When the Wetherills arrived in the Mancos Valley in 1879, they brought a humanitarian ethic that clashed with U.S. Indian policy, said relative and historian Harvey Leake.
Leake, whose great-grandfather was John Wetherill, gave a presentation at the Anasazi Heritage Center on his family’s adventures in the Southwest.
There’s more to the Wetherill story, he says, than just bringing the attention of the country to the famous ruins of Mesa Verde.
“Even the old maps showed cave houses in the area, so there was some knowledge about cliff dwellings before the Wetherills even arrived on the scene,” Leake said. “But I wanted to understand why the family’s respect and admiration of Native Americans was different from those around them, so I set out on a treasure hunt of my family’s archives and interviewed elders.”
The family’s Quaker roots defined their respectful attitude towards Native Americans and their ancestral connections to the Southwest, Leake said. The family lived and traded with local tribes, and rejected the U.S. government’s antagonistic view of Natives.
“They had a fascination with Native Americans and archaeology and were compelled to explore and live where they practiced their traditional ways,” Leake said.
He shared the family’s history with local tribes.
In 1907, John Wetherill witnessed a raid on a village on the San Juan River near Shiprock in which the U.S. Calvary arrested 10 Navajos and killed two others.
“My great-grandfather visited villages and tried to calm fears,” Leake said. Leake expressed disdain for William T. Shelton, superintendent of the Shiprock boarding school, who, he said, helped instigate the raid to “steal children and take away traditional culture.”
“The Navajos had no due process whatsoever,” Leake said. “(The attack) was by a group of people who think they have the right to tell another group how to live. Reservations were a segregation tool so land could be made available for mining, farming and settling.”
The Wetherills witnessed government rhetoric that was racist and xenophobic toward native communities, Leake said.
He’s not afraid to skewer a sacred cow in making his point, claiming that the celebrated explorer John Wesley Powell also degraded Native American culture. In 1879, Powell was the director of the Bureau of Ethnology in charge of studying native tribes.
Leake said Powell wrote articles with titles like “From savagery to barbarism and from barbarism to civilization.”
“Powell implied non-European cultures were intellectually and morally inferior, and that creating an artificial environment was progress, not living and adapting with nature as Native Americans did,” Leake said.
The prevailing attitude toward tribes contrasted with the Wetherill’s respect for them, Leake said. The family patriarch, Benjamin Kite (BK) Wetherill, was a Quaker who lobbied for better treatment of natives by the BIA in the 1860s. President Ulysses S. Grant hired BK Wetherill as an Indian agent charged with protecting cattle drivers from the Osage tribe.
“If you look at the letters, he actually protected the Osage from the cattle drivers, and was there when the Osage made peace with 400 Pawnees,” Leake said. “The Quakers sympathized with native tribes and tried to help them out.”
Leake added that his great-grandfather made friends with the Utes, “contrary to other settlers who tried to drive the Utes out.”
His great-grandparents, John and Louisa Wetherill embraced the frontier’s unique cultures, he said, choosing to live in the “dreaded Black Mountains of the San Juan where no white man had ever gone and returned alive.”
“They had a house and trading post in Oljato, Utah, where their nearest white neighbor was 70 miles away,” Leake said. “They were living with native people in wild country the government thought was dangerous.”
John Wetherill was the superintendent of Navajo National Monument from 1910 to 1938, and built a lodge south of Kayenta, Ariz., to entertain guests.
In Leake’s family’s collection is a manuscript by Louisa Wetherill that translates an oral history about adapting to nature by a Navajo man named Wolf Killer.
“It tells me the Wetherills appreciated and honored Native American closeness to nature,” Leake said.
A favorite quote by his great-grandfather is a lesson Leake holds dear.
“The desert will take care of you. At first, it’s big and beautiful, but you’re afraid of it. Then you begin to see its dangers, and you hate it. Then you learn how to overcome the dangers, and the desert is home.”
