Two-Story Cliff House
This picture duplicates the first photograph ever taken of a Mesa Verde cliff dwelling. Discovered in 1874, the ruin is the first known to have been entered, photographed and named.
A year later, in 1875, another government survey party passed through the Mancos Canyon. Only a mile from Two-Story Cliff House the leader of the party, Mr. W. H. Holmes, discovered a much larger and more imposing cliff dwelling that Jackson had missed. To this ruin, shown in the picture below, he gave the name Sixteen Window House.
Sixteen Window House
This cliff dwelling, discovered in 1875, was the second to be named. The name was given because of the holes in the lower wall.
THE DISCOVERY OF CLIFF PALACE
Although the small cliff dwellings of the Mancos Canyon were discovered in 1874, fourteen years passed before the largest of the cliff dwellings was found. Very little is known about that intervening period of fourteen years. There is considerable evidence that a number of prospectors and cattlemen were in the canyons of the Mesa Verde. Without doubt ruins were seen but the evidence is fragmentary and indefinite. We must move up to the year 1888, for the discovery of the greatest of the ruins.
At this point one name becomes especially prominent in this story of discovery, the name Wetherill. It is encountered in almost every tale of early exploration and it is found in a great many of the ruins, carved or written on cave walls. In 1881, Mr. B. K. Wetherill moved into the Mancos Valley and settled on a ranch a few miles north of the Mesa Verde. In the Wetherill family were five sons, Richard, John, Alfred, Clayton and Win. Addition of a brother-in-law, Charles Mason, rounds out the group of men who did the most work in discovering and exploring the ruins of the Mesa Verde.