Charles Lummis - Some Strange Corners of Our Country

LAWRENCE CLARK POWELL

E set out alone on foot, September 11,1884, to walk from Ohio to California andhe made it, arriving in Los Angeles the next year on the first of February. By anotherten years he had become the greatest booster the Southwest has ever known.

This Yankee maverick was Charles Fletcher Lummis, called Lum, the son of a Massachusettsminister, not quite a Harvard graduate, having withdrawn just before Commencementwhen trouble with two women threatened to fence him in. He fathered a daughter byone and married the other, then left her in Cambridge to finish her medical degreewhile he headed for Ohio to work on her fathers farm. He soon found something betteras editor of the Scioto Gazette. Young Lum always managed to land on his feet andrunning.

He needed something to settle him down. With a gift for writing first apparent atHarvard and developed while on the Chillicothe newspaper, Lummis struck a long-distancedeal with General Harrison Gray Otis, owner of the LosAngeles Times, that wouldtake him on that long walk, filing dispatches of his adventures along the way. Hehad plenty of them at least he said so.

And so he set out for what promised to be a better land and job. News had reachedthe East of what became known as the Boom of the Eighties in Southern California.It was the craziest time since the Gold Rush. His route was the Old Santa F Trail,followed by traders and travelers since the 1820s, and now by the new railroad tothe coast.

Unlike the argonauts, Lummis did not challenge the Rockies, taking instead the lowroad to Santa F. Like those before him, he marveled at sight of the battlements,shutting the whole western sky from north to south, far as sight could reach, distant,severe and cold.

That turn in the road was the most meaningful ever taken by Lummis, for it led toa lifelong commitment to a land of Sun, Silence and Adobe. Not only did he discovera newfoundland, he was met there by warm and welcoming people whose skin was a differentcolor from his. We all start with racial prejudice, he was to say, and few graduatefrom it. He was one who did, as he became an eloquent champion of the inhabitants,Indian and Spanish. He was also the first to christen that land The Southwest andto coin the phrase See America First.

In Santa F, letters of introduction led to Amado Chavez, scion of an old New Mexicanfamily and Speaker of the territorial House of Representatives. He soon pressedon west, visiting the Chavez domain at the foot of Mt. Taylor, easternmost sacredpeak of the Navajos. There he formed a lasting bond with that family. His firstson, lost to death at six, was named Amado.

In Southern California, Lummis had another unexpected welcome when he was met atthe Los Angeles city limits by General Otis himself and given the job of city editorof the Times. After five hectic years, including coverage of Geronimos uprisingand failure to become a good husband to his wife Dorothea, now practicing medicinein Los Angeles, Lummis took refuge in a paralytic stroke that crippled his left side.

He recuperated on the Chavez hacienda at San Mateo, then went to live with the TewaIndians at Isleta Pueblo, on the Rio Grande below Albuquerque. There he was nursedback to health by the missions schoolteacher, Eva Frances Douglas. Despite Dr. Dorotheasefforts to hold him, Lummis gained his freedom to marry the younger woman. In anunusual act of thanks, he dedicated his book, Land of Poco Tiempo, To Eva and Dorothea.

Once again he began to write to make a living, eastern magazines his market, theSouthwest his subject. In those early years of the transcontinental railroad, whatbecame the Santa F found it good business to give Lummis a pass on either Pullmanor caboose.

He was thus able to make several trips to New York, where he lunched with such literaryarbitersasRichard Watson Gilder and Brander Matthews. At Tiffanys he offeredto showtheirjewels on the bridle of his horse Alazan. The Harvard connection didhimnoharm. Now a western eccentric, he paid a Manhattan tailor twenty-five dollarstomakehim a three-piece suit of corduroy, henceforth his standard apparel, sometimestoppedwithan Indian headband and a red sash around his waist.

During the early 1890s Lummis exploded with articles, all celebrating his new land.From 1891 to 1894 they were gathered in six solid volumes. This honeymoon harvestmarked his high point as a promoter of the Southwest. Although he lived until 1928,based in Los Angeles, and never stopped fighting for the preservation of our culturalpast, Lummis did not surpass that burst of books.

Now a century later, while civilization has come to every corner, it has not changedthe wonders celebrated in Some Strange Corners of Our Country. Therein Lummis fixedthe vision and configuration of an Enchanted Land. Thirty years later when he haltinglyenlarged that book into Mesa, Canon and Pueblo, the freshness was gone. The resultwas heavy, the updating outdated. His publisher had to nag him to finish; his heartwas not in it.

In that one halcyon time, newly married and father of a growing family, Lummis flowered.The pressures of being celebrated and controversial lay ahead, and he led a carefreeif Spartan existence, living on wild fruits and on jam and doughnuts of his own making.His unpublished journal of those three and a half years at Isleta are rich with incidentsof his daily life not included in his books, such as a glimpse of a 400-pound Indiangrandmother whose job was to sit over the place in the floor beneath which the familysgold was buried. Some ties with Isleta lasted the rest of his life, when the youngsons of his old friends came to Los Angeles to help him build El Alisal, the greatstone house on the bank of the Arroyo Seco.

Among those early books, Some Strange Corners of Our Country remains one of the best,as sound as ever in knowl edge and strong in feeling. Although published by Century,most of its chapters first appeared in St. Nicholas magazine. Its bold illustrationswere replaced in the later volume by pallidly reproduced photographs taken by theauthor. Not until 1987 were his Pueblo documentary views well printed.

Thanks to preservation of those natural wonders as national parks and monuments first urged by Lummis todays visitors to the Southwest will find this book auseful companion. The land is still there in all its immensity: the Grand Canyonhas been saved from further damming, although its sky is noisy with aircraft; MontezumaWell still flows into Beaver Creek through a crack in the limestone, while MontezumaCastle stands guard; the Petrified Forest, Tonto Bridge, and the Lava Flow have beenpreserved; and Inscription Rock, safeguarded in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt,Lummiss Harvard schoolmate, still emerges from the low pinon-juniper forest as ElMorro National Monument. All is still there, timelessly pristine.

That is why this first look, with an understanding of what is seen, is worth reprinting.It endures as one of the lasting achievements of this first and best popularizerof the Southwest.