Richard Wetherill and the Discovery of Cliff Palace

December eighteenth, eighteen eighty-eight was cold and clear, which is the kind of day that makes the high desert mesa country look like it was painted rather than deposited. Richard Wetherill, a rancher from the Mancos Valley, and his brother-in-law Charlie Mason were working the Chapin Mesa on horseback, looking for cattle that had wandered off in the winter. They came to the canyon edge and looked across.

Wetherill later wrote that what he saw looked like a magnificent city. There were rooms. There were towers. There were openings in the cliff face arranged like windows. The whole complex was tucked into a natural alcove in the canyon wall, sheltered by an overhang hundreds of feet above it, preserved by six hundred years of dry Colorado air.

Cliff Palace had been abandoned around thirteen hundred common era. Nobody had disturbed it. The pottery was still where people had set it down. The timbers were in place. The plaster on the walls retained pigment.

Wetherill was not an archaeologist. He was a rancher with sharp eyes and a practical intelligence, and over the following years he excavated extensively, selling artifacts to museums and private collectors. He made deals with the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History. His methods would be considered looting by modern archaeological standards. They were also, at the time, the only documentation the site was receiving before commercial pot-hunters with less interest in record-keeping arrived.

The Hopi people and other Pueblo nations do not regard the site as abandoned. They regard it as the home of their ancestors, temporarily left, with the belonging carried south. The National Park Service today consults with twenty-six affiliated tribes on Mesa Verde management. Wetherill saw a magnificent city. What he was actually looking at was someone else's grandfather's house.