The Heritage of the Desert

By: Zane Grey

Narrated by: Jim Roberts

Jack Hare is a young New Englander who has decided to travel to the West. He is rescued from sure death in the Utah desert by an old settler named August Naab, a Mormon patriarch. Jack is taken to Nabb's ranch and learns that it can be a dangerous place, since it is challenged by cattle thieves and a corrupt rancher who is after Naab's water rights. The greatest danger Hare faces, though, is over Mescal, a half-Navajo shepherdess with whom he falls in love. She is already promised in marriage to Naab's firstborn son. Hare must find a way to stop the marriage without killing the son of his benefactor. Mescal runs away as her solution to the problem, and Jack heads out after her. On the way back, a gun battle with rustlers brings the story to an incredible conclusion.

Public Domain (P)2015 Jimcin Recordings

Who cast this narrator?!

There is something jarringly distracting about having a classic western read by somebody with a thick New England accent. I’m FROM New England so it should have eventually faded into the background, but it was so incongruous that at first I thought it was a speech impediment, and every tome he dropped an “r” or pronounced “got” as “gut” it pulled me right out of the story. The robotic “radio voice” reading that sounded dramatic but didn’t actually track with the emotional tone of the words didn’t help either. Classic example of how the WRONG narrator can ruin everything.