The Delight Makers eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 557 pages of information about The Delight Makers.

The Delight Makers eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 557 pages of information about The Delight Makers.

I saw it proved again in our contact with the Quichua and Aymara 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 Fe 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 Archaeology has a summer session there; and its excavations verify Bandelier’s surmises.  Normal students and budding archaeologists 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 slept in the safe.  The many students who wished copies of their very own were referred to dealers in Americana, who searched for this already rare volume; and many were proud to get it, at last, at ten, fifteen and even twenty times its original price.  It will always be a standard—­the most photographic story yet printed of the life of the prehistoric Americans.

CharlesF. Lummis.

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Project Gutenberg
The Delight Makers from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.