In 1884 Charles Fletcher Lummis, a relatively unknown journalist from Ohio, began a correspondence with the editor of a “breezy” Western newspaper that had sprung up in deserts of southern California. It was called the Los Angeles Daily Times. Lummis was looking for a new job, and after sending a few letters to the editor, Harrison Gray Otis, he had the nerve to ask him for one. Otis liked the young man’s writing, so he offered Lummis a position—and a train ticket out west. Lummis had other ideas about how to get to Los Angeles. He didn’t want to go by train. That would be “tedious.” He decided, instead, that he would walk.
After making his 3,500-mile journey, a “tramp” that took him 143 days to complete, Charles Lummis went on to become one of the most important proponents and chroniclers of the life and culture of the American Southwest. His vision of the region as a land of natural and cultural enchantment endures today. As a writer of sixteen books, a poet, photographer, magazine editor, Indian rights activist, amateur architect, librarian, and champion of artists and ethnologists like Frederic Remington and Adolph Bandelier, he gave new meaning to that tired phrase about working tirelessly. Despite his output, Lummis himself is little remembered by history, in part because his vision of the Southwest was clouded by a myth of his own making.
Lummis was born in Massachusetts in 1859. His father, a Methodist clergyman, gave him a strict, old-fashioned education. He was “well drilled in the common branches,” having learned Latin at the age of seven, Hebrew at eight, Greek at ten. Despite the academic drills, or perhaps out of rebellion, Lummis didn’t do well at Harvard. Sometimes, instead of going to class, he walked the railroad tracks outside of town, armed with a pistol, looking for rabbits to shoot.
His first passion was athletics, especially wrestling and boxing. He was small in stature and possessed the kind of pugnacious attitude that made it difficult to keep things inside the ring. “I have always had the ill luck,” he wrote, “to fall into fights and get maimed therein. In a sophomore quarrel I was shot in the left side, the ball glancing a couple of inches from the heart. I have also been stabbed several times, thanks to an exuberant spirit.” Exuberant spirit or not, this passage, like much of Lummis’ writing, is hard to evaluate. The reader is left to wonder what is truthful and what is self-aggrandizing exaggeration. In his memoir, written much later, he claimed to have once run the hundred-yard dash in ten seconds flat. It would have been the world record at the time.
