Travel, Exoticism, and the Writing of Region: Charles Fletcher Lummis and the "Creation" of the Southwest



MARTIN PADGET

A local magazine this is and always will be— but never a narrow one. . . . Geographically, its area is California, New Mexico, Arizona, and whatever further patches constitute the Southwest. In that area there is probably a wider range and variety of subject-matter than in all the rest of the Union together; besides which, this is exclusively the romantic corner of the United States as well as the wonderland of the continent. The tallest and noblest peaks in the United States, the deepest and noblest chasms in the world, our finest (and our only) ruins, the strangest and grandest scenery, the most remarkable geographic contrasts-all are in this extraordinary area. So, too, is the latest and highest development of modern civilization, the climax of human achievement to date, the most radical and important experiment ever made by the race which Just now stands at the head of the world.

—Charles Fletcher Lummis, "In the Lionq's Den."

Land of Sunshine 4:2 (January 1896), p. 89

INTRODUCTION

On September 11, 1884, Charles Fletcher Lunu-nis embarked on a self-styled "tramp across the continent" from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Los Angeles, California. The trek ended on February 1, 1885, after 143 days and 3,507 miles of walking. Planned as both a personal endurance trip and a publicity stunt, the "tramp" was a deliberate attempt to step outside the boundaries of Eastern society and engage in a frontier existence in the Southwest. It was also a sporting adventure, a masculinist athletic trial, an escape from his home in malarial Ohio, a symbolic departure from the realm of perceived decadence in the East, a chance to avoid marital responsibility toward his first wife Dorothea, and, in practical terms, the means of securing the city editor's position at the young Los Angeles Times newspaper. En route Lummis sent two series of letters to the Chillicothe Leader newspaper in Ohio and to the Los Angeles Times. His letters to the Times later formed the basis for the book A Tramp Across the Continent, published in 1892. Travel westward for Lummis meant a deliberate move away from an East he perceived as economically And morally corrupt, subject to race mongrelization, and scourged by a cruel climate in which the full bodily and mental potential of the individual could not be realized. Yet the enigma of southwestern travel was that while it was a self-conscious departure away from the perceived threat of immigration to Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural purity in the East, it was a move into one of the most racially and ethnically diverse regions of the U.S.
Fiction writer, poet, journal editor, historian of "Spanish" America, explorer, archaeologist, ethnologist, folklorist, raconteur, and feisty eccentric, Lummis was one of a generation of Anglo intellectuals who became fascinated with the Southwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Harvard-educated Eastern transplant who came to live most of his life in Los Angeles, he was hyperbolic, self-aggrandizing, and relentlessly enthusiastic in his promotional writing. Between 1884, when he first "tramped" through Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California, and his death in 1928, Lummis wrote voluminously about the region's natural landscapes and its populations of American Indians and Mexicanos.1 In the 1890s, when the bulk of his books on the Southwest were published, and through to the end of his life in 1928, Lummis was judged by his peers as one of the foremost writers on the Southwest.2
In brief, I am arguing that from the moment he entered the region Lummis was actively engaged in mapping a new cultural geography of the Southwest. Through highly romanticized commentaries on the region's spectacular natural landscapes, archaeological and anthropological antiquities, and "exotic" populations of American Indians and Mexicanos, Lummis transcribed selected parts of the Southwest into the bodies of written texts. His voluminous writings about New Mexico and Arizona stood alongside descriptive travelogues of the Southwest by such writers as John C. Bourke, Ernest Ingersoll, Susan Wallace, and George Wharton James.3 Indeed, together with James, Lummis was probably the most enthusiastic promoter of the Southwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lummis's interest in the cultural antiquity of the region echoed the ongoing pursuits of pioneering archaeologists and anthropologists in the Southwest, foremost among them Adolph Bandelier, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Jesse Walter Fewkes, Washington Matthews, and James and Matilda Cox Stevenson. These individuals developed a greater personal and professional familiarity with the Southwest, and in the process of producing knowledge about the region's landscapes and peoples they helped rationalize the hitherto unfamiliar cultural terrain of the region for government, popular, and professional audiences.4 While there were significant differences among the texts written on the Southwest by Wallace, Lummis, and Cushing, collectively they contributed to the process whereby the colonial frontier of the Southwest was claimed by intellectual authority and, in tandem with social and economic activities, was transformed into a U.S. national region.
Recent critics have noted that the incorporation of the conquered territories of the Southwest into the U.S. in the aftermath of the Mexican- American and Civil Wars proceeded along aesthetic as much as economic and political lines.5 Writers of turn-of-the-century travelogues and ethnological reports contributed to the process of cultural incorporation by exoticizing the livelihoods of contemporary Pueblo Indians and Navajos and by romantically conjecturing on the pre-Columbian past of the Southwest. In representing dramatic natural landscapes such as the Grand Canyon, large-scale archaeological antiquities such as Pueblo Bonito (in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico), and the adobe-structured homes of Pueblo Indians, writers produced the Southwest for popular and professional rederships.6 In the 1880s and 1890s, as travelers became attracted to the Southwest for the full exercise and expression of their physical and creative energies, their voices joined with regional boosters to rhetorically construct the region as a land of enchantment. New Mexico and Arizona, in particular, were prized for the varieties of authentic experience they afforded. Curtis Hinsicy argues that late-nineteenth-century "aesthetic claim staking" in the Southwest "reflected ... 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."7 He further argues that around 1900 these responses were commodified and thereafter "the association of authenticity with the Southwest fed powerful market forces" through to their powerful elaboration in the 1990s.8 Nowhere is the link between personal experience, authenticity, and promotion stronger in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth- century representations of the Southwest than in Lummis's texts.
In tramping across the continent, Lummis strived to embodv and incorporate the geographical expanse of the U.S. through his athletic activity. Initial travel through the Southwest was an opportunity to escape what he saw as the debilitated culture of the East by regenerating his "Saxon" identity outside the bounds of "civilized" society. After 1884, he demonstrated a lifelong commitment to the promotion of the racially invigorating qualities of New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California. Extensive travel through the region in subsequent years formed the basis of his knowledge of the history and cultures of the Southwest. Significantly, it was Lummis's personal investment in the region that afforded him the expertise to make grandiose, sweeping statements about its attributes, and this expertise was in large part founded on what he and many contemporaries saw as his authentic experience of place. Thus Lummis's chief capital in claiming authority on the Southwest became his own experience—"authentic" experience that was created and commodified through the act of writing.
This article examines Lui-nmiss "creation" of the Southwest for popular readerships in both the East and the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His association with the Southwest in general, and New Mexico in particular, went through three distinct phases: initial encounter (the "tramp"), participant observation (prolonged stays at San Mateo and Isleta Pueblo), and yield (removal to Los Angeles and capitalization of his "expertise" on the region). The discussion proceeds in three parts.
First, I examine how Lummis wrote about the Southwest when first visiting the region. While proceeding on the walk with fierce athletic intensity, he also labeled his account "the wayside notes of a happy vagabondizing."9 This combination of almost tireless activity with the advocation of a less-hurried and less-regimented livelihood was central to Lummis's character and his work, and was only seemingly paradoxi- cal. As we will see, the combination was the site of a productive tension that was first evidenced in the "tramp" itself.
Second, I take the years 1888-92 as Lummis's period of participant observer ethnography in the Southwest. After arriving in Los Angeles in 1885 and expending himself in three years of characteristically frenzied activity at the Los Angeles Times, Lummis suffered a severe stroke and left the city to recover in New Mexico. For almost a year he stayed in or around San Mateo with the family of Amado Chaves, former Speaker of the New Mexico territorial government. Out of his experience with the Chaves family grew a fierce regard for the beliefs and practices of the old Spanish colonial elite and a sympathetic, albeit patronizing, affection for the local population of "humble" Mexicanos.
Lummis then removed to Isleta Pueblo, where he lived for three years, eventually overcoming his paralysis. Lummis spent much of his time at the pueblo recording what he saw for publication. A flow of books, remarkable for their quantity if not their quality, issued from Lummis's pen, half of them published while the author was still residing at Isleta. A New Mexico Daiid (1891), A Tramp Across the Continent (1892), Some Strange Corners of Our Country (1892), The Land of Poco Tiempo (1893), The Spanisb Pioneers (1893), The Man Who Married the Moon (1894), The Enchanted Burro (1897), and The King of the Broncos (1897) all drew from their author's intimate experience of locale and combined travelogue, ethnology, archaeology, storytelling, and regional history in their exposition of southwestern themes. Written primarily for an Eastern audience, these texts trumpeted the Southwest as a "foreign" country within the U.S. For Lummis it was the very difference of the region, measured in terms of landscape and population, that was its chief cultural asset. Thus he celebrated Pueblo Indian festivals, Navajo rug-makers, "Mexican" shepherds, and hidalgo Indian-fighters, while also writing negatively about Native American beliefs in witchcraft and the activities of the Hispano Penitentes. In this section, I endeavor to unravel the complex web of racial, ethnic, gender, class, and cultural relations in Lummis's representations of Pueblo Indian life and his disparaging portrayal of the Penitentes.
Third, I overview Lummis's writing on the Southwest after his move back to Los Angeles in 1893 by examining his editorship of the influential magazine Land of Sunshine (later renamed Out West). Initiated in 1894 as a promotional journal for Los Angeles and southern California, the magazine quickly took a more literary turn after Lummis assumed the editor's position in 1895. As editor and chief contributor, Lummis relentlessly praised the climate and culture of southern California, paying particular attention to the region's "Spanish" heritage by actively campaigning for the preservation of its mission buildings. El Alisal, Lummis's home on the outskirts of Los Angeles in the Arroyo Seco, became a gathering point for southern California literati, artists, and politicians. Visitors included many writers who were published in Land of Sunshine/Out West and who remain well known today, among them Mary Austin, Ina Coolbrith, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and John Muir.

"THE WAYSIDE NOTES OF A HAPPY VAGABONDIZING"

The eleventh of twenty-four letters Lummis sent to the Chillicothe Leader in Alamosa, Colorado, was dated November 18, 1884. He described coming into La Veta, a small town lying at the foot of the Spanish Peaks, just north of the New Mexico territorial line:
The day was full of interest to me, for in it, 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."10
He continued by characterizing local ranchers as "a snide-looking set, twice as dark as an Indian, with heavy lips and noses, long, straight, black hair, sleepy eyes, and a general expression of ineffable laziness." And he added: "Their language is a patois of Spanish and Mexican. These may be poor specimens along here. I hope so. Not even a coyote will touch a dead Greaser, the flesh is so seasoned with the red pepper they ram into their food in howling profusion."11
Such brutal humor at the expense of rural Hispanos was hardly a new facet of Anglo travel writing on the Southwest; indeed, it appears that prior to first contact Lummis crossed the Spanish Peaks with his racial prejudice formed.12 Soon after writing from Alamosa, however, his opinion changed and, in his next letter to the Leader, written in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he praised "Mexicans" for their hospitality and personal warmth. Given the opportunity to revise his account of the "tramp" in later years, Lummis highlighted his earlier racism by asking a rhetorical question: "Why is it that the last and most difficult education seems to be the ridding ourselves of the silly inborn race prejudice ?"13
This gesture of public penance was fully expressed in A Tramp Across the Continent, when he rewrote his entry into "a civilization that was then new to me" by explaining:
In Colorado the Mexicans are much in the minority, and are frequently nicknamed "greasers"—nomenclature which it is not wise to practise as one proceeds south, and which anyway is born of an unbred boorishness of which no Mexican could ever be guilty. They are a simple, kindly people, ignorant of books, but better taught than our average in all the social virtues—in hospitality, courtesy, and respect for age. They are neither so "cowardly" nor so "treacherous" as an enormous class that largely shapes our national destinies; and it would be a thorn to our conceit, if we could realize how very many important lessons we could profitably learn from them. I speak now from years of intimate, but honorable, personal acquaintance with them—an acquaintance which has shamed me out of the silly prejudices against them which I shared with the average Saxon.14
Rhetorically, the passage suggests a significant change in Lummis's interpretation of Mexicano culture. On the basis of personal contact, Lummis not only dismissed Anglo stereotypes of Mexicanos but praised their "social virtues" in direct relation to the "unbred boorishness" of lower-class Anglos. His succeeding writing on Hispanos, however, proceeded to reformulate rather than overturn existing Anglo assumptions about Hispano culture.
When writing about New Mexico after his return from Los Angeles in 1888, Lummis characterized the territory's charm as that of "the land of poco tiempo." This representation contributed to equally debilitating Anglo notions of Hispano backwardness, rustic simplicity, and lack of competitive spirit measured in social, economic, and racial terms. Representations of Hispanos generally divided local people into two camps. On the one hand, Lummis related a number of stories about pobres, the humble shepherds, farmers, and miners of the region; while, on the other hand, he dramatized the lives of ricos, a privileged class of landowners and officials. These stories were often based on tales of Indian fighting and "heroism" told to him by Colonel Manuel Chaves of San Mateo. Emergent from this largely dualistic attention to character and deeds in New Mexico was storytelling that stressed fatalism, sentimentalism, heroism, and romance in the lives of Hispanos. Stories were nuanced so as to emphasize the perceived fatatism of pobres to the rigid social hierarchy of Hispano culture and the similarly passive acceptance among ricos of their diminished authority and wealth in Anglicized New Mexico. As we shall see in the next section, a significant exception to this general rule of representation is found in Lummis's fanatical pursuit of the Penitentes, whom he saw as a threat to the otherwise orderly incorporation of Hispano culture into U.S. society.
Turning to Lummis's initial view of Pueblo Indians, it is ironic, considering his later period of residence there, that Lummis's first impression of Isleta Pueblo was not complimentary. In a letter to the Chillicothe Leader, he labeled the pueblo "tolerably interesting."15 At that point of his account, Lummis was more concerned with describing other details of his walk from Albuquerque to El Rito, New Mexico. Thus he wrote about lava beds, agates, the scarcity of water, and the loneliness of the country, before describing a meeting with cowboys (whom he saw favorably) and his arrival in the "tiny Indian town" of El Rito. In his next letter, however, he wrote with vigor about his own appearance at Laguna Pueblo as "Pa-puk-ke-wis," wildman of the plains.16 What Lummis claimed to have occurred was described with characteristic flamboyance.
My nondescript appearance as I climbed up a house and sat down on the roof, captured the whole outfit, as well it might. The sombrero with its snake-skin band, the knife and two six-shooters in my belt, the bulging duck coat and long-fringed, snowy leggins, the skunk skin dangling from my blanket- roll, and last but not least, the stuffed coyote over my shoulders, looking natural as life, made up a picture the like of which I feel sure they never saw before and never will see again. They must have thought me Pa-puk-ke-wis, the wild man of the plains. A lot of the muchachos and muchachas (boys and girls) crowded around me, and when I caught the coyote by the neck and shook it, at the same time howling at them savagely, they jumped away, and the whole assembly was convulsed with laughter. An Indian appreciates a joke, even if it be a rather feeble one.17
Here we see Lummis's relish for the drama of self-creation. In representing himself as "Pa-puk-ke-wis," he made himself more "wild" than the Indians. His cultivation of a rough-edged "Southwesterner" guise manifested a deep desire to go beyond the East in order to revitalize his mind and body out West. Read as the sign of cultural liberation, Lummis's role-playing in the Southwest found him wearing the clothes of the other, as measured in class, racial, and ethnic terms. At the same time, for all the spontaneity that may have attended this first instance of dressing-up in the Southwest, the act was quickly commodified through the process of writing for popular readerships.
In his combination of roles as touristic adventurer, enthusiastic athlete, and professional writer, Lummis closely resembled his friend from Harvard, Theodore Roosevelt, who also wrote extensively on Western themes in the late nineteenth century. Roosevelt and others of his generation and elite social standing in the East, such as artist Frederic Remington and writer Owen Wister, traveled West to shore up what they saw as the threatened identity of White Anglo Saxon Protestants in the U.S. According to G. Edward White, they went West in order to experience for themselves the perceived distinction between the West as an "agrarian, rural, egalitarian, and ethnically homogeneous" social order and the East as an "Industrial, urban, elitist, ethnically heterogeneous, and racially-mixed" social order.18 To live the outdoors life in the West was to partake of a stabilizing influence on a social body threatened by economic depression, labor unrest, crises of management, and large-scale immigration. By appealing to male, and particularly youthful, readers in the East through his advocacy of the rigorous Western life, Roosevelt sought to invigorate what he saw as their limpid bodies. Nature, youth, manhood, and the state were conjoined in Roosevelt's understanding of what constituted the health of the body politic, and it was through a symbolic reassertion of the primacy of man over nature that men grew strong again.19
Lummis shared with Roosevelt a passion for fierce athleticism, hunting, and the masculinist pursuit of rugged individualism. Letters from the tramp were filled with details of food and trophy hunting, trout fishing, and scrapes with mountain lions. Adventures that put a premium on quick thinking and sharp physicality taxed the body into an often ecstatic expenditure. These adventures were, in turn, seen as a remedy for a social sickness identified by Lummis in the following terms: "Somehow, our civilization has always seemed to me to civilize backwards. Its whole tendency is toward laziness, for it is always inventing something to supplant work.... Yes, civilization is mighty fast ruining the race physically, and the mental and moral decay are inevitable corollaries of the bodily."20
These sentiments echoed a pervasive fear among many middle-class and upper-class Easterners, a fear that Donna Haraway argues was figured forth in the specter of decadence that "threatened in two interconnected ways, both related to energy—limited, production systems—one artificial, one organic. The machine threatened to consume and exhaust man. And the sexual economy of man seemed vulnerable both to exhaustion and to submergence in unruly and primitive excess."21 For Haraway, the establishment of Carl Akeley's African Hall in New York's American Museum of Natural History in the early twentieth century was an emblematic expression and assuagement of Eastern anxiety over the threatened social superiority and racial purity of privileged whites in the U.S. The museum was the "ideological and material product of the sporting life" advocated by Western enthusiasts.22 Therein, the purity of nature was given manifest form through the art of taxidermy and the construction of dioramas that joined animals and man "in visual embrace."23
The ideological underpinnings of the institutional growth discussed by Haraway are much the same for Lummis's case in the 1880s. Lummis's advocacy of the Southwest in succeeding years pivoted about a similar concern for the preservation of threatened manhood, the consolidation of racial identity, and the conservation of both natural and cultural resources for moral and exploitative purposes. Since the walk West was a means of recreating his personal identity in a way that stressed individualism and self-reliance in the most testing of circumstances, it is also significant that Lummis made little reference to his wife Dorothea Rhodes Lummis in the letters sent either to Ohio or Los Angeles. It appears that Lummis's tramp was motivated in part by a desire to avoid confronting the reality of his failing marriage.24 Lummis's virtual silence concerning Dorothea in his public letters demonstrates how the assertion of a masculinist self meant denying the domestic scene.25

"THE LAND OF SUN, SILENCE, AND ADOBE"

In A Tramp Across the Continent, Lummis wrote: "I have lived now in Isleta for four years, with its Indians for my only neighbors; and better neighbors I never had and never want. They are unmeddlesome but kindly, thoughtful, and loyal, and wonderfully interesting. Their endless and beautiful folklore, their quaint and often astonishing customs, and their startling ceremonials have made a fascinating study"26 While residing in New Mexico between 1888 and 1892, Lummis used his informal participant observer ethnography of not only Isletans but other Pueblo groups, Navajos, Utes, and Apaches to fill out his accounts of regional landscapes and peoples. Part travelogue, part regional history, part ethnology, part folklore, and part adventure storytelling, Lummis's articles and books on the Southwest all capitalized on 1-iis intimate experience of locale. These articles, largely published in Eastern magazines such as Scribner's Monthly, St. Nicholas, and Harper's Monthly, transported images of the Southwest across the country in the years that Lummis spent in New Mexico. The articles were incorporated wholesale or in revised form into Lummis's books which, in turn, tended to crowd one another as passages in one volume were duplicated or amplified in a succeeding volume.
While residing at Isleta Pueblo, Lummis sent a number of stories to St. Nicholas. The magazine was published by Century Company of New, York and designed for an audience of children. Similar to its parent publication, Century magazine, St. Nicholas was cosmopolitan in fare, featuring myriad stories and travelogues that described locations across the globe. Thus in his writing for St. Nicholas, Lummis capitalized on an existing market for stories and travelogues with "exotic" locations. Lummis Wrote two series of articles that described the landscapes and peoples of the Southwest and retold folk tales from Isleta Pueblo. These articles were published in the magazine between 1891 and 1894, and later were collected in two books, Some Strange Corners of Our Country and The Man Who Married the Moon (later renamed Puebla Folk-Tales). Aimed toward a young male audience, the articles jostled for readers' attention alongside many other adventure stories, travel narratives, and historical fictions. Typically, young female readers were offered domestic fictions. sentimental poems (including several by Lummis's first wife Dorothea), and college-girt romances.
At this point I want to single out one of Lummis's clutch of southwestern books for attention in order to examine the terms on which American Indians and Hispanos were to be incorporated into the U.S. Some Strange Corners of Our Country was published by Century Company in 1892, although most of its chapters had been published previously in St. Nicolas. Marketed toward a middle-brow juvenile audience in the East, Lummis began the book by chastising his audience for not taking greater pride in the natural wealth and historical drama of American culture. Lummis quickly turned to the Southwest as a part of the country that would cure his audience of its "unpatriotic slighting of our own country":
There is a part of America—a part even of the United States—of which Americans know as little as they do of inner Africa, and of which too many of them are much less interested to learn. With them "to travel" means only to go abroad; and they call a mail a traveler who has run his superficial girdle around the world and is as ignorant of his own country (except its cities) as if he had never been in it. I hope to live to see Americans proud of knowing America, and ashamed not to know it; and it is to my young countrymen that I look for this patriotism to effect so needed a change.27
The writing that followed was relentlessly hyperbolic. Lummis's key words were "wonder" and its variations: "curious, "marvelous," "astonishing" and "strange." The Grand Canyon, featured in the first chapter, was described as a "stupendous chasm," then an "unparalleled chasm," and later a "peerless gorge," before Lummis declared that he couldn't describe it at all. Southwestern landscapes were described in what had become standardized terms by the late nineteenth century. The "Great American Desert" was a "vast, arid waste," while throughout the book the immensity of open terrain and the unrelenting indifference of mountains and deserts to the presence of (Anglo) humans were played upon by the author.28 Further chapters described such natural, albeit "freak" phenomena as the Petrified Forest, the natural bridge of Pine Creek, and the lava fields of El Malpais. In giving travel directions to many of these same "forbidding" landscapes, Lummis made it obvious to readers that a touristic infrastructure had been set up which facilitated relatively easy access to most of the places described in the book. Consequently, the first chapter of the book ended with details of travel, food, and accommodation costs for visitors to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Presumably these details, largely absent from the original articles in St. Nicolas, were included for the book's adult readers.
The bulk of the book related the customs of contemporary Hopi, Navajo, and Pueblo Indians, and speculated on the fate of the Pueblo's cliff-dwelling ancestors. Common to chapters on the Hopi Snake Dance, Navajo "superstitions," witchcraft, Navajo and Pueblo medicine men, and the lsleta Scalp Dance was Lummis's rhetorical wonder at the prevalence of practices in the modern U.S. that "properly" belonged to another time and place. In setting the scene for an account of the Hopi Snake Dance, Lummis wrote: "It is in these strange, cliff- perched little cities of the Hupi ('the people of peace,' as the Moquis call themselves)that one of the most astounding barbaric dances in the world is held; for it even yet exists. Africa has no savages whose mystic performances are more wonderful than the Moqui snake-dance—and as much may be said for many of the other secret rites of the Pueblos."29
But the Hopis, Navajos, and Rio Grande Pueblos did not belong to another time and place really, and Lummis knew it. Instead he realized they were a vitalistic part of the Southwest's contemporary cultural geography, and as such were liable to be objects of fascinated viewing in the eyes of Anglo visitors. Lummis played upon cultural antiquity, "quaintness as well as alleged barbarism, and "exotic" practices among the Hopis and other groups of Native Americans, not simply to relegate their beliefs and acts to the past, but, instead, to make this textualized "past" their entry into the contemporary U.S. It is no coincidence that Some Strange Corners of Our Country was published only a year before the opening of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, for the book shared in the display and commodification of the non-Anglo other that was so much a part of the fair. In terms of the fair itself, it might be said that the book erred less toward the pedagogical purpose of displays in and around the Anthropological Building, under the supervision of Frederick Ward Putnam and Franz Boas, than it partook of the character of the Midway Plaisance, that "jumble of foreignness" where quasi-ethnological types and exotic "curiosities" were exhibited.30
For Curtis Hinsley, borrowing from Walter Benjamin's analysis of the mid-nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, the flaneur who walked the Midway was the newly emergent modernist type through whom the older P. T. Barnum-esque human freak show and the public ideal of late-nineteenth-century museum-based anthropology were conjoined: "The eyes of the Midway are those of the, flaneur, the stroller through the street arcade of human differences, whose experience is not the holistic, integrated ideal of the anthropologist but the segmented, seriatim fleetingness of tile modern tourist 'just passing through.'"31
I propose that Lummis's book itself amounted to a gallery of quickly sketched portrayals of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences that were designed to thrill as much as educate the reader. Some Strange Corners of Our Country thus shared with the fair the quasi-ethnological exposition of the lives of non-Anglo peoples, although in this instance the others dwelled within the U.S. This quasi-ethnological curiosity was piqued by taking a readerly stroll through the pages of a book full of suggestions, in the guise of travel directions, on how to purchase the experience of cultural interaction for oneself.
As Hinsley notes, at the fair the commodity relation largely decided the nature of the exchange between Anglo visitors and those ethnic others brought in from the imperial (or internal colonial) periphery to the urban center of Chicago for the purposes of exhibition. Similarly, in succeeding years, travelers bent on following Lummis's directions to the Southwest would find that within the part of the country the author had labeled the domain of "still savage peoples, whose customs are stranger and more interesting than those of the Congo," there were indigenous people increasingly able to sustain their livelihoods by capitalizing on tourists' very desire to purchase authentic artifacts from them.32 Although Lummis's writings about southwestern American Indians exoticized their cultural practices and made them the object of an incorporative gaze, it is important to emphasize that incorporation was a complex and dynamic process of negotiation between dominant and marginalized cultures. E. L. Wade notes that as early as 1880, when the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad reached Albuquerque, there was a developing infrastructure for the sale of local Indian wares at main depots in the Southwest."33 Subsequently, the arts and craft trade at stations, hotels and pueblos helped sustain many American Indian communities in the Southwest. By the late 1880s, Pueblos and Navajos, in particular, were able to capitalize on traditional crafts as a way of contributing to their livelihoods. In some cases Pueblo Indians left their homes to travel great distances in order to participate in Anglo cultural festivals such as the Los Angeles Fiesta, in which Isletans performed ceremonial dances, displayed traditional crafts, and participated in elaborately staged tableaux. The increasing numbers of tourists and curiosity seekers who viewed American Indians performing their "authentic" selves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped further commodify Native livelihoods. Yet commodification neither at the turn of the century nor today, when arguably the arts and crafts trade thrives more than ever, simply co-opted Native American "traditionalism." Over the past hundred or so years, despite much internal contestation over the degree to which tourism should be engaged, Native communities have learned to profit from Anglo interest in their arts, crafts, and homes.
Turning to Lummis's representation of Mexicanos, the terms of cultural incorporation proved different from those associated with Native Americans. In Some Strange Corner of our Country, he praised the Spanish for making in the Southwest "a heroic history which is quite without parallel."34 While elite Hispanos allegedly owed their nobility to 'pure" Spanish blood and their direct lineage to Europe, poor Hispanos were seen as mestizos whose racial and cultural traits were confused. Lummis both sentimentalized and demonized pobres in his travelogues and fictions. As noted earlier, Lummis claimed to have liberated himself from racialist assumptions about Mexicanos after his initial arrival in the Southwest. His writing on the Penitentes, though, demonstrates both continued racialism and a fanatical obsession with making their activities into the cultural property of his readership. By taking a close look at how Lummis invented the Pentitentes for public consumption, we arrive at a more solid understanding of how such representations were an integral part of constituting a cultural claim on southwestern Mexicanos.
In several published articles and book chapters, Lummis wrote about the occasion on which he photographed the crucifixion of a Brother-hood member in San Mateo, New Mexico. The fullest account of this episode is to be found in The Land of Poco Tiempo (1893), in a chapter that pivots about the twin axes of attraction and repulsion.35 For Lummis, the Brotherhood was a grotesque wonder of the Southwest whose acts of penance during the four weeks of Lent were to be highlighted and exploited for representational gain. In the chapter, "The Penitent Brothers," Lummis described "a procession of flagellants" "in which voters of this Republic shredded their naked backs with savage whips, staggered beneath huge crosses, and hugged the maddening needles of the cactus; a procession which culminated in the flesh-and-blood crucifixion of an unworthy representative of the Redeemer."36
According to Marta Weigle, the Penitentes were a subsection of the Hispano population of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. "Penitentes" was a pejorative label, and officially their organization was named "La Fraternidad Piodosa de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno"("The Pious Fraternity of Our Father Jesus Nazarite").37 The Brother-hood's roots were in the late eighteenth century and their influence on local folkways grew in the mid- 1830s, after the secularization of missions in Mexico. For Weigle, the Brotherhood was "a movement clearly within Spanish Roman Catholic tradition" which "took root because it fulfilled vital needs for social integration and individual spiritual security," particularly during the Secular Period when Franciscan friars were gradually replaced by secular priests.38 Penitential observances were a frontier phenomenon, whereby generally poor settlers in areas remote from first Spanish and then Mexican centers of administration, who suffered from often inhospitable natural conditions and poor relations with hostile nomadic Indians, innovated their own patterns and practices of belief to create an identifiable folk religion. Many of its members, particularly after the American annexation of New Mexico in 1846 found a cultural refuge in the Brotherhood: "As residents of a Territory of the United States, the Hispanic populace had to adjust to a new regime which separated the powers of church and state, to a new language, to important changes in Catholic Church administration, and to a growing influx of Anglo- American settlers who were largely Protestant."39
Lummis made little effort to understand the Order as anything other than an anachronistic and barbaric organization that had degenerated from a once noble heritage in Spain: "By slow degrees the once godly order shrank and grew deformed among the brave but isolated and in- grown people of that lonely land; until the monstrosity of the present fanaticism had devolved."40He claimed that until its suppression by the Catholic Church earlier in the nineteenth century, Brotherhood membership had numbered in "some thousands, with fraternities in towns of every county" of New Mexico. By 1888, however, Penitente activity was supposed to be limited to only three towns 'in the Territory. He proceeded to recount activities he observed take place during 1891 in San Mateo, "the most unreclaimed village in New, Mexico" (emphasis mine)—a place, he also noted, where witches were said still to be abundant.41 By invoking the word "unreclaimed" Lummis tacitly acknowledged that his own purpose was to represent penitential activity as the remnant of an obstinate past that needed eradication.
Lummis's account represents bodily violence as the primary characteristic of penitential activity; thus, the chapter is filled with references to "tortures," "long, bleeding cuts," and blows which "[ravish] from the back its tiny morsels of flesh."42 Readers were warned of the danger of becoming too curious about the Brotherhood: "Woe to him if in seeing he shall be seen! A sharp-edged knife or knife shall be over-curious of his back, and across its bloody autograph a hundred fearful lashes shall lift their purpling wales-in barbarous hint to him henceforth to keep a curb between the teeth of inquisitiveness."43 In describing his photography of the Penitente ceremony, it is clear that for Lummis the courting of such danger was a vitalistic thrill in itself. In fact the chapter as a whole is preoccupied with Lummis's own risk-taking.44 Made into a sensational spectacle, the Penitentes' stated capacity for bloody revenge upon the body of the outside viewer was made the very measure of Lummis's heroic escapology. Indeed, he followed the preceding statement by enthusing: "[L]et him stalk his game, and with safety to his own hide he may see havoc to the hides of others.",45 Sensationalism, stalkimng game, escapology, the anticipation of pain run through with an almost masochistic delight—these were all vital elements of the account. But the central point of encounter between the Penitentes and Lummis was on the ground of technology. Lummis conveyed his eagerness for the final seven days of Lent to arrive by stating: "I had been watching feverishly for Holy Week to come. No photographer had ever caught the Penitentes with his sun-lasso, and I was assured of death in various attractive forms at the first hint of an attempt."46The camera, then, was for Lummis the primary means of exposing the "barbarous" practices of the Penitentes. His "feverish" desire to intrude on dangerous ground led to him setting up a large format camera in plain sight of processional officials and participants while receiving the protection of his friend, Don Ireneo Chaves, from a mob that was "openly hostile."47 That evening Lummis successfully bribed processional officials so as to allow him to freely photograph the Good Friday crucifixion the next day.
Lummis described the culminating procession of the Penitentes in detail, again emphasizing the collective antipathy of the "ill-faced mob" toward him and the bodily endurance of the Brothers, three of whom lashed themselves, while another two carried heavy crosses, and two more walked "with a burro-load of entrana (buckthorn cactus) lashed upon his naked back."48 When it finally came to the actual crucifixion of a Brother, the Hermano Mayor (or Chief Brother) signaled that Lummis could take his photograph. In Lummis's words: "And there we stood facing each other, the crucified and I—the one playing with the most wonderful toy of modern progress, the other racked by the most barbarous device of twenty centuries ago."49 Thus Lummis constructed the encounter between photographer and subject so as to offset modernity against antiquity. By relegating Brotherhood practices to a stubborn past that refused to give way to what he considered correct behavior within the more egalitarian present, Lummis helped shape readers' perceptions of part of New Mexico's Mexicano population as backward, deluded, and in a state of willing submission to "fanatical" religious beliefs.

"ROMANCE IS THE CHIEF RICHES OF ANY PEOPLE"

THE CULTURAL LEGACY OF CONQUEST50

In 1892, having made a full recovery from his paralysis, Lummis left New Mexico to make an archaeological expedition to Peru and Bolivia with archaeologist and ethnologist Adolph Bandelier. The expedition was financed by Henry Villard, builder of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Before leaving the U.S., Lummis and his second wife Eve, together with their four-month-old daughter Turbese, moved to Los Angeles.51 In a letter to his former wife Dorothea, with whom he maintained ties after their divorce, he explained the South American trip: "I couldn't go on forever filling the public with New Mexico and Arizona: I could feel that my rope there was about to end."52 There was, then, at this time a sense of exhaustion to Lummis's association with the Southwest. While the archaeological expedition was to falter in 1893 because of Villard's financial problems, Lummis used his experiences in Peru and Bolivia as the basis for further writings, such as the books The Gold Fish of Gran Chimu (1896) and The Enchanted Burro (1897) and celebratory articles on Spanish colonialism in the Americas.53 On his return to Los Angeles in the autumn of 1893, Turbese and Keith Lummis note that "[e]verything had to be turned into money—articles, photographs, even cherished curios.... Eve was frail then and undernourished, but her husband set her to printing hundreds of photographs to sell to tourists curious about the bronco-busting explorer, his scenes of the Southwest, and his collections."54 This fact, in combination with the sentiment aired in the letter to Dorothea, suggests the consistently improvised quality of Lummis's association with the Southwest. It appears that financing of his activities was often tenuous, there being no guarantee that much money would be made from his writing.
Doubts notwithstanding, LLimmis did not cease to exploit southwestern themes in future articles and books. In 1894, he took over the editorship of the Journal Land of sunshine and held it until 1909. As editor and chief contributor to Land of Sunshine, Lummis advocated the development of southern California's commercial and cultural resources and extolled the virtues of what he called "the right arm of the continent." Historian Kevin Starr points out that Lummis was one of a number of boosters in the 1890s who sought to capitalize on the romantic past of southern California in particular, and the Southwest as a whole, in selling the region to incoming investors, tourists, and prospective residents."55
Land of Sunshine (subtitled An Illustrative Monthly, Descriptive of Southern California) began life in June 1894 as a promotional magazine. Funded in large part by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the journal was designed to appeal to both California and Eastern readers, particularly "travelers, health seekers, and intending settlers."56 In December 1894, Lummis was announced as the journal's new editor and characterized by one writer as "one of the best known of the younger school of American writers."57 Although the promotional invective remained, under his editorship Land of Sunshine quickly took on a more cosmopolitan character. Stating the purpose of the journal in his first editorial, Lummis wrote that Land of Sunshine "aims to find out and bring out a literature and art local in color but broad in sympathy. It will make a modest but growing feature of short stories, poems, studies, sketches, all of characteristic flavor; the folklore and folksongs, the history and legends, the types of man and nature, and whatever else shall appeal to the intellectual."58 We see how this statement of intent informed the selection of material for the journal by briefly noting some of the articles that appeared in the December 1895 edition. The lead article on "California and Fremont, written by Jessie Benton Fremont, widow of John C. Fremont, was accompanied by a Joaquin Miller poem and articles on the oldest church in Los Angeles, Cahuilla Indian songs and dances, and the preponderance of Spanish words in (American) English. Thus, at the outset of his editorship, Lummis emphasized historical, romantic, and ethnological themes relevant to both southern California and the Southwest in general. By this time the subtitle of the journal also had been changed to A Magazine of California and the Southwest.
Through the 1890s and the early 1900s, the cultural and geographical scope of the journal continued to broaden under Lummis's guidance. He used the pages of Land of Sunshine/out West to pursue campaigning interests in the restoration of southern California missions through the Landmarks Club, in Indian policy reform initiatives through the Sequoyah League, and in Native American cultural preservation through the Southwest Museum. Lummis also endorsed a number of writers and artists who, individually and in groups, visited El Alisal, his home in the rustic environment of Arroyo Seco, a few miles northeast of Los Angeles. Special fascination, however, was reserved for what Lummis saw as the glorious Spanish colonial heritage of southern California mid New Mexico. "The Missions," he proselytized, "are, next to our climate and its consequences, the best capital southern California has."59 He also praised the "Spanish-American face" as the "very poetry of evolution," noting that "through all [variations of the mestizo], individual or local, runs the inevitable dominant of Spain. "60 Southern California, according to Lummis, was to be understood "not only [as] the new Eden of the Saxon home-seeker, but part, and type, of Spanish America."61 In southern California, then, Anglos had the opportunity to combine "Anglo-Saxon" energy with the aesthetic "beauty" of the "Spanish- American" past.
Such prizing of the imagined past of California was neither new to Lummis nor to southern California readerships. By the 1880s, more than thirty years after the signing of the Treaty of Gauadalupe Hidalgo and the official incorporation of former Mexican territories in the Southwest into the U.S., the sorrowful plight of dispossessed Californios could be safely mourned in the pages of travelogues. Helen Hunt Jackson, for example, in one travel article characterized Californios as both "children" and "Poets," indolent and charming, culturally backward and of the old rather than the new world.62 She looked with both ambivalence and horror at the impact of U.S. expansionism on California's Mexicano and Native American populations. While she praised the development of the agricultural industry in southern California—the state was ready to be "Garden of the world," she grimaced outwardly at what she saw as the exploitative and often immoral culture of settler whites. Such ambivalence was further dramatized in her novel Ramona, designed to awaken the nation at large to the plight of displaced California Indians. In actual fact, Jackson's highly romanticized image of California's ranchos and missions was seized upon by promoters who wished to boost the state's image to potential investors and settlers, and to tourists, by appealing to its "Spanish" (and not Mexican) past.
Lummis, who went on to become an active campaigner for the rights of southern California Indians in the late 1890s, contributed to the romantic myth inspired by Ramona while working as a journalist at the Los Angeles Times in the 1880s. In 1888, only four years after the publication of the novel, Lummis privately published a small volume entitled The Home Ramona, which featured photographs of Camulos Rancho in Santa Barbara County, the supposed home of Helen Hunt jackson's heroine, For Lummis, Camulos was "the sweetest spot where e'er romance/Above, or fancy strayed.' The last stanza of the singularly sentimental verse, "Camulos," reads:

Untaint by greed of riches,
That is our modern shame;
Und-tanged as in those far old days
When Padre Serra came;
Its white adobes face the sun,
Its myriad wood-doves call—
Its heart the heart of mother Spain&medash;
Of Spain before the fall!63

After his return to Los Angeles in 1893, Lummis further capitalized on the romantic nostalgia inspired by Ramona through myriad articles, editorials, and books. He also helped organize southern California cultural celebrations of the 1890s, such as the 1894 Spanish Days Fiesta in Coronado and the 1895 Fiesta de Los Angeles. These festivals were organized and funded in the main by chambers of commerce, business elites, and railroads and played a central role in revitalizing the stagnant economy of the southland in the aftermath of a real estate boom in the 1880s.64 The following description of the Coronado event gives notice of how a sense of the region's "Spanish" past was conspicuously created for public consumption:
The fiesta will be as nearly as possible a revival of the sports, tournaments, dances, and pastimes of the early Spanish Californians. In the dress of the participants, the presence of Indians and Mexicans in their native costumes, the trappings of the horses and the character of the games; the whole fiesta will be a scene from the ancient days, transplanted to delight a modern audience. Mexican and Spanish caballeros, Indian riders and American cowboys will compete for hours in horsemanship, and among other thrilling events will be a genuine Spanish bull-fight.65
Lummis used his ties with Isleta Pueblo to include Pueblo Indians in both the Coronado and Los Angeles fiestas. In a letter printed in the San Diego Union newspaper, he reported on the success of his recent negotiations with the Isletans: "I shall have to go for them, and shall bring you a full twenty, or two or three more. They will be the most representative band of Pueblos that ever went anywhere; and it may positively be reckoned a triumph to get such a showing."66The Pueblo Indians were to display traditional crafts and perhaps perform a dance, although the latter was to be understood as "a privilege and not a proposition." At the Los Angeles Fiesta, lsletans were set to perform in "a Pageant of the Pacific, illustrating the aboriginal civilizations of the West Coast of America, the Spanish conquest, and the new era in California."67 They were featured in a parade of floats that first dramatized the Spanish colonial conquest of Guatavitas, Incas, and Aztecs and then depicted "our own Southwest and its romantic prehistoric peoples." The description continues:
An exact representation of one of the famous cliff dwellings will be peopled with actual descendants of the Cliff-dwellers, repelling an attack of the Apaches. Next will come a correct model of one of the stupendous communal houses of the ancient Pueblos, accompanied by actual Pueblos in their picturesque national costume. In this tableau will be introduced the priest- scout Fray Marcos de Nizza, who discovered New Mexico and Arizona in 1539; and that greatest of North American explorers, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who discovered the Grand Canon of the Colorado, most of New Mexico, Colorado, Indian Territory, and Kansas, 355 years ago.68
By appearing in a tableau that represented the "discovery" of New Mexico by Spanish conquistadors, it seems that Isletans were complicit in a celebration of their own colonization. Yet things were more complex than at first they seem. Theodore Jojola notes that Isletans continued to perform at the Fiesta until 1903 when, in an effort to quieten disruptive disputes over who was chosen to travel to Los Angeles, tribal officials prenvented further participatioii.69 These disputes were, in turn, part of a larger conflict within the Isleta community between "conservatives" and "progressives" over the degree to which pueblo governmental and social structures should be allowed to change in the face of contact with Anglo outsiders.70 During his residency at Isleta Pueblo between 1888 and 1892, Lummis had made strong ties with both the wealthy Abeita family, through whom he gained access to ceremonials and restricted tribal knowledge, and the non-Indian traders and missionaries who also lived in the pueblo locale.71 These ties suggest the degree to which Lummis associated with Pueblo "progressives."
Perhaps some of those Isletans who traveled away from their home environment did so because they had become alienated from their "traditional" culture. Equally, however, Isletans may have become curious about the world beyond Isleta, and travel outside Pueblo lands allowed them to explore Anglo culture for themselves. Regardless of the precise reasons why each individual made his or her way to Los Angeles, the movement back and forth between the pueblo and the metropolis was indicative of the larger dilemma for Isletans over how to engage with Anglo society and their incorporation into the U.S.

CONCLUSION

By the turn of the century, Lummis was an influential figure in the middle-class and elite culture of Los Angeles. His self-appointed expertise on matters ethnological and "Spanish" had become prized by a diverse audience of promoters, civic architects, travelers, and general readers who wished to know more about the history and cultures of the Southwest. In Los Angeles, Lummis proved one of the major promoters of the Southland's new urban culture as he capitalized on the southern California Mission Myth. The construction of a romantic Spanish colonial past by civic architects was both a sales ploy and an attempt to overlay the blatant commercialism of the booster ideology with a "greater" sense of purpose. By extolling the gentility of the old Californios and the romance of the Spanish missions, Lummis endeavored to provide the key to a hybridized future, where incoming whites could take the "best" of the culture that had preceded them while forging a strengthened mind and body through the vigorous, year-round outdoor life that California's climate allowed them. Clearly such a picture manipulated both past and present realities (such as forced labor for Indians under the old Spanish mission system and contemporary racial conflict in post-Civil War Los Angeles) in order to render the illusion of a natural hierarchy of racial, ethnic, class, gender, and cultural values in the city and state.72
As I have strived to demonstrate, racialist and class-biased assumptions were always at work in Lummis's promotional activity in both the Southland and the greater Southwest. Overall, his writing ended up servicing an oligarchic and repressive cultural ideal that is expressed most clearly in Land of sunshine, when Lummis envisioned Los Angeles as "the latest and highest development of modern civilization, the climax of human achievement to date, the most radical and important experiment ever made by the race which just now stands at the head of the world."73, For all of Lummis's profound interest in American Indians and Mexicanos, his imagined America was hierarchized along racial, class, and gender lines that clearly privileged forms of Anglo male authority.
And yet this is not the whole story. For in the course of traveling through, living in, and writing about the Southwest, Lummis contributed to Anglo audiences a simultaneously popular yet more complex understanding of Native American and Mexicano cultures in the Southwest. I have singled out Lummis for critical attention because in his roles as interpreter and promoter of the Southwest he played a significant role in popularizing the region's landscapes and peoples, first to largely Eastern audiences and in time increasingly to Western readerships. The challenge in reading Lummis today is not to be merely dismissive of his representations, but to criticize his texts in ways that counter the hierarchy of cultural values they establish. And further, to realize that even though Lummis played a significant role in promoting southwestern tourism and establishing institutions such as the Southwest Museum that attempted to fix Native American cultures through the dominant culture's gaze, the forms of cultural exchange associated with these sites have changed over time and arc open to continued contestation and negotiation.74

FOOTNOTES

  1. In using the words "Hispano" and "Mexicano" to describe the residual "Mexican" population of the Southwest's conquered territories, I follow the example of anthropologist Sylvia Rodriguez. Of her own use of terminology, she writes: "In keeping with the prevailing trend in the contemporary ethnographic and ethnocentric literature on the region, the term Hispano will be applied specifically to the subgroup of Mexicanos or subsequently Mexican Americans who settled the Upper Rio Grande and adjacent regions of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado" (p. 390). "Mexicano" describes people of emic, or native, origin to the Southwest as a whole. Rodriguez, "Land, Water, and Ethnic Identity in Taos." In Charles L. Briggs and John R. Van Ncss, eds., Land, Water, and Culture: New Perspectives on Hispanic Land Grants. Albuquerque: University of NewMexico Press, 1987, pp. 313- 403.
  2. For biographical information on Lummis, see Edwin R. Bingham, Charles F Lummis: Editor of the Southwest. San Marino, Cal.: The Huntington Library, 1955; and Turbese Lummis Fiske and Keith Lummis, Charles F. Lummis: The Man and His West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,1975.
  3. See John C. Bourke, The Snake-Dance of the Moquis: Being a Narrative of a journev from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the Villages of the Moqui Indians of Arizona. New York: Scribner, 1884; Ernest Ingersoll, The Crest of the Continent. Chicago: R. R. Donliellev and Sons, 1885; Susan Wallace, The Land of the Pueblos. New York: George D. Hurst, 1888; and George Wharton James, The Indians of the Painted Desert Region: Hopis, Navahoes, Wallapais, Havasupais. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1903; and New Mexico, The Land of the Delight Makers, Boston: The Page Company, 1920.
  4. For details on the development of ethnological research in the southwestern field and the growth of professionalized anthropology in the U.S., see Curtis M. Hilis, Jr., Savaqes and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropoloqy. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1981.
  5. See journal of the Southwest 30:4 (Winter 1990) special issue, "Inventing the Southwest." The following essays are of particular relevance to the present discussion: Barbara Babcock, "By Way of Introduction" (pp. 383-99) and "'A New Mexico Rebecca': Imaging Pueblo Women" (pp. 400-37); Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., "Authoring Authenticity" (pp.462-78); and Marta Weigle, "Southwest Lures: Innocents Detoured, Incensed Determined" (pp. 499 - 540).
  6. My, use of produced deliberately echoes Edward Said's, Orientalism, a key reference point in the previously cited work of Babcock, Hinsley, and Weigle. See Edward Said, Orientalism New York: Random House, 1979.
  7. Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., "Authoring Authenticity," p. 462.
  8. Ibid., p. 462.
  9. Charles E Lummis, A Tramp Across the Continent (1892; reprint). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, n.p.
  10. Charles [F.] Lummis, Letters from the Southwest, ed. James R. Byrkit. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991, p. 90.
  11. Ibid., p. 97.
  12. Raymund Paredes notes that mid-nineteenth-century, Anglo travel writers tended to emphasize the bodily, characteristics of Mexicanos as the key to their racial and cultural character. Following the example of earlier writers, Lummis caricatured facial appearances and bodily dispositions so as to bring together stereotypical images of the sly Indian and the sleepy, Spaniard in the figure of the "Greaser." Sec Raymund A. Paredes, "The Mexican Image in American Travel Literature, 1831-1869." New Mexico Historical Review 52:1 (January 1977), pp. 5-29. Paredes periodizes his essay through the publication dates of The Personal Narrative of James 0. Pattie (1832) and J. Ross Browne's Adventures in the Apache Country (1869). Also see David J. Weber, "'Scarce More Than Apes': Historical Roots of Anglo American Stereotypes of Mexicans in the Border Region." In David J. Weber, ed., New, Spain's Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in 105stheamen'can West, 1540-1821. Albuquerque: University, of New, Mexico Press, 1979, pp. 295-307.
  13. Charles F Lummis, A Tramp Across the Continent, p. 97.
  14. Ibid., p. 75.
  15. Charles [F.] Lummis, Letters from the Southwest, p. 186.
  16. Ibid., p. 199.
  17. Ibid., p. 199.
  18. G. Edward White,The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968, pp. 184-85.
  19. I have borrowed the articulation of the key words "nature," "youth," "manhood," and "the state" from Donna Haraway's essay "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-36," in her Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 26-58.
  20. Charles [F.] Lummis, Letters from the Southwest, p. 127.
  21. Haraway, "Tcddy Bear Patriarchy,' p. 55.
  22. Ibid., p. 42.
  23. Ibid., p. 26.
  24. Before Lummis set out on the walk, the two had already experienced a separation after secretly marrying in Boston in 1880. After failing to graduate from Harvard, Lummis had left for the Scioto Valley in Ohio to manage his father-in-law's farm while Dorothea remained in Boston to finish her medical training. The decision to leave Ohio was made not long after the couple had resumed living together. Dorothea's letters to Lummis during the initial separation make poignant reading as she sought to rationalize her love for him and what appears to have been his benign neglect of her. See Dorothea Rhodes Lummis Moore Collection at the Huntington Library for letters written between 1883 and 1884; and Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 207- 10, for a discussion of Dorothea's struggle to balance her beliefs in romantic love and duty to the Institution of marriage.
  25. This silence also disguises the extent to which Lummis was dependent on women throughout his life for emotional support. The other side of extreme physical exertion both on the walk and in Lummis's initial years in Los Angeles was profound anxiety about his constitution. This anxiety was expressed first through partial paralysis and later through temporary blindness.
  26. Charles E Lummis, A Tramp Across the Continent, p. 142.
  27. Charles F. Lummis, some Strange Corners of our Country: the wonderland of the Southwest. New York: Conetury Co., 1892, pp. 1-2
  28. Ibid.,p.28.
  29. Charles E Lummis, Some Strange Corners of Our Country, pp. 45-46.
  30. See Curtis M. Hinsley, "The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chica o, 1893." In Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting cultures: The Poetics and Politics of museum Display. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1991, pp. 344-65. Frederick Ward Putnam, director and curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, was appointed as head of the Department of Ethnology and Archaeology at the Chicago World's Fair. Franz Boas, who later became one of the major proponents of professionalized anthropology in the U.S., was Putnam's chief assistant.
  31. Ibid., p. 356.
  32. Charles F. Lummis, Some Strange Corners of our Country, p. 5.
  33. See Edwin L, Wade, "Thc Ethnic Art Market in the American Southwest, 1880- 1980." In George W Stocking, Jr., ed., Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, pp. 167-91.
  34. Ibid., p. 165. Note that Pueblo Indians and, to a lesser extent, Navajos were in large measure valorized through their association with Spanish colonialism.
  35. In a diary entry for the week of September 6-12, 1888, Lummis noted that "The Penitentes" article, 7,000 words long, was written in one day. In an entry for the following week he noted that Century had refused publication and that the article later came out in The Cosmopolitan. See "Diary Extracts" in The Charles Fletcher Lummis Collection, The Southwest Museum. These typed extracts from Lummis-, much longer diary, which was handwritten in Spanish, were made late in his life as he prepared to write an unfinished autobiography.
  36. Charles F Lummis, The Land of Poco Tiempo, p. 56.
  37. My information on the Fraternity is drawn from Marta Weigle's Brothers of light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976.
  38. Marta Weigle, Brothers of light, Brothers of Blood, p. xviii.
  39. Ibid., p. xviii.
  40. Ibid., p. xix.
  41. Charles E lummis, Some Strange Corners of Our Country, p. 63.
  42. Ibid., p. 77.
  43. Ibid., p. 62,
  44. Much the same tenor is found in his diary writing. Note that after sending his article on the Penitentes to Century, his fascination with the Brothers' practices continued. In an entry for September 12-18, 1888, Lummis wrote that he had photographed a Morada and some Brorhers. He added: "That night with a brave boy, burgle the Morada and steal the only 2 Penitente scourges ever acquired by museum or collector. We are detected and fired at with rifles 6 times as we bound over the rocky ridge behind the Morada. Luckily, they did not recognize us." See "Diary Extracts" in The Charles Fletcher Lummis Collection, The Southwest Museum.
  45. Charles E Lummis, The Land of Poco Tiempo, p. 62.
  46. Ibid., p. 64.
  47. Ibid., p. 66.
  48. Ibid., p. 71.
  49. Ibid., p. 75. Note also that the photograph may well be a fake. If indeed the crucifixion scene was contrived for the photograph, this only adds another level of invention to Lummis's "creation" of the Southwest.
  50. The full sentence reads: "Romance is the chief riches of any
    people—though we begin to understand it only as romance fades from the world." See Charles E Lummis, The Spanish Pioneers and the California Missions. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1930, p. 299.
  51. See Turbese Lummis Fiske and Keith Lummis, Charles F. Lummis: The Man and His West, p. 75.
  52. Ibid., p. 82
  53. Bingham notes that Villard, financier of the Northern Pacific Railroad, funded half of the planned three-year expedition before his bankruptcy. He also relates that while in Peru and Bolivia, Lummis conductcd archaeological fieldwork, photographed, and collected fabrics, skulls, and other ethnological objects. Many of these objects found their way into Lummis's home, El Alisal, and the Southwest Museum. See Bingham, Charles F. Lummis: Editor of the Southwest. p. 14.
  54. Turbese Lummis Fiske and Keith Lummis, Charles F. Lummis: The Man and His West, P. 87.
  55. See Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progresive Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, particularly chapter 3, "Art and Life in the Turn-of-the-Century Southland," pp. 64-98.
  56. Anon., 'Editorial." Land of sunshine 1: I (June 1894), p. 12.
  57. Charles Dwight Willard, "fhe New Editor." Land of Sunshine 2:1 (December 1894), p. 12.
  58. Charles F. Lummis, "Editorial Column." Land of Sunshine 2:2 (January 1895),P. 35.
  59. Charles F. Lummis, "In the Lion's Den." Land of Sunshine 4:1 (December 1895) p. 43.
  60. Charles F. Lummis, "The Spanish-American Face." Land of sunshine 2:2 (January 1895),p. 21,
  61. Charles F. Lummis, "Editorial Column." Land of Sunshine 2:2 (January 1895),P. 35.
  62. Helen Hunt Jackson, "Outdoor Industries in Southern California," in her Glimpses of California and the Missions. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1902, p, 257.
  63. Charles E Lummis, The Home of Ramona: Photographs of Camulos, the fine old Spanish Estate described by Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson, as the Home of Ramona. Los Angeles: Chas. E Lummis and Co., 1888, n.p.
  64. See Christina Wielus Mead, "Las Fiestas de Los Angeles: A Survey of the Yearly Celebrations, 1894-1898." Southern California Quarterly 31:1 and 2 (March and June 1949), pp. 61-113- and Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1973, pp. 70-83.
  65. Anon., The Spanish Fiesta (n.d.), n.p. A copy of this small pamphlet is at the Huntington Library.
  66. Charles F. Lummis, "Letter to E. S. Babcock,' published in San Diego Union,March 4, 1994, reprinted in The Spanish Fiesta, n.p.
  67. Frank Van Vleck [probably pseudonym for Charles F. Lummis], "La Fiesta de Los Angeles, 1895" Land of sunshine 2:5 (April 1895), p. 83.
  68. Ibid., p. 84
  69. See Theodore S. Jojola, "Charles F. Lummis and Isleta Pueblo," unpublished article. I thank Jojola for furnishing me with a copy of the article.
  70. See ibid., pp. 3-4, for details.
  71. See ibid., pp. 5-6, for details.
  72. For Mike Davis, the accruing of cultural capital for Los Angeles by Lummis and other agents who combined literary skills with promotional outlets involved the manipulation of both past and present "realities" in order to create a picture of a city that served as "the sunny refuge of White Protestant America in an age of labor upheaval and the mass immigration of the Catholic and Jewish poor from Eastern and Southern Europe." See Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990). New York: Random House, 1992,p. 30.
  73. Charles F. Lummis, "in the Lion's Den." Land of Sunshine 4:2 (January 1896),p. 89.
  74. Today the Southwest Museum in Highland Park, a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, is surrounded not by the predominantly Anglo population that Lummis envisioned, but by a primarily, Latino community,, Thus the 'Spanish' past resurfaces, albeit in quite changed form, in the multicultural present.