The Great Central Valley
California's Heartland

Explores the natural and social history of California's agricultural heartland. This book celebrates the tenacious people of the Valley, where hard work and ingenuity are the means to both survival and success.

Johnson's and Dawson's photographs - which are complemented by engravings by Thomas Moran, paintings by Albert Bierstadt and William Hahn, and photographs by Carleton Watkins, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee, among others - bring home to us, as only visual images can, that it is up to us to safeguard the future of this endangered valley, to conserve its extraordinary human and natural wealth, and to try to reclaim some of its lost grandeur.