Charles Fletcher Lummis (March 1, 1859 – November 25, 1928) was an American journalist, civil rights activist, preservationist, poet and librarian who promoted Native American rights and historic preservation. He founded the Southwest Museum of the American Indian.
Lummis began his career as a printer and wrote poems. He traveled in the American Southwest, and settled in Los Angeles, California, where he became known as a historian, photographer, ethnographer and archaeologist. He worked as a city editor for the Los Angeles Times. After being paralyzed, he lived in a Pueblo Indian village and began promoting Native American rights. Later in his life he was a city librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library.
Early life and career
Lummis was born in 1859, in Lynn, Massachusetts. He lost his mother at age two and was homeschooled by his father, who was a schoolmaster and a Methodist minister. Lummis enrolled in Harvard for college and was a classmate of Theodore Roosevelt, but dropped out during his senior year. While at Harvard he worked during the summer as a printer and published his first work, Birch Bark Poems. This small volume was printed on paper-thin sheets of birch bark; he won recognition from some of the day's leading poets. He sold the books by subscription and used the money to pay for college. A poem from this work, "My Cigarette", highlighted tobacco as one of his life's obsessions.
In 1880, at the age of 21, Lummis married Dorothea Rhodes of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Transcontinental walk
In 1884, Lummis was working for a newspaper in Cincinnati and was offered a job with the Los Angeles Times. At that time, Los Angeles had a population of only 12,000. Lummis decided to make the 3,507-mile journey from Cincinnati to Los Angeles by foot and send weekly dispatches to the paper chronicling his trip. The trip began in September and lasted through the winter, lasting 143 days. One of his dispatches describing meeting and interviewing famed outlaw Frank James. Lummis suffered a broken arm and struggled in the heavy winter snows of New Mexico. He became enamored with the American Southwest, and its Spanish and Native American inhabitants. Several years later, he published his account of this journey in A Tramp Across the Continent (1892).
