The Basket Woman

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A volume of western myths and authentic Indian folk-tales for school use. Cocky young glaciers, contemplative pine trees, resourceful ancient Paiutes, and rabbits too clever for their own good. Through the kindly but mysterious Basket Woman, they all become the companions and teachers of Alan, the young son of homesteaders in early Nevada. The Basket Woman, a keeper of her people's traditions, doesn't simply tell stories: She transports her young friend into powerful mythic tales, where Alan learns the secret of the trees and animals and the wisdom of the people who flourished in this "land of little rain" before the arrival of foreigners from the East. While the stories make delightful and instructive reading for children, on another level they are an intense examination of the dramatic implications of a legacy of conquest upon the land and its native peoples. At eighteen, Mary Austin herself homesteaded in California during a catastrophic drought. These stories were written during her sometimes desperate life as a young mother and wife of a failed water developer in the region east of the Sierra Nevada. The proceeds of their publication in eastern magazines and later as a school text kept Austin's bankrupt family going.