Lummis wasn’t impressed with Los Angeles when he arrived. It paled in comparison to Boston, where he grew up. Los Angeles also lacked sophistication. Lummis quickly grew bored with the city and went to the desert to chronicle the Apache Wars. During one of his trips, he had a paralysis attack and went to San Mateo, New Mexico to recover. He took so much time away from work that the publisher fired him. His wife then divorced him. When Lummis health improved, he worked as a freelance writer and photographer. He remarried then traveled to South America to aid the ethnographer Adolph Bandelier in his studies of indigenous tribes.

When Lummis and his wife returned to Los Angeles in 1893, he had little money left. He took a position with a regional magazine sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce and turned it into a serious magazine that he renamed Out West. He convinced Jack London and John Muir to write stories for the publication. In the meantime, he wrote books and poetry, translated Spanish texts into English, co-founded both the Southwest Museum and the Landmarks Club of Southern California, and lobbied for indigenous people’s rights. He earned enough money to buy a piece of land in East Los Angeles and built a house there that he called El Alisal.