Marshal South And The Ghost Mountain Chronicles: An Experiment In Primitive Living (Adventures in the Natural and Cultural History)

For 17 years, from 1930 to 1947, poet, artist, and author Marshal South and his family lived on Ghost Mountain—a remote, waterless mountaintop that is today within California’s Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Over a period of nine of those years, South chronicled his family’s controversial primitive lifestyle through popular monthly articles written for Desert Magazine. The articles reflected his passion for the desert while praising its early inhabitants and their lifestyle. Drawing on his poetic skills, SOuth wrote vivid word pictures about the desert—its beauty and natural history—as well as their daily life at Yaquitepec, creating both a very loyal and supportive readership and naysayers who objected to his philosophy and lifestyle. After years of silence Rider South, the eldest of the three children who were raised on Ghost Mountain, and his wife Lucile feel it is time to tell the story and to set the record straight. The book includes their own memories plus all of Marshal South’s Desert Magazine articles and many never-before-published photographs of the family.