Mark Thompson, American Character

Charles Lummis (1859-1928) was a corker, a Los Angeles resident who became a household name, long before there was a Hollywood. He achieved that honor by walking from Cincinnati to LA in 1884, and writing it up for the newspapers as he went. A blogger without a blog.

A while ago, I wrote up his account of that trip, A Tramp Across the Continent (1892). Today is a review of a Spur Award winning biography of the man by another LA writer, Mark Thompson.

Character. The early western, as I’ve come to understand it, was a story about American character. It emerged in the Progressivist Era of the Teddy Roosevelt years. It found in the already mythic West the conditions that produced men and women of moral strength and physical stamina.

The word “character” has another almost opposite meaning. We use it for someone whose behavior is so out of the ordinary, it’s comical. Whether you laugh or not depends on how highly you regard true eccentrics.

Charles Lummis, 1897

Charles Lummis seemed somehow to exhibit both kinds of character. He had the courage to take on bureaucrats and corporate interests in the fight for Indian rights and the preservation of the historical Southwest. It helped that Teddy Roosevelt was a personal friend, but Lummis would have gone on fighting anyway. He had the tenacity of a pit bull.

He was also something of a clown, dressing in a Spanish-colonial style outfit and sombrero. He built his own house, El Alisal, out of the boulders from a dry arroyo that runs between Pasadena and what is now downtown Los Angeles. He entertained there with dinner parties that drew folks as varied as John Muir and Douglas Fairbanks.

A man who seems to have had a vast appetite for public attention, he commanded the center ring of a self-made three-ring circus. Married more times than most people knew of, he was also a flagrant philanderer. He kept a life-long diary that included a record of sexual congress with each of his wives and countless mistresses.

A hopeless workaholic, he rarely slept, driving himself until he was physically too ill to go on. He was also a voluminous letter writer and editor of Out West, a magazine with Chamber-of-Commerce aspirations when he came aboard. Then under his guidance it became a high-pitched screed for his preservation projects and ongoing battles with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

H. H. Knibbs, Overland Red (1914)

Old West meets New West in this novel set in Southern California by early western writer Henry Herbert Knibbs (1874-1945). Most of the story, in fact, would happily take place in the 19th century. There is a ranch with cowboys on horses, gold prospecting in the Mojave, and a big gunfight outside a saloon. But for good measure, Knibbs also throws in a motor car, Los Angeles, and references to movie-making.

Reality meets myth in the book, as well. The title refers to its central character, a former sheriff of Abilene, now an itinerant (hobo) on the run from the law in Barstow, where he’s mistakenly believed to have killed a man. Living rough, he has his wits and plenty of grit to keep him going.

The novel’s subtitle, A Romance of the Moonstone Cañon Trail, gives a whole different impression of the book’s contents. You might guess that you’re in for some poetic renderings of landscapes and sunsets or a dew-fresh story of young lovers. You get all that, too. The novel even begins with a long, long prose poem about the Camino Real.

Becoming a man. At the heart of the novel is a study of how a teenage boy, Collie, becomes a man. An outcast, he has been adopted by Overland Red, and the two have been traveling together for four years when we first meet them. Collie is then taken under the wing of a ranch foreman, Brand Williams, who gives him a job as a ranch hand and helps him learn to be a cowboy.

For Knibbs, as for many of the early western writers, the achievement of manhood involves the discovery of longing and tender feelings for a young female. In this case, we get the spunky niece of the ranch owner, Louise.

Love between Collie and Louise smolders for a long time, dampened by the social distance between them. She is well-to-do and educated, he is neither. Both are pure-hearted and innocent. Collie knows nothing of love but the confusion his feelings generate. She wants him as a friend, but keeps deeper feelings at bay. It’s safer being a coy mistress of her doting uncle.

East also meets West in the novel, as yet another young man falls under the influence of Overland Red. He is Billy Winthrop, who arrives on the scene in a motorcar. He is rich and bored with life, looking for adventure. He is also a lunger, afflicted with consumption and expecting a short life. (Readers today need to be reminded that 100 years ago TB was the cause of 1 out of 10 deaths in America.)

Billy’s is yet another story of growing into manhood. He gladly puts up the capital to underwrite Overland Red’s gold prospecting in the Mojave. Though Red objects, Billy follows him into the desert. And so, working side by side with Red, Billy recovers his health. Honest labor and the dry desert air work their wonders.