The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [412]
When Roosevelt created Mesa Verde National Park, it contained 52,073 acres, all rising high above the surrounding mesa. There were more than 4,000 deserted dwellings for archaeologists like Hewett and novices like the Wetherills to analyze now in an appropriate way. Two women—Virginia Donaghe McClurg and Lucy Peabody—had led the successful crusade to preserve these ruins. McClurg was a New Yorker who had moved to Colorado in 1879 to teach. Intrigued by the mysteries of Mesa Verde, she wrote a series of preservationist stories for the Review of Reviews, Cosmopolitan, and Century Magazine. Her partner in championing Mesa Verde—Lucy Peabody—came from Cincinnati. For a while Peabody worked as a secretarial assistant at the Bureau of American Ethnology, where she advocated saving the ruins in the Four Corners area. When she married a major in the U.S. Army, she moved to Denver, where her interest in Mesa Verde’s cliff dwellings grew.
Both McClurg and Peabody were devoted Roosevelt Republicans in 1906—i.e., progressives. They saw in Roosevelt the best chance for preserving Mesa Verde from speculators. Influenced by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Chautauqua movement, and Susan B. Anthony, they became a bulwark against silver mining around Durango, Colorado. At that time, Europeans were offering money for ancient relics found around the Mesa Verde excavation site. A recession had developed, and pot hunting became profitable for poor Coloradan farmers and for transients. In 1891 twenty-three year old Nils Otto Gustaf Nordenskiöld, of the Academy of Sciences, collected more than 600 items for Sweden from Mesa Verde. (Today they’re in a museum in Helsinki and should be returned to the United States at once.) In 1893 Nordenskiöld—whose uncle was a famous Arctic explorer—published a heavily illustrated book, The Cliff Dwellings of Mesa Verde. Archaeologists from all over the world now wanted to visit Colorado. “Nordenskiöld’s expedition and the loss of a large and valuable collection aroused both admiration and deep resentment among American archeologists,” historian Char Miller writes, “and provided strong arguments in Congress for protective legislation.”47 Roosevelt felt that Nordenskiöld had looted American property. Wasn’t there any law to stop foreign raiders from stealing U.S. antiquities?
When Roosevelt became president in 1901, the answer to his question was still no. Yet, with Lacey working on the legislative angles (and the activists in Santa Fe who gravitated around Edgar Lee Hewett receiving attention from the press), a federal strategy was incrementally being put in place for the Pajarito Plateau and Mesa Verde. Using the power of the pen, McClurg and Peabody initiated a grassroots progressive movement in Colorado to protect Mesa Verde. Women in Colorado had won the vote in 1893 (they were among the first in America to do so), and these suffragists now made Mesa Verde their cause. They tried to persuade the Ute to cede Mesa Verde to the federal government. They formed a women’s association to police the cliff dwellings and protect the site from vandals. With the help of John Wetherill, “No Trespassing” signs were posted—so many, in fact, that they looked frightening. The women also enlisted Hewett to argue the archaeological case in Congress. “These are unquestionably the greatest prehistoric monuments within the limits of the United States,” Hewett said. “Aside from their great historic and scientific value they would be of more general interest to the public.” A visibly upset Hewett claimed that “irresponsible damage” was being done at Mesa Verde and that the “deterioration progresses very rapidly.”48
From 1901 to 1903, during the Fifty-Seventh Congress, two bills had been introduced in the House of Representatives to establish a national park at Mesa Verde—both died. Congress did authorize the Department of the Interior to negotiate with the Ute in the hope that they would relinquish the ancient cliff dwellings.