LA Autry Blog

Part VII of a Series: To learn more about the Lummis Housebook Digitization Project, read the introductory post So Lummis Pretty Much Knew Everybody, Didn’t He?  For the other posts in the series, click here.

Sketch by Thomas Moran, 1923.
Charles Fletcher Lummis Papers, Braun Research Library Collection, Autry National Center; MS.1, page 409.

In this edition of Harbach and the Housebook, I’m including my favorite painter at the top of the list. I enjoy not only his work but also the national park he helped create through his paintings. If you have never been to Yellowstone National Park, I hope you will be able to visit it someday. I’ve been there several times over the years and am always amazed by it.

1. Thomas Moran—famed American painter whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. In 1871, he joined an expedition into a then largely unexplored area known as the Yellowstone region. His paintings, along with the photographs of William Henry Jackson (who also visited Charles Lummis and signed the housebook), caught the attention of the nation and helped persuade President Grant and the Congress to preserve Yellowstone National Park—the world’s first national park—in 1872. Also in 1872, the U.S. Geological Survey named Mount Moran in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park for him. His remarkable oil-on-canvas painting, Mountain of the Holy Cross, is in the Autry’s collections.
2. Louise Aline Barnsdall—American oil heiress, best known as Frank Lloyd Wright’s client for the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, which is now the centerpiece of the city’s Barnsdall Art Park. She was also a guiding force and important financial contributor for the Hollywood Bowl.
3. George Fawcett—American stage and film actor of the silent era.
4. Marah Ellis Ryan—author, actress, and activist for Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. She lived among the Hopi Indians and supposedly was the only white woman ever admitted to their secret religious rites.
5. Arthur C. Bent—American ornithologist notable for his encyclopedic, 21-volume work Life Histories of North American Birds. This book is still considered to be an important reference to most ornithologists in the world.
6. Burt A. Heinly—author of Building the Longest Aqueduct in the World, which describes the construction of the aqueduct that made it possible for Los Angeles to grow into one of the world’s largest cities. He was chief engineer William Mulholland’s private secretary and publicist during the planning and construction of the aqueduct.
   
7. Father Richard A. Gleeson, S.J.—Jesuit priest who was the first president of Los Angeles College, which was then located in Highland Park, California. The school later relocated to West Los Angeles and became Loyola Marymount University.
8. Archibald H. Sayce—a pioneering British Assyriologist and linguist who once held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at Oxford University.
9. Luisa and Rosa Villa—sisters who were prominent contributors to Charles Lummis’s Hispanic music recording project. They sang and played the guitar and mandolin for Lummis, recording about twenty pieces. They were also influential in the romantic revival of Californio dances. The sisters continued to perform these songs at an annual fiesta that was held at the Southwest Museum’s Casa de Adobe in the late 1930s.
10. Robert N. Bulla—California state senator.
11. Wesley Bradfield—curator of the Museum of New Mexico. In 1912, Museum Director Edgar L. Hewett (who also visited Lummis and signed the housebook) sent Bradfield to the Mayan ruins of Quiriguá in Guatemala to take photographs and make molds of the spectacular monuments at the site, which are among the largest ever built in the Mayan world.
12. Eugene M. Rhodes—writer who became known as the “cowboy chronicler.” He was also a close friend of Lummis.

The next blog will include one of America’s greatest Western artists, a future member of a Presidential commission that would find the Navy and Army military commanders at Pearl Harbor guilty of dereliction of duty following the Japanese attack in December 1941, Hollywood’s first Hispanic movie star actress, and a person who served as the fifth, tenth, and fourteenth governor of Colorado. See you then.