Erskine Caldwell got the idea for a series of books about American regions after coming home from covering the German invasion of Russia, and this was the first one out, in 1941. Edwin Corle got the desert — Nevada, Arizona, western Utah, the southeast corner of California — and he was a storyteller before he was a historian, so that’s how he plays it. Death Valley gets the most room. There’s the discovery of Mitchell Caverns under the Providence Mountains, the Mormons trying to build Deseret, a lot of mining that went bad, and a lot of people who walked out into that country and were never accounted for. History sits under all of it, but the yarn comes first. It’s also a snapshot of the desert before the war changed it, which makes it worth more now than when it came out.