In 1971, anthropologist Lowell John Bean was digging through archives at the Smithsonian Institution when he stumbled across a “superb” 20-page manuscript on the Chemehuevi Indians, a historically nomadic desert tribe whose territory spanned from the Tehachapi Mountains to the Colorado River and from Death Valley to the San Bernardino Mountains.
The paper’s authors were a renowned, Stanford-educated linguist-ethnographer named John Peabody Harrington and a mystery woman: Carobeth Laird.
Laird wasn’t an academic, as far as Bean knew. She’d never published. What was the nature of her contribution? He couldn’t ask Harrington, who’d died 10 years earlier and left behind an immense trove of almost one million documents—the largest collection of anthropological field notes the Smithsonian had ever seen. Why had this important manuscript languished unpublished for decades in the great man’s files?
Eager to circulate the paper among scholars, Bean assigned several students to find Laird and secure publication rights. Their search led them to Georgia Laird Culp, a Chemehuevi tribal leader who, it turned out, lived in Los Angeles with her elderly mother, Carobeth. A spry, energetic white woman in her 70s, Laird was delighted to be “discovered” after all these decades. And with that began an amazing tale.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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Born in 1895 to a newspaper publisher and a housewife in San Diego, Laird, then Carobeth Tucker, grew up in an intellectual and progressive family that helped raise her child when she became a single mother at 16. A high school dropout, she preferred to devour musty, mostly incomprehensible and outdated library books on paleontology and anthropology. At 19, she enrolled in the San Diego Normal School, a state-sponsored teaching college, and quickly grew besotted with her handsome linguistics professor, Harrington.
Perhaps Harrington saw in his bright pupil an aptitude he could harness for research. They married, and he taught her how to do fieldwork. In a desperate race to record the customs, myths, and languages of Indigenous tribes whose numbers were dwindling, Harrington swept his young bride to villages located in today’s Tejon Ranch.
His single-minded focus left him little time for his wife. In the rough field, he insisted they subsist on a pot of beans or mush that he cooked weekly. He didn’t shower or wash his clothes (and didn’t see why she had to, either). She was allowed to read only ethnographic works. When she became pregnant, he urged her to have the baby in one of the villages where he was conducting his studies, so he could observe tribal childbirth customs. She returned to San Diego to have the child, whom she left with her parents to rejoin her husband. Yet he disappeared for weeks on research jaunts, leaving her without food, heat, or money in winter.
In 1923, Harrington sent Carobeth to Arizona to interview George Laird, a Chemehuevi blacksmith, and gather material on the tribe. A romance bloomed between the young woman and her 48-year-old subject, who supplied the affection she’d pined for in her marriage. Divorce was scandalous; racism and miscegenation laws abounded. The rights of Indigenous people were nonexistent, their culture and reverence for the natural world dismissed as primitive and backward.
Carobeth didn’t give one fig what society thought. She divorced Harrington, married Laird, and embarked on a new existence that brought deep impoverishment but also the happiest, most productive years of her life.
While her new husband farmed and worked on remote ranches, Carobeth Laird raised their children, ran the house, and, at night, in partnership with her new husband, continued the work she’d learned to do with Harrington. George had spent his childhood among elders who’d steeped him in stories of vanished tribal life of the early 1800s; Carobeth took notes on a rickety manual typewriter.
After George’s untimely death in a farming accident in 1940, Carobeth, desperate for money, boiled down decades of research into a 20-page treatise on the Chemehuevi and submitted it to a journal, where it was rejected because she wasn’t an academic, just some woman who’d married an Indian. Then she sent it to Harrington, asking for help. Instead, Harrington, a paranoid man who lived in fear that other linguists would steal and claim credit for his work, slapped his name on the paper and buried it in a research box.
As the students sat rapt in her living room listening to this story, the lively, engaging Laird said that she had also written a full-length manuscript about the Chemehuevi. Would they be interested in publishing that, too?
Excited by the possibilities, Professor Bean invited Laird to the annual fiesta held at the Malki Museum on the Morongo Indian Reservation, in Banning, where she sat all day talking in Chemehuevi to guests and discussing the tribe’s culture, myths, and grammar with linguists, anthropologists, and ethnographers.
That day in 1971, the board of the Malki Museum Press agreed to publish her full-length book. “At the age of 75,” wrote board member Harry W. Lawton, “Carobeth Laird returned to a life she had left 50 years earlier. She re-entered the discipline of anthropology.” Laird might have argued that she’d never left.
Lawton and others also urged Laird to write a memoir about Harrington and their lives in the early 1920s. The stories poured out, and she completed a book-length manuscript in three months. Published in 1975, Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of My Life with John Peabody Harrington is an immensely readable memoir that has sold 200,000 copies and was widely hailed by luminaries such as Tom Wolfe. “Never before have I heard of an exciting new literary talent bursting forth at the age of 80. But here, I am convinced, we have one,” Wolfe wrote in Harper’s Bookletter.
A year later, The Chemehuevis was also published to acclaim, and it quickly became essential reading in its field. Laird was profiled in Parade. She published articles on Chemehuevi culture in the Journal of California Anthropology, collaborated with scholars, and wrote a new book, Mirror and Pattern: George Laird’s World of Chemehuevi Mythology. Another book, Limbo, was a muckraking personal account of patient mistreatment in a nursing home where she was sent to recover from surgery.
Laird died in 1983 at 88, pleased that her contributions to anthropology had finally been recognized. But time and tastes are fickle. Today, her books are sporadically reissued but often go out of print; hardcovers can fetch hundreds of dollars.
In her writing, Laird succeeded in illuminating the life of her secretive and enigmatic genius first husband as well as the humanity, humor, and intelligence of the tribe she’d embraced as her own. She also succeeded in a lifelong ambition to break into a field dominated by tweedy, white, college-educated men, not high school dropouts and teen moms like Carobeth Laird.
In Encounter, she recounts those early years of learning from library books. “You see,” she writes, “I had discovered Evolution. I had discovered Science.… There were those who spent their lives in pursuit of absolute truth, and I wanted above everything to belong to that elite band.”•
Denise Hamilton is a Los Angeles native, crime novelist, and former reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She’s the editor of Los Angeles Noir and Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics and was a finalist for the Edgar Award. Read more about her at denisehamilton.com.
