Letters from the Southwest: September 20, 1884, to March 14, 1885 by Charles Lummis, and Some Strange Corners of Our Country: The Wonderland of the Southwest by Charles Lummis (review)

Reviews 189 lesser known authors—Richard Nelson, Clara Fosso, John Hildebrand. The editors have successfully attempted to “go beyond the typical cliches and adver­ tising slogans to provide an authentic record of a given time and place.” Visiting the Eskimo village of Wales, Alaska, just across the Bering Strait from Siberian Russia, John Morgan reminds us that “in fact not winter but summer is the alien season here.” Most residents of Wales “find summer boring” and long for what to them is the normal state of affairs: howling winds, subzero temperatures, and nine months of snow. Alaska challenges many of our assumptions in just this fashion. Anthropologist Richard Nelson, in an excerpt from a forthcoming book on southeast Alaska, writes of the other geographic extreme, the dense rain forests along the Pacific Coast. The spruce forest has a “dark, baritone richness, tinkled through with river sounds and chickadees.” Over everything is “a deep blanket of moss that mounds up over decaying stumps and fallen trunks like a shroud pulled over the furnishings in a great hall.” Nelson agrees with the Koyukon Indians of interior Alaska, who teach that “the forest is not merely an expression ... of sacredness . . . the forest is sacredness itself.” William O. Douglas takes us far north again, into the vast­ ness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: The Arctic has a call that iscompelling. The distant mountains make one want to go on and on over the next ridge and over the one beyond. ... It is a domain for any restless soul who yearns to discover the startling beauties of creation in the place of quiet and solitude where life exists without molestation by man. Alaska: Reflections on Land and Spirit is an impressive assemblage of 22 distinguished essays where, in the editors’ words, “one can still glimpse some­ thing of the original grandeur and mystery of the universe.” JOHN A. MURRAY University of Alaska, Fairbanks Letters from the Southwest: September 20, 1884, to March 14, 1885. By Charles Lummis. Edited by James W. Byrkit. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1989. 358 pages, $29.95.) Some Strange Corners of Our Country: The Wonderland of the Southwest. By Charles Lummis. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1989. 287 pages, $12.95.) We’ve plundered the West in many ways. Gouged landscapes and leveled forests aside, the list of literary publicists, boosters, and just plain hustlers who swarmed into the region, exploiting its newness to gild their own reputations, would be a long one. Surely, close to the head of the pack would be Charles Lummis. An editor, amateur anthropologist, and at times flamboyant dresser, Lummis crowed the praises of the Southwest at century’s turn, a time when 190 Western American Literature urban readers back in the East swooned for exoticism. They wanted romance, and that’s what Lummis fed them. Such can be seen in this new reprint of Lummis’s 1891 book, Some Strange Corners of Our Country, with a foreword by Lawrence Clark Powell. The collection of travel essays skitters across the arid lands, dipping into the wonders of Indian witchcraft, the spectacle of the Grand Canyon, and such, but only deeply enough to come up with handfuls of glitter to titillate its eager audience. Not that Lummis couldn’t be crafty in his sleight of hand. Making the most of his trek afoot westward in 1884-1885, the young Harvard dropout squeezed double duty from travel letters penned along the route and published in two newspapers. AseditorJames W. Byrkit details in Lettersfrom the South­ west, those sent ahead to the Los Angeles Times were poetic enough but spun with some caution. The adventurer was hoofing it toward a promised position on the newspaper, and he had the good sense not to sullyhis reputation before­ hand with spontaneous outbursts. Drawn from the same experiences, the dispatches to the Chillicothe, Ohio, Leader hardly called for restraint. After all, gussied up in his fringed buckskin outfit, pedometer strapped to leg, Lummis was leaving that place. The book presents the Leader letters, now available for the first time since 1885. If that were all to Lummis, the voluminous chicanery of a western writer on the make, we...