Before Mesa Verde National Park became a preserve of the nation’s amazing archaeology and human history in 1906, it was a target of looters and full of picnic trash.
It took a group of strong women to clean it up, and the “Mother of Mesa Verde,” Lucy Peabody, was leading the effort.
Dressed in a canvas split dress of the period, Peabody (aka tour guide Beth Wheeler) explained to a group of tourists how Cliff Palace would have appeared 110 years ago.
“We went to a lecture by Virginia McClurg in Denver and heard stories of outfitters with shovels and dynamite busting through walls so they could get to the artifacts and sell them,” Peabody says. “We got upset, because we knew the archaeology there belonged to all of us.”
Depression economics at the end of the 19th Century drove local farmers to loot ancient sites for revenue, she says. In 1900, a whole pot excavated from Mesa Verde would fetch $3,000.
Local banks funded the “Sunday Diggers” Peabody continues. Locals would be hired to dig all day in the sites here. A picnic would be served, and the trash would be deposited in the ruins where it piled up.
“At the end of the day, the banks would sell the relics, and the diggers would get a portion of the sales,” Peabody says.
Another archaeologist from Sweden simply packed up six crates of artifacts and boarded the train in Durango. There were no laws against looting then, so authorities had to let him go.
Determined to clean up and save Mesa Verde’s precious history, Peabody joined the Colorado Cliff Dwellers Club, a woman’s lobby group formed to convince Congress to make it a National Park.
“We were passionate about saving the ruins, but we knew we had to act fast,” she said.
After a couple of false starts President Theodore Roosevelt designated Mesa Verde National Park in 1906 “to preserve the works of man” and he also signed into law the American Antiquities Act prohibiting removal of historical artifacts from public lands.
A Mancos Times Tribune headline read: Mesa Verde brought under control of federal government to preserve cliff dwellings.” In 1906, there were 73 visitors to the new national park. Colorado was pressured to build a road into the park to allow stage-coaches to arrive with visitors.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were no roads into the park, and visitors arrived by train from Durango, then rode horseback into the canyons to explore the cliff houses.
“For years it was unlimited camping all around here. Campfires were made from 700 year old timbers ripped from the ruins,” Peabody recalls.
Nowadays, visitors are admonished if they sit on a ruin wall, as a young girl learns on the tour, and she jumps up from her seat.
A soft summer rain falls, and visitors of the Cliff Palace Twilight Tour are given a half hour to enjoy the sunset and contemplate life in the canyons from a bygone era.
“We are so glad that these women had the foresight to help create this national park,” Peabody says.
Sign up for Lucy Peabody’s tour and others featuring local characters of the past at the Visitor and Research Center located at the entrance to the park.
jmimiaga@cortezjournal.com