In 1884, Harrison Gary Otis was looking for newspapermen to staff the Los Angeles Daily Times, the modest paper he edited in a very modest Los Angeles. The city's first paved road - Main Street - had been laid down less than four years before. With only 12,000 residents, Los Angeles was the provincial seat of a rural county with hardly 34,000 residents.KCETs Artbound is revisiting early Los Angeles to explore one of its key and most controversial figures: Charles Fletcher Lummis. As a writer and editor, 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.
But more would come, Otis was sure. The Southern Pacific railroad linked the city to the transcontinental rail network (but it wouldn't be until the end of 1888 that trains arrived directly from the East). An orange empire in the county's inland valleys had begun to boom. The whole nation wanted the golden promise of navel oranges from Los Angeles.
Civil War veterans suffering from PTSD and lungers - men and women suffering the urban scourge of tuberculosis - had a promise to redeem too: the promise of renewed health in the easeful sunshine of the valleys and foothills. The new rail connection from the East would bring them by the thousands.
Los Angeles, so favored by nature, Otis thought, was not destined to remain in the shadow of San Francisco, the center of industry, finance, and population in California. What Los Angeles needed was a storyteller, a weaver of tales, a poet really, to further Otis' demand that the city deliver on its promise of wealth for those, like him, who intended to turn millions of vacant, dusty acres into farms, orchards, and house lots for millions of migrants.
Otis found a poet in Charles Fletcher Lummis, who pitched himself perfectly to the irascible Times editor. From his home in Ohio, Lummis thought Los Angeles might be a promise too, a promise of adventure and romance in the Far West. He planned to achieve both by convincing Otis of his Republican Party loyalty, his bravado, and his capacity for the strenuous life. Otis was impressed by Lummis' skills as a writer but even more by Lummis' proposal to walk the 3,507 miles from Chillicothe to Los Angeles, sending dispatches along the way. Otis offered him the job.
For all its real dangers, walking to Los Angeles in 1884 was essentially a newspaper stunt, a way for Lummis to replay for Times subscribers the heroic narrative that heading west had already become in the Californian imagination.
Lummis greeted Otis in San Gabriel 143 days later, having nearly died in the snows of Colorado and New Mexico and having broken and then reset his arm while crossing the Arizona desert.
For all its real dangers, walking to Los Angeles in 1884 was essentially a newspaper stunt, a way for Lummis to replay for Times subscribers the heroic narrative that heading west had already become in the Californian imagination. Getting here has always been part of what being here means. The more arduous, the more demanding the passage, the more legitimate was the payoff on the promise. Lummis' suffering, even as part of a stunt, seemed to prove that he had earned the golden destiny that Otis imagined for Los Angeles.
Charles Lummis (here in frontier dress) had walked to Los Angeles in 1884 as a newspaper stunt. Courtesy of the Photo Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.
Charles Lummis (here seated in his study at El Alisal in Highland Park) continued to embody a heroic narrative that Californians wanted to remember. Courtesy of the Photo Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.
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Joan Didion found conflicting lessons in the journey west. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, UCLA Library.
That's how California native Joan Didion framed her family's journey. Didion's family - five generations of Californians on her mother's side - had crossed the plains and deserts in a train of covered wagons in the 1840s. Along the way, they pitched over the wagon's side nearly all the finer things they had accumulated back East until they had only the essentials. A reed organ was left by the side of the trail. Babies were buried there. So were husbands and wives. So were certain assumptions.
That the survivors acquired, Didion argues, was a stripped down wagon train morality that she thought she still found in the descendants of pioneer migrants. One of the promises we make to one another, she writes in her essay On Morality, is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.
But the test of California may have taught some of them a different lesson, Didion feared. The crossing might not after all be a noble odyssey, might instead be a mean scrambling for survival. Perhaps the promise wasn't mutual support in adversity or even health, wealth, and happiness in the sunshine but something perverse that the strong snatched from the weak.
What if what you earned in coming to California wasn't Eldorado but Donner Pass, not a gift of fortune but a dehumanizing slide into despair, brutality, and cannibalism? When you jettison others so as not to be caught by winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains,' do you deserve not to be caught? Didion wondered. When you survive at the cost of [fellow migrants], do you survive at all?
When Didion writes of flying home to California from New York, she feels a strange lack. The more comfortable the flight, the more obscurely miserable I would be, for it weighs heavily upon my kind that we could perhaps not make it by wagon.
Didi
