In this engaging oral history, residents of California's scenic, sparsely-populated Owens Valley reflect on their varied experiences with the region's turbulent past. Contested themes of Native American removal, water transfers, and wartime internment are interwoven with remembrances of the valley's multicultural communities, its cattle ranching and agriculture, and its Western filmmaking, railroad, and mining enterprises. Together, author and narrators create an accessible and richly textured work of history, memory, and place.

East of the rugged Sierra Nevada in California's Owens Valley lies Manzanar. Founded in 1910 as a fruit-growing colony, it was named in Spanish for the fragrant apple orchards that once filled its
spectacularly scenic landscape. Owens Valley Paiute lived there first, followed by white homesteaders and ranchers. But with the onset of World War II came a new identity as the first of 10 "relocation centers" hastily built in 1942 to house 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, removed from the West Coast. In
the face of upheaval and loss, Manzanar's...

The Owens Valley is a bold and beautiful land where rugged alpine peaks tower over the deep trough of high desert that John Muir called "a country of wonderful contrasts." Inhabiting a rich and complex past are native people, miners, cattlemen, farmers, and city builders who laid claim, often violently, to its resources. By 1913, Owens River water was flowing south through the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and from the long and bitter conflicts that followed emerged an Owens Valley future far removed from the agrarian Eden envisioned by 19th-century pioneers. Today, unparalleled recreational...