The Desert

"Before Van Dyke wrote this book, the general opinion of the desert was that it was a pretty terrible, scary place. People remembered the pioneer parties getting lost as they crossed the Great Basin and eating each other alive, so it was a terrifying place. He was the first person to propose that the Western desert might be beautiful, but it turned out that he was something of a charlatan. He was a Rutgers art professor in the 1880s and a total New York, urban guy. He was the art consultant for one of the railroad barons, and he announced that he’d taken this extraordinary journey across the desert in the heat. He’d battled Indians and coped with thirst and hunger, and brought back this book with incredible visual descriptions of the landscape. It turns out that he had a cousin with a ranch in the area, had taken a train trip to see his cousin, and probably didn’t do anything except a little light riding around the ranch. You notice in the book that it’s totally depopulated, there’s never a mention of another person in the book. It’s just him with his art connoisseur’s eye and the shifting sunlight across the desert landscape. But it is a book that completely changed the American idea of what the Western desert could be, and Sierra Club hikers will still carry it around. It’s a beautifully written book. It is amusing that he slightly faked up the one-man-versus-the-elements story, but it was a book that changed the aesthetics of the desert. Hence the hideous experience of being fact-checked by any major US publication. But he completely got away with it. It was only about a century later that people suggested that he might not have been the daredevil that he claimed to be. Both and neither. The book is a very fine description of things that you can see, but it is oddly bloodless. He claims in the introduction to have had this romantic time, but he doesn’t tell tall stories about Indian fighting for most of the book. He was received uncritically as someone who had gone on a solo journey. And it really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t undermine the book that he had a much more comfy way of visiting the desert than he made up. It’s just this individual connoisseur and his eye. It’s an art critic’s book, which is actually why it became so influential, because it became fashionable to like this landscape."