07 - Vagabonding Down The Andes by Harry A. Franck

In 1911, Harry A. Franck leapt from a boxcar, crossed the Rio Grande from Laredo, and began a vagabond journey he thought would last eight months. Instead, it consumed four years of his life. The first part, through Mexico and Central America, he recorded in Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras (1916). He then worked as a census taker in the Panama Canal Zone (Zone Policeman 88, 1913) before setting out on the longest and most detailed leg of his travels: Vagabonding Down the Andes (1917). Leaving Panama in 1912, Franck trekked on foot for nearly 30 months, much of it along the ancient Inca highway, before staggering into Buenos Aires—then one of the world’s most glamorous cities. Along the way he endured jungles, mountains, hunger, and hardship, armed with little more than a pistol and his grit. An opinionated iconoclast, Franck combined book-learning with “street smarts,” living among the poorest communities, drinking water from wagon ruts, and surviving hand-to-mouth. He had already traveled around the world (A Vagabond Journey Around the World, 1910), and his raw, adventurous style makes Paul Theroux seem tame by comparison. Franck’s saga—gritty, vivid, and unapologetically of its time—remains a landmark in American travel writing.