This man appropriated indigenous culture to create a new SoCal lifestyle brand—in the 1880s
He may have been well-meaning, but he asked people to call him ‘Don Carlos’
Charles Fletcher Lummis first met his new boss under an oak tree at the San Gabriel Mission in Southern California. Lummis wore a battered hat wrapped in rattlesnake skin; his arm was tied into a sling with a colorful bandana. The two shared a picnic lunch, then hiked the 10 miles to Los Angeles. At 26 years old, Lummis had just completed walking across the country. It had taken 143 days to trek the 3,507 miles from Cincinnati, Ohio.
The next morning, on December 5, 1885, he arrived at work promptly at 10 a.m. He was the newest reporter at the Los Angeles Times. And he had plenty of material.
The Times hired Lummis during the four months of his trek. His dispatches to various papers proved riveting: He had shot snakes in the desert, defended himself against robbers, and cared for a canine companion who followed him 1,500 miles. It was “the longest walk for pure pleasure that is on record,” according to Lummis’ book A Tramp Across the Continent, which he dubbed “the simple story of joy on legs.”
But his experiences made for more than journal entries. The articles, and a later book, would launch Lummis to national acclaim, and eventually, criticism. For along his trek, he fell in love with the American Southwest — then devoted his life to researching, romanticizing, and appropriating its indigenous culture for Southern California sophisticates.
Lummis was born and raised in the conservative Northeast, then as an educated 20-something, started to seriously resent it. A Massachusetts native, he studied at Harvard but left during his senior year. (Teddy Roosevelt was a classmate.) A bout of malaria added to his restless claustrophobia. He yearned to flex his muscles beyond the confines of polite society.
Lummis’ rebellion manifested in an act of unapologetic, rugged masculinity, frontier adventure, and self-invention. He wrote, “I was after neither time nor money, but life — not life in the pathetic meaning of the poor health-seeker, for I was perfectly well and a trained athlete; but life in the truer, broader, sweeter sense, the exhilarant joy of living outside the sorry fences of society, living with a perfect body and a wakened mind, a life where brain and brawn and leg and lung all rejoice and grow alert together.”
In A Tramp Across the Continent, Lummis skims the first leg of the trip. States like Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana hold no interest for him — “It would make this story too long, and it were better that the space be saved for the greater interest and excitement of the tramp in the farther West.” It’s only after Kansas City, when he reaches the plains, that “it began to feel as if I were getting ‘really out west.’”
From his experiences, Lummis wrote breathless essays about the rich culture in the Southwest, where he had fallen in love with the “exotic” and “quaint” populations of American Indians and Mexicanos.
It didn’t go smoothly at first. One letter to the Chillicothe Leader—dated November 18, 1884—found Loomis on the northern New Mexico border, filled with racist disgust:
“I stepped across the line from an alleged American civilization into the boundaries of one strangely diverse. Two miles out from little Cucharas, and on the willowy banks of Cucharas creek, I ran across a big plaza of Mexicans — Greasers as they are called out here. A Westerner would no more think of calling a ‘Greaser’ a Mexican, than a Kentucky Colonel would of calling a negro anything but ‘nigger.’”
In later letters, he revised his tone, however. By the time he reached Santa Fe, he had met some hospitable “Mexicans” and appeared to address his earlier bigotry: “Why is it that the last and most difficult education seems to be the ridding ourselves of the silly inborn race prejudice?”
He applied this softer, paternal approach to A Tramp Across the Continent.
After his trip, Lummis would join other white intellectuals, writers, and travelers whose fascinations with the region led to a dissipation of its people’s heritage and traditions throughout the West. Historian Curtis Hinsley later called it “aesthetic claim staking,” or “a widespread appetite in post-Civil War American society for varieties of authentic experience: authentic aesthetic/religious sensibilities, relations to landscape, modes of production, sexual identities, and social relationships.” Because Lummis had spent time among Pueblo, Hopi, and Navajo people, and proclaimed himself a defender of their ways, he was given what amounted to a promotional platform.
By the time Tramp published in 1892, Lummis had spent more time in the Southwest, largely by circumstance. During his first three years at the Los Angeles Times, he drank heavily, womanized, and worked 20-hour days. In 1887, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed.
He moved to San Mateo, New Mexico, where he spent three years recuperating with the Chaves family, who transported him around their ranch in a wheelbarrow. Slowly, Lummis began to limp and performed menial labor. By the end of his stay, he was galloping horses across the property. The land that, years before, had captured his imagination now proved nothing short of miraculous to Lummis.
He returned to L.A. and published The Spanish Pioneers in 1893. The book was once again a “performance” of the ideals and heroics he saw in the Southwest, a land colonized by Spain. But more, writes Kevin Starr in Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era, “The citizens of the Southwest, [Lummis] insisted, should live a life touched by this Spanish heritage.”
Lummis devoted the rest of his life to practicing and promoting the land of poco tiempo. With the sun, the Mediterranean climate, and nearby Southwest cultural traditions, Los Angeles could surely compete with the country’s stuffy Northeastern elite. All it needed was a hefty dose of Old Spain.
He divorced his first wife and called himself “Don Carlos.” He wore a green corduroy suit in a Spanish cut, donned Navajo jewelry, and ate tamales, frijoles, and olives. After rolling his own cigarettes, he lit them in the style of old Spanish vaqueros: with a flint and a rag sprinkled with gunpowder. In 1898, he began constructing a new home, which he called El Alisal on the west bank of the Arroyo Seco River (a few miles from where Dodger Stadium is today). He employed Native American artisans to help with the house’s finishes. Over 25 years, he invited luminaries like John Muir, Sarah Bernhardt, and Douglas Fairbanks to sample his lifestyle. During his bohemian Saturday-night gatherings, Lummis wore “party buckskins.”
Today, Lummis would be accused of unabashed cultural appropriation, but at the time not so. In 1893, he transformed a chamber of commerce promotional paper called The Land of Sunshine into a magazine (later renamed Out West) that extolled the virtues of taking up the Spanish lifestyle in Southern California. Businessmen and railroads with an interest in a revitalized economy funded cultural celebrations organized by Lummis, such as the 1894 Spanish Days Fiesta in Coronado and the 1895 Fiesta de Los Angeles. President Roosevelt called upon Lummis as an adviser on Indian affairs. The latter founded the Sequoyah League to provide the Indian Bureau with “authentic disinterested information”; the stated purpose was “to make better Indians by treating them better.” He populated the board with white Easterners, including Grover Cleveland and ethnologist Alice Fletcher. In 1907, he built the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, still in operation today.
While Lummis had an agenda, his knowledge and time spent studying the complex cultural and racial layers of Southwest indigenous and colonial history helped inform people — at the time, mostly a wealthy Anglo male system. The pressure of minority groups to assimilate and negotiate with this oligarchy was enormous. For some indigenous and marginalized communities, that meant offering their own cultures as currency. As early as the 1880s, for example, Native Americans built an infrastructure to sell their wares to curious tourists. Did they ever share the same profit? No.
Ironically, Lummis’ yearly income shrunk to $255.06 by 1922. By trying to juggle his writing, museum work, travel, and a later position as city librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library, he experienced another mental collapse. It came shortly after his six-year-old son Amado’s death of meningitis in 1900. In 1912, he became temporarily blind after contracting a fever in Guatemala, and the Times canceled his column “I Guess So” in 1915.
Hollywood and the entertainment industry boom was yanking Los Angeles into a dazzling new era of celebrity and glamour. The city abandoned the Southwest fad — except on the occasional movie set.
Lummis died on November 24, 1928, having authored 20 books. The city of Los Angeles currently operates El Alisal, renamed Lummis House, as a museum.
