The Delight Makers | Page 3

I had to
crouch over him and the precious paper with my water-proof focusing

cloth) somehow bestowed about him. Up and down pathless cliffs,
through tangled cañons, fording icy streams and ankle-deep sands, we
travailed; no blankets, overcoats, or other shelter; and the only
commissary a few cakes of sweet chocolate, and a small sack of
parched popcorn meal. Our "lodging was the cold ground." When we
could find a cave, a tree, or anything to temper the wind or keep off
part of the rain, all right. If not, the Open. So I came to love him as well
as revere. I had known many "scientists" and what happened when they
really got Outdoors. He was in no way an athlete--nor even muscular. I
was both--and not very long before had completed my
thirty-five-hundred-mile "Tramp Across the Continent." But I never
had to "slow down" for him. Sometimes it was necessary to use
laughing force to detain him at dark where we had water and a leaning
cliff, instead of stumbling on through the trackless night to an unknown
"Somewheres." He has always reminded me of John Muir, the only
other man I have known intimately who was as insatiate a climber and
inspiring a talker. But Bandelier had one advantage. He could find
common ground with anyone. I have seen him with Presidents,
diplomats, Irish section-hands, Mexican peons, Indians, authors,
scientists and "society." Within an hour or so he was easily the Center.
Not unconscious of his power, he had an extraordinary and sensitive
modesty, which handicapped him through life among those who had
the "gift of push." He never put himself forward either in person or in
his writing. But something about him fascinated all these far-apart
classes of people, when he spoke. His command of English, French,
Spanish, and German might have been expected; but his facility in
acquiring the "dialects" of railroad men and cowboys, or the language
of an Indian tribe, was almost uncanny. When he first visited me, in
Isleta, he knew just three words of Tigua. In ten days he could make
himself understood by the hour with the Principales in their own
unwritten tongue. Of course, this was one secret of his extraordinary
success in learning the inner heart of the Indians.
I saw it proved again in our contact with the Quíchua and Aymará and
other tribes of Peru and Bolivia.
I have known many scholars and some heroes--but they seldom come

in the same original package. As I remember Bandelier with smallpox
alone in the two-foot snows of the Manzanos; his tens of thousands of
miles of tramping, exploring, measuring, describing, in the Southwest;
his year afoot and alone in Northern Mexico, with no more weapon
than a pen-knife, on the trails of raiding Apaches (where "scientific
expeditions" ten years later, when the Apache was eliminated, needed
armed convoys and pack-trains enough for a punitive expedition, and
wrote pretentious books about what every scholar has known for three
hundred years) I deeply wonder at the dual quality of his intellect.
Among them all, I have never known such student and such explorer
lodged in one tenement.
We were knit not only thus but in the very intimacies of life--sharing
hopes and bereavements. My first son, named for him, should now be
twenty-two. The old home in Santa Fé was as my own. The truly
wonderful little woman he found in Peru for mate--who shared his
hardships among the cannibals of the Amazonas and elsewhere, and so
aided and still carries on his work--I met in her maiden home, and am
glad I may still call her friend.
Naturally, among my dearest memories of our trampings together is
that of the Rito, the Tyuonyi. It had never in any way been pictured
before. We were the first students that ever explored it. He had
discovered it, and was writing "The Delight Makers." What days those
were! The weather was no friend of ours, nor of the camera's. We were
wet and half-fed, and cold by night, even in the ancient tiny caves. But
the unforgettable glory of it all!
To-day thousands of people annually visit the Tyuonyi at ease, and
camp for weeks in comfort. The School of American Archæology has a
summer session there; and its excavations verify Bandelier's surmises.
Normal students and budding archæologists sleep in the very caves
(identified) of the Eagle People, the Turquoise, Snake and other clans.
And in that enchanted valley we remember not only the Ancients, but
the man who gave all this to the world.
During the six years I was Librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library,
far later, no other out-of-print book on the Southwest was so eagerly

sought as "The Delight Makers." We had great trouble in getting our
own copy, which