Get the story straight...

Like everyone else who goes to Peru, I most want to see Machu Picchu. (For those who don't know, or forgot, Machu Picchu is the site of an Incan citadel perched on the tippy top of a steep mountain in the Andes, overlooking a valley floor 2,000 feet below...that's a photo of Machu Picchu at the top of the blog.) If you get your history from the Man, you probably know that Hiram Bingham, a Yale professor (and descendant of Protestant missionaries who helped steal Hawaii from the Hawaiians) "discovered" Machu Picchu in 1911. What you may not know is that when he finally set foot there--led by the hand by a local boy--he found some disquieting graffiti: Lizarraga, 1902. Yes, some 9 years before his "discovery," some cat by the name of Lazarraga got there "first." (He was a local, who lived on the valley floor for 30 years.) In the many books and articles he wrote about Machu Picchu, Bingham failed to mention Lazarraga...or the fact that a number of others told Bingham about Machu Picchu and where to find it, and three Peruvian families were already living next to the peak of Machu Picchu when Bingham showed up. As Kim MacQuarrie notes in the marvelous "The Last Days of the Incas," where I got this nugget, fortunately for Bingham, he had the Yale U. Press and National Geographic magazine to tell his story; Lazarraga, obviously, did not.