In Search of the Old Ones

David Roberts

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780684832128
• eBook ISBN: 9781439127230
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

An exuberant, hands-on fly-on-the-wall account that combines the thrill of canyoneering and rock climbing with the intellectual sleuthing of archaeology to explore the Anasazi. David Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi—the name means "enemy ancestors" in Navajo—who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism. Roberts's book is full of up-to-date thinking on the culture of the ancient people who lived in the harsh desert country of the Southwest.

1 The Cowboy Who Found
Cliff Palace

I PULLED my rental car into a slot between a Winnebago and a Mountain Aire, parked, and got out. A scent, heavy in the air—pine sap on a May breeze—carried me instantly back into the past. As a boy of twelve, car-camping with my family, I had first come to Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado, in the mid-1950s. For two days, we had toured the ruins: with my younger brothers and sister, I had climbed in and out of subterranean kivas, crawled through small portals into dark rooms, stood on high ledges and leaned over ancient walls masoned at the very edge of the precipice.

My father, an astronomer, had told me the two most important things he knew about the Anasazi, both considered, in the scientific optimism of the fifties, solid fact. They were, moreover, the kind of truths a boy with a restless spirit could never forget. A terrible drought in the late 1200s, my father said, had driven the Cliff Dwellers out of Mesa Verde, never to return. But before that, they had built their houses beneath the arching sandstone overhangs, in “caves” where no rain or snow could fall, chiefly because of the climatic advantage: the shelters were warm in winter, cool in summer.

Later, when my father hired a contractor to build an extension to our house on Bluebell Avenue in Boulder, he himself designed a roof that overhung our new living room at precisely the angle of the sheltering brow of certain Mesa Verde ruins. And it worked: to the marvel of the neighbors, our living room, with its floor-to-ceiling windows facing south, was full of sun in December, cool and shadowy in June.

In my memory, at Mesa Verde in the 1950s, we had been free to prowl and clamber through the ruins almost at will. Much had changed in the decades since. Now, on my ninth or tenth visit to the national park, I joined the crowd at the asphalt-paved overlook and waited for the four o’clock tour of Cliff Palace. It was May 1994. Of the six hundred Anasazi cliff dwellings in the park, only two were at the moment open to the public: Spruce Tree House and Cliff Palace. For the first season ever, Cliff Palace—the largest Anasazi cliff dwelling ever built—could be seen only on a ranger-led hourly tour. You had to get a ticket at the visitor center, four miles away, and the tours were limited to sixty people each.

As we waited, the ranger—identified as James on his name tag—explained the new regimen as a response to burgeoning tourism. “Yeah,” he said, “Cliff Palace’s been taking a beating.” But I knew that visitation at Mesa Verde had held steady, just under seven hundred thousand per annum, for the last several years; 1993 had actually seen fewer tourists than the year before.

On the hour, the forty-five visitors in our group trooped slowly down the paved trail to a point short of the ruin itself, where James parked us in the shade. It was a cool afternoon, and after fifteen minutes many in our group were shivering, but James had his spiel to give. He seemed defensive about the new restrictions. “The Park Service has a twofold mission,” he recited. “One is to serve you, the public. The other is to preserve the ruins.”

James, I thought, was a sympathetic enough fellow: he looked like a Park Service lifer, and he was a Westerner through and through, who pronounced the place “Mesa Vurduh.” I could hardly blame the ranger for his rote, mechanical delivery. How many tours a week was he charged with processing through the ruin?

But I wondered if he cared about the misinformation he was dishing out—or even knew that much of what he said was wrong. Chaco Canyon, James told us, “is in the middle of the Navajo Reservation.” (Chaco lies east of the reservation.) “The Anasazi were the first people in North America to build permanent stone structures.” (Had James heard of Chichén Itzá, Palenque, Bonampak?) “The Anasazi,” claimed James with a hint of fervor, “actually did better than the Egyptians who built the pyramids—and they did it without the horse and the wheel and slave labor.” (Not a single horse or wheel or slave helped build the pyramids.)

No one in our shivering group, myself included, raised a peep. The kids, bored with the lecture, played with stones or their shoelaces. Opposite us, gleaming in the sun, stood Cliff Palace; but it was like a slide projected on a screen.

With half our precious hour gone, James at last herded us over to a restored kiva, where we sat and listened as he resumed his lesson. The ranger was no mere automaton: in some sense, he cared deeply about Mesa Verde and the Anasazi. But when he expressed that enthusiasm, it came out in clichés. “Mesa Verde is like a large puzzle,” he proposed, “like that TV show Unsolved Mysteries.”

All too soon, it was time to file out of Cliff Palace. I loitered at the back of the group, then, when James wasnát looking, poked my head inside the ground-level window of a remarkable four-story square tower, craned my neck, and stared once more at the vivid red paintings on the inner walls at the third-story level. In recent years archaeologist Kim Malville, of the University of Colorado, has shown that these pictographs demonstrate an Anasazi awareness of the arcane astronomical phenomenon called the lunar standstill.

Only two or three years earlier, when you could still wander into Cliff Palace on your own and stay till the 6 P.M. closing, the ranger on duty had encouraged visitors to look at the pictographs inside the square tower. Now, with a group of forty-five, doing so was too much of a bother.

A few members of our group paused at the outskirts to snap a last photo of Cliff Palace shining in the late sun. “Take your picture quickly,” James urged, “’cause we have to get out of here before the next tour comes in.” Indeed, the five o’clock bunch were at the moment settling down for their own lecture in the shade.

At the time of my visit, the Park Service employed about 30 full-time rangers at Mesa Verde. In summer, the peak season, that number swells to 100. The park concessionaire, ARA, has some 150 employees working in May, 250 during the summer.

At Mesa Verde in May, you can stay in the park motel, called Far View Lodge, or camp in the campground; you can eat in four different restaurants, buy supplies in two groceries, browse through four different gift shops; you can gas up at two filling stations, or peruse brochures and watch a slide show at the visitor center. But in May you can walk through only two cliff dwellings, and you can visit the finest of them all only with a ticket, as part of a horde of forty, fifty, or sixty.

It is not, in the last analysis, tourist impact on the ruins that has turned Mesa Verde so restrictive. It is bureaucracy on the rampage. The more “services” a national park offers, the more snags and hassles the overworked rangers confront. And their bosses, rather than pare back a gift shop here, a snack bar there, shut down the ruins instead. Already there is doleful talk that in the next few years the Park Service may close Cliff Palace altogether, confining visitors to the distant overlook.

When I was twelve, Cliff Palace had sung to my spirit. Four decades later, the place was dead for me. During my regimented hour under the tutelage of James, the predominant emotion I had felt was vexation. Only my furtive glimpse of the hidden pictographs inside the square tower had touched me with the breath of wonder.

Yet Cliff Palace—despite the paved trails, the roped-off “no entry” precincts, the crude overreconstruction by archaeologists in the 1920s, and the rangers’ canned talks today—remains a remarkable place. One way or another, I thought, it was worth the effort to see Cliff Palace afresh … to see it as Richard Wetherill had, that December day in 1888.

BENJAMIN WETHERILL, patriarch of a steadily growing clan, had led his family on an erratic pilgrimage through the Midwest, homesteading in Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri before fetching up in 1880 in southwestern Colorado. On the Mancos River, a few miles downstream from the frontier town of the same name, Wetherill built his Alamo Ranch, taking the cognomen from the Spanish word for “cottonwood.”

Years of farming and prospecting had broken the old man’s health. During the 1880s, his five sons took over the running of the ranch. Eldest of the five was Richard, barely twenty-two when the Alamo was being built. Thin, strong, five feet eight, his hair already turning gray, Richard was a man of few words. “He kept his eyes fixed,” writes his biographer, Frank McNitt, “unblinking and often quizzical, upon those he was addressing. Some of his friends have said they had a nervous feeling that he gazed right into their minds.”

His formal education limited to high school, Richard nonetheless was a bookworm with a driving curiosity. In the coming years, he would gain a proficiency in both the Ute and Navajo tongues. And though the ranch demanded most of his time, at heart Richard Wetherill was an explorer.

In the 1880s, the town of Mancos lived in constant fear. The Utes upon whose land the pioneers had infringed were not happy about the trespass; without warning, they would raid and burn isolated homesteads or attack travelers passing through. The women and children of Mancos felt an edgy apprehension even in their own backyards, and the Mancos men rode everywhere armed.

The Wetherills, however, were Quakers. Although all five sons became crack shots, they sometimes left their guns at home when they rode into the backcountry. Perhaps their faith gave them added courage, for almost alone among the Mancos ranchers, they prowled at will downriver, into the canyon-thronged heartland of the Ute Mountain Utes.

The Indians took notice. The daring of the Wetherills gained them a wary respect: within a few years, ill or hungry Utes felt safe showing up at the Alamo Ranch, and in turn they let the Wetherills graze their cattle in canyons that were off-limits to all other Anglos.

Directly west of the Alamo Ranch, plunging the valley year-round into early sunset, loomed the vast, high tableland of Mesa Verde. In the 1880s, the mesa remained terra incognita to white settlers. Yet as they pushed their cattle into the side canyons of the Mancos south of the plateau, the Wetherill brothers began to discover small cliff dwellings ensconced in south-facing sandstone alcoves. They were not the first Anglos to do so: as early as 1874, the great photographer William Henry Jackson, exploring for the Hayden Survey, had found and recorded a nine-room ruin that he called Two Story House in Mancos Canyon.

Digging among the ruins, taking home curios, the Wetherills developed a part-time hobby to leaven the heartless toil of ranch work. Meanwhile, they befriended the Ute chief, Acowitz. One day, twenty miles down the Mancos from the ranch, Acowitz walked up to Richard Wetherill as he stared at the twisting bends of Cliff Canyon, where he had never been.

At that moment, Acowitz chose to tell his cowboy friend something he had told no other white man. Far up Cliff Canyon, near its head, he avowed, stood many houses of the ancient ones. “One of those houses,” said Acowitz, “high, high in the rocks, is bigger than all the others. Utes never go there. It is a sacred place.”

Richard pleaded to be guided to the site, but Acowitz warned him that he too should avoid the ruin. “When you disturb the spirits of the dead,” the chief insisted, “then you die too.” Richard filed away the tantalizing information.

Almost two years passed. On a bitter day in December 1888, with snow on the wind, Richard and his brother-in-law Charlie Mason rode horseback along the rim of Mesa Verde above Cliff Canyon, tracking cattle that had strayed far from their usual pastures. Twenty-five miles from the Alamo Ranch, the cowboys knew they faced a cold bivouac under the pines before they could bring the cattle in.

A looping track drew the two men near the mesa’s edge, where a cliff dropped sheer to the talus below. They dismounted, walked to the rim, and gazed east across the head of Cliff Canyon. Suddenly Richard blurted out a cry of astonishment.

Half a mile away, in the cliff forming the canyon’s opposite wall, loomed an overhang that sheltered a natural cavern fully four hundred feet long by ninety feet deep. Inside it stood the pristine ruins of an ancient city, more than two hundred rooms built back-to-back of stone and mud, dominated by a round three-story tower. So this was the place Acowitz had told Richard about! “It looks just like a palace,” murmured Mason.

Either then or shortly after, Wetherill named the ruin Cliff Palace. The brothers-in-law forgot about their cattle. Roping together dead trees with their lariats, they improvised a ladder to descend the cliff, then scrambled down through the piñon pines to the canyon floor and up the opposite slope to enter the majestic ruin.

It was as if the vanished inhabitants had walked off a few hours before, leaving everything in place. The rooms were strewn with intact ceramic pots sitting in the dust. On one floor the ranchers found a heavy stone axe, still hafted to its wooden handle. A perfunctory dig in the rubble uncovered three skeletons.

Wild with the passion of discovery, the men split up to search for other ruins in the few hours of daylight they had left. Wetherill headed northwest across the mesa top and stumbled upon another great ruin, which he named Spruce Tree House. He rejoined Mason at dusk; the men built a campfire and talked into the night.

In the morning, the pair found yet a third village, whose most startling feature was a soaring four-story tower. Square Tower House was the obvious name.

Today, Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House are the only cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park open year-round. Visitors peer from a lookout point down on Square Tower House, whose fragility has caused it to be closed to the public. Meanwhile, Cliff Palace has become the best known of all Anasazi sites, one of the most famous ruins in the world.

After his discovery had brought Richard Wetherill a modest celebrity, his brother Al—second in the line of five sons—complained that he had glimpsed Cliff Palace a year before Richard had found it, in fading light from half a mile below the site. Magnanimously, both Richard and Charlie Mason granted the younger brother’s claim.

Many years later, Al Wetherill described that fugitive glimpse:

In the dusk and the silence, the great blue vault hung above me like a mirage. The solemn grandeur of the outlines was breathtaking. My mind wanted to go up to it, but my legs refused to cooperate. At the time I was so tired that I thought later would be the time for closer investigation.

The discovery of Cliff Palace was the turning point in Richard Wetherill’s life. A part-time hobby became a passionate obsession as Richard sought to transform himself into a self-taught archaeologist. During the next few years, the Wetherill brothers found ruin after ruin on Mesa Verde—182 sites in all. They dug at will among the dwellings and carted out not only pots and stone axes and jewelry, but skeletons and skulls.

Hoping to arouse public interest and sell the relics they had dug, the brothers organized exhibitions of their booty in Durango, Pueblo, and Denver. The shows were utter failures; their reception, as Al later put it, amounted to “indifference verging on ridicule.” Then Charlie Mason and Clayton Wetherill (fourth of the five brothers) discovered an exquisitely preserved mummified child. Where old pots and burnished arrowheads had failed, the mummy prevailed: in Denver it became a cause célèbre, and the brothers sold their first collection to the State Historical Society.

By his own later admission, when he began digging in the ruins, Richard Wetherill was little more than a pothunter. For that matter, in 1888 true archaeology had scarcely been practiced in the United States, and many a professional in Wetherill’s time excavated as crudely as he did.

Gradually, however, Richard realized that science would better be served if the intact collections could find their way into museums. Instead of well-heeled curio hunters, he began to search for altruistic patrons.

One of the first was a young Swedish baron, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, who was traveling across the West in search of a cure for tuberculosis (from which he would die at the age of twenty-six). University trained in geology, Nordenskiöld had visited digs in Italy and was aware of the best European techniques. Hiring Richard Wetherill to supervise ambitious excavations at Mesa Verde in 1891, he taught the cowboy to use a trowel instead of a shovel and stressed the importance of written and photographic documentation.

Wetherill was an eager student. Soon he had devised his own field-note forms, and the records he kept grew more and more detailed and precise. The judgment of posterity lay always heavy in his thoughts. As he wrote a later patron, “This whole subject … is in its infancy and the work we do must stand the most rigid inspection, and we do not want to do it in such a manner that anyone in the future can pick flaws in it.”

Eventually, vast collections of Anasazi artifacts assembled by Wetherill would anchor the Southwest holdings of half a dozen major institutions, including the Field Museum in Chicago, as well as the American Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. Although Nordenskiöld’s assemblage—the only Wetherill collection to leave the country—finally found its way to the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki, in 1891 the Durango sheriff, prompted by local outrage, arrested the Swedish aristocrat in an attempt to keep the relics in the United States. (He was freed when it was learned that no law forbade the export of ancient artifacts; the Antiquities Act would not be passed until 1906.) Nordenskiöld’s seminal report, The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, published in Stockholm in 1893, was the first scholarly monograph ever written about the Anasazi.

The passion intensified. Led by Richard, all five brothers and Charlie Mason, along w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• 1 THE COWBOY WHO FOUND CLIFF PALACE
• 2 MOQUI CANYON
• 3 FAULT LINES
• 4 THE PLACE OF ONE WHO IS STANDING
• 5 IN PRAISE OF CEDAR MESA
• 6 THE TRAIL TO AWATOVI
• 7 THE OUTDOOR MUSEUM
• 8 BEYOND THE ANASAZI
• 9 THE SUCKED ORANGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• APPENDIX: ANASAZI CHRONOLOGY
• GLOSSARY
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• Photo Credits