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 of miles of wilderness and desert we trudged side by side—­camped, starved, shivered, learned and were Glad together.  Our joint pursuits in comfort at our homes (in Santa Fe and Isleta, respectively) will always be memorable to me; but never so wonderful as that companioning in the hardships of what was, in our day, the really difficult fringe of the Southwest.  There was not a decent road.  We had no endowment, no vehicles.  Bandelier was once loaned a horse; and after riding two miles, led it the rest of the thirty.  So we went always by foot; my big camera and glass plates in the knapsack on my back, the heavy tripod under my arm; his aneroid, surveying instruments, and satchel of the almost microscopic notes which he kept fully and precisely every night by the camp-fire (even when 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 canons, 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.