Writer and photographer Charles Lummis (1859–1926) led a colorful life, which included two unhappy marriages and divorces, heavy drinking, and womanizing, while establishing his reputation as a journalist, and activist in the areas of Indian rights and the preservation of California’s missions. But he was never financially successful. While he earned a regular but modest income during several periods of his life, he remained chronically short of funds.
Like many who came to promote the region, he was from the East. Born near Boston, he attended Harvard (Theodore Roosevelt was a classmate), but did not graduate. Moving to Cincinnati, he found work as a newspaper editor, and in 1880 married Dorothea Rhodes. When he was offered a position as the first City Editor at the Los Angeles Times in 1884, he decided
to walk to California as a publicity stunt. As a result of his trek, Lummis experienced a cultural conversion of religious intensity. He began as a Yankee, full of bravado and the racial and class prejudices of his times. He arrived as a “Southwesterner,” genuinely moved by the humility, generosity, and warmth of the Native American and Hispanic people he had encountered. The Southwest would remain his passion for the rest of his life.
In his three-year stint for the Times, Lummis reported on the rough-and-tumble of bustling Los Angeles, which then had a population of 12,000. A stroke that left him partially paralyzed ended his newspaper career. In 1893 he took another editorial position with Land of Sunshine and until he left in 1909, he promoted regional issues and authors.1 He became the Los Angeles city librarian in 1904, and established the Southwest Museum in 1907 (it opened to the public in 1914).
The Arbor and Ramona’s Tree is typical of his work in its blue color, its aspect ratio (the relationship between height and width), and its California setting. Lummis contact-printed his negatives on cyanotype paper because it was cheaper than the newly available gelatin-silver printing-out papers favored by many artists. At first he printed his own negatives, but he soon pressed his second wife, Eva Douglas, into service so they could sell prints to tourists as souvenirs.
About 1887, Lummis purchased his first and favorite camera, a 5 x 8 inch Anthony Patent Duplex Novelette from the E. & H.T. Anthony Company. With additional accessories, it could convert either to 8 x 10 inch format or double as a stereo camera, producing two 5 x 4 inch photos on the same negative, though Lummis never used the Duplex for either of these alternative formats. For more than four decades, his full-frame contact prints typically measure five inches by eight inches—very wide or very tall—unless he trimmed them to improve the composition. Over the course of his career, Lummis took some 10,000 photographs.
Helen Hunt Jackson’s popular novel Ramona was published in 1884, and helped to create a romanticized image of Spanish-American colonial culture and to spur the Mission Revival style. Lummis, eager to capitalize on the popularity of the novel, put together several souvenir books titled The Home of Ramona.2 Lummis made The Arbor and Ramona’s Tree in 1887 at Rancho Camulos in Ventura County—about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Although Hunt never revealed if a specific hacienda had inspired her, and may well have drawn upon several locations, Lummis was convinced that Camulos was her model (the site had become popular with tourists), and for him that ranch and others like it, were symbols of an older, more graceful, and romantic way of life.
The hanging grapevines in The Arbor and Ramona’s Tree, suggest Lummis shot it in spring or summer.3 On either side of the open gate stand a young woman in white and a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat with his back to the camera. Who these figures are is uncertain, but the woman is probably one of the del Valle family, owners of Camulos. Through the gate is a large cottonwood trunk, supposedly the meeting place for the heroine and hero, Alessandro, in Ramona.
The Home of Ramona is one of Lummis’ minor works. He may have first assembled it from his Camulos photos to settle a local controversy about the real-life setting of Ramona, as owners of several other ranchos also made that claim. But by the turn of the twentieth century, Camulos had won the public relations contest, largely on the basis of articles and books published by Lummis and his contemporaries Adam Clark Vroman and George Wharton James.
Despite his hopes, The Home of Ramona made little, if any, money for Lummis, and is now all but forgotten. Neither of his major biographers—including his own daughter and son—lists it among his publications. His bibliographer notes it as his third and final hand-made work, but is not clear as to when it was self-published.4 Lummis may have begun gathering the photographs for the album in 1887, perhaps even pasting and stitching a few copies together prior to December 5, 1887, the day he suffered a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body for several years. His wife Dorothea may have assisted him.
The Huntington Library version offers further insight into Lummis’s production of the albums of The Home of Ramona, and is noteworthy in several regards. It is inscribed by Lummis to Susanita del Valle, the seventeen-year- old daughter of his hosts at Camulos. It is dated February 3, 1888, two days before Dorothea, finally exasperated with her husband, took him to San Mateo, New Mexico, where he went to recuperate at the hacienda of his friends the Chaves. They divorced later that year and in 1891 he married Eva Douglas (they were divorced in 1912). The album has been bound between hard covers. It is possible that Lummis may have had it commercially bound before presenting it to Susanita, with whom he fell briefly in love (much to the embarrassment of his hosts at Camulos).
Dick George
Charles Lummis, The Arbor and Ramona’s Tree, 1887, cyanotype, 10.1 x 17.8 cm, SOLARI 94.018.003L