I am, I confess, among the most boring men in my family. In a family lineage that includes war heroes, riverboat gamblers, inventors, crusaders and even a guy named King Arthur, I instead write science humor on the interwebs.

Not much to brag about.

That’s not to say I don’t do stuff - I have travelled all over Europe, parts of the mid-east, and a decent chunk of Asia. I’ve gone up against the Bulgarian mafia, done falconry in England and faced down Turkish police. There just isn’t a lot to explore these days and real-life adventuring is so obscure as to be a little weird to take on as a career: There are no inner reaches of Africa left unmapped and the Amazon has better cell phone reception than I get in Silicon Valley.

Heck, even being an astronaut means you only get to drive a glorified delivery van to a warehouse orbiting the globe.

But I look like I do stuff and a few months ago I was at a conference and a woman came up to me and started babbling about interviewing me after a near-disaster in the Lincoln Sea part of the Arctic Ocean during the ESA’s CryoSat-2 mission last year. I looked at her quizzically and finally she noticed.

“I have the wrong person, don’t I?” she asked. I nodded my head (1). “Well, they described him and said he looked like a younger Harrison Ford so I assumed it was you.”

She meant the Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, of course, and not that knucklehead Han Solo in “Star Wars” who mumbled something unintelligible about making the Kessel Run in “less than twelve parsecs.” No one in my family would ever make that kind of grade-school physics mistake.


So I may not be an archaeologist but at least I look like people think one should look. It’s no surprise. My grandfather was an explorer/adventurer/fortune hunter of the old school kind, back in the 1920s. When “Raiders of the Lost Ark” first came out there was rampant speculation (among the three members of my family who cared) that my grandfather was the inspiration for the character, since clearly lots of real-life adventurers got movie serials made about them, uncredited or not. They think that because of one particular adventure he had.

Like most stories involving my family, it started with a pie.

It was no ordinary pie. It was booby-trapped - a clever ruse. No member of the Cash family could ever suspect something as delicious and wholesome as pie being part of an evil plan. But evil it was.

My grandfather had been part of an expedition into central France, near Vichy (2). France, you might think? Well, yeah, at least then there were still things to do discover. They find what turned out to be (over the course of many years) around 3,000 artifacts - tablets, glass, vases. The usual stuff.

Most interesting was an ancient box which had a number of ceramic tablets in them, each with 6 or 7 lines. At first they believed the language to be Phoenician, then Celtic and then something much, much older.

We’ll never know. My grandfather met an attractive woman, they had a brief, torrid romance and then both she and the box disappeared. My grandfather, enraged, took up the pursuit. Cash men leave women, not the other way around. He came close to finding her one time but she was always a step ahead of him.

Why would any of that lead my family members to believe he was the inspiration for Indiana Jones? Well, like I said, he was also a strict pie man. The legend since I was a boy, and he told me the story himself in the early 1970s, was that the closest he got to catching her was in a bakery in the Banat region of the Carpathians (3). But it was an odd sort of bakery, making only cheescake.

“CHEESECAKE!” he exclaimed, “Why did it have to be cheesecake?”

It haunted him forever. He continually searched for them, and they tried to stop him. Thus the booby-trapped pie. Now, really, my grandfather told this story to everyone, including a number of students who went on digs with him. It has become archaeology folklore. Transforming it into something much less horrifying, like snakes (4), is either a pleasant homage or a shameless rip off. With George Lucas involved, either is possible.

Do I think that’s evidence enough to make a case for pappy being the real Indiana Jones? Well, no, this isn’t a political article, I require actual facts before I make conclusions. But it’s a pretty good story. However, since I have had a chance to think about this I will address some questions you are also probably asking, namely …

If it wasn’t your grandfather, who was the real Indiana Jones?

Well, no one knows. While Steven Spielberg at least has some creative vision, George Lucas is notorious for lifting pop culture mainstays, modifying them slightly, and stating that they issued forth in whole from his mouth - sort of like Chronos, except in reverse.

Here would be my guesses:

Vendyl “Texas” Jones - in support of his claim, he notes that Randolph Fillmore, a writer on “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, attended one his digs prior to the script. He also is something of a religious archaeologist, artifacts of which were the basis for the only two good movies they did. Spielberg and Jones deny that Fillmore was involved in the first draft and say Endy is no closer to Indy than Indiana is to Texas. Ooooh, in your face, Jones!

The family dog - Lucas says the character was named after the family dog. Yes, every left wing person in Marin county, the place San Francisco thinks is too left wing, loves red states so much they name their pets after them. If there was money at stake from the Luke Skywalker character, you can be sure Lucas would claim he named the character after his ranch. There is some chance that Lucas was so cavalier as to name the character after his dog rather than a dog after the character that made him a gazillionaire, just like there is some chance I am a Chinese jet pilot.

Lucas attempts to protect his version, and his wallet, by having Indy’s father state in “Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade” that his son was named after the family dog. Fanboys will use that as proof.

Roy Chapman Andrews - Famous explorer and dinosaur hunter, he travelled across China and even discovered the first dinosaur eggs. If Lucas shamelessly ripped off movie serials of the 1940s and 1950s, as he claims, those producers shameless ripped off Andrews.

Hiram Bingham III - Army officer and explorer, he is most famous for discovering Machu Picchu, the “lost city.” Later he was a Republican Governor and Senator from Connecticut - when you could be Republican and live in Connecticut. Disqualified because Lucas must have known about the Republican thing and he hates the military.

Percy Harrison Fawcett - British explorer in Brazil, who disappeared mysteriously exploring the Amazon in 1925. Did he die? Presumably, yeah, but some think he discovered the remains of an ancient alien civilization where presumably he would still live today. Nothing is more valued to advanced alien races than the knowledge of an old guy from 1925. That’s a lot more believable than piranhas or pagan savages putting his head on a stick.

So who was it? My bet would be Andrews was the obvious inspiration for the character while Texas Jones got a nod for the name. Being on the dig of a guy named ‘Texas Jones’ and then having a character named Indiana Jones is likely too much coincidence for even George Lucas to deny with a straight face, though he stiffed us all with that Star Wars prequel and wasn’t laughing so I suppose anything is possible.

If you have better ideas, be sure to share them. And be sure to bring pie. No cheesecake allowed unless it’s, you know, for pictures in my articles.

NOTES:

(1) Though I probably blogged about it, I wasn’t there.
(2) Glozel.
(3) That’s Transylvania, and a story for another time.
(4) I am actually okay with cheesecake but we have grown weaker as a culture since his day.