[In the following, Wallace provides a favorable assessment of People of the Valley.]

People of the Valley is not a novel for every one. One can scarcely imagine its rocketing into the best-seller class, and probably it would not, without a great deal of expert tinkering by script writers, make a very good moving picture. It has a certain familiar Steinbeck quality—earthy, ribald, honest, sharply observed and profoundly human. But where [John] Steinbeck likes to draw from his observation a sociological lesson, fairly specific and easily ingested, Frank Waters concerns himself with values of an altogether different order, with fundamental moral values at once as simple and as incomprehensible as faith itself.

Accordingly he demands rather more from his reader than Mr. Steinbeck. In spite of this, or conceivably because of it, there is much here to stimulate and reward the imagination. Readers who are content to take the primitive and ruthless Maria del Valle on her own terms probably will treasure her and return to her again and again. The portrait Mr. Waters draws of her here has the rudeness and dignity of an aboriginal wood carving, a quality not unlike the stained, cracked, weather-beaten figures of saints in the adobe huts of the Sangre de Cristo.

In the blue valley high in the mountains of New Mexico people had been living for a hundred years. A handful of Hudson's Bay trappers, Frenchmen they were, had drifted down over the snowy passes looking for beaver. Up the Rio Grande from Mexico and over the Pecos came a few families of Spanish settlers, changing and slurring the syllables of L'Eau du Mort to Demora. Across the plains from the east came blue-eyed men with long rifles, pausing to eat and drink and gamble before they pushed on westward. Of these there lingered only a peddler, an Irishman named Murphy. Now the Mofres, who continued to exercise a hereditary aptitude for politics, were no more gringos than Maria del Valle herself.

Old as the life of the secluded valley was, Maria was scarcely younger. Born to an Indian woman who died at her birth, Maria grew up in the hills. Her only guardians were two ancient and taciturn goatherds, who set her to watch the flocks and would have starved her as well, except that the child was almost as wild and self-sufficient as one of her own goats. She learned to keep her own counsel and picked up a few tricks of divination, foretelling floods and droughts and such matters from the bones and skulls of goats. This was the sum of her education until a blond gringo soldier rode by. Maria forgot him promptly and lost the locket he gave her, but she called his son Theodosio.

By this time the goatherds were dead—drowned in a flood they had failed to foretell—and Maria owned and tended the goats. She would have married Onesimo, except that the priest found the proffered fee insufficient. He left her two children and a strip of valley land. There were others after Onesimo. She had grandchildren of her own when Don Fulgencio came courting. And she was a very old woman indeed before she learned why that was—why the wealthy old man, who had outlived any possible interest in romance, should have urged his suit so stubbornly.

Maria by this time was a legend in her own right. Skilled in herbs and prophecy, famed for curing headaches with the blue tax stamps from tobacco packages, she was the surly and autocratic counselor to the community. She was 80 when the first heard about the dam. Always the valley had been harassed by floods, had suffered from droughts as a visitation of divine caprice. Now the government would change all that. The voters, illiterate for the most part, had made their marks on the ballots. What, they wanted to know, did Maria think?

Maria listened to the arguments of the politicos with a mind uncluttered by reading. She began to fight the dam, not opposing it with any reason, but calling forth the feeling for the land it would supplant. She knew, like other dictators, that it was impossible to fight change with its own weapons. It was necessary to go back to the dimly understood truths that lie dormant in dead faiths. So shapes the contest of wills between the Federal Government and Maria del Valle, which is the burden of Frank Waters's novel. One of them, he makes it clear, may understand the theory of soil conservation. The other understands her land and her people.