Lummis' foot journey from Ohio to Los Angeles. Very descriptive of the Southwest.

Lummis' foot journey from Ohio to Los Angeles. Very descriptive of the Southwest.

Lummis' other set of letters, to the Los Angeles times, are well-known as the basis for his A Tramp across the continent (Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1892). These are the 24 letters written to the Chillicothe Leader. They are more robust than the Times versions, which were more deliberately crafted, more commercial. An essential for Western collections. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Charles Fletcher Lummis began his spectacular career in 1884 by walking from Ohio to start a new job at the three-year old Los Angeles Times. By the time of his death in 1928, the 3,500 mile "tramp across the continent" was just a footnote in his astonishingly varied career: crusading journalist, author of nearly two dozen books, editor of the influential political and literary magazine Out West, Los Angeles city librarian, preserver of Spanish missions, and Indian rights gadfly. Lummis both embodied and defined our vision of the West, and of America itself.

In the Fall of 1832 Washington Irving took part in what he called "a month foray beyond the outposts of human habitation, into the wilderness of the Far West." As was his habit, Irving kept a memorandum book, which he later expanded into A Tour on the Prairies, a real-life Western adventure in the third decade of the nineteenth century. His account is fresh and clear. He saw and makes his readers see the frontiersmen, the trappers, the Indians, and the troopers as they actually were in the 1830s.