The Beginning
He was an unlikely adventurer. Back home in Illinois, Herman Frey was just a timid, skinny, slightly hunch backed kid that no one except his mother and brother seemed to care very much about.
Later, especially when in Mexico, things changed quite a bit, in that among his exploits there, in 1946 Frey became the discoverer of a significant Maya ruin, which is now called Bonampák. This site was important, because its unique murals flew in the face of what was then the common belief that the Maya were a peaceful people, even though it took several decades for its full importance to sink into the slow moving muddy waters of the archaeological establishment.
His finding the ruins and reporting them did not do Frey much good outside of Mexico, since world credit for the site’s discovery went to another American who also trudged there, though two months later. However, the other man had the public relations department of the United Fruit Company to back him up.
Frey’s unexpected death in 1949 during his final expedition put an end to his efforts to be recognized for the find. Some called his demise an accident, but another suggestion has involved the possibility of murder, but other than that, little has happened through the decades.
Certainly, the United Fruit Company would not have mourned Frey’s passing. He had attacked it in the press in Mexico up until the time of his death, because he saw it as having stolen the discovery of Bonampák from him.
Frey was a hero to Mexicans for having the guts to take on a large multinational corporation. However, he was probably not held in high regard for that by those in power in United Fruit.
In 1989, when the Chiapas state government dug up Frey’s remains, it discovered some interesting damage to his skull, which had never been mentioned before. This certainly renewed the doubts about whether or not the death was an accident.
The death of this American adventurer in Mexico may be still a mystery, but perhaps a good way to understand how and why he died may be to begin to understand the intriguing times in which he lived. It may seem hard to imagine how an easygoing pacifist from Illinois wound up in the Lacandón jungle in the first place, much less became involved in a controversy over his discovery of a lost city there. The area was well away from any beaten path. It was in the far southern part of Mexico, and certainly was not easily visited in 1941, when he first arrived there.
Since Frey’s death in 1949, many authors who have written about the Lacandón Indians or Bonampák have at least mentioned him. There are so many conflicting and often very imaginative versions of what he did in life and how he died, that from all the contradictions, it is difficult to understand the real Carlos Frey.
What is clear is that after leaving his hometown, his life became an odyssey, which took him all over the United States. Finally, his dreams led him into Mesoamerica, where he finally chose Mexico as his home. There he dreamed and quested until his untimely death.
While there are a few facts available about Frey among the often embellished stories told in Mexico, the truth about his early life in Illinois is not easy to come by. In his many surviving letters and lengthy narratives, he only rarely referred to this early time. From these sources, it is also obvious that he was not the type of person to become even mildly popular in his hometown.
He was born in Chicago on November 16, 1915, as Herman Charles Frey. His family later moved to the small town of Staunton in southern Illinois, where his father began working in a coal mine.
At the age of eight, young Frey announced — probably on a childish whim — that he wanted to become an archaeologist, but the family just laughed at him. He satisfied himself by hunting for arrowheads when they visited an uncle’s farm. Though he never told how he heard about them, he later related how he dreamed even then of Maya ruins, such as Palenque and Chichén Itzá, so very far away in Mexico.
At the height of the Depression, from 1930 to 1933, Frey’s father was out of work, and the family went on relief. Herman spent most of high school in his patched clothing and as a social pariah. His classmates called him "Humpy Herman" due to a slight curvature of the spine, which added to his misery at school. He later wrote about how he "had to fight every bully in town" for using that awful nickname.
Adding to his problems, Frey quickly outgrew his clothes, and would not wear anything he considered to be too small. Also, according to his mother, "He never wore the same pants for more than a week, but that I had to wash and press them again." His feeling at that point in his life was that if he could not have new clothes, they could at least be reasonably clean and fit right.
Though pictures show him as rather handsome, young Herman had no friends, and did not participate in many school activities. He never dated, though he played on the football team. His first coach was very supportive though, and expressed great hopes for him in life.
However, when Frey was in his senior year, for some unexplained reason, a new coach did not care for him at all. In fact, in the very last game of Herman’s last season at school the man kept him on the bench, despite his team’s ultimately winning 40 to 0. This was complete humiliation and it was devastating. Frey went home and cried.
As soon as Herman graduated from high school, he closed out his small bank account, and put Staunton behind him forever. Although he probably never regretted leaving his hometown, from his letters, it is obvious that he always hoped to be famous there someday. Later, when relatively well-known in Mexico, he even sent news clippings of his exploits to his hometown newspaper.
Frey’s first job was at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933. This was an effort by Chicago to put the Depression behind it by emphasizing the positive aspects of the city, and to draw attention away from its economic ills. At his job there, Frey began to work by stamping The Lord’s Prayer on pennies and selling them for a nickel. That position lasted only a few days, but it did give him an employee pass to get in without the expense of paying admission. It is likely that this exposition first introduced him to the work of the archaeologist, Frans Blom, because Blom’s contribution to this event was a replica of a building at the ruins at Uxmal, Mexico.
From the vantage point of having a free pass, Herman also became a tourist guide. Although he was from down state Illinois, he studied his Chicago city map very carefully, and was even able to take people to other sites in areas he, himself, had never seen. According to his mother, he became more knowledgeable about the area than his cousins, who actually lived nearby.
After the Chicago exhibition and for a time, Frey worked and traveled around the United States with an airplane advertising company. The outfit would go to state and county fairs, and tow signs in the air for their customers.
Going cross country, there were times when Herman stopped overnight to see his parents and brother. These visits were usually brief, at least in part, because his father usually would try to talk him into taking a steady job in the mines. Herman would almost invariably leave the next day, either due to his schedule or a need to get away from his father’s nagging. One odd thing about Frey’s sojourns is that in all his many letters home, virtually all of them were addressed to his mother, and those that were not were addressed to his brother.
Frey must have been a very odd sight on the American roadways in the waning days of the Depression. For hitchhiking, he usually wore English riding boots and trousers that he had bought secondhand. He felt, perhaps rightly, that their "rather dashing effect" had something to do with his success at getting rides. People must have found him rather intriguing, and stopped to give this unusual looking man a lift. He was also a very easygoing and pleasant fellow, and that must have certainly helped him in the long hours of travel.
His mother later discussed this part of his life: "Herman loved strangers. Even as a baby, he’d go laughing to anybody. He could hitchhike to California faster than you could go by bus. And, oh, the stories he’d tell… He’d bring strangers here. I’d feed them. Then they’d be off."
At some point in this period, Frey appears to have visited Mexico for the first time. However, he does not appear to have left any specific information about the trip, except the fact that he went.
Finally, Herman wound up in San Francisco in May of 1939, where he soon began to work at the new exposition there. The event was a world class fair that celebrated the recent openings of both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, and oddly like the city’s World Fair’s of 1915, it was a sadly futile plea for peace in the world. One can only hope that San Francisco never undertakes a third such effort.
This later fair was an almost magical event with its fairy tale buildings and variety of talent. Many of the rich and famous of the day came to get in on the event. This was also one of the few times in his life away from his parents that Herman was able to send them any money.
While Herman arrived on the scene a couple months late, and for a while was not one of the regulars at the fair, during slow times, the management kept him at his job selling popcorn for long twelve hour days. However, he seems to have found time to meet other people, particularly females.
Later, Frey worked for a florist at the fair, and found that he liked flowers and enjoyed arranging them. He also took particular pleasure in meeting some of the many pretty girls who worked in the area.
Before the break in the fair at the end of October, 1939, Frey was planning to go back and travel around Mexico. On hearing this, a mutual friend suggested that he go as a companion for a girl, her mother and two other young ladies. The older woman had a new car for transportation, and wanted a young man along for protection. Naturally, his high school Spanish would come in handy. Frey later claimed that it took an hour to decide to go, but with his love of travel and appreciation of the opposite gender, it seems very unlikely that it took anywhere near that long.
In late November of 1939, Frey and company drove into Mexico from California via Texas. Apparently, they spent some days in the north of Mexico, and later traveled to the south, but very annoyingly, Frey wrote nothing of what they did or saw, except for a few cryptic post cards to his mother.
At some point later, the older woman and, most likely, her daughter left, no doubt heading back to the States, leaving Herman with just two companions, Marian and Priscilla. At this point, fortunately, Frey began to write in much more detail about his travels.
These three traveled from Oaxaca to Juchitán, where Frey was very impressed by the local female population, referring to them as being "all well proportioned" and "simply gorgeous." They arrived on December 31, just in time for a big dance being held in the center of the market.
They took in the event, though neither of the girls who were with him wanted to do more than watch. Possibly, they felt out of place among the far more colorfully dressed local ladies.
Frey later described the local females: "The greatest splurge of color was worn by the girls sitting around the cement dance floor. Their dresses and blouses were of bright maroon or shiny black silk with large embroidered flowers in the brightest of colors, and the skirts were of heavily starched wide lace. Their hair was braided with red, pink, purple, and yellow ribbons. (Their) almond shaped eyes were strikingly set off by their soft brown complexions."
Since he did not want to miss a chance to join in the festivities, Frey asked one local girl to dance, and she accepted. However, there was no chemistry between them, so after that he looked around and saw "a beautiful girl, dressed the same as the others, and yet she was not the same."
At this moment, while it can easily be explained as a mere infatuation, the entire focus of Herman Frey’s life was about to change. This girl that he met was Lucelia Ríos, a chemistry student home from Mexico City for the holidays. Herman got to her just as a local fellow did, and to his great surprise, she chose him for the dance.
They spoke, but later he could not remember a single word that they said, because his "knees felt watery, and a heavy fog was coming in." Frey later described her as having "a smile that revealed beautiful teeth and the ghost of a dimple." He was surprised that she could speak some English, and must have seen her status as a female university student as quite unusual, so that may have been intriguing. However, it seems quite obvious that young Herman was also very much fascinated by her physical charms.
Herman and Lucelia shared nearly every dance until midnight. At the new year, the custom in Juchitán, as in many places, is for good friends to embrace, and this is what they did until well after the song "Jarabe Tapatía" ended. A few more tunes played, and finally Lucelia had to go home with her younger sisters.
Following a nearly sleepless night, Frey eventually went over to Lucelia’s house to see her in late morning. By now, she had learned that he was in town with two female companions, and he hastily explained the entirely platonic nature of his situation.
Later that day, Herman and Lucelia spent some time together sitting in a hammock in the family courtyard. There she sang to him in the shade of the trees.
That night, there was yet another dance, and this time Herman and Lucelia spent the entire evening together. Thinking that this was their final night, at the end he said farewell.
The next day, in the effort to leave with his two companions, he managed to oversleep. In a letter, he later admitted to his mother that his dawdling was intentional. After belatedly racing to the station, the three Americans found the train leaving, and ended up having to wait until the next day. No doubt, Frey was overjoyed as he rushed to see the lovely Lucelia once again.
Again in the pleasure of her company, Frey quickly decided that he would stay in Juchitán with Lucelia while Priscilla and Marian went onward to their destinations of Tuxtla Gutierrez and San Cristóbal. He would rejoin them on their return instead.
Frey later described these next few days as bliss. He and Lucelia strolled and talked, while gazing into each other’s eyes, though they were always accompanied by her younger sisters. He went with her to the market. They would walk to the river, and hold hands while the younger children swam or waded. Though not of a religious sort, Frey even went to one of her father’s Seventh Day Adventist meetings, and actually sat through it.
Everything pleasant always seems to end so very quickly, and soon Priscilla came back, although she came alone. Marian had wanted to go back home without delay, and she remained on the train after switching to a Pullman car. Priscilla was low on cash, and could not afford the much safer and better seat.
This remaining companion insisted on Frey returning with her, so she and all her luggage would be secure in second class, since safety, then as now, is a concern on Mexican trains. He felt a moral obligation to see her home, and so, he went with her.
Frey and Lucelia parted with a promise to meet that September in Mexico City, where she went to school. She did not like the idea of parting, and he could not understand why she kept saying, "It will not be the same." His last memory of her there was of her running away from him in tears back into her father’s house.
According to Frey, the returning Priscilla was an ardent shopper who had "bought out most of Chiapas," so he suggested taking turns sleeping and watching all the baggage. He recommended that she sleep first, but then he stood vigil, alone in his pondering and he did not awaken her. He sat for the entire night, quietly agonizing over his decision to leave Lucelia so far behind.
Once he returned to the States, Frey went back to his job at the San Francisco Fair to save money in earnest for his return to Mexico. He cut his expenses as much as possible, going so far as to live in a warehouse and eat scraps. He worked hard to save for his goal of returning to Mexico and Lucelia, with an apparently arbitrary goal of saving a thousand dollars to that end.
While no one will ever know if he actually reached his monetary goal, once the fair closed for good at the end of September in its second year, Frey did go back to Mexico. From Ensenada, just south of Tijuana he took a boat to Mazatlan on the mainland side of the Gulf of California. This, he wrote his mother, took twelve days.
Frey did not leave very much in writing about his very slow trek back to see Lucelia. His original plan was to visit her, see much of the central part of the country, and possibly return to the United States in mid-February.
Instead, he first visited a number of cities to the east of Mexico City after passing through on the way there. These included Puebla, Vera Cruz and Cordoba. When he returned to the Capitol in November, he finally went to see Lucelia. Most likely, he had been having some doubts about his feelings, but after a time of serious soul searching, it is likely that he finally decided that he very much wanted to keep his promise to return.
When he finally returned to Lucelia, she was not in the colorful native garb of Juchitán, but she was the same alluring dark haired beauty. According to Frey, he "kept falling more in love."
It is unclear how much time passed after his return, but one afternoon when he came to her house to pick her up, she was not alone. A young man was angrily berating her as she stood on the front steps and she was shaking her head as if to say "no."
When Frey walked up to see what was going on, the fellow also began to verbally attack him. He spoke in a very rapid, very angry Spanish, so that he was quite hard to understand. In the midst of this onslaught of words, Herman managed to figure out that this fellow had been going with Lucelia, and that he did not approve of Frey at all. The one girl Herman had so belatedly decided he cared so very much about just stood there. She said nothing at all.
What more was there for him to say? Frey merely turned and walked away, not knowing, not even caring where he was going. He just walked on and on into that long Mexico City night.
After this fiasco, Frey got wildly drunk for a time. The Christmas and New Year’s day period all passed in variations of that condition, as he tried to keep the lovely Lucelia out of his mind.
Even a year later, and despite many adventures in Mexico, Frey still felt a certain emptiness at not having Lucelia with him. The feeling may have been mutual, because she later wrote to him in 1946, not realizing that by that time, he was already married.
Whatever went on in Frey’s mind, it resulted in his determination to not return to the United States — at least for now. He would try his luck in Mexico. It was a decision that would keep him there for the rest of his rather short life, and it would lead him to be the first to find the lost city of Bonampák.