The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin

When a group of California-bound ``argonauts'' almost perished, crossing Death Valley's wasteland in 1849, the legends of gold and hellish climate instantly achieved lasting interest.i rewrote this sentence; read carefully But modern readers will have problems with these 27 tales: most were written between 1890 and 1910 in the ornate, stilted diction of that era. There's some historical value in a few eye-witness accounts of the '49ers' troubles: John Wells Brier's ``The Argonauts of Death Valley'' and William Lewis Manly's ``Good-Bye Death Valley!'' and ``Charles Alvord.'' The other pieces have curiosity value at best. Sydney Norman's 1908 attack on ``Death Valley Scotty,'' titled ``Chasing Rainbows in Death Valley,'' is longer on spleen than on facts or good writing. Sadly, there isn't much good writing here at all, and without the editors' introductory notes readers would have trouble discerning truth from fable. The final section, on ``Tall Tales,'' dowses for humor and comes up dry. (Nov.)