How British explorer colonel Percy Fawcett came to be missing in 1925 along with a son and friend on expedition and never found has never been proven beyond reasonable doubt. However it is believed he was killed by hostile indians. At the time he was searching basically for a lost city of gold in the Mato Grosso and ironically some of the richest gold deposits in the world have been found in the area he was searching in. Now age 58 and not yet successful at finding the city he left word before beginning the expedition that it might be two years before he would return, then proceeding with the expedition with a son and a friend of his son.                                                                                                                                       Colonel Fawcett in 1906 (then a British Major) began working for the government of Bolivia as a border surveyor and for a number of years thereafter as well as being an explorer, naturalist and writer surveyed the Nation's border seperating Bolivia and Brazil,  Bolivia and Peru and Bolivia and Paraguay (and perhaps Bolivia and Chili) untill he joined WW1. He was very familiar with Bolivia and as to the bordering nations perhaps a hundred miles or so beyond the current Bolivia frontier. He was no newcomer to the greater primative central eastern south eastern Bolivia-Brazil border frontier area. The border includes on the east side a short stretch in the Brazil Mato Grosso of the Guapore river and the short stretch on the west directly across river in Bolivia (the Guapore river in Brazil is known sometimes as the Itenez river) defining Brazil and Bolivia on the map, and the Guapore being the principle upriver tributary of the Mamore river shown in the photo given at the twin ports of Guajara-mirim, Brazil and Guayaramerin, Bolivia. Incidentally what you are looking at on the right hand shore (the Bolivia side) in the photo is where Sandra Bullock asks Craig Scheffer "do all the women in New York City fall for that line" and then walks away farther up the bank hands on her buttocks in FIRE ON THE AMAZON. The movie ironically has nothing to do with my page title FIRE ON THE AMAZON.                                                                                                      Crude tapped rubber flowed down the Guapore in boats from the Mato Grosso to these twin ports. From the twin ports point a year round rail road for economy of transportation circumventing a couple of hundred mile stretch of a difficult part of the Mamore river had been built and the rubber was loaded onto rail at the twin ports to be unloaded far dowriver at Puerto Velho, Brazil and once again placed on boat again to continue on the river (name of the river now the Madeira) hundreds of miles to the main trunk of the Amazon river below Manaus, Brazil and continuing by boat out the ramaining 1,000 miles of river to the Atlantic ocean (the Amazon is an enormous place depending on how you draw it out at just below or just above the square mileage of the 48 U.S. states from Mexico border to Canada border, Atlantic ocean to Pacific ocean). For its time, the very early 20th century, the rail road was the most expensive ever built per mile of rail and the death rate, mainly form Malaria, for percentage of workers to total number of workers, was about the same as the Panama Canal in the early unsuccessful building attempts. But whereas the Panama Canal construction failed the construction of this rail road succeeded. One reason for the success may be the only way out once arrived was a climb of 500 miles over the 20,000 foot Andes mountains to the west or a 1,500 mile boat journey down the primative Amazon to the Atlantic ocean on the east..                                                                                                                     Colonel Fawcett had envy for Hiram Bingham who had discovered Machu Picchu near a mountain top in Peru in 1911, which was a summertime city of rest for the Inca well to do. Colonel Fawcett was looking for a gold mining city, or city of rest in the mountains of the Mato Grosso where the well to do would retreat to (my best guess is from the cold of Tiwanaku (Atlantis of Plato) in the high Andes altiplano during the months of June through September). It appears Colonel Fawcett was searching for a "very ancient" city long gone in the Mato Grosso unexplored mountains - as most of the population of Tiwanaku left the city with a great long lasting drought about 1,000 years ago that evaporated its vast agricultural water irrigation and crop anti frost heating and fish growing canal system fed by the Tiwanaku river. At the same time Lake Titicaca which the Tiwanaku river empties into fifteen miles downriver from the villiage of Tiwanaku evaporated over many years many feet below the altitude of its outlet the Desaguardo river and it took many years of rains before it reached its outlet level again. In the meantime small temples of worship were built below the normal outlet water level now devoid of water.                                                                                                   Tiwanaku was very important to Greece as far back as the time of Plato 2,400 years ago, and having moved from even more ancient times from farther south in the Altiplano, perhaps because of rumblings of volcanic activity. There is no volcanic activity in Tiwanaku.                                                                         In1925 the year of his last exploration in which he disappeared Colonel Fawcett began his journey into the Brazil interior beginning Rio de Janeiro to Cuiaba (Cuyaba), Brazil his base operations. Cuiaba in 1925, now a modern city of one half million people, was beginning an expansive growth period continuing into the present 21st century, the capital having been moved to Cuiaba almost one hundred years before (1835) from the old Mato Grasso capital Vila Bela de Santisimma Trinidad (or simply Vila Bela de Santissima) on the Guapore (Itenez) river near the Brazil-Bolivia border. The river Guapore (Itenez) flows into the Mamore then the Madeira its waters eventually reaching the main Amazon trunk, being part of the Amazon basin, but Cuiaba some hundred miles to the east of the southern Bolivia border near Paraguay, is in the Pantanal system and waters from Cuiaba area flow down to the Paraguay river-Pantanal to the Parana river eventually to enter the Atlantic ocean at Buenos Aires-Montevedeo.                                                                                                       But at Cuiaba this all means little - just over a range of mountains not far north of Cuiaba waters flow north easterly towards the equator and the main trunk of the Amazon. However at Cuiaba Colonel Fawcett had reached his limit in terms of distance from the Bolivia border where he was still known and respected by many of the local population from his many years of exploration and surveying. He was much better known in Bolivia. He had been not far north of Cuiaba four years earlier on exploration at "Dead Horse Camp" a name which he gave to the camp as he had to shoot a horse there. The exploration had gone awry and he had been forced to give it up. This time his Camarada (guide) by the name of Bernardino accompanied him on the 1925 expedition from base operation at Cuiaba to Dead Horse Camp located at latitude 13 degrees 43' south, longitude 54 degrees 35' west and then farther north east to the Kuluseu (Kulisevo, Kurisevo) river area in the upper alto Xingu river region at latitude 12 degrees 50' south where he left him, his oldest son Jack and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimmel a newspaper photographer, the guide bringing back with him a letter to mail colonel Fawcett had written to his wife to "have no fear of failure". Leaving the Camarada in the Kulusev river region the Fawcett group began their explorations and at some point camped not far from an indian camp probably for recuperation of the two younger members as the indians noted the colonel was in good shape but the young men were limping. It is not known where the Fawcett expedition had been exploring between the time of their arrival at this indian camp in the upper Xingu river basin and the time Bernardino had departed. The tribe was the Kalapalo, a Carib speaking group of indians who then lived on the Kuluene river, a tributary of the Xingu river, the Kuluene located in the upper Xingu river basin the next river east of the Kuluseu river. They the Kalapalo-Kuikuro, indians who speak the same carib language and whose villiages may be mixed or seperate, say in current years the Fawcett expedition within not many days of resting had moved on, their camp being undisturbed. However even beyond the Kuluseu river as he entered the uncharted interior to find the lost city of Z his fame would have gone with him to some distance and a few would have known him or about him and that he was a famous Bolivia-Brazil border surveyor. And some would have believed he was causing the sudden expansive growth in Cuiaba unwelcomed by many being sorely displeased by civilization coming into the Mato Grasso interior - which they connected with him being a surveyor, blaming him for it, and killed him for this reason. Any people, indians or whites (Vila Bela de Santissima Trinidad on the Mamore - called the Itenez  river in Brazil - where the capital of the Mato Grosso had been nearly 100 years before, is a black African city) could have done it seperately or together. There were a mutiplicity of potential motives which have an imaginary or real base.                                                                                                                             The letter Z which colonel Fawcett called his lost city may be a crude map of his intended path of exploration begining Rio de Janeiro (or possibly Sao Paulo) ending at Cuiaba the base operations and then north east to Dead Horse Camp base camp and beyond and then returning sharply to north of Vila Bela de Santissima Trinidad, Brazil by the Bolivia border in the expedition path plan. The letter X superimposed over the letter Z would pinpoint the final outfitting community and outpost of civilization Posto Simoes Lopes whereafter the expedition now entered unexplored lands. However the exploration party never made it back to Vila Bela de Santissima Trinidad near the Bolivia border if this was the plan, or to Santa Cruz, Bolivia via Riberalta if that was the plan - all communities or areas where he would have been known and highly respected.                                                                              As regards Vila Bela de Santissima Trinidad on the Guapore (Itenez) river near Bolivia it was in the early 1900s simply called Mato Grosso City. One can read then Major Fawcett's 1910 report working for the Government of Bolivia of his Bolivia border survey explorations since appointment 1906, including a description of Matto Grosso City of about 100 black people in the Matto Grosso, the Guapore river and its tributary the Bolivia Green river and his expedition journey up the Green river and dense jungle surrounding it lower onto the 1,500 square mile plateau of the Bolivia "Lost World" which his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later came to call this great raised oval plateau and the jungles surrounding it 360 degrees lower down, one objective to search out along the expedition route rubber trees, a source of revenue. The Colonel Fawcett exploration group were the first to reach the plateau and make detail notes on it for the Government of Bolivia. It was a difficult place being a 1,500 square mile raised flat and level land of thick matted grass that covered and hid sharp stones (they were constantly falling) with deep georges. This raised open land plateau took three weeks to explore and was basically a place of hardship and deprivation with little food provided by nature in contrast to the wealthy 4,000 square miles of jungle that surrounded it. There were native indians on the plateau but they avoided the exploration group. A description of this exploration by Major (Colonel) Fawcett can be found written by him along with other Bolivia border explorations he undertook for the Bolivian government in the still published THE GEOGRAPHICAL JOURNAL - The Journal of the Report of the Royal Geographical Society, May 1910, No. 5, Vol XXXV). This report can be read on line. Go to http://physics.gallaudet.edu/charting/the-park/lost-world/journal-1910.html .                                                                                                   The border surveys of Major Percy Fawcett (Colonel Fawcett following WW1) employed by Bolivia have never been questioned, being that accurate. In addition this is probably the best overall description of Bolivia ever written.                                                                                                                      When you click on this report you will find that the earlier expeditions prior to 1910 differ from the later1925 expediton to the upper Xingu river area in that the Colonel hired no peons to accompany him and his son and friend of his son as he had earlier to accompany himself, Mr. Fisher the assistant engineer and Mr. Urquhart the English settler up the Green river to the plateau of the Lost World. In the early expeditions report Colonel Fawcett writes about the exploration of the great surrounding Bolivia jungle and plateau west of Mato Grosso City (Vila Bela de Santissima Trinidad), Brazil was very rugged and his peons wanted to give up and die in place. There were six of them not the best as peons were hard to find - two indians, an Argentina waiter, a Paraguay silversmith, a Spanish baker and a Spanish Taylor. Beside the peons accompanying him was a man named F. G. Fisher an assistant engineer and an english settler by the name of Urquhart. At one point it was necessary to beat the peons to keep them from seeking their wish successfully. Two years later he learned five of the six peons had died and he judged this was not from the starvation of the journey as all were starved but from the weakness the starvation had caused along with the returning of the peons to the Mato Grosso which was especially given to diseases. He gained this information about their deaths from one of the peons who he met in a Paraguay revolutionaries detention camp two years later. Apparantly he, Fisher and Urquhart remained in good health. Probably all nine in the expedition had equal food rations and that seems conclusively the case, but it could be still interpreted by some that the peons had unequal rations else why did five out of six die within two years and Colonel Fawcett, Urquhart and Fisher remained healthy.                                                                                                                It was not that long after arriving at Dead Horse Camp a dog colonel Fawcett is said to have purchased in the Mato Grosso to take with him on his exploration returned to his former owner very skinny. This may be true and have some bearing. An indian was encountered in 1927 wearing as an ornament the colonels nameplate off a case he was carrying. This may have some bearing also but from former expeditions the Colonel was known to stash such as a case in the wilderness to lighten a load. With a plan to return the same route but returning a different. However in 1933 his compass was discovered with an indian tribe and colonel Fawcett never let his compass out of his sight. One would expect the compass would reappear in the Xingu river system area the Colonel was exploring but it reappeared to the south on a latitude line more near to a latitude line parallel with Dead Horse Camp with indians people closer to Cuiaba and civilization living along that line which is significantly south west of where the Fawcett party disappeared.                                                                                            &n