This author embarked on an intimate ten-year journey exploring and collecting fascinating stories and vast amounts of information about this remote area, and in so doing uncovered many little-known gems of history. She reveals how the Spanish captured Paiute Indian children, brought them across the Old Ute Trail around the western end of Grand Canyon and sold them as slaves, and how Mormons purchased Native children, then claimed to simply indenture and raise them to become “a white and delightsome people.” There are stories of rebellious Indian souls, along with tales of moon-shining in Grand Wash and hilarious pioneer characters. She includes intriguing reports of historic dam surveys and expeditions, river crossings both successful and not, daily lives of families at the old ferry crossings, important archeological surveys, discoveries of mystery mines, the struggles of first settlers.
Yet perhaps most of all, this work vividly illustrates how the very land, itself, ultimately has the sheer power to dictate history, and how the land will continue to do so.
Woven throughout, the author also brings insights into long-contentious issues involving use of the vast public-owned land areas present in the west. She explains how, historically, most were actually lands no one wanted to own and pay taxes on, yet many industries still demanded rights to use resources from these lands, such as harvesting of trees, grazing of cattle, and mining, all while paying small user fees and often leaving the larger expense of maintenance, repair, oversight, and management to designated government agencies funded by the U.S. taxpayer. She brings us to modern-day and shows how conflicts have greatly increased with a much larger variety of users now wanting rights to use and have a say in the future of these public-owned lands.... hikers, photographers, researchers, hunters, preservationists, fishermen, boaters, ATV users, and more.
This is an inclusive work of almost 400 pages, containing nearly 200 historic and descriptive photos and hand-illustrated maps for the area.
Of Norse/Scottish descent, born and raised in the upper rural Midwest, Mary has always had deep empathy for the Earth and its many species. She has also possessed irrepressible curiosity and the need to understand larger patterns while incorporating long-term historical views. At the age of thirty, Mary and her two amalgate Native American children migrated to the west and southwest, a land of mountains, desert, and canyons where Mary had always longed to be. During the 1970's while in Colorado, she became deeply involved with the survival of wolves and other large predators in the wild, animals at that time fast disappearing from vast western landscapes. While living near Lake Mead and western Grand Canyon with her National Park Service Ranger husband, Don McBee, during the early 1970's and again throughout the 1980's, Mary spent years hiking, four-wheel exploring, and intensely researching this remote and fascinating high desert country, all of which resulted in this inclusive work. The author left the Long Shadow lands in 1990 and since has shared time between her native Heartland in Iowa, family, and continued roaming of her beloved Southwest.
