Explorers and Missions of Brazil's Wild West: Final Part

Albert Maxwell's recent trip to northern Mato Grosso, Brazil, had given him reason to believe that the jungle was too hostile an environment to support a mission.  The only way in was on horseback and the insect infestations led to disease and infection.  He had witnessed the failure of other ventures when traveling along the Guaporè River.  The stately homes now lay abandoned and overgrown, their owners having simply given up and fled back east. 
Maxwell made one more attempt to penetrate the jungle in 1926.

On this trip he was alone and going into an area considered very dangerous after the disappearance of Colonel Percy Fawcett there the year before. The British explorer had entered the jungle looking for the mythical City of Z, another El Dourado.  He had given instructions for no one to come looking for him, and to this day no one knows how or where he died.  Many think he was killed by one of the tribes in that territory, and Maxwell claims to have seen a trunk with Fawcett's name plate in a tribal hut he visited.  But since Maxwell was able to walk right into that same village without experiencing any aggression, it is equally likely that Fawcett died of natural causes in such a place.
It is certainly true that Maxwell had an extraordinary way of being accepted by each and every tribal group he came into contact with.  There are stories of deaths of priests and government workers at the hands of the Xavante, but Maxwell decided to wander through the jungle alone looking for them.  The Xavante  eventually found him and led him into their camp to meet the rest of the tribe.  They sat together and were able to communicate in the most basic way.

The people who Maxwell felt needed his help the most urgently were the Kaiwa, a tribe sharing land with two other groups in the southern Mato Grosso. Contact with white settlers had left them poor and displaced from their way of life, struggling with disease and starvation.  He went with his wife to live in a town near the reservation.  Over the next ten years he used every ounce of energy to raise money, work the land, and  to build and establish a school, orphanage and hospital for the Kaiwa people.  They still function to this day and serve the needs of many other tribes.  The Kaiwa Mission is the only one of its kind to tend in this way to the needs of the indigenous tribes of Brazil. It is from there that I am writing this account of its founder.