UNLIMITED Audiobooks and eBooks

Over 40,000 books & works on all major devices

Get ALL YOU CAN for FREE for 30 days!

The Basket Woman

Mary Hunter Austin

How does All You Can Books work?

All You Can Books gives you UNLIMITED access to over 40,000 Audiobooks, eBooks, and Foreign Language courses. Download as many audiobooks, ebooks, language audio courses, and language e-workbooks as you want during the FREE trial and it's all yours to keep even if you cancel during the FREE trial. The service works on any major device including computers, smartphones, music players, e-readers, and tablets. You can try the service for FREE for 30 days then it's just $19.99 per month after that. So for the price everyone else charges for just 1 book, we offer you UNLIMITED audio books, e-books and language courses to download and enjoy as you please. No restrictions.

Book Excerpt: 
. . .s here and ropes of white clematis tangled over thickets of brier rose. Low down the ravine broadens out to inclose a meadow the width of a lark's flight, blossomy and wet and good. Here the stream ran once in a maze of soddy banks and watered all the ground, and afterward ran out at the cañon's mouth across the mesa in a wash of bone-white boulders as far as it could. That was not very far, for it was a slender stream. It had its source really on the high crests and hollows of Oppapago, in the snow banks that melted and seeped downward through the rocks; but the stream did not know any more of that than you know of what happened to you before you were born, and could give no account of itself except that it crept out from under a great heap of rubble far up in the cañon of the Piñon Pines. And because it had no pools in it deep enough for trout, and no trees on its borders but gray nut pines; because, try as it might, it could never get across. . . Read More

Community Reviews

Interesting because it was written last century in the aughts by a white woman who was a botanist and could see what was happening to the land and indigenous communities. A voice that pointed out a lot for her time. And some captivating descriptions of plants in their habitats.

Though this set of short stories doesn't have the flow of her other work, I really enjoyed the environmentalist overtones embodied in abiotic systems, as exemplified in "The Cheerful Glacier." She also promotes a vision of how it could have been had whites in the west used a little less gunpowder. E

Mary Austin wrote The Basket Woman: A Book Of Indian Tales as a kind of sequel to her masterpiece, The Land of Little Rain. Both books deal with the things she learned, mostly from the local Paiute Indians at the nearby campoodie in the Eastern Sierras.

She lived in Independence, California, not far

By "Indian" refers to people who are Native American not people from the subcontinent of India.