
All the Wild and Lonely Places
256 pages
6 x 9
256 pages
6 x 9
Lawrence Hogue
"All the wild and lonely places, the mountain springs are called now. They were not lonely or wild places in the past days. They were the homes of my people." --Chief Francisco Patencio, the Cahuilla of Palm Springs
The Anza-Borrego Desert on California's southern border is a remote and harsh landscape, what author Lawrence Hogue calls "a land of dreams and nightmares, where the waking world meets the fantastic shapes and bent forms of imagination." In a country so sere and rugged, it's easy to imagine that no one has ever set foot there -- a wilderness waiting to be explored. Yet for thousands of years, the land was home to the Cahuilla and Kumeyaay Indians, who, far from being the "noble savages" of European imagination, served as active caretakers of the land that sustained them, changing it in countless ways and adapting it to their own needs as they adapted to it.
In All the Wild and Lonely Places, Lawrence Hogue offers a thoughtful and evocative portrait of Anza-Borrego and of the people who have lived there, both original inhabitants and Spanish and American newcomers -- soldiers, Forty-Niners, cowboys, canal-builders, naturalists, recreationists, and restorationists. We follow along with the author on a series of excursions into the desert, each time learning more about the region's history and why it calls into question deeply held beliefs about "untouched" nature. And we join him in considering the implications of those revelations for how we think about the land that surrounds us, and how we use and care for that land.
"We could persist in seeing the desert as an emptiness, a place hostile to humans, a pristine wilderness," Hogue writes. "But it's better to see this as a place where ancient peoples tried to make their homes, and succeeded. We can learn from what they did here, and use that knowledge to reinvigorate our concept of wildness. Humans are part of nature; it's still nature, even when we change it."
PART I. Introductory
Chapter 1. The View from Garnet Park
Chapter 2. Dos Cabezas: Initiation
Chapter 3. Domelands: Reading the Desert
PART II. Deep Time
Chapter 4. Carrizo Badlands: Walking on the Bottom of the Sea
Chapter 5. Edge of the World: Creation
Chapter 6. Mission Gorge: Fire and Water
Chapter 7. First Grove: Gardens in the Wilderness
PART III. Cowboys and Indians
Chapter 8. Oriflamme Canyon: Bushwhacking with Pedro Fages
Chapter 9. Box Canyon: Soldiers and Forty-niners
Chapter 10. Table Mountain: Cowboys and Their Cows
Chapter 11. Indian Hill: Homeless
PART IV. A Century of Wilderness
Chapter 12. Salton Sea: Taming the Desert
Chapter 13. Seventeen Palms: Our Limits Transgressed
Chapter 14. Ghost Mountain: Bad Days at Yaquitepec
Chapter 15. Red Rock Canyon: The War on the Desert
PART V. Desert at the Millennium
Chapter 16. Horse Canyon: Weeding the Wilderness
Chapter 17. Third Grove: Battle for the Bighorn
Chapter 18. Campo: Reimagining Ancient Traditions
Chapter 19. Whale Peak: The Wilderness Path
Chapter 20. Epilogue: Eyes in the Dark
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index