American character

the long version

"Charles Fletcher Lummis began his spectacular career in the public eye in 1884 at the age of twenty-five by walking from Cincinnati to Los Angeles to take up his new job at the five-year-old Times. By the time of his death in 1928, the 3,500-mile "tramp" was just another event in Lummis's astonishingly varied career: incendiary journalist, presidential advisor, two-fisted editor of the influential magazine Out West, author of sixteen books, patron of young artists and writers, Los Angeles city librarian, and cultural preservationist of the Southwest." "Attired in his trademark sombrero, bright green corduroy suit, and red Navajo belt, Lummis became a celebrated figure across the country for his fiery opinions and outlandish behavior. The Harvard-educated frontiersman covered the U.S. Army's pursuit of Geronimo, was the first outsider to witness and report the grisly crucifixion rituals practiced by the Penitentes sect in New Mexico, and blew the whistle on a string of murders committed by one of the territory's most powerful families. He traveled to Peru with Adolph Bandelier, restored half a dozen Spanish missions in California, reformed the Los Angeles Public Library, and founded the city's Southwest Museum." "Lummis befriended and influenced an exceptional number of American history's most prominent figures, including General George Crook, Phoebe Hearst, Libby Custer, John Muir, Jack London, William Lloyd Garrison, John Philip Sousa, Frederic Remington, and Teddy Roosevelt, who made Lummis part of his informal "cowboy cabinet." But Lummis's greatest legacy - beyond the buildings he preserved and the national parks he championed - was the role he played in changing the nation's attitude and policies toward racial and cultural minorities, particularly in granting political and religious freedoms, and simple respect, to Native Americans." "Mark Thompson has recreated the irresistibly compelling story of one of our nation's most fascinating characters. Romantic and contentious, mercurial and defiant, Charles Fletcher Lummis was a man of heroic proportions, a figure who both embodied and defined our vision of the West and of America itself."--Jacket.