American Character
A Biography of Charles Fletcher Lummis

Prologue

On December 3, 1901, Charles Fletcher Lummis passed through Chicago on a train trip from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. He had a few hours to spare in the Windy City so he dropped by the studio of sculptor Laredo Taft to meet with a small group of the local literati. Even those who had never met Lummis had heard enough about the eccentric journalist and editor to be intrigued by his visit. Lummis didn’t disappoint. Though he stood just 5 feet 6 inches tall, he dominated the gathering from the moment he walked into the room, dressed in his trademark ensemble: a well-worn, Spanish-style corduroy suit, red Navajo sash, and soiled Stetson sombrero.

The impression he left wasn’t entirely favorable. "He was reeking with sweat and his hair was tousled into wig-like tufts. He looked like some half-Mexican rancher," observed the novelist Hamlin Garland, one of those who had gathered to greet him. Lummis cursed the Chicago weather, pronounced all cities "monstrous, destructive and futile – Chicago the worst of them," and headed back to the train station to resume his journey east, leaving a somewhat befuddled group at Taft’s studio in his wake.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Lummis was the proudly declared purpose of his journey. Though he hardly looked the part of presidential advisor, he had been summoned to Washington to confer with President Theodore Roosevelt, who had been sworn in less than three months earlier following the assassination of William McKinley. Preparing his first annual presidential message to Congress, which would help set the tone for his presidency, Roosevelt wanted to hear what Charles Lummis thought he should say about the West, and about Indians, a group Lummis knew intimately from having lived in their midst for four years.

For his part, Garland, who had grown up on the northern plains and fancied himself something of an expert on the region, believed Lummis’s "bluff, rough and ready manner" was to a degree an affectation designed to mask his New England upbringing. And yet he had to admit Lummis’s knowledge of the West, particularly the Mexican borderlands and the brown people of those parts, was unsurpassed. "He amused me at the same time that he won my respect," Garland wrote in his memoir, Companions on the Trail, published in 1931, four years after Lummis’s death. "Without in any degree defending his manner of dress and his outlook on life, I valued his knowledge of the Southwest and of Southern California which made him helpful to the president." Still, while Garland admired Lummis’s "truculent nonconformity," he questioned whether it paid to be "picturesquely crumpled and dirty. Couldn’t a man think just as well in a presentable suit and clean collar?" he wondered.

Roosevelt, for one, didn’t mind. Lummis had on the same outfit he was wearing at Taft’s studio when he reached Washington at noon two days later. He usually wasn’t self-conscious about his appearance but Lummis was disheveled enough on this occasion to call the White House from the train station to offer advance warning of his condition. Roosevelt insisted he should come immediately anyway for a luncheon with a handful of dignitaries that was just getting underway. Afterward Lummis stayed for a private meeting with the president, the first of four he would have that week.

A year younger than Roosevelt, Lummis, then 42, had first achieved a measure of national fame seventeen years earlier during a widely followed "tramp across the continent" from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. Since then he had distinguished himself in a remarkable succession of careers. Poet, journalist, photographer, archaeologist, editor, champion of Spanish heritage in the Americas and Indian rights advocate, Lummis was a lifelong workaholic who always had half a dozen projects going at once and rarely got more than three or four hours of sleep a night.

He wrote sixteen books, ranging from a couple of volumes of poems and a chronicle of his 1884-85 tramp to a history of the Spanish pioneers and several collections of Pueblo Indian folk tales. He churned out countless newspaper and magazine articles for many of the leading periodicals of his day. And he also wielded influence behind the scenes with a manic outpouring of letters, tens of thousands of them over the course of his life, to thousands of people ranging from leading writers, social scientists, artists and politicians to unknown admirers contributing a dollar to save one of the crumbling Spanish missions or to help the Indians. His love of life, generosity of spirit and devotion to the causes he espoused permeated everything he wrote and did. As one of Lummis’s closest friends, Stanford University President David Starr Jordan, put it, "He is a journalist by profession, a human geyser of the first water, bubbling with enthusiasm."

Lummis’s extraordinary career spanned a remarkable period in the history of the American West. During his lifetime, the nation went through changes that were dramatic even by the standards of recent fast-paced decades. The Apaches were still holding out against the U.S. Army and Los Angeles was a Spanish-Mexican pueblo without a square foot of pavement when Lummis first strode into the Southwest. By the time he died, tourists were flocking to the pueblos by automobile and Los Angeles had been transformed into a modern city, home of a thriving movie industry, with traffic jams and the first whiff of smog.

From the moment of his arrival, he fell in love with the natural wonders of the Southwest. But Lummis was even more inspired by the rich and diverse cultural heritage he found. In a region where Indians and Spanish settlers had intermingled and intermarried for centuries, joined more recently by northern Europeans, blacks and Chinese, he learned that his country was far more multiracial and polyglot than he ever imagined growing up in New England. He quickly became convinced that the United States was far better for it. He spent his life encouraging other Americans to tour the Southwest, hoping visitors to the region would have the same eye-opening experience that had changed his life.

As he had at Taft’s studio in 1901, Lummis raised eyebrows everywhere he went in life. But he was never fazed by the criticism that he continually stirred up with his eccentric attire, bombastic pronouncements and scandal-tainted personal life, which included three failed marriages and widely publicized extramarital entanglements. Flaws and all, he was a genius, according to many of his devoted friends. They far outnumbered the detractors who considered him an egomaniac.

When Lummis died in 1928, the headline over his obituary in the New York Times called him an "Apostle of the Southwest." Lummis "was one of the first ‘discoverers’ of the southwest," the Times stated. "Many a person had traveled through Arizona and New Mexico before he did. A few had written of it glowingly. But Mr. Lummis combined the skill and instinct of a journalist with a deep love of the country." His friend, Harry Carr in an obituary he wrote for the Los Angeles Times came closer to capturing Lummis’s own perceptions of his place as a chronicler of American history, though Carr, too, resorted to the word that Lummis shied away from. "Lummis was one of the first writers to realize that the history of the United States did not begin with Plymouth Rock; one of the first to discover the Southwest as a treasure trove of romance, history and archaeology," Carr wrote.

Lummis would have been flattered by the sentiment, though he would have quibbled with the wording. He took pride in the large part he played in raising awareness of the beauty and cultural contributions of a region he loved. But he once demurred, "I am convinced – despite keen maternal pangs to the contrary – that I didn’t discover anything." The suggestion that he had discovered the Southwest was yet another example of the lack of respect for, and the ignorance of, the real discoverers – starting with those he called the First Americans, who had a sophisticated culture in the Rio Grande Valley for more than 1,000 years, and the Spanish, who brought European civilization to the heart of the North American continent in New Mexico a century before Anglo Saxon settlers first erected their crude huts on the shores of Lummis’s native New England.

Lummis would have preferred for his obituaries to credit him with rediscovering the Southwest and telling its story to a nation with an often woefully narrow view of its past, present and future.