Thousands of notable people, from practically every walk of life, visited Charles Lummis in his house in the Arroyo Seco during the decades that he lived there. The parties he threw at El Alisal in its heyday were one of the hottest tickets in
Dennis Harbach, at El Alisal
town. “No one invited ever failed to come,” the singer Edith Pla, a frequent visitor, reminisced years later. “And there were people who wanted to come for years but were never invited.”
In the summer of 1899, Lummis started putting out a guestbook for visitors to sign, a practice he continued until shortly before his death in 1928. By then, 444 pages of the 505-page volume had filled up with nearly 7,000 signatures, as well as assorted inscriptions, snippets of verse, and miniature works of art. (A digital copy of the entire book is viewable here on the Autry Museum’s website.)
Quite a few of the names were world-famous: naturalist John Muir, poet Carl Sandburg, attorney Clarence Darrow, silent-screen movie star Douglas Fairbanks, photographer Dorothea Lange, artist Frederic Remington, and on and on. The identity of many of the other signers, famous and lesser known, had been lost in the mists of time—until an amateur local historian named Dennis Harbach set out to decipher every last one of them, if he possibly could.
A drawing and inscription by the artist Charles Russell (click to enlarge)
Lummis Housebook, Braun Research Library Collection, Autry National Center
Dennis has published some of his findings in three books: a two-volume set titled El Alisal’s Remarkable Visitors, with photos and brief bios of a couple hundred of Lummis’s most interesting guests, and another titled The Lummis Housebook: Hidden Works of Art, showing 18 of the most notable sketches and paintings in the book. His books are available in the research collections of the Hearst Castle, the Huntington Library, and the Autry Museum.
The Lummis Housebook is more than just a jumble of names. Many of the signatures are clustered under headings identifying the occasion, or are arranged around a menu or a rectangle depicting a dinner table, so that it’s possible to determine who attended, for instance, a Spanish dinner on Dec. 13, 1903, and who sat next to whom. Dennis recounts some of the stories contained within its pages in presentations that he occasionally gives at El Alisal and other historic sites and museums around Los Angeles.
I caught up with him by phone recently and asked some questions about his fascinating research project, now in its seventh year.
Q: How did you get started on deciphering signatures in the Lummis Housebook?
A: I started volunteering at the Southwest Museum and of course there you find so many items of interest that are related to Charles Lummis, which got my curiosity up. At that point [Southwest Museum curator] Kim Walters told me about the housebook and mentioned that it would be great to find out who had signed the book. I took a look at it and said, okay, I will take it on. That was around 2012. We are continuing to work up to the present day, though the findings now are few and far between. There are people we still can’t identify, but we keep plugging away at it.
Q: How many signatures remain unidentified?
A: The total number of signatures in the book is around 6,970, but they are not all unique because some people signed more than once. We have been able to identify 6,545 of them, or roughly 94 percent. So 425 remain unidentified.”
Q: How do you go about identifying those signatures that are indecipherable?
A: I use a few methods. First, I check in with someone like Kim or Liza [Posas, head archivist at the Autry Museum] to see if they can make sense of the signature. Some of the curators at the Huntington Library have also offered to see if they could make them out. One that they spotted that I had had a heck of a time deciphering was C. Hart Merriam, one of the founders of the National Geographic Society. Another was Fred Blanchard, the first president of the Hollywood Bowl. The curator at the Huntington, Daniel Lewis, looked at that one and in an instant said, that’s Fred Blanchard. He had seen it in the past and he knew exactly who it was. He went to the library, got some known examples and it was a dead-on match.
Q: Do you have any favorites?
A: There are so many, but one of the people that absolutely fascinated me, because I had never heard of him, is Frederick Russell Burnham. He was an American citizen living in South Africa who fought for the British during the Boer War and he became so famous down there that when he was finally returning to the United States, Queen Victoria invited him to dine with her because she had heard so much about him. He explored for gold in the Klondike. He later became president of the Southwest Museum. If you were going to give the title of adventurer to anyone, Burnham would be at the top of your list.
Another who is absolutely fascinating was named Zintka L. Colby. She was survivor of the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. No one ever knew her real name because her family was all killed and she was an infant when she was found three days after the massacre. Lummis mentioned that the family that took her in gave her a name [sometimes rendered as Zitkala Noni] which translates as Little Lost Bird. She visited Lummis twice. Once she was brought by her adoptive parents and when she was a young woman, she came back and visited again with her husband. She’s really a remarkable story.
Another one that I find politically interesting is Cornelius Cole. He represented California in Congress, and was present on the dais when Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.
“A Noise at Home-Coming,” Oct. 22, 1927. Dinner party celebrating Lummis’s return from what would be his final trip to visit “my Pueblo Indians” in New Mexico. (click to enlarge)
Lummis Housebook, Braun Research Library Collection, Autry National Center
Q: Based on your findings about who was in attendance at El Alisal for dinner parties and other occasions, which event do you most wish you could have attended?
A: A dinner that Cornelius Cole attended would be among my top five because not only was he there but the investigative journalist Ida Tarbell also attended. She was very well known for exposing Rockefeller’s monopolistic practices at Standard Oil. A lesser-known part of her career is that she wrote a major biography Of Abraham Lincoln. You can imagine how excited she must have been to be sitting there and talking with someone who had been a close friend of Lincoln’s.
Q: Is there an end in sight to your work on the housebook?
A: The Lummis housebook is probably a project that will never end because I always have my eye peeled for the signatures that we haven’t deciphered yet. I’ve gotten lucky in the last month or so. We’ve been able to make three or four IDs, but IDs are few and far between right now.
I have quite a number of people whose signatures are easily readable but I can’t find out any information on them, or their name is so common that it could be any number of people. One that is especially frustrating because she sang at the house a lot was a woman named Alma Real. There is even a road in Pacific Palisades named after her but I can’t find anything about her. It’s as if she was a ghost unless she was at Lummis’s house.
Some that are still illegible no human being would ever be able to read. Only someone who knew the signature in advance could decipher them. So I don’t think we’re ever going to get below 400, which is a shame. But then again, no one can read my handwriting either.
Art by Edward Borein inscribed, “Dear Lummis. Here’s to your friends and mine. The people who took their color from the parrot’s wing.”
Lummis Housebook, Braun Research Library Collection, Autry National Center
inclined neighbors who began building their Arts and Crafts homes in the Arroyo Seco in the late 19th century were the predecessors of the beatniks, surf bums, gay rights pioneers and hippies who were drawn to the region in the second half of the 20th century, according to the book, 
He boasted often about all the river stones from the arroyo that he hoisted into place, with help from a rotating cast of helpers, and how fit the hard work left him. El Alisal was his “gymnasium,” he said. In a pronouncement displaying his penchant for bombastic self-congratulation, he once wrote of the experience, “It is pitiful for a man to get a home off the bargain counter and miss all the joy he might just as well have had in building it.” The stonework was a “construction to last 1,000 years unimpaired.”
The stonework shines in the bird’s eye views of the house snapped by the drone. I’m sure it will need help to make it another 885 years. But at the age of 115 or so, Lummis’s house looks great in Harbach and Houser’s photographs.
California Historical Society, its occupant and caretaker since the 1960s. The stumbling block is the question of who should pay the steep costs of maintaining the stone structure, built by Lummis himself and teams of helpers over a period of time from the 1890s into the 1910s and named by him El Alisal.