Grass

I sell fine and rare books from my lair in beautiful, downtown Spray, Oregon. I used to profess cultural anthropology, gender studies and the peoples and cultures of the insular Pacific. I specialized in ethnographies of third-gender traditions and the technologies of transsexualism. I love the study of culture and of the modes of human subsistence.

Sometimes the above congeals in a single book. Merian C. Cooper's Grass, published first in March of 1925, is one of them. Grass is that rare work of travel and exploration that becomes so popular as to be optioned for a Hollywood film, in this case not yet even a talkie, being instead a dramatic, bracing, albeit “silent” film. One of the likely three prior owners of my copy added in fine penned flourish, just inside the front flap, “An astounding drama of migration, with its sights and sounds crystalized."

Indeed. Grass is augmented with 64 black-and-white photographs taken by Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack. He and the intrepid author accompanied the nomadic pastoralist people the Bakhtiari, in cultural anthropological terms, a very large "tribe" of roughly 50,000 men, women and children. The Bakhtiari were then a proud group of “transhumant pastoralists” who moved with their animals and herds--donkeys, horses, mules, goats, sheep and dogs--up and down and across various montane environments to seek water and pasture, game and firewood, moving themselves and their animal herds in a relatively systematic way, year after year, season after season, always coming “home” to a base that was by rights theirs. In Grass as in real life, the Bakhtiari climb and pass over mountain-tops. They ford icy-old streams and rivers rushing with snow-melted water. They cut down timber to make the tent-poles that they then carry with them so as to make portable shelter. They milk and slaughter their animals to sustain themselves along the way, while also breeding them.

Grass, both book and film, centers on and follows Haidar Khan and the rest of the Khan clan and the Bakhtiari and their thousands of animals as they cross the Karun River and over Zard Kuh, a sub-range of the Zagros Mountains. In one scene, the Bakhtiari slaughter goats and sheep so as to remove their stomachs and bladders so as to stitch them together and inflate them so as to make inner-tubes that they cover with stitched-together goat-skins so as to be able to float their children and belongings across the rivers and streams.

Grass, the book, traverses Turkey, Persia (now Iran) and modern-day Khuzestan. Grass, the film, was made and produced by Cooper and Schoedsack and distributed by Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lask. On their trek, author and photographer were joined by Marguerite Elton Harrison Blake (1879–1967), an American socialite and explorer who, early on, founded the Children's Hospital School near Baltimore and who, many decades later, founded the Society of Woman Geographers. Cooper and Schoedsack went on in 1933 to write and produce and distribute King Kong. Culture.

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