallace Austin. The following year, after moving to Bakersfield, the couple left for Inyo County, where they resided until 1905. Then, Mary Austin left the California desert, never to return. Material drawn from her Kern County days, which included intermittent visits, 1892-1905, was used in a number of her novels: The Land of Little Rain, 1 sidro , The Flock, Lost Borders, The Arrow Maker, The Ford, The Lands of the Sun, The Children Sing in the Far West, Earth Horizon, and One Smoke Stories approximately one-third of her published works.