Charles Fletcher Lummis

Charles Fletcher Lummis (March 1, 1859, in Lynn, Massachusetts – November 24, 1928, in Los Angeles, California) was a United States journalist and an activist for Indian rights and historic preservation. A traveler in the American Southwest, he settled in Los Angeles, California, where he also became known as a historian, photographer, ethnographer, archaeologist, poet and librarian.

Early life and career

Charles Fletcher Lummis was born in 1859 in Lynn, Massachusetts. He lost his mother at age 2 and was homeschooled by his father, who was a schoolmaster. Lummis enrolled in Harvard for college and was a classmate of Theodore Roosevelt, but dropped out during his senior year. While at Harvard he worked during the summer as a printer and published his first work, Birch Bark Poems. This small volume was printed on paper-thin sheets of birch bark; he won acclaim from Life magazine and recognition from some of the day's leading poets. He sold the books by subscription and used the money to pay for college. His best poem from the work, "My Cigarette", highlighted tobacco as one of his life's obsessions.

Lummi also admitted to an obsession with women. At the age of 21, Lummis married Dorothea Rhodes of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1880.

Transcontinental walk

In 1884, Lummis was working for a newspaper in Cincinnati and was offered a job with the Los Angeles Times. At that time, Los Angeles had a population of only 12,000. Lummis decided to make the 2,200-mile journey from Cincinnati to Los Angeles on foot, taking 143 days, all the while sending weekly dispatches to the paper chronicling his trip. One of his dispatches chronicled his meeting and interview with famed outlaw Frank James. The trip began in September and lasted through the winter. Lummis suffered a broken arm and struggled in the heavy winter snows of New Mexico. He became enamored with the American Southwest and its Spanish and Native American inhabitants. Several years later, he published his account of this journey in A Tramp Across the Continent (1892).

Editor at the Los Angeles Times

Upon his arrival, Lummis was offered the job of the first City Editor. He covered a multitude of interesting stories from the new and growing community. Work was hard and demanding under the pace set by publisher Harrison Otis. Lummis was happy until he suffered from a mild stroke that left his left side paralyzed.

New Mexico

In 1888, Lummis moved to San Mateo, New Mexico to recuperate from his paralysis. He rode on the Plains while holding a rifle in one good hand and shooting wild jack rabbits. Here he began a new career as a prolific freelance writer, writing on everything that was particularly special about the Southwest and Indian cultures. His articles about corrupt bosses committing murders in San Mateo drew threats on his life, so he moved to a new location in the Pueblo Indian village of Isleta, New Mexico on the Rio Grande.

Indians of Isleta

Somewhat recovered from his paralysis, Lummis was able to win over the confidence of the Pueblo Indians, a Tiwa people, by his outgoing and generous nature. But a hit man from San Mateo was sent up to Isleta, where he shot Lummis but failed to kill him.

In Isleta, Lummis divorced his first wife and married Eva Douglas, who lived in the village and was the sister-in-law of an English trader. Somehow he convinced Eva to stay with Dorothea in Los Angeles until the divorce went through. In the meantime, Lummis became entangled in fights with the U.S. government agents over Indian education. In this period, the government was pushing assimilation and had established Indian boarding schools. It charged its agents with recruiting Native American children for the schools, where they were usually forced to give up traditional clothing and hair styles, and prevented from speaking their own languages or using their own customs. They were often prohibited from returning home during holidays or vacation periods, or their families were too poor to afford such travel. Lummis persuaded the government to allow 36 children from the Albuquerque Indian School to return to their homes.

While in Isleta, he made friends with Father Anton Docher from France; he was the missionary Padre of Isleta. They both also befriended Adolph Bandelier. While living in Isleta, Lummis boarded in the home of Pablo Abeita. In 1890 he traveled with Bandelier to study the indigenous people of the area.

Magazine editor

Charles Fletcher Lummis, 1897

In 1892, Lummis published Some Strange Corners of Our Country, recounting some of the areas and sights he had discovered. Between 1893 and 1894, Lummis spent 10 months traveling in Peru with Bandelier.

After the men's return, Lummis and Eva returned to Los Angeles with their year-old daughter, Turbese. Unemployed, Lummis landed the position of editor of a regional magazine, Land of Sunshine. The magazine was renamed Out West in 1901. He published works by famous authors such as John Muir and Jack London. Over his 11 years as editor, Lummis also wrote more than 500 pieces for the magazine, as well as a popular monthly commentary called "In the Lion's Den".

He also built a remarkable stone house in Los Angeles, calling it El Alisal for the sycamore tree that grew just outside. As president of the "Landmarks Club of Southern California" (an all-volunteer, privately funded group dedicated to the preservation of California's Spanish missions), Lummis noted that the historic structures "...were falling to ruin with frightful rapidity, their roofs being breached or gone, the adobe walls melting under the winter rains."  Lummis wrote in 1895, "In ten years from now—unless our intelligence shall awaken at once—"there will remain of these noble piles nothing but a few indeterminable heaps of adobe. We shall deserve and shall have the contempt of all thoughtful people if we suffer our noble missions to fall." 

At about the same time, Lummis also established a new Indian rights group called the "Sequoya League," after the noted early 19th-century Cherokee leader who developed a written alphabet for the language. Several years later, in 1907, Lummis founded the Southwest Museum of Los Angeles, California, and led the fundraising campaign to build a new structure for it. He saw the Southwest Museum building open in August 1914.

Indian rights activist

Lummis continued his fight against the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and called on his classmate President Teddy Roosevelt to help change their manner of operating. He found a home for a small group of Indians who had been evicted from their property in the Palm Springs, California area. The Sequoya League began a battle against Indian Agent Charles Burton, accusing him of imposing a "reign of terror" on the Hopi pueblo in Oraibi by requiring Hopi men to cut their long hair. It was their custom to wear it long, a practice with spiritual meaning. Lummis was accused of overstating the case against Burton and lost his welcome at the White House. (However, subsequent social pressure on Burton led him to reverse the haircutting policy.)

El Alisal

El Alisal in 2007

In 1905, Lummis took the position as City Librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library. At El Alisal, also known as Lummis House, he frequently entertained, with parties he called "noises" for various writers, local artists and other prominent figures. The parties usually included a lavish Spanish dinner with dancing and music performed by his own private troubadour. The extravaganzas wore out a number of female assistants or "secretaries" conscripted into working on them.

Lummis divorced again. In 1915 he married his third wife, Gertrude, at El Alisal.

Later life and death

Between his drinking and womanizing, Lummis faced a series of personal setbacks and tribulations. He lost his job at the library for insisting on doing most of the work at home. Eva divorced him over his womanizing.

He went blind from a "jungle fever" he claimed was contracted while in Guatemala; after more than a year of blindness, he regained his sight. At that time, he stopped writing.

By 1918, he was destitute. The Southwest Museum Board named him founder emeritus in 1923 and gave him a small stipend. Lummis also decided to enlarge, revise and republish Some Strange Corners of Our Country as Mesa, Canyon and Pueblo in 1925. He engaged in a renewed civil rights crusade on behalf of the Pueblo Indians.

Lummis died in 1928, leaving a legacy of Indian lore and photography. He was cremated and his ashes were placed in a vault in a wall at El Alisal. Supporters bought his home El Alisal, which is now used as the headquarters of the Historical Society of Southern California.

The Southwest Museum operated independently until 2002, when it was merged into the Autry National Center. The Autry has launched a multi-year conservation project to preserve the enormous collection amassed by Lummis and his successors. The Southwest Museum is open to the public only on Saturdays due to this work.

Legacy and honors

Beginning in 2006, the annual Lummis Day Festival was established by the Lummis Day Community Foundation. it holds the festival in Lummis' honor on the first Sunday in June, drawing people to El Alisal and Heritage Square Museum for poetry readings, art exhibits, music and dance performances and family activities. The foundation is a non-profit organization of community activists and arts organization leaders.

Publications

• A New Mexico David and Other Stories & Sketches of The Southwest. Scribner's. 1891
• Some strange corners of our country: the wonderland of the Southwest. 1892
• My Friend Will. 1894
• The Gold Fish of Gran Chimu: A Novel. Lamson, Wolffe. 1896
• The Enchanted Burro: Stories of New Mexico & South America. 1897
• The awakening of a nation: Mexico of to-day. 1898
• The King Of The Broncos and Other Stories of New Mexico. Scribner's. 1915
• The Spanish Pioneers And The California Missions (1936) Full book online at The Internet Archive. 1920
• The Prose of It (poem on Geronimo). c. 1926
• A Bronco Pegasus: Poems. Houghton Mifflin. 1928
• Flowers Of Our Lost Romance (1909) Full book online at The Internet Archive Houghton Mifflin. 1929
• New Mexican Folk Songs. UNM Press. 1952
• General Crook and the Apache Wars. 1966
• Bullying The Moqui. 1968
• Dateline Fort Bowie: Charles Fletcher Lummis Reports on an Apache War. 1979
• A Tramp Across the Continent. University of Nebraska Press. 1982. ISBN 0-8032-7908-6
• Letters From The Southwest: September 20, 1884 to March 14, 1885. 1989
• Mesa, Cañon and Pueblo. University Press of the Pacific. 2004. ISBN 1-4102-1543-1
• Pueblo Indian Folk-Stories. Forgotten Books. 2008. ISBN 978-0-8032-7938-4
• The Land of Poco Tiempo. BiblioBazaar. 2009. ISBN 978-1-103-73190-9
• The Man Who Married the Moon and Other Pueblo Indian Folk Tales. (1891)

References

• Simmons, Marc. Charles F. Lummis: Author and Adventurer: A Gathering. Sunstone Books. 2008. (ISBN 9780865346390)
• Bingham, Edwin R. Charles F. Lummis: Editor of the Southwest. Huntington Library, 2006. ISBN 978-0-87328-221-5
• Samuel Gance, Anton ou la trajectoire d'un père, L'Harmattan, Paris, 2013, 208 p.(devotes chapter XIV "Chas" to Lummis) ISBN 978-2336290164, historical novel

Further reading

• LCC F786 .W73 1999 (devotes chapter 4 "The Showman with the Shining Right Hand" to Lummis)

External links

Archival collections

• Finding Aid to the Charles Fletcher Lummis Papers, Braun Research Library Collection, Autry National Center; MS.1, Los Angeles, California.
• Guide to the Charles F. Lummis Papers, Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
• Finding Aid for the Charles Fletcher Lummis Papers, 1889-1928, UCLA, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library

Other

• Works by Charles F. Lummis at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Charles Fletcher Lummis at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Southwest Museum (est. 1907) official website
• Mark Thompson, author of American Character, a biography of Charles Fletcher Lummis
• Charles Fletcher Lummis Manuscript Collection at the Autry National Center
• Charles F. Lummis Page at Spirit of America
• Lummis Biography – Historical Society of Southern California
• Lummis Day Festival
• "Charles F. Lummis" by Robert E. Fleming in the Western Writers Series Digital Editions at Boise State University
• Article, with archival photos, about Charles Fletcher Lummis – L.A. as Subject/KCET
• "Sunday's Lummis Fest Recalls Infancy of Los Angeles Cultural Venues" Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2012 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/30/entertainment/la-et-cm-lummis-day-celebration-recalls-infancy-of-la-cultural-venues-20120529