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Aside from attending the Santiago conference, Bingham’s plans for his next trip south were hazy, though typically ambitious. He had another major expedition in mind. This time, he would follow “the most historic highway in South America, the old trade route between Lima, Potosí, and Buenos Aires.” Bolívar had used the route during some of his later military campaigns. Beyond that, it seems that Bingham just wanted to have a good look around.

The travelogue that Bingham published after the journey, Across South America, reads like two books welded together. The first half, presumably written with his political sponsors in mind, is devoted to tabulating business opportunities for American companies and making Twain-like observations such as “I have been in eight South American capitals and in none have I seen such bad manners as in Buenos Aires.” One of his Yale students, Huntington “Coot” Smith Jr., joined him for this first leg of the journey. After a one-thousand-mile train ride through Argentina, the pair encountered “two rough looking Anglo-Saxons” at the border with Bolivia. One of the men, a robber “driven out of the United States by the force of law and order and hounded to death all over the world by Pinkerton detectives” was likely an associate of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The gang leaders had been killed days before in a shoot-out with the Bolivian Army. Bingham’s guide took advantage of the opportunity and bought the bandits’ mules.

In Bolivia, Bingham had his first exposure to the two primary indigenous peoples of the Andes. He was not impressed by the Quechuas he met, despite their having descended from the populace of the oncegreat Inca empire. After watching a “poor, half clad Indian” submit meekly to a savage whipping from an army officer, Bingham concluded that “there is no doubt about the Quechuas being a backward race . . . bred to look upon subjection as their natural lives, they bear it as the dispensation of Providence.” The Indians’ reliance on chewing mildly narcotic coca leaves, he wrote, had left them “stupid, willing to submit to any injury” and, what must have been a high crime to Bingham, “lacking in all ambition.” Even worse were their neighbors the Aymaras, who in addition to possessing all the faults of the Quechuas were “insolent and unruly.” Bolivia’s oligarchic government was an absolute necessity in Bingham’s eyes, “the only possible outcome of an attempt to simulate the forms of the Republic in a country whose inhabitants are so deficient both mentally and morally.”

After attending the Pan-American Scientific Congress, Bingham entered Peru for the first time in January 1909. He had picked up a new companion in Santiago, swapping Coot Smith for another well-connected young man, Clarence Hay, the son of a former U.S. secretary of state. The two men rode the train to Cusco. The city that had once been the gold-plated nexus of the vast Inca kingdom, the royal seat of one of the largest empires on earth, was now a seedy provincial capital notorious for what Bingham called its “unspeakably filthy” streets.

Hardly had the explorer disembarked from his train, however, than he began to fall under Cusco’s spell. Approaching along the bank of the Huatanay River, he caught his first glimpse of the Roman Catholic monastery of Santo Domingo, constructed atop the convex Inca walls of the Koricancha, the ancient Temple of the Sun. He was mesmerized by the city’s “long walls of beautifully cut stone, laid without cement, and fitted together with the patience of expert stone cutters”—walls whose perfection he would remember two years later when he came upon Machu Picchu. The palaces of the Incas—for that was the title of the supreme ruler, the Sapa Inca, or more commonly just the Inca—had once ringed the square. Conquistadors had constructed new homes atop their royal foundations.

The stone buidings of the Incas, Machu Picchu in particular, are the empire’s most easily recognizable legacy. The most important ones, constructed for religious