In the obituary she wrote for the Saturday Review of Literature, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant described Mary Austin as “the leading literary figure of the Southwestern world, and perhaps the most monumental of our American women writers.”1 Austin, the author of more than thirty successful books was an early nature writer who explored the western landscape and her relationship to it in books including The Land of Little Rain (1903) and California: The Land of the Sun (1914). Her work helped to define a popular conception of the American Southwest. Of The Land of Journeys’ End (1924), a New York Times critic noted that Austin’s text was “written out of such knowledge of the region, its characteristics and inhabitants as, possibly, is shared by no other general writer, and with an understating, love and sympathy that tip her pen with flame and color.”2