Her book, The Chemehuevis, was characterized by ethnographer Lowell John Bean as "one of the finest, most detailed ethnographies ever written.
"[1] Her memoirs, Encounter with an Angry God and Limbo, chronicled her first marriage to linguistic anthropologist John P. Harrington and her time in a nursing home, respectively.
[2] Tucker assisted Harrington in his field work for the Bureau of American Ethnology and learned ethnographic skills from him.
For seven years, she traveled with Harrington through California and the Southwest and helped compile a huge amount of ethnographic notes.
[3] While there, Tucker's principal consultant was a Chemehuevi man, George Laird, who lived on the Colorado River Indian Reservation.
[1] Laird's last book, Mirror and Pattern, a linguistic and structural analysis of Chemehuevi myths and language, was published posthumously in 1984.