IN MEMORY
ONE day of August, 1888, in the teeth of a particular New Mexico sand-storm that whipped pebbles the size of a bean straight to your face, a ruddy, bronzed, middle-aged man, dusty but unweary with his sixty-mile tramp from Zuñi, walked into my solitary camp at Los Alamitos. Within the afternoon I knew that here was the most extraordinary mind I had met. There and then began the uncommon friendship which lasted till his death, a quarter of a century later; and a love and admiration which will be of my dearest memories so long as I shall live. I was at first suspicious of the "pigeon-hole memory" which could not only tell me some Queres word I was searching for, but add: "Policárpio explained that to me in Cochiti, November 23, 1881." But I discovered that this classified memory was an integral part of this extraordinary genius. The acid tests of life-long collaboration proved not only this but the judicial poise, the marvelous insight and the intellectual chastity of Bandelier's mind. I cannot conceive of anything in the world which would have made him trim his sails as a historian or a student for any advantage here or hereafter.
Aside from keen mutual interests of documentary and ethnologic study, we came to know one another humanly by the hard proof of the Frontier. Thousands
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.
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
CHARLES F. LUMMIS