California Desert Trails

by J. Smeaton Chase

Book Overview

In 1916, J. Smeaton Chase, embarked on a journey across the Mojave Desert. Traveling upon horseback in one of the harshest deserts in the world, Chase rode alone for two years! His fascinating... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0935382607
• ISBN13: 9780935382600
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Tioga Pub. Co.
• Length: 387 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Must-Read for California Desert Lovers!

I highly recommend this book to all California desert lovers! It's at once amusing and horrifying how much the California desert has changed in just the 90 or so years since Chase passed through. Unlike John Van Dyke's (The Desert) more poetic and lofty visions of the desert, Chase's observations are a bit more realistic and often offer dreary glimpses of a harsh landscape. I would have given this book five stars were it not for the reproduction: "This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.". There are several pages that are outright missing from my book, and several others that I could not read due to poor scanning. If you're a desert wanderer and lover willing to deal with the imperfections, this book should be in your collection!

Get to Know the Personality of the Desert

Whether you love, hate, or fear the desert, you have never experienced it as you will if you read this book. You may be amazed to find that some of the social, political, economic, and environmental issues associated with the desert were around in similar form nearly a hundred years ago. This beautifully written book will introduce you to the harshness and kindness of the desert in a personal way as you travel through it with Mr. Chase, who traveled in the heat of the summer. Having read the book and written the forward for it, I can say it has changed forever how I look at our amazing California desert.

Overlooked Classic

California Desert Trails is a classic of nature writing from near the turn of the last century, but has remained more of a secret than the subject matter of the book. Chase, a British social worker in Los Angeles, was also a photographer who made a trip in the summer of 1918 to document the region from Palm Springs south through the Anza-Borrego area and from there east to the Imperial Valley and finally to the Colorado River and Yuma. Chase's descriptions of his adventures and the beauty he traveled through put the book in the same genre as Muir and Mary Austin, while the accuracy of his scientific descriptions predate Edmund Jaeger's classic of the same region, "California Deserts", by almost 50 years.The reader is carried along with Chase, and his horse "Kaweah", through the deserts of Southern California before much of what we have come to know the area by existed. Pre-automobile California was much the same as it had been for thousands of years, the home of Indians, native desert animals and plants, and very little else except for breathtaking beauty and solitude. Chase captures this land in a way that few writers before or since have been able to. All this notwithstanding, Chase has been all but forgotten in the century since he wrote California Desert Trails. This is sad considering his ability to describe what he saw: "When the red flood of sunset comes on those great plains and hill slopes, where no other object breaks the far expanse, while the ancient river moves silently on to the lonely gulf and the mysterious sea, and the traveler's steps halt under that old spell of evening, then the dark, upward-pointing finger of the saguaro gives an added solemnity to that impression of the vast, unchanging, and elemental which is the eternal note of the desert."As a chronicle of a California that no longer exists, California Desert Trails strikes me as a fossil; an incredible, poignant preservation of something that once existed but which long ago ceased to be a part of day-to-day life: "A straight white line marked on the desert proved to be a macadamized road which had lately been laid for the benefit of automobilists. This gave notice that I was approaching the settlements of Imperial. Two or three [automobiles] passed us, for there is a fair amount of traffic between San Diego and the now-born towns of the valley." Chase and Kaweah tromp and trudge through places with names that are still in use, but which have changed so much since 1918 that I wonder if the pair would recognize many of them. Here is Palm Springs of that year: "On the morning of starting I had been up since four o'clock, and we got on the move while Palm Springs was yet rubbing its eyes. As we passed the Reservation there came the chatter of orioles breakfasting with nonchalance on old Rosa's early figs at forty cents a pound. The racket, checked while the thieves listened with bored amusement to the rattle of her warning bell, -- a kerosene can with horsesho