American Character
 Mark Thompson
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Arcade Books
  ISBN: 1559705507


The Curious Life of Charles Fletcher Lummis & the Rediscovery of the Southwest.

This old turtle began chewing her way through this biography of a forgotten, complex American poet, prolific letter writer, journalist, photographer, archaeologist, editor, champion of Spanish heritage in the Americas, & Indian rights advocate -- the classic workaholic of the late 19th & early 20th Centuries.

Charles Fletcher Lummis was a Yankee born before the Civil War to a Methodist clergyman & educator. His mother died at her parents home in Bristol, New Hampshire after the birth of his sister, when he was two. His childhood with his grandparents was idyllic, if the norm in cultivation & confinement. When he was six, the age considered ripe for formal education, he was sent to his father, who was then the principal of the New Haven Female College. His father thought his son should start his education in that school. Charlie was so overwhelmed by the horde of “tittering girls” that he persuaded his father to teach him alone, which he did for the next ten years. His father also remarried at that time & started another family.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Charlie's years at Harvard were filled with pranks, raising hell & close-calls with authority. Even though he was two years younger than most of the students, he could run circles around everyone with his command of French, Latin, Greek, & rhetoric & moral philosophy. It was athletics, however, that fascinated him, & he took every opportunity to work in the gym & in the boxing ring.

It was at a resort in the White Mountains where he worked every summer of his college years that Charles compiled his first book of poems, with the lake as inspiration. He printed a dozen books on birch bark, binding them with thread, & put them up for sale in the gift shop. By the end of the summer of 1879, he had sold more than 3,500 booklets.

Charles Lummis discovered he had a way with words, that people liked to read what he wrote & others liked to pay him for them. Thus began his career as a journalist & writer. Charles did not graduate from Harvard, instead he made his marriage public. He had taken great pains to keep it unknown, & herein lies the seed of Charles Fletcher Lummis' lifelong relationship with the tender gender. Dorothea Rhodes had been someone he had tutored, Dolly became someone he married. Dolly's father was someone who offered Charles the job of managing a six-hundred acre farm a thousand miles west in Chillicothe, Ohio.

All this time Charles had been submitting poems & articles to “the best magazines in the country”, rewriting & resubmitting when they were rejected. He lasted one season on the farm in Ohio before being offered a job at the newly-founded Los Angeles Times on the other side of the country. True to his character, Charles decided he'd walk there & write about it! That Tramp Across the Continent, serialized in weekly editorials, catapulted him into the public's eye.

Now you see why Mark Thompson's book is quite a long one. By the time Charles Fletcher Lummis was 26, he had already lived a life filled with adventure. Once he got to California, his life took another compelling turn. He discovered America's abiding racist attitude toward the Chinese, Negroes & Spanish. He dove right into exposing it all in his articles. While no one was amused, the circulation of the newspaper steadily rose.

It was on the beat, covering the Apache Wars & General Crook's meetings with Geronimo, that Charles discovered the American Southwest, its people & its allure, & the rest, as they say, is history.

A long history, entirely too much to include in a review. You are going to have to buy yourself a copy of Mark Thompson's American Character, settle down & immerse yourself in an America of another time, to find exactly how Charles Fletcher Lummis came to be an “expert” on Spanish heritage & Indian Affairs, how he befriended the 26th President, how his words affected a nation & how the rest of his life turned out.

In this era of bland plasticity, American Character, reminds us of how individualistic, passionate, offensive & charming our forefathers were. It also reminds us of how devastating was our impact upon the people & the land in a time when a man could bemoan the wholesale slaughter of buffalo & Indians, without batting an eye as he shot other critters just for the thrill!

Pioneer times beget strong characters. Charles Fletcher Lummis, all of five foot six inches tall, reeking of tobacco & bedecked in his trademark ensemble of a soiled Stetson sombrero, well-worn Spanish-style corduroy suit, & red Navajo sash, dominated every meeting he attended east of the Mississippi. While he offended people prone to propriety, his ascerbic comments about civilized life, invariably found their mark in the majority of his readership.

That he had the ear of a President, was, in fact, considered by Theodore Roosevelt as a vital part of his “cowboy cabinet,” tells us of his life-long influence, via his editorials & books, on the way Americans thought of themselves.

American Character while long, as was Lummis' life, is one evocative, satisfying narration of an eccentric, articulate man of his time. Suffice to say, Charles Fletcher Lummis was indeed an American Character, & that Mark Thompson has given this forgotten ancestor his due, in a well-wrought, deeply researched biography.

Charles Lummis' books made him one of the best-sellers of his time, strongly influencing our collective mythology &, when he found the land of his heart, affected the way we looked at the American Southwest.
Birch Bark Poems 1879;
A New Mexico David 1891;
The Man Who Married the Moon 1892. Reprinted as Pueblo Indian Folk-Stories 1992;
Some Strange Corners of Our Country 1892, 1989;
A Tramp Across the Continent 1892, 1982;
The Land of Poco Tiempo 1893, 1966;
The Spanish Pioneers 1893, 1929;
The Gold Fish of Gran Chimu 1896;
The Enchanted Burro 1897;
The King of the Broncos and Other Stories of New Mexico 1897;
The Awakening of a Nation: Mexico of Today 1898;
The Landmarks Club Cook Book 1903;
My Friend Will 1911;
Spanish Songs of Old California 1923;
Mesa, Cañon and Pueblo 1925;
A Bronco Pegasus 1928 & Flowers of Our Lost Romance 1929.

American Character: Charles Fletcher Lummis & the Rediscovery of the Southwest, has been named by Western Writers of America as Winner of the 2002 Spur Award in the biography category.
(06/09/02)

Rebecca