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44 chapter two Walking Their identity seemed as lost as though they had never been; and when their resurrection came it was not to be remembered but recreated—not rediscovered but invented. charles f. lummis, THE LAND OF POCO TIEMPO (1893) Charles Lummis had to walk 3,507 miles to begin to see beyond the frontier myth. The distance between his starting point in Ohio and his destination in California was actually much shorter, but the route he took during that fall of 1884 was, appropriately, far from linear. It is true that Lummis was traveling west for a very conventional reason—a new job was awaiting him at the Los Angeles Times. His narrative of the trip, A Tramp Across the Continent (1892), was also full of dubious dime-novel episodes of macho action and peril, including a hand-to-paw altercation with a wounded mountain lion in Colorado. He gave a further tip of his hat to the frontier myth with some mention of being “outside the sorry fences of society.” Nevertheless, there were aspects of Lummis’s escapade that seem distinctly new and modern. The walk was an unabashed publicity stunt by a man who was on his way to becoming a tireless regional booster and selfpromoter ; the dispatches he sent to the Times along the way, later collected in A Tramp, were read nationwide. He could easily have made the journey by rail and written the usual travelogue. Instead, Lummis chose to walk for 143 days across mountains and deserts “purely ‘for fun,’” he wrote. The West, especially the Southwest, became in his depiction a place to know such “physical joy” and “to have the mental awakening of new sights and experiences.”1 What seems most genuine about A Tramp was this sense of Lummis’s awakening to the region before him. White and Harvard-educated, he presented himself as a world-wise Yankee who was also a virile outdoorsman, an exemplar of the “strenuous life” well before TR coined the phrase. Lum- Walking • 45 mis was speaking to an increasing number of middle- and upper-class Americans who were embracing an emerging consumerist ethic of play and leisure, quite at odds with the producerist toil and sacrifice implicit in the agrarian frontier myth. Lummis reveled in the West and Southwest as a physical challenge, a temporary one taken on for sport (his enthusiasm wore a little thin in the Mojave Desert). Whether for tourism or more active recreation like hunting and fishing, the West was no longer to be seen simply as an expanse of free land for homesteaders but as a wonderland for visitors. Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and William Henry Jackson had been conveying the message in paint and photograph since the late 1860s, and railroads like the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe (AT&SF) had begun touting attractions like the Grand Canyon at about the same time Lummis walked by. Honing his skills as Southwest booster par excellence, he did his part as well: “I shall not attempt to describe the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, for language cannot touch that utmost wonder of creation. There is but one thing to say: ‘There it is; go see it for yourself.’”2 There was more to Lummis’s awakening than his personal exploration of the dramatic natural landscapes of the Southwest. What predominated in his narrative were his encounters with the region’s exotic cultural landscapes . “My eyes were beginning to open now to real insight of the things about me,” he recalled, “and everything suddenly became invested with a wondrous interest.” His first such encounter happened while walking south out of Colorado into New Mexico Territory—as he put it, “We stepped into a civilization that was then new to me”: a Hispanic village. He admitted to then being “very suspicious of the people,” but by the time he wrote A Tramp, several years of living among them in New Mexico had overthrown these notions. Even though his depiction of poor “simple” Hispanics retained a tinge of elitism, Lummis also offered a remarkable commentary for the early 1890s, a decade that nationally saw racism and nativism rise to a feverish and often violent pitch: “Why is it that the last and most difficult education seems to be the ridding ourselves of the silly inborn race prejudice? . . . The clearest thing in the world to him who has eyes and chance to use them, is that men everywhere—white men, brown men, yellow men, black men—are...

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