When young Charles Lummis heard about a job in the small town of Los Angeles more than a century ago, he walked all the way to it—across the plains, up Pike's Peak, down Devil's Gorge, through the Grand Canyon, over the desert. It was, by conservative estimate, one of the grandest hikes in American history. With no reason to be modest, Lummis called his "unpretentious" account of it "the wayside notes of a happy vagabonding."