Dateline Fort Bowie; Charles Fletcher Lummis Reports on an Apache War ed. by Dan L. Thrapp

Abstract

54 Western American Literature Dateline Fort Bowie; Charles Fletcher Lummis Reports on an Apache TV • Edited by Dan L. Thrapp. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1 206 pages, $10.95.) The Charles Fletcher Lummis invoked here is the larger-than-life editor memorialized by Los Angeles's Southwest Museum and House; the Apache War is that of 1885-86; the editor-annotator one-time foreign correspondent and newspaper editor who has a number of books on the Southwest and the Apaches, most of published by the University of Oklahoma Press. The New England-born Lummis is an important figure in the in tual and cultural history of the Southwest, to which he quite literally ftom Ohio in the fall and winter of 1884-85, having prudently sent family ahead by train. He had, with a foresight he did not display in circumstances, contracted to furnish reports of his progress to the Angeles Times. The results were so successful that he found with the Times as a reporter. Thrapp's Introduction shows us that L attachment to the campaign against Geronimo and his allies was reporter's own idea following a year of desk-bound labor. In view of energetic activity to which Lummis devoted his life, this is hardly a Even for those who have read the chapters on Lummis in Clark Powell's California Classics and Southwest Classics (Ward Press, 1971 and 1974, but developed from series in Westways M first-hand acquaintance with Lummis's published work may be rare. is a figure of considerable importance in his time whose legacy has down to us but whose published work is almost inaccessible today. The greatest attraction of Dateline Fort Bowie is not, I should the actual events on which Lummis is reporting - depending on looks at it, he either got there too late (after the death of Captain Crawford under the guns of Mexican irregulars) or left too early ( Indian scouts talked Geronimo and his cadre into surrender). importance the book has lies in the insights of a shrewd, individual which views the \vorId in terms of its personalities and sees it both tively and clearly. Thrapp gives us a precise, just picture of Lummis in his He was a character, but one gifted with a brilliant, evercurious , ever-inquiring intellect, a man with no prejudices that could not be easily lifted, and a free-thinker in a Victorian period when free-thinking and free-acting were rarities. In appearance, with his rumpled clothing and wildly-floating aura of stubborn hair, Lummis might have seemed a precursor to the so-called "youth culture" of our day, but there was more depth and more warmth to him. He was something of a scientist in his clear and meticulous thought, and his views were generally sound. Thrapp has included here all he could identify of Lummis's from General Crook's field headquarters at Fort Bowie, Arizona Reviews 55 ',in the order in which they were written. This is not the order in which they,were printed in the Times, for Lummis wired some dispatches while mailing others, and postal vagaries are not new, much as they may have iiltensified. In addition, dispatches from other sources to the Times (such ,1i5those from Associated Press) are interspersed whenever editor Thrapp I()und them of value. In the end, however, it is not the historical event but the reporter's J(!sponse to it that comes through, often in surprising fashion. A prime eiample is his article of May 2, 1886, on "The Cowboy, a Good Fellow but No Indian Fighter," one of the shrewdest, most devastating, yet most kindly appraisals of that bewildering type that has yet seen print. And the point '1:S, here it sees print, and at least one much-spoken-of, little-read literary figure proves a writer, after all. ARTHUR FRIETZSCHE San Luis Obispo) California Literary America) 1903-1934: The Mary Austin Letters. Selected and edited by Thomas Matthews Pearce. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, ]979. 296 pages, $17.95.) Contributions in Women's Studies, No.5. A feminist, writer, and friend of the Indian, Mary Austin knew many of the leading literary, social, and political figures...