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A Woman's Work -- Mesa Verde

   Thousands of feet above the Mancos and Montezuma Valleys of southern Colorado, piñon pine and juniper trees cast a blanket of evergreen upon a sandstone plateau. Eighteenth-century Spanish explorers named this dramatic landscape the Mesa Verde or “Green Table.” But centuries before, around A.D. 600, an early Pueblo culture had made its home on this land and in the sandstone cliffs below. There they developed a style of architecture that melded their practical and spiritual needs with the natural design of the earth. These people perfected the craft of pottery and managed to live for more than 700 years off a land whose skies were not often generous with rain. But in the late 1800s, mere decades after stumbling upon the remains of this civilization, European settlers threatened to destroy all the Puebloans had left behind.

This was the reality that greeted a bold young newspaper reporter from the East when she first visited the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in 1882. Virginia McClurg was working as the Colorado Springs correspondent for the New York Daily Graphic when she took an assignment to write about the “buried cities.”

Word of the cliff dwellings had spread eastward throughout the 1870s. The first photographs were circulated in 1874 and clay models were displayed two years later at the National Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia. The buzz had drawn McClurg to this long-quiet spot in a remote land, and what she found there changed the course of her life, and the future of the prehistoric ruins.

McClurg arrived in Mancos by way of a freighter’s wagon, the heavy ankle-length dress required of women in those days probably billowing over the vinegar barrel where she was perched. From there, she rode a dusty horse trail to the seat of a civilization that spanned seven centuries and left no apparent clue as to why it had vanished.

The few clues that remained were diminishing daily: Pot hunting had become the local pastime. Locals organized Sunday picnics around digging for souvenirs. Some tossed dynamite into the dwellings before they entered, perhaps as a measure against rattlesnakes or to provide better light and access for pot hunting. Visitors took what they could find and left a bit of themselves behind in the form of discarded garbage or gear, or names carved into the stone walls of the dwellings.

Economics drove excavations of the ruins. A collection of relics—from pots to tools to the very bones of the Ancestral Puebloan people—could sell for $3,000, more than ranching or farming could provide in a decade, according to Duane Smith, author of Women to the Rescue, a history of the founding of Mesa Verde National Park. Consequently, information about the earliest inhabitants of Mesa Verde was disappearing a little more each day—destroyed, unearthed, or packed off to places like Chicago, Denver, and as far as Europe. McClurg’s first visit was short, but four years later she returned for an expedition that cemented her devotion to the preservation of Mesa Verde. A handful of insightful individuals before her had sounded a call to protect the site, but until McClurg signed on, none had the devotion, moxie, and endurance required to erode the indifference of the federal government, thousands of miles away. To change that, McClurg began lecturing widely and passionately about the importance of the archaeological record left at Mesa Verde. She motivated her listeners to sign a petition demanding protection of the ruins, and she lobbied Colorado Senator Edward Wolcott to present it to Congress. Wolcott obliged; Congress did not. McClurg, however, was not one to be dissuaded. “She was like a bull dog,” says Tracey Chavis, executive director of the Mesa Verde Museum Association. And it was her tenacity and audacity that made things happen for Mesa Verde, Chavis says.

Preserved in Antiquity This June will mark 100 years since President Theodore Roosevelt signed one of the most important pieces of conservation legislation in United States history. The Antiquities Act of 1906 culminated a decades-long drive by visionary Americans who, like Virginia McClurg, devoted their lives to protecting the nation’s cultural resources. Newly “discovered” relics of prehistoric civilizations throughout the Southwest, including Colorado’s Mesa Verde and Arizona’s Casa Grande, had sparked the discussion. Degradation of those sites and the lengthy and cumbersome process required of Congress to afford them protection had highlighted the need for a more immediate solution. The Antiquities Act of 1906 made it possible for the president to use his discretion to quickly set aside “objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated on lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States” as national monuments. The Antiquities Act was used, largely before the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916, to set aside incredible scientific resources such as Zion, Chaco Canyon, and Petrified Forest (which later became national parks, following the approval of Congress). Some structures, such as Montezuma Castle and the Statue of Liberty, have remained national monuments. More recently, some critics have viewed the Antiquities Act as a controversial way for the president to set aside land for preservation without the approval of Congress. But without the Antiquities Act many places that have now come to define America, like the Grand Canyon, Fort Sumter, and Dinosaur National Monument may not have been preserved for future generations.