His photographer’s eye was already framing shots of doors draped with strings of dried red chiles, pretty maidens with piles of Indian corn, chubby children and happy dogs playing out front, and picturesque old folks with handwoven serapes and weathered faces. Alongside many of the houses, protected behind breast-high adobe walls from the withering winds, were tiny gardens bordered by grape vines, plum and peach trees. The fields surrounding the village yielded rich harvest of corn and wheat. Cattle and burros grazed in the brown meadows. Abundant water gurgled through an ancient aqueduct system from the Rio Grande, just beyond the fields past a grove of towering cottonwood trees. The waters of the river itself were dotted with ducks and geese.

The farmers of Isleta were prosperous enough that they had recently pooled their funds to buy a newfangled mowing machine to expedite the wheat harvest. But they still employed more primitive forms of technology. They processed their grain in small, water-powered mills, and hauled supplies in ox-drawn wooden carts with wheels that were carved in one block from cross sections of huge sycamore tree trunks. The mellow rasp of the millstones, the "greaseless shriek" of the carreta, and the church bells were the sounds that Lummis fondly remembered from his years in Isleta.

To be sure, beneath the bucolic surface of Isleta, there was more social turmoil than met the eye. The sense of dislocation that had begun with the end of Spanish rule was exacerbated in 1883 when the local cacique, the hereditary leader of the pueblo, became paralyzed. He was still alive when Lummis moved in but was only nominally in charge. Though he survived for another four years, he was the last of the life-appointed hereditary chieftains of Isleta. His role was filled a decade after his death by the first democratically selected Pueblo Counsel.

The fact that no one was really in charge in 1888 goes a long way toward explaining how Lummis managed to slip in. The Pueblos have always been famously wary of outsiders -- a suspicion borne of centuries of repression and attack by outsiders. The pueblos generally made exceptions for foreign traders and priests, but not for the likes of Lummis. He wrote in his diary that in December 1888, a few weeks after he arrived, the aguacil, or pueblo sheriff, told him point blank that he could not stay. But the aguacil clearly did not speak for everyone. Lummis’s landlord was Juan Rey Abeita, the patriarch of one of the most prominent families in town.

Lummis was the strangest gringo the Isletans had ever seen. He was poorer than they were. When his physical condition worsened, as it did periodically, he seemed helpless. He had several relapses into severe paralysis and on several occasions ended up in a convent hospital in Santa Fe for a period of recuperation. According to one of the many stories about him, one day when he was at a low point he was still so determined to make it to the post office to check on his mail that he dragged himself on his belly, pulling himself over the hard, dusty ground with his one good hand. He had made it a hundred yards when one of his neighbors found him and, over Lummis’s protests, plopped him into a wheelbarrow, giving him a ride the rest of the way. The checks he got by mail in those days were often just $5 or $10 for a ditty or humorous line of prose for Life, Puck or Judge. The proceeds barely covered the cost of postage on his large volume of outgoing mail. In fact he sometimes had to borrow money from his poor Indian neighbors to pay for stamps.

Hobbling around town with his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, he frightened the more superstitious townsfolk, who heeded an old Pueblan folk tale about paralysis and other bodily defects. Anyone who touched a person who was paralyzed or had another serious physical disability would come down with the same malady, they feared. So they gave Lummis wide berth. On the other hand, others wondered whether there was some mystical kinship between Lummis and Isleta’s own paralyzed cacique, a sentiment that left them more favorably predisposed toward the odd American.

Despite their fears of him and their innate suspicion of all outsiders, the Isletans slowly warmed up to gregarious Lummis, with his infectious joie de vivre that belied his sorry physical state. Amado Chaves, who paid him a visit in January, less than month after he moved in, found that he had settled in comfortably. He had a "nice clean room," on the outskirts of the pueblo on the main lane leading into the church courtyard, and the Indians "liked him very much," Chaves reported.

Their nicknames for him reveal that the chief sentiments toward the strange new villager were sympathy and amused affection. One Tigua name that they gave Lummis meant "One Who We Worry About." Others called him Kha-tay-deh, which means "Withered Branch." But the nickname that stuck was "Por Todos" -- For Everyone. It was a reflection of his chronic generosity. He never returned from a trip to Albuquerque without a handful of candy for all the children. And he gladly shared his tobacco with the men of the village, as long as they didn’t mind him sticking around for a smoke and plying them with questions.

Many Isletans at first were wary of Lummis because of his paralysis and peculiar lifestyle

Despite his paralysis, Lummis was a determined hunter, as this photo of him in Isleta in 1891 attests.
Courtesy of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles (N.42941)