American Character: The Curious Life of Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Rediscovery of the Southwest

by Mark Thompson

Overview

Charles Fletcher Lummis began his spectacular career in 1884 by walking from Ohio to start a new job at the three-year old Los Angeles Times. By the time of his death in 1928, the 3,500 mile "tramp across the continent" was just a footnote in his astonishingly varied career: crusading journalist, author of nearly two dozen books, editor of the influential political and literary magazine Out West, Los Angeles city librarian, preserver of Spanish missions, and Indian rights gadfly. Lummis both embodied and defined our vision of the West, and of America itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611456073
Publisher:	Arcade
Publication date:	03/07/2012
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mark Thompson graduated from Columbia Law School, but like Lum, headed west to write.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Restless Yankee

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By the end of the first week of his final semester at Harvard, it was apparent that nothing less than a miracle would get Charles Fletcher Lummis to the finish line. He was unquestionably smart enough to graduate and with honors, if he had set his mind to that goal. After all, he had qualified for admission to Harvard two years before he was old enough to enroll. And despite his own spotty college record, Lummis was in demand as a tutor for other college students in subjects ranging from French, Latin, and Greek to rhetoric and moral philosophy. But judging from his behavior at Harvard, it seemed that his chief goal in college was to get kicked out.

To begin with, he was an incorrigible prankster. His partner in many of the escapades, as recounted in the memoir he was writing when he died, was Boies Penrose, a future senator from Pennsylvania. In one of their more harmless stunts, they posed as "professional vagabonds" and made a 127-mile trek to Manchester, New Hampshire, and back over Thanksgiving weekend of 1879, begging along the way. Some of their pranks around campus were considerably riskier to their status as students in good standing. Lummis claimed they garishly painted college buildings in the middle of the night, scrawled "Death to the Faculty" on walls in paint so black that the words could still be made out a year later, and retaliated against obnoxious residence hall proctors by screwing the proctors' doors shut and nailing trip wires at ankle level across entrances to their quarters. They also stole signs from storefronts around town and stored them in a vacant dorm room.

Lummis usually succeeded in covering his tracks, but not always, and he was called in by administrators more than once to defend his behavior. On one occasion, an irate father complained about Lummis to college president Charles W. Eliot after finding some highly suggestive letters that his daughter had written but never mailed to Lummis. When Eliot called him in and demanded that he explain the 'shocking, horrible letters," Lummis looked the distinguished president straight in the eye and told him the "cold facts," vowing that he hadn't touched the girl but admitting that he wished he had.

"I should play poker with that man!" Lummis marveled. "His face never changed in the whole hour." Lummis didn't hear anything more about the girl. "Since I was neither expelled nor suspended, I knew that he had believed me," Lummis said.

Lummis was suspended once. It's not clear why. In an autobiographical essay he wrote a year after the fact, he stated without further comment: "I was absent during the first half of my junior year, at Water-town," where his father was living at the time. "Cause — special vote of the faculty."

As reckless as he had been, when the final semester of his senior year got under way, Lummis was still enrolled at Harvard and intent on finishing. The diary that he had recently begun keeping recounts his losing effort to stay focused. Classes started on Monday, January 3, 1881. Lummis's diary entry for that day commences "The grind begun. Don't like it for a cent" and ends "Dull day."

On Tuesday, Lummis focused enough to turn in an assignment that impressed a professor, but he spent the entire afternoon walking the railroad tracks on the edge of town with his pistol looking for rabbits to shoot. He couldn't even find a pigeon, but when he saw several men trying to snag eels with a spear through a hole in the ice on a pond, he decided to give that a try, borrowing the spear and quickly bagging three of the slimy creatures. "Great fun. Must invest in a spear & try it myself," he noted in his diary. He spent the next two days collecting a debt to raise funds for a spear, buying the implement, catching thirty of the creatures, hauling them home, and skinning them. It wasn't until well after nightfall on Thursday that he turned to schoolwork. "Grind like the deuce for about 8 hours," his diary entry for that day ends.

The frenetic bursts of effort, however, weren't enough to make up for all the classes he was missing. Just six weeks into the semester, Lummis casually noted, "Went up to visit the Dean, agreeably to his invitation. He said that it will be expedient to attend all recitations for the rest of the year." The next day he "went to English VI today for the first time, and found it tolerably interesting."

But it was no use. For Charles Lummis, graduating from Harvard just wasn't meant to be. He made it through the rest of that semester without any major run-ins with the administration, but in order to graduate, he had to pass a series of exams. He passed all of them except those in trigonometry and analytical geometry. He could have gotten tutoring and retaken the exams, but Lummis apparently didn't even consider doing that. A few steps short of the finish line, he dropped out.

His seditious behavior in college was as close as Lummis ever got to rebelling against his father. The Reverend Henry Lummis was a Methodist clergyman and educator revered by generations of students in the succession of preparatory schools and colleges across New England and the upper Midwest where he served as an administrator and teacher.

Charlie loved his father. And he clearly appreciated the advantages that the caring but strict discipline at home gave him later in life. His father was "a marvelous man," Lummis wrote in a tribute to his father at his death in 1905. He was "one of the most beloved men I have ever known. ... Father gave me my foundation." But perhaps Lummis wouldn't have been so insubordinate in college if he had enjoyed a little more freedom earlier in life. He suggested as much in his memoir. At Harvard, he wrote, "I found that for the restrained, encircled 18-year-old son of a Methodist minister, circumscribed by the atmosphere of the congregation, there were many other things to study than lessons. ... From my cloistered life I had come to the Tree of Forbidden Fruit. I climbed that tree to the top."

His mother had an equally profound influence on Lummis, though in tragically different fashion. She died on April 24, 1861, leaving Rev. Lummis to care for twoyear-old Charlie and his two-month-old sister, Louise Elma. Known as Hattie, the twenty-two-year-old mother was probably afflicted with tuberculosis even before Charles arrived on March 1, 1859. In her diary, she chronicled moments of elation about the baby she called Charlie Bird, interspersed with "moments of great sadness" when she sensed that the "months were hurrying me to life's close." Indeed they were. Her second pregnancy, not much more than a year after Charlie's birth, sapped what little strength she had left. So she moved with Charlie to her parents' home in Bristol, New Hampshire a few months before her second child was due, and there she died. For the rest of his life, Charlie Lummis would always be in no small part a motherless child. Not that he lacked attention from loving and supportive adults. Members of his close-knit extended family tried to fill the void left by his mother's death. Since his busy father couldn't possibly care for two babies, Charlie and his newborn sister remained with their grandparents for the next four years.

Louisa and Oscar Fowler were faultless surrogate parents. And Bristol was an idyllic place to grow up. A picture-postcard New England village of perhaps four hundred people, it had a large open commons in the middle of town where Charlie and his grandfather once watched a company of newly enlisted soldiers marching off to the Civil War. The crystal clear Newfound River rushed past the village, over a dam beside a mill, and down a three-hundred-foot cascade.

Charlie's grandmother made unforgettable pies and doughnuts, and his grandfather, the village saddle and harness maker and part-time probate judge, introduced him to the avocation that Charlie would always rank as life's single greatest pleasure: fishing for trout. Judge Oscar Fowler also taught Charlie that even if he was smaller than most, he didn't have to yield to anyone on account of his size. Grandpa Fowler was just five feet six inches in height, which was as tall as Charlie ever got. But he was "as tough as nails," tipping the scales at 230 pounds "without an ounce of fat," Charlie somewhat improbably claimed. He went on to assert that at the age of sixty, his grandfather beat a dozen eighteen-year-olds in a footrace across the Bristol commons.

Those four years with his grandparents were perhaps the closest he ever got to living in what he considered a complete home. But it didn't last. In the fall between his fifth and sixth birthdays, at an age when formal schooling could begin, he moved to his father's house. At the time, Rev. Lummis was principal of the New Haven Female College in Tilton, New Hampshire. Just nineteen miles from Bristol, it was a dramatically different setting — particularly the school filled with tittering girls where his father wanted Charlie to start classes. The trauma of moving to a strange new home no doubt magnified the usual first-day jitters. But his reaction to school was more severe than that. He spent his first day, as he told it in his memoir, hiding under a table, refusing to emerge until his father arrived and coaxed him out. "I told father I couldn't learn that way and asked him to teach me himself," Lummis wrote. And he "did exactly that for the next ten years."

Within a few years of his return to his father's house, Charlie's little sister, Louise Elma, had rejoined the household, and a stepmother had entered the picture. She would eventually have five children of her own, giving Charlie one half brother named Harry and four half sisters, Harriet, Katherine, Laura, and Gertrude. So it was far from a lonely childhood. But his father's new wife, Jennie Brewster, happened to be the same teacher he had recoiled from on his first day in school. Jennie was probably the one whose job it was to see that Charlie completed the daunting lessons that his father assigned, which couldn't have helped them establish a warm rapport. "We were greatly unsuited for the relationship by temperament but our mutual love for my father went a long way," he stated in his memoirs, only hinting at the tensions that must have arisen. "While she caused me a great deal of unhappiness in my young years, it was not all her fault. She was a noble woman as well as a brainy one and a model wife to my father."

Over the next twelve years, the family made six moves to towns in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Charlie took a few courses in the schools where his father taught. But most of his schooling took place at home under the direction of his father. It was an old-fashioned education even for those days. He was "well drilled in the common branches'," with a special emphasis on classical languages, starting with Latin at the age of seven, then Hebrew at eight and Greek at ten. He honed his skills in these tongues by translating verses of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament over dinner each night.

As for his father, Lummis never made public any hint of criticism. "I am grateful for each of the seven lickings he gave me — and they all left their marks," Lummis wrote. One licking was especially memorable, the only time in his life that he was "laid on his back" by another man, Lummis claimed. He had reacted to something his father said in a manner that the older Lummis interpreted as a sign of disrespect. "I am sure he was mistaken about it, for I never in my life felt a moment's resentment against him," Lummis wrote years later, even then excusing his father for what ensued. "But the next thing I knew I was on my back, four points down, ten feet back into the next room, with father astride of me and saying very softly, 'Charlie, don't you ever look at me that way again'."

He never defied his father again, except indirectly in college. He heeded his father's wishes at least to the extent that he enrolled, even though he had "no violent ambition for college. I went because Father had gone and because he had trained me with years of personal concentration. It was the cultural convention of New England." From the start, however, he proved to be a very unconventional student.

The rigorous training he had received at home left Lummis exceedingly well prepared for Harvard. He had already read nearly everything that was on the reading lists for the Latin and Greek courses at the university. Though he was indifferent about attending class and balked at assignments that didn't catch his fancy, he didn't shy away from academic challenges. Quite the contrary. To enter Harvard at that time under the newly adopted elective system, students were required to pass an exam in either French or German. With his solid grounding in Latin, Lummis figured French would be too easy. So he chose to enter in German, picked up a 3,600word German dictionary, "swallowed it whole," and waltzed through the test. But academics never got more than part of his attention. His priorities in college, as he later put it, were poker, poetry, and athletics — a list to which he could have added pretty girls and pranks.

Within days of his arrival on campus, he made a name for himself as a pugnacious free spirit, according to a tale that he would repeat often in later years. The tradition at Harvard when he entered in 1877 was that freshmen had to cut their hair short. But Lummis, apparently alone among his classmates, refused to knuckle under. The sophomores weren't about to let that challenge go unanswered. The enforcers of the upper class posted an ultimatum on a campus bulletin board: "NOTICE: If Freshman Lummis doesn't get his hair cut, '80 will cut it for him."

Lummis, whose thick, curly hair fell below his ears, promptly posted a response: "Lummis '81 will be glad to meet all tonsorially inclined of the Class of '80 individually or collectively, at 16 Holyoke any time."

Lummis's favorite part of this story was the compliment that his audacity elicited from one particular sophomore, "an odd looking chap" who was "flat-chested, hatchet-faced, lantern jawed, with funny side whiskers." His name was Theodore Roosevelt. Ordinarily he would have had nothing to do with Lummis, being from an entirely different social stratum. He was "a patrician who chummed with the Minots and Cabots and Lowells" and was known as an unusually diligent student to boot, proud to rank nineteenth in his class of 230. Lummis, in contrast, was a self-described "callow pauper" prone to ditching classes. Yet Roosevelt, who had been a sickly child and had tried to overcome his physical deficiencies in many of the same ways that Lummis compensated for his height, admired the freshman's brashness. He "grinned at me across the Unfathomable Abyss," Lummis recalled. In that memorable booming voice of his, Roosevelt called out, "Bully! It's your hair — keep it if you want to. Don't let them haze you."

Both Lummis and Roosevelt would become famous for maintaining a crushing workload, a habit that for both became ingrained in college. Lummis also began "night hawking" in those days, getting some of his most productive work done in the hours well past midnight. He stayed up late practically every night to play poker for as long as others lasted. Then he would turn his energies to translating the works of obscure Greek, Latin, and German poets.

Lummis devoted most of his time at Harvard to athletics. He spent hours in the gym. Some of the feats he took credit for in the memoir written many decades later are improbable, to say the least. For example, he claimed to have run the hundred-yard dash in ten seconds flat, which would have been a world record at the time. But there was no doubt that he whipped himself into perfect shape in his college days, judging from a photograph of him wearing nothing but shorts. He is suspending himself in the air on a set of parallel bars, showing off his muscular arms, powerful thighs, and a taut torso entirely free of fat. For at least the next decade, published descriptions of Lummis routinely mentioned that he was a "trained athlete." That was no exaggeration.

Lummis's preferred methods of physical and mental conditioning were wrestling and boxing, sports that he enjoyed both as a spectator and as a participant. Prizefighting was just barely respectable in the Puritan culture in which he was born and raised, but the pangs of guilt he felt the first time he paid money to see a prizefight quickly passed.

"When the door opened my scruples fell off me like snowflakes in the sun," he wrote. He loved nothing better than to step into the ring himself, preferably with a larger opponent. It was great fun, he wrote with the bravado that would characterize some of his published work, "to stand up and have my face pounded off me by a man forty pounds heavier and with six inches more reach — if every once in a while I could jump around his kidney, or get him in the turn of the jaw, and cool off while they brought him to."

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2011 Mark Thompson.
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Table of Contents

Prologue,
1. The Restless Yankee,
2. Tramp Across the Continent,
3. On the Beat in El Pueblo de Los Angeles,
4. Defending the General Pursuing Geronimo,
5. Boom and Bust,
6. A New Mexico Convalescence,
7. Refuge in Isleta,
8. Taking On the Albuquerque Indian School,
9. The Lion of Out West,
10. Showdown at Warner's Ranch,
11. The Tyrant of Keams Canyon,
12. Tumult in the Last Home of Old California,
13. Last Stand Against the Indian Bureau,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Bibliography,