The Gilded Man (El Dorado) and Other Pictures of the Spanish Occupancy of America

Adolph F. A. Bandelier looms over the documentary history of the Southwest. A Swiss-born ethnologist and archaeologist who tramped the pueblos and ruins of New Mexico and beyond in the 1880s, he gave his name to Bandelier National Monument and laid groundwork that shaped a century of Pueblo scholarship. The Gilded Man, first issued by D. Appleton in 1893, gathers his essays on the El Dorado legend and the wider drama of Spanish exploration and occupancy in America, blending hard fieldwork with the storyteller's instinct that also produced his novel The Delight Makers.

This copy is the 1962 Rio Grande Press edition in the press's "Rio Grande Classic" series, which faithfully reissued landmark Southwestern texts for a new generation of readers and collectors. The black cloth boards with gilt titling and the dual title page, pairing the Chicago reprint imprint against Appleton's original 1893 leaf, make it a clean, honest example of how the Bandelier legacy was kept in circulation. A worthy shelf companion for anyone tracing the intellectual roots of Southwestern archaeology.