We spent the entire morning on Wednesday looking for a dentist in Cortez who was not on vacation during Labor Day week. The staff at the campground was very friendly and gave some recommendations, but they did not work out. Janet had been bothered for a while by a bad tooth, and we both felt it was time to deal with it.
We finally found a friendly dentist on Main Street willing to see Janet on Thursday. So we went over to "Cortez Smiles" to get the necessary paperwork taken care of. It was right next to the True Value Hardware store and the Navajo antique dealer.
Rather than waste the rest of the day, we drove out to Mancos, about seven miles the other side of Mesa Verde from Cortez. Our destination: the Alamo. No, not John Wayne's Alamo; rather, the nineteenth-century ranch that once belonged to B.K. Wetherill and his sons, Richard, Al, Clayton, Winslow, and John.
We have been reading about the history of archaeological explorations on Mesa Verde. One of the staff at the Visitor's Center was from Mancos and could tell Janet exactly where the old Wetherill ranch, Alamo Ranch, was located.
To us, this was special. We crossed the Mancos "River,"
turned a corner, and there it was.
Even some of the Wetherill buildings were still there.
You have to understand that the Wetherills and Mancos were at the heart of the Mesa Verde story.
The boys were giving tours through ruins in Mesa Verde as early as 1884, before the Cliff Palace discovery. They usually followed the Mancos River through the southern portion of Mesa Verde; but in December 1888, Richard made his famous detour up Soda Canyon with Charlie Mason.
The town of Mancos became the headquarters for Mesa Verde National Park until the 1920s and the jumping off point for tourists. Whoops. It lies in a beautiful valley between Mesa Verde and the La Plata Mountains.
I am happy to report that Richard Wetherill's reputation is now being restored both by professional scholars and by the Park Service. For a long time he was accused of exploiting his knowledge of Mesa Verde for profit--a "pot-hunter."
In fact, the Wetherills were a Quaker family, who had great respect for the humanity of American Indians. B.K. Wetherill, the father, worked with the Osage Indians in Oklahoma before moving to Mancos, where he established friendly relations with the local Ute Indians. Richard, especially, had a passionate desire to know more about the "hidden" past of the Pueblo Indians. He brought in a professional (Swedish) archaeologist, Gustav Nordenskiold, to help him "scientifcally" excavate the sites on Mesa Verde. He worked with museums to preserve the artifacts he uncovered and he kept careful notes about the location and context of artifacts he found--something that even early archaeologists often failed to do. Too bad most of the museums (I will not name names) have misplaced the notes he sent along with the items, or, in some cases, sold the collections to private businessmen!
I would argue that Richard Wetherill made more important contributions to American archaeology than the discovery of Cliff Palace (if, in fact, he was really the first to see it--unlikely).
In 1893, in Cottonwood Wash near Blanding, Utah, he had the good sense to keep digging after he had found Pueblo cultural artifacts. Three feet later, he found the remains of an early culture and corpses with different shaped skulls. He called these the "Basket people." Richard had discovered the Basketmaker culture and claimed that it represented a separate culture from the Puebloans. It took almost twenty years until archaeologists and anthropologists accepted Wetherill's discovery as genuine--posthumously.
Richard Wetherill also recognized the importance of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico before archaeologists had ever heard of it. He worked with the Navajo there in the last years of his life, trying to puzzle out what is, perhaps, the most important ancestral Puebloan site of all. That is, until federal agencies decided to take control of Chaco Canyon and banned Richard Wetherill. Jealousies and rivalries are the story of ancestral Puebloan archaeology in its first decades.
Richard Wetherill died of a gunshot wound mistakenly fired by a Navajo hired hand in 1910. In 1927, Alfred Kidder and the Pecos Conference of archaeologists officially defined the difference between Basketmakers and ancestral Puebloans in the SW.
I end our Mesa Verde saga here.
On Thursday, Janet had her tooth looked at, and, we hoped, fixed until we get back home.
We rested and got caught up on some of our blogs.
Than we bade adieu to the Mancos Valley, Sleeping Ute Mountain,
and the highway up Mesa Verde.
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