Photograph of Charles F. Lummis playing guitar for his children, Turbese and Jordan, in the courtyard of El Alisal, Los Angeles, California, July 31, 1903. | Image: Unidentified photographer; courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West.
Artbound revisits early Los Angeles to explore one of its key and most controversial figures: Charles Fletcher Lummis. As a writer and editor of the L.A. Times, an avid collector and preservationist, an Indian rights activist, and founder of L.A.'s first museum, Lummis' brilliant and idiosyncratic personality captured the ethos of an era and a region. Watch Artbounds season eight debut episode, Charles Lummis: Reimagining the American West, premiering Tuesday, May 10 at 9 p.m., or check for rebroadcasts here.
Charles Fletcher Lummis built a world with words.
Before the polymathic writer, editor, and preservationist would become a hyperbolic figure of Los Angeles history, he was a poet. And by many accounts, he wasn't very good. Writing hackneyed love poems and odes to his cigarettes, Lummis wrote his first work, the Birch Bark Poems, while at Harvard, during the height of the Romantic literary movement of the mid-1800s. But Lummis later found success as a journalist in Chillicothe, Ohio. When Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, offered him a job in 1884, he picked up his life and traversed the continent to venture to Los Angeles, by foot. Along his self-proclaimed tramp across the continent, he wrote letters that were widely read in the paper, earning him a reputation before he sauntered up to this distant outpost on the Pacific, whose population was under 15,000 at the time.
When Otis met up with Lummis in a San Gabriel hotel, to walk the final ten miles with the bedraggled eccentric, the publisher later wrote: It was needless to say that he did not come here for his health, and he could hardly be called a tenderfoot. He has joined the staff of the Times, and has come to stay. Lummis was the Los Angeles Times' first city editor. But after surviving his 143 day sojourn across wild terrain, it was a desk job that proved dangerous. Within a few months at the paper, he suffered a mild stroke, which ended his tenure at the Times.
Lummis published A Tramp Across the Continent in 1892, recounting his outlandish trek. His journey was perhaps a connective tissue suturing the Anglo American world with cultures of indigenous peoples, the vestiges of the Spanish Empire, and the former territories of Mexico. It was a first contact filtered through Lummis' experience, a perspective constrained by his New England upbringing and those late Victorian compulsions to catalog and report. His concepts of civilization were ensconced in the concepts of Eurocentric and neoclassical ideals that celebrated architecture and a culture's ability to change a landscape, instead of working with it. Like Percy Shelley writes in his early Romantic poem Ozymandias, about an Egyptian artifact at the British Museum: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away. Like Shelley's interest in ancient Egypt's ability to build, Lummis' attention was on Native Americans' ability to create tangible things: baskets, clothing, or pueblo buildings. For many native peoples, the ephemerality of life was part of the beauty of living. Immortality wasn't achieved by the things or artifacts of an empire left behind, but instead a person's life was a short moment in an infinite existence intertwined with nature, which preceded one's birth and continued after death.
Yet Tramp Across the Continent connected with the city-bound populaces in those years between the late Industrial Revolution and the beginning of Modernism, who dreamed of the freedom of native peoples espoused and exoticised by writers like Lummis.
He later moved to New Mexico, and traveled through Peru, but returned to Los Angeles in the middle 1890s. He enlisted as an editor of a magazine called Land of Sunshine, which he relaunched as Out West, in 1901.
Later, he would found the Southwest Museum as Los Angeles' first institution, but in many ways, his magazine became his first museum, showcasing photographs of indigenous communities, dispatches by famed naturalist John Muir, and unveiling his version of the West to readers across the country.
Below Artbound presents a full article written by Chas Lummis in the 1905 edition of Out West, with all of the eras idiosyncratic typographical follies intact. Lummis article illuminates the way his travels informed the worldview that he'd manifest later, from his efforts to preserve Spanish folk songs and the missions to his crusade to keep the cultures of indigenous peoples intact.
WHEN the Southwest Society of the Archaeological Institute of America began, as the very forefront of its scientific activities, to record on a large scale the old folk-songs of the South west, there were not lacking formal persons in the East to protest : But that isnt archaeology you know.
To which the obvious and the actual reply was : No, it isnt. But in ten years it will be, and as dead and gone as the rest. Out here we think it would be rather sensible and scientific to catch our Archaeology alive.
And that is what the Southwest Society has done, is doing, and will continue to do for so long as there shall remain a still-animate specimen to collect. It is, indeed, also uncovering and re-articulating the dry bones of the extinct humanities in its great field ; it has done, in its first year, at least as much for the archaeology and history of its region as any sister society ever did-and has in its hands the tangible results, for the grea
Most recent headlines
17/02/2025
TVBEurope talks to the team who brought a piece of broadcasting history back to life on BBC Wales last night
By Jenny Priestley
Published: February 14, 2025 ...
17/02/2025
Eligible studios will receive the relief directly from their local authorities, with no need to submit a claim
By Matthew Corrigan
Published: February 17, 20...
17/02/2025
As DEI initiatives come under pressure in the USA, supporters of Rise, which promotes diversity in the media and entertainment sector, discuss the continuing im...
17/02/2025
EIB Global loan will partially fund SES's continued O3b mPOWER medium earth orbit (MEO) fleet expansion enabling additional capacity worldwide. O3b mPOWER s...
15/02/2025
At Nielsen, Business Resource Groups (BRGs) play a critical role in nurturing a ...
15/02/2025
Innovation to empower creativity: Explore the latest in Lightroom
Rob Christensen February 15, 2025
0 Comments
Whether you want to remove distracting ...
15/02/2025
Wisycom, a worldwide leader in RF technology and provider of wireless solutions, announces a new distribution agreement with EQUAPHON. An Argentinian profession...
15/02/2025
DPA Microphones, the leading manufacturer of high-quality microphone solutions, is pleased to welcome Nicholas Nick Mariano and Vincent Vince Divine to the ...
15/02/2025
Tuxera, a leading provider of quality-assured file systems and networking solutions, will showcase how Tuxera Fusion SMB enables unprecedented performance for m...
15/02/2025
Bitmovin's latest Video Developer Report indicates an increasing role of AI, the slow adoption of next-generation codecs, and continuing challenges when it ...
15/02/2025
When Michelin Enterprises set out to promote its prestigious Hotel Guide in the new Sleepless in the Kitchen , campaign, veteran German/Slovenian gaffer Robert...
15/02/2025
Formula E, the world's first all-electric racing series, revolutionizing motorsport with cutting-edge technology and a commitment to sustainability has sele...
15/02/2025
Agile Content, a global leader in TV and video technology solutions, announces its rebranding to AgileTV.
The transition to AgileTV stems from a commitment to ...
15/02/2025
Hiltron Communications will promote the latest additions to its range of satellite communication products, systems and supporting services at GovSatCom 2025. Th...
15/02/2025
Following the success of the original Airglow Booklight, DoPchoice debuts a new addition to their inflatable line the Float. This lightweight, inflatable, round...
15/02/2025
LAS VEGAS Marshall Electronics has announced that it will debut its newest camera controller, the RCP Plus, at the 2025 NAB Show at Booth N2649 between April 5 ...
15/02/2025
ATLANTA Gray Media has named Blake Sebo as the next general manager of KTUU and KYES, Gray's NBC and CBS affiliates in Anchorage, Alaska....
15/02/2025
KOKKEDAL, Denmark DPA Microphones will feature its new CORE+ technology for distortion-free microphone sound at the 2025 NAB Show, April 5-9, in Las Vegas....
15/02/2025
SWANSEA, U.K. QuickLink will launch StudioPro-NDI and StudioPro-3, two new models of its QuickLine StudioPro video production platform, at the 2025 NAB Show, Ap...
15/02/2025
Live From 2025 NBA All-Star Game Weekend: After 25 Years, Turner Sports All-In F...
15/02/2025
NASCAR Driver Cam on Max Embraces Cloud-Based Workflow for 2025 Season Chris Brown of WBD Sports says Mobii will play key part in delivering signals from the tr...
14/02/2025
Last month, we officially launched the Spotify Partner Program, a powerful new m...
14/02/2025
From an island off the coast of Lutruwita to the global stage in France SBS & ...
14/02/2025
The future of electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) land systems is evolving so that ...
14/02/2025
Here are 5 reasons why you should attend ISE 2025
Discover more about Calrec: Learn more about Calrec's legacy of innovation in broadcast audio solutions ...
14/02/2025
World Radio Day: On the same wavelength
By Graham Murray, International Sales Manager at Calrec
To mark World Radio Day, Calrec's International Sales Ma...
14/02/2025
DALLAS and TYSONS, Va. Tegna has concluded a broadcast rights agreement that makes Tegna's KFAA in Dallas the exclusive local television partner of the Dall...
14/02/2025
Amazon's Prime Video has released a new app for Apple TV that the streamer said delivers an improved streaming experiences with faster scrolling, improved s...
14/02/2025
CLEVELAND Telos Alliance announced a software update for its Axia Quasar XR and SR line of audio-over-IP (AoIP) mixing consoles and will show the offering at th...
14/02/2025
Puget Systems Returns to HPA Tech Retreat 2025 with New Analysis Tools for Puge...
14/02/2025
Glass Animals: Tour of Earth Uses Blackmagic Live Production Workflow
Brie Clayton February 14, 2025
0 Comments
80six deploys Blackmagic URSA Broadcas...
14/02/2025
A dispute between Paramount and Youtube TV that would have pulled CBS stations and Paramount's cable channels from the streaming service has been temporaril...
14/02/2025
Colourist Deidre (Dee) McClelland details how she helped shape the distinct look and feel of whimsical Oscar-nominated stop-motion film, Memoir of a Snail
By C...
14/02/2025
BitFire said it intends to introduce forward-looking services that simplify the launch of live production workflows, and enhance real-time collaboration
By Jen...
14/02/2025
The claim by the liquidators is the latest twist in the ongoing saga of the companys collapse at the end of 2021
By Matthew Corrigan
Published: February 14, ...
14/02/2025
A carriage dispute between YouTube TV and Paramount could come to a head today (Feb. 13), with the virtual pay TV provider threatening to pull all of the progra...
14/02/2025
ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J. LG Electronics USA has opened a new in-house, state-of-the-art virtual production studio at its 360,000-square-foot North American headqu...
14/02/2025
NEW YORK In a bid to help local broadcasters find new ways of monetizing their content, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and TVB have relea...
14/02/2025
WASHINGTON Three Democratic U.S. Senators have sent a stern letter blasting FCC Chair Brendan Carr for the weaponization of the agency for attacking broadcast...
14/02/2025
Years after launching the streaming service Apple TV+ in November of 2019, Apple has finally released a version of its steaming app for Android devices....
14/02/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. Red Digital Cinema will make its V-RAPTOR [X] and KOMODO-X camera systems available with Nikon's premier Z Mount, providing filmmaker...
14/02/2025
DAYTONA, Fla. The Fox Sports production of this year's Daytona 500 will see the addition of a few new tech elements and the continued unfolding of the broad...
14/02/2025
Watch Bryson Battles Blind Audition on The Voice Get a Four-Chair Turn Michael Bubl said the Boston Conservatory at Berklee musical theater senior might have...
14/02/2025
2025 Daytona 500: FOX Sports Looks To Ride Super Bowl LIX Momentum Into NASCAR S...
14/02/2025
14 Feb 2025
VEON's Kyivstar and the Come Back Alive Foundation Raise USD 2....
14/02/2025
Max Renews THE PITT, Starring Noah Wyle, For A Second Season
Max
Warner Bros. Television Group
The Pitt
New Episodes Of The Medical Drama From John...
14/02/2025
This year, Technicolor proudly celebrates 110 years of shaping the magic of cinema pioneering color, visual effects, and innovation that bring unforgettable l...
14/02/2025
NBA All-Star: More Games, More Teams, More Music, More Sound From the Court Turner Sports' team will deploy familiar tech to capture all the audio By Dan D...
14/02/2025
LIV Golf Continues To Innovate With Drones, Data-Driven Graphics, and All-Access...
Photograph of Charles F. Lummis playing guitar for his children, Turbese and Jordan, in the courtyard of El Alisal, Los Angeles, California, July 31, 1903. | Image: Unidentified photographer; courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West. 
