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he come close to exploring all of it. “No one really has,” he said.
    As we left the bar that night, Chris said he would begin making plans for our journey and would hire two locals to help carry equipment. “This is gonna be fun,” he said in parting.

“I Was Lost”
    I NDIANS CALLED GEORGE HEYE Isatigibis, or Slim-Shin—for the narrow legs holding up his colossal body. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds, with a fire-hydrant neck, a gold watch chain across his chest, and a cigar almost always dangling from his mouth. His money came from his father, an oilman who had sold out to John D. Rockefeller. He drove a Rolls-Royce and was regularly seen in New York’s finest nightclubs, sometimes, as a friend once said, with a “blond at either elbow and a bucket of champagne in front of him.” Long before he decided to go after the lost city, people referred to him as a “boxcar collector,” for his impulse to grab up every Native American artifact he could find, no matter how small. Others, though, called him a plunderer, because what he was doing sometimes appeared to be more akin to grave robbing.
    Heye’s obsession with Indian artifacts began in 1897 on a business trip to Arizona, where, after graduating from Columbia University’s School of Mines, he was working on a railroad project in Kingman. For ten months he lived in a tent, and at night he visited the Indians who worked for him. “One night I noticed the wife of one of my Indian foremen biting on what seemed to be a piece of skin,” he recalled once. “Upon inquiry I found she was chewing the seams of her husband’s deerskin shirt in order to kill the lice. I bought the shirt, became interested in aboriginal customs, and acquired other objects as opportunity offered, sending them back home. . . . That shirt was the start of my collection. Naturally, when I had a shirt I wanted a rattle and moccasins. And then the collecting bug seized me and I was lost.” That was a feeling Morde and Murray could relate to.
    Elsewhere, Heye described his mission to collect as an attempt to solve “the great mystery of the origin of the prehistoric races of the Western Hemisphere.” His critics, however, saw a less elevated man. “He bought all those objects solely in order to own them,” an unnamed professor of archaeology told the New Yorker in a 1960 profile of the collector. “George was fortified by the sufficient monomania to build up a superlative, disciplined collection.”
    By the time Morde met him in New York, Heye had truly gotten lost. He was sixty-three and had given up everything—first engineering, then a job on Wall Street—to build his new museum. “George would get himself a new limousine and make a pilgrimage, at ninety miles an hour, across the continent,” the professor recalled. “He’d pause at towns that took his fancy, look up the local mortician and the weekly-newspaper editor, and ask for word of people lately deceased, or soon likely to become so, whose possessions might include an Indian collection.”
    When Heye wasn’t out searching himself, he hired scores of anthropologists and adventurers to roam the Americas. “He collected the best anthropologists,” the professor continued. “His crew had the money to dig up or buy everything that the rest of us couldn’t afford.” Early on, he stored his collection in an elegant Madison Avenue mansion, where he lived with his socialite wife (the first of three; his second wife, tired of his artifacts and wandering, would lock him out of his house and ask for a divorce) and two children, but in 1939 it was housed in a four-story building in Harlem, at 155th Street and Broadway, and known as the Museum of the American Indian. (In 1989, the Smithsonian would acquire the entire collection; by that time, the museum had the largest assemblage of Native American artifacts in the world.)
    Heye’s interest in the lost city was likely owed to an obscure doctor in New Orleans who sold