Photograph of Charles F. Lummis playing guitar for his children, Turbese and Jordan, in the courtyard of El Alisal, Los Angeles, California, July 31, 1903. | Image: Unidentified photographer; courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West. Artbound revisits early Los Angeles to explore one of its key and most controversial figures: Charles Fletcher Lummis. As a writer and editor of the L.A. Times, an avid collector and preservationist, an Indian rights activist, and founder of L.A.'s first museum, Lummis' brilliant and idiosyncratic personality captured the ethos of an era and a region. Watch Artbounds season eight debut episode, Charles Lummis: Reimagining the American West, premiering Tuesday, May 10 at 9 p.m., or check for rebroadcasts here.
Charles Fletcher Lummis built a world with words.
Before the polymathic writer, editor, and preservationist would become a hyperbolic figure of Los Angeles history, he was a poet. And by many accounts, he wasn't very good. Writing hackneyed love poems and odes to his cigarettes, Lummis wrote his first work, the Birch Bark Poems, while at Harvard, during the height of the Romantic literary movement of the mid-1800s. But Lummis later found success as a journalist in Chillicothe, Ohio. When Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, offered him a job in 1884, he picked up his life and traversed the continent to venture to Los Angeles, by foot. Along his self-proclaimed tramp across the continent, he wrote letters that were widely read in the paper, earning him a reputation before he sauntered up to this distant outpost on the Pacific, whose population was under 15,000 at the time.
When Otis met up with Lummis in a San Gabriel hotel, to walk the final ten miles with the bedraggled eccentric, the publisher later wrote: It was needless to say that he did not come here for his health, and he could hardly be called a tenderfoot. He has joined the staff of the Times, and has come to stay. Lummis was the Los Angeles Times' first city editor. But after surviving his 143 day sojourn across wild terrain, it was a desk job that proved dangerous. Within a few months at the paper, he suffered a mild stroke, which ended his tenure at the Times.
Lummis published A Tramp Across the Continent in 1892, recounting his outlandish trek. His journey was perhaps a connective tissue suturing the Anglo American world with cultures of indigenous peoples, the vestiges of the Spanish Empire, and the former territories of Mexico. It was a first contact filtered through Lummis' experience, a perspective constrained by his New England upbringing and those late Victorian compulsions to catalog and report. His concepts of civilization were ensconced in the concepts of Eurocentric and neoclassical ideals that celebrated architecture and a culture's ability to change a landscape, instead of working with it. Like Percy Shelley writes in his early Romantic poem Ozymandias, about an Egyptian artifact at the British Museum: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away. Like Shelley's interest in ancient Egypt's ability to build, Lummis' attention was on Native Americans' ability to create tangible things: baskets, clothing, or pueblo buildings. For many native peoples, the ephemerality of life was part of the beauty of living. Immortality wasn't achieved by the things or artifacts of an empire left behind, but instead a person's life was a short moment in an infinite existence intertwined with nature, which preceded one's birth and continued after death.
Yet Tramp Across the Continent connected with the city-bound populaces in those years between the late Industrial Revolution and the beginning of Modernism, who dreamed of the freedom of native peoples espoused and exoticised by writers like Lummis.
He later moved to New Mexico, and traveled through Peru, but returned to Los Angeles in the middle 1890s. He enlisted as an editor of a magazine called Land of Sunshine, which he relaunched as Out West, in 1901.
Later, he would found the Southwest Museum as Los Angeles' first institution, but in many ways, his magazine became his first museum, showcasing photographs of indigenous communities, dispatches by famed naturalist John Muir, and unveiling his version of the West to readers across the country.
Below Artbound presents a full article written by Chas Lummis in the 1905 edition of Out West, with all of the eras idiosyncratic typographical follies intact. Lummis article illuminates the way his travels informed the worldview that he'd manifest later, from his efforts to preserve Spanish folk songs and the missions to his crusade to keep the cultures of indigenous peoples intact.
WHEN the Southwest Society of the Archaeological Institute of America began, as the very forefront of its scientific activities, to record on a large scale the old folk-songs of the South west, there were not lacking formal persons in the East to protest : But that isnt archaeology you know.
To which the obvious and the actual reply was : No, it isnt. But in ten years it will be, and as dead and gone as the rest. Out here we think it would be rather sensible and scientific to catch our Archaeology alive.
And that is what the Southwest Society has done, is doing, and will continue to do for so long as there shall remain a still-animate specimen to collect. It is, indeed, also uncovering and re-articulating the dry bones of the extinct humanities in its great field ; it has done, in its first year, at least as much for the archaeology and history of its region as any sister society ever did-and has in its hands the tangible results, for the grea
