Acoma Pueblo

Charles Lummis visited Acoma for the first time in 1885, and he fell in love with the place. For the rest of his life, he returned regularly and counted a succession of pueblo governors as his good friends.  He first tried out a newly purchased device, a large box camera, on a trip to Acoma in 1886.  On their honeymoon in 1891, he and his bride, Eve, were guests of Governor Martin Valle, who gave them a family heirloom blanket as a wedding gift, which is one of the prize holdings in the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles today.  Lummis visited Acoma for the last time in the summer of 1927, not knowing until a few months after he returned to Los Angeles that he had a terminal case of cancer.  He died the next year.

Today the ancient pueblo is on the Acoma Indian Reservation and visitors are permitted only on guided tours, which begin several times a day at the visitor center at the base of the cliff. Only a few of the Acoma  people live full-time in the old pueblo.  But all  families in the tribe maintain ceremonial homes on the mesa top, which is still used for tribal festivals and ceremonies, most of which are closed to outsiders. 

In typical Lummis fashion, he waxes romantic about Acoma in the excerpt reprinted to the right, which is from a chapter about the pueblo in his 1892 book about his beloved New Mexico, The Land of Poco Tiempo.

Acoma in a photo taken by Lummis in 1891 
Courtesy of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles (N.24466)

"Upon the bare table-top of this strange stone island of the desert, seven thousand feet above the level of the sea, stands a town of matchless interest -- the home of half a thousand quaint lives, and of half a thousand years' of romance...  It is a class by itself. I might call it the Queres Gibraltar; but Gibraltar is a pregnable place beside it....   It is the Garden of the Gods multiplied by ten, and with ten equal but other wonders thrown in; plus a human interest, an archaeological value, an atmosphere of romance and mystery. It is a labyrinth of wonders of which no person alive knows all, and of which not six white men have even an adequate conception though hundreds have seen it in part.  The longest visit never wears out its glamour; one feels as in a strange, sweet, unearthly dream as among scenes and beings more than human, whose very rocks are genii, and whose people swart conjurors. It is spendthrift of beauty."

Acoma father and son in a photo taken by Lummis in 1891 
Courtesy of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles (N.30540)