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Some Strange Corners of Our Country
Lummis's prose portraits of the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Montezuma Castle, and other sites reflect the author's knowledge of Southwest anthropology and history.
270 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1892
About the author
Charles F. Lummis
172 books23 followersCharles Fletcher Lummis was a United States journalist and an activist for Indian rights and historic preservation. A traveler in the American Southwest, he settled in Los Angeles, California, where he also became known as a historian, photographer, ethnographer, archaeologist, poet and librarian. (Source: Wikipedia)
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August 13, 2019
In the neighborhood where I grew, there was this strange collection that fascinated me as a child, on a hill called the Southwest Museum. A little while after building a little house for himself out of river rock not a block from an elementary school I attended in Highland Park, the museum was conceived and built by this journalist who had traveled the country collecting the artifacts housed there. Recently I found myself in a position to read his account of that journey.
The journey was made one century prior to my leaving High School. The man had been very ill following a stroke, but the journey restored his health. How much the country has changed in that time! As I sat in a public bus driving me between towns, that rattled my bones well enough to imagine a stagecoach journey, and settled into the book, I overheard an adolescent girl with roots in the region speaking about about the horrors she had endured that pushed her to flee her school and her home town. Bullying, torment, and the male gaze. She dreamed of a life in the arts, as an aerial silk dancer. Public school had left her with the opposite of a feeling of safety or promise.
Reading this book today, I wonder if this is the direction the wanderer Lummis had envisioned as one of the first rail and stage tourists. He traveled a Southwest that was still raw and dangerous, without services, engines, radio or ice. He traveled a Southwest populated by far more Native Americans and Mexicans than Anglos. I think I hear him laughing in his grave with all this "invasion" talk the TV hucksters are selling their candidates and their assault rifles with these days. As a journalist and educator, he knew exactly what order all the invading took place. Lummis didn't travel with an assault rifle, though the country was undoubtedly more dangerous. He carried a camera.
I'll pluck a few gems, and a problem from the book, but the engravings alone are well worth seeing - you'll realize in a hundred years, the first travel guide of the American Southwest is in fact describing a completely different world you really can't visit at all today. Having some relation to the first peoples, but not enough to feel qualified to speak of it, it is really challenging for me to write this review. I hope I do well.
Mr. Lummis knew that the world was changing, and wanted to save as much of the part that was slipping away, or had already been forgotten, as he could. He believed that revealing the arts, architecture, and diversity of the first peoples to European city shut-ins was the best way to give them a chance to endure in the present. He believed if people saw the beauty of the land, they would come and spend their money, and accelerate this. He was also a man of science, and when he writes about nature and geology, he is most eloquent. He believed American pragmatism and technology would reach the people he met and stayed with very soon, for their benefit, and was himself convinced he was helping to build a new kind of utopia for all peoples in a place called Los Angeles. He envisioned modernity sparing them from trials without factual evidence, that caused them early deaths, or the pointlessness of treatable diseases, and that it was only a matter of time before the quality of life of everyone he met would advance as had seen happening in the big cities. How disappointed he might feel knowing so many people in this region, of any culture, still struggle to see a doctor or dentist!
Being a person from a century ago, he is biased and blind to the cause and effect of colonialism that we easily see today, the layers that go on stacking, and the imbalance that is still being enforced on their descendants. In his day, he saw the railroad link the continent and shorten the distance from months to only days of travel, and assumed like many a better future was ahead for all. And so he had a blind spot towards the roles of the past, even as he sought to represent all the positives of the little explored interior that he could.
First, one has to know that words change in only a century. We don't use terms like savage anymore, unless it's what a terrible barber did to your hair. But would you notice the specific intent and rebuke behind Lummis choosing to describe the people who lived in that country as brown, instead of the word red? In his time, Awful meant Awesome. And Supernatural meant Nature that is Super. Meanings change in only a few generations. So do the stories of history. The pueblos he stayed at would point to cliff dwellings, and describe an ancient species of human that had long vanished from the earth. And he would then share the new research that suggested they were in fact the very same people. He promoted handicrafts of petrified wood as a way to popularize evidence of deep geological time for big city doubters of Darwin, drops mention of the book "Prometheus Unbound" and has as a mission statement that he is unwilling to advise the traveler except from personal knowledge. He described the colors of the land in gem and crystal tones. He was both reverent of the beliefs he encountered, recording them faithfully, and a challenger of superstition. While he refers to most of the magic he saw as tricks, and in this time Harry Houdini is quite active, he also faithfully reports when he cannot explain what he sees, such as a kiva ceremony where a shaman repeatedly shoots lightning out of his hands and across the room. In effect, the beginnings of any modern American - full of bias, curiosity and conflicting information. But how much can be compared, when we can do in a few hours, what he spent weeks doing on foot and horseback, camping along the way?
The world he describes is not our world. He saw strong men weeping at their first sight of the Grand Canyon, probably a naturalist's Stendahl Syndrome. He saw the Moqui perform a live rattlesnake dance, a writhing mass of them, kept in their homes and brought out to be carried around in their mouths the way a cat carts about her kittens. Then he saw a Navajo jeweler, the next nation over, nearly murdered for making a custom rattlesnake bracelet at his request, and watched it destroyed, as they never touched the things. He was told that they asked forgiveness of a bear before having to kill one, should it attack humans... and later followed a Ute who had no qualms about shooting them for game. For many in the East, there was no clue about the scale, antiquity and distinctions of the people out here. This was a land of thousands of languages, each with their own worlds. In the southwest, these worlds were larger than most any European Empire. He felt they had more respect for women, and that their handwork and sustainable ways of life were in many ways superior than the production of the factories that was accelerating the possibility of visiting this place. He referred to the very atmosphere of the Southwest as 'wizard's air'.
The most enlightened side of this semi-ancient man, beyond the poetry of nature which is timeless, is his fascination with magic. He reminds us that in the world behind him, and the one in front of him, the word Witch refers specifically to all magic that goes beyond healing and propitiation of the cycles of nature. He describes a country where executions are still happening, and the idea they stopped at Salem simply wasn't true. He witnessed some of this, and was introduced to long lists of killings going on between the pueblos, barely held in check by what he saw as enlightened American pragmatic and scientific views. He truly seemed to believe that the opposite of superstition was this new kind of human, the American voter. When he tried to explain that he had a stroke, and how it had been caused (a ruptured blood vessel in the brain) and that he had regained the use of his arm... few were willing to accept any other explanation than curse and reversal by witch. So one can't really call the traveler a debunker, who is outnumbered and never believed. But the terror he describes as shaping the daily lives of people does seem believable, especially if they are regularly being put in the ground for no better evidence than that of religious trials, or being blackmailed into handing over food and goods else they will be cursed. Quite seperate from the joyous stone hugging dancing in diaphanous frocks we enjoy at the beginning of folk horror movies today, evidence for witchcraft he encountered, leading to executions, included not being able to sleep! Having a black feather or any part of an owl in your house! He felt it was no less distressing than anything the Puritans had done, and seemed to believe that American democracy alone was the path to leaving the hysterics and murders behind.
But he reveals a less enlightened side when he describes a famous cave on the route to the Zuni pueblo, that is inscribed with the names, really epitaphs, of Spanish conquistadors. He echoes a sentiment held widely by frontier people and carried well into the 1960s, that these sorry and doomed Spaniards were the epitome of bravery. Now, remembering that this is a person who is also travelling more or less alone through the same mostly roadless wilderness, where animals still roam that will slay you for a bit of jerky, and there is no plastic bag to hide the smell... the math done by these people was a bit different.
We have inherented knowledge, education, and an awareness of what has come to pass. But for him and most like him, the calculus was simple - people being ordered to go somewhere they are absolutely not welcome, most certainly to die, are brave in some way. Lummis was a paying guest, making his notes in the shade of plazas where they had been executed. He finds the names of three doomed men scratched in what he regards as an ancient handwriting, left to garrison the entire pueblo, and speaks as if they will be the epitome of courage for all time. He is certain of it. Perhaps it was a marvel of faith - a priest sent to be one of 200 people in a region of 10,000 who don't want you there, one of a long line guaranteed never to return to anything familiar to them, was his idea of a remote prehistory. These names were written in the 1600s, but there was no Renaissance going on here! And that made these ghosts of colonialism nearly three hundred years in the past for the travel writer. For us, time is like a pancake, there was Columbus, and then all this unchecked horror and unchecked growth, and that brings us to now, some weird almost purely contrived struggle between denial and hand wringing about how to move forward. For him, the land had barely shifted, time was about the leap from sharpened stick to rifle to the ballot box, and these Conquistadores were as remote to him as his own Highlander 'savage' ancestors.
Stories from another world.
Besides this chapter which is valuable mainly for a study in the roots of bias carried by a person who would have been roundly denounced as a liberal if time was comparable, for his admiration, light travelling ways, cultural and scientific devotion... If you want to get a taste of how rapidly things have changed, and how sharply the distinctions are between who has lost the most, and who has gained most consistently... Then to taste something that still tenuously remains true (that the wild beauty here is still vast enough that the despoilers haven't quite devoured it all yet)... Let this document written by one who mainly appreciates assure you, what we do right now will change the world - very quickly, very completely, undoubtedly unevenly, and in a very short time.
The journey was made one century prior to my leaving High School. The man had been very ill following a stroke, but the journey restored his health. How much the country has changed in that time! As I sat in a public bus driving me between towns, that rattled my bones well enough to imagine a stagecoach journey, and settled into the book, I overheard an adolescent girl with roots in the region speaking about about the horrors she had endured that pushed her to flee her school and her home town. Bullying, torment, and the male gaze. She dreamed of a life in the arts, as an aerial silk dancer. Public school had left her with the opposite of a feeling of safety or promise.
Reading this book today, I wonder if this is the direction the wanderer Lummis had envisioned as one of the first rail and stage tourists. He traveled a Southwest that was still raw and dangerous, without services, engines, radio or ice. He traveled a Southwest populated by far more Native Americans and Mexicans than Anglos. I think I hear him laughing in his grave with all this "invasion" talk the TV hucksters are selling their candidates and their assault rifles with these days. As a journalist and educator, he knew exactly what order all the invading took place. Lummis didn't travel with an assault rifle, though the country was undoubtedly more dangerous. He carried a camera.
I'll pluck a few gems, and a problem from the book, but the engravings alone are well worth seeing - you'll realize in a hundred years, the first travel guide of the American Southwest is in fact describing a completely different world you really can't visit at all today. Having some relation to the first peoples, but not enough to feel qualified to speak of it, it is really challenging for me to write this review. I hope I do well.
Mr. Lummis knew that the world was changing, and wanted to save as much of the part that was slipping away, or had already been forgotten, as he could. He believed that revealing the arts, architecture, and diversity of the first peoples to European city shut-ins was the best way to give them a chance to endure in the present. He believed if people saw the beauty of the land, they would come and spend their money, and accelerate this. He was also a man of science, and when he writes about nature and geology, he is most eloquent. He believed American pragmatism and technology would reach the people he met and stayed with very soon, for their benefit, and was himself convinced he was helping to build a new kind of utopia for all peoples in a place called Los Angeles. He envisioned modernity sparing them from trials without factual evidence, that caused them early deaths, or the pointlessness of treatable diseases, and that it was only a matter of time before the quality of life of everyone he met would advance as had seen happening in the big cities. How disappointed he might feel knowing so many people in this region, of any culture, still struggle to see a doctor or dentist!
Being a person from a century ago, he is biased and blind to the cause and effect of colonialism that we easily see today, the layers that go on stacking, and the imbalance that is still being enforced on their descendants. In his day, he saw the railroad link the continent and shorten the distance from months to only days of travel, and assumed like many a better future was ahead for all. And so he had a blind spot towards the roles of the past, even as he sought to represent all the positives of the little explored interior that he could.
First, one has to know that words change in only a century. We don't use terms like savage anymore, unless it's what a terrible barber did to your hair. But would you notice the specific intent and rebuke behind Lummis choosing to describe the people who lived in that country as brown, instead of the word red? In his time, Awful meant Awesome. And Supernatural meant Nature that is Super. Meanings change in only a few generations. So do the stories of history. The pueblos he stayed at would point to cliff dwellings, and describe an ancient species of human that had long vanished from the earth. And he would then share the new research that suggested they were in fact the very same people. He promoted handicrafts of petrified wood as a way to popularize evidence of deep geological time for big city doubters of Darwin, drops mention of the book "Prometheus Unbound" and has as a mission statement that he is unwilling to advise the traveler except from personal knowledge. He described the colors of the land in gem and crystal tones. He was both reverent of the beliefs he encountered, recording them faithfully, and a challenger of superstition. While he refers to most of the magic he saw as tricks, and in this time Harry Houdini is quite active, he also faithfully reports when he cannot explain what he sees, such as a kiva ceremony where a shaman repeatedly shoots lightning out of his hands and across the room. In effect, the beginnings of any modern American - full of bias, curiosity and conflicting information. But how much can be compared, when we can do in a few hours, what he spent weeks doing on foot and horseback, camping along the way?
The world he describes is not our world. He saw strong men weeping at their first sight of the Grand Canyon, probably a naturalist's Stendahl Syndrome. He saw the Moqui perform a live rattlesnake dance, a writhing mass of them, kept in their homes and brought out to be carried around in their mouths the way a cat carts about her kittens. Then he saw a Navajo jeweler, the next nation over, nearly murdered for making a custom rattlesnake bracelet at his request, and watched it destroyed, as they never touched the things. He was told that they asked forgiveness of a bear before having to kill one, should it attack humans... and later followed a Ute who had no qualms about shooting them for game. For many in the East, there was no clue about the scale, antiquity and distinctions of the people out here. This was a land of thousands of languages, each with their own worlds. In the southwest, these worlds were larger than most any European Empire. He felt they had more respect for women, and that their handwork and sustainable ways of life were in many ways superior than the production of the factories that was accelerating the possibility of visiting this place. He referred to the very atmosphere of the Southwest as 'wizard's air'.
The most enlightened side of this semi-ancient man, beyond the poetry of nature which is timeless, is his fascination with magic. He reminds us that in the world behind him, and the one in front of him, the word Witch refers specifically to all magic that goes beyond healing and propitiation of the cycles of nature. He describes a country where executions are still happening, and the idea they stopped at Salem simply wasn't true. He witnessed some of this, and was introduced to long lists of killings going on between the pueblos, barely held in check by what he saw as enlightened American pragmatic and scientific views. He truly seemed to believe that the opposite of superstition was this new kind of human, the American voter. When he tried to explain that he had a stroke, and how it had been caused (a ruptured blood vessel in the brain) and that he had regained the use of his arm... few were willing to accept any other explanation than curse and reversal by witch. So one can't really call the traveler a debunker, who is outnumbered and never believed. But the terror he describes as shaping the daily lives of people does seem believable, especially if they are regularly being put in the ground for no better evidence than that of religious trials, or being blackmailed into handing over food and goods else they will be cursed. Quite seperate from the joyous stone hugging dancing in diaphanous frocks we enjoy at the beginning of folk horror movies today, evidence for witchcraft he encountered, leading to executions, included not being able to sleep! Having a black feather or any part of an owl in your house! He felt it was no less distressing than anything the Puritans had done, and seemed to believe that American democracy alone was the path to leaving the hysterics and murders behind.
But he reveals a less enlightened side when he describes a famous cave on the route to the Zuni pueblo, that is inscribed with the names, really epitaphs, of Spanish conquistadors. He echoes a sentiment held widely by frontier people and carried well into the 1960s, that these sorry and doomed Spaniards were the epitome of bravery. Now, remembering that this is a person who is also travelling more or less alone through the same mostly roadless wilderness, where animals still roam that will slay you for a bit of jerky, and there is no plastic bag to hide the smell... the math done by these people was a bit different.
We have inherented knowledge, education, and an awareness of what has come to pass. But for him and most like him, the calculus was simple - people being ordered to go somewhere they are absolutely not welcome, most certainly to die, are brave in some way. Lummis was a paying guest, making his notes in the shade of plazas where they had been executed. He finds the names of three doomed men scratched in what he regards as an ancient handwriting, left to garrison the entire pueblo, and speaks as if they will be the epitome of courage for all time. He is certain of it. Perhaps it was a marvel of faith - a priest sent to be one of 200 people in a region of 10,000 who don't want you there, one of a long line guaranteed never to return to anything familiar to them, was his idea of a remote prehistory. These names were written in the 1600s, but there was no Renaissance going on here! And that made these ghosts of colonialism nearly three hundred years in the past for the travel writer. For us, time is like a pancake, there was Columbus, and then all this unchecked horror and unchecked growth, and that brings us to now, some weird almost purely contrived struggle between denial and hand wringing about how to move forward. For him, the land had barely shifted, time was about the leap from sharpened stick to rifle to the ballot box, and these Conquistadores were as remote to him as his own Highlander 'savage' ancestors.
Stories from another world.
Besides this chapter which is valuable mainly for a study in the roots of bias carried by a person who would have been roundly denounced as a liberal if time was comparable, for his admiration, light travelling ways, cultural and scientific devotion... If you want to get a taste of how rapidly things have changed, and how sharply the distinctions are between who has lost the most, and who has gained most consistently... Then to taste something that still tenuously remains true (that the wild beauty here is still vast enough that the despoilers haven't quite devoured it all yet)... Let this document written by one who mainly appreciates assure you, what we do right now will change the world - very quickly, very completely, undoubtedly unevenly, and in a very short time.
April 11, 2012
Really interesting and eye opening book about travels throughout the Southwest, particularly its native peoples and little known splendors. The book was written in the 1890s which added a whole other layer of historic interest (for example, transportation by stagecoach). The author, who lived in a Pueblo Indian town in New Mexico, is quite descriptive. The book comes off as a travel advertisement. He puts across the argument that anything you may want to see by going abroad (i.e. exotic people, ancient ruins, natural wonders) you can find first in the American West. It seems many of his descriptions may be exaggerated, but the result is successful because it inspired me to investigate further into things like native practices and the location of a giant land bridge/arch large enough to support crops on top. I plan to immediately loan to my archeologist friend and look forward to picking his brain about it soon.
December 9, 2025
Although the author writes well, this book can be difficult to get through when he isn't writing about the natural beauty of the southwest. His views of indigenous people are about as beneficent as an average person of his time frame would have, but the extreme and emotional superlatives he writes in as he indulges in one dehumanizing trope after another can be pretty exhausting from a modern standpoint. Of all the indigenous tribes, he only has a generally positive view of the Pueblo Indians (as he called them), among whom he lived a good portion of his later life. It feels like his less glowing view of other tribes, particularly the Diné, was filtered through that life experience. Read for the travelogue parts, skip his armchair anthropology.
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