It is a fascinating story of a vanished people. For endless centuries they dominated the Mesa Verde, passing through higher and higher stages of culture. When an unendurable calamity forced them to leave they left behind abundant evidence of their skill and industry. With the care they now receive Cliff Palace, Spruce Tree House, Sun Temple and the innumerable other ruins will stand forever as monuments to the skill of their ancient builders.
Mesa Verde National Park was created to preserve the works of those prehistoric people. Slow, silent centuries have spread a cloak of mystery over it and visitors should come with open minds, prepared to hear an absorbing story of a strange people. Complete enjoyment and understanding come only to the visitor who is able to leave his modern self behind, momentarily, and live and think in terms of the past.
2
DISCOVERY
After the cliff dwellings were deserted by the Pueblo Indians late in the thirteenth century they stood, unmolested by man, for many hundreds of years. The owls and pack rats took them over and enjoyed their security, but from all evidence it was many centuries before men again entered the caves.
The Indians themselves may have intended to return when conditions became normal again but they never came back. There is no evidence that farming Indians ever lived in the Mesa Verde after its desertion by the ancient people. Other Indians came but they were hunters and they seem to have shunned the silent cave cities.
A couple of centuries after Mesa Verde was deserted an important event took place, an event that was to have a strange effect on it at a later date.
America was rediscovered!
Fifteen thousand years after the Indians discovered the continent from the west, white men entered it from the east. A new people blundered into the western hemisphere that had so long belonged to the Indians.
The newcomers were a greedy lot and they began to stretch acquisitive fingers in all directions. Mexico was colonized and tales of wealth among the Indians to the north led the Spaniards into the Southwest. In 1540, Coronado was only 150 miles from the Mesa Verde but he turned away. Other Spaniards came nearer and nearer until at last, in the year 1776, they were at the base of the great green mesa.
On August 10, 1776, only thirty-seven days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Escalante, a Spanish priest, camped in the very shadow of the Mesa Verde. It seems almost incredible that at a time when the colonists along the Atlantic seaboard knew nothing of the vast wilderness beyond the first range of mountains, Escalante and his men were here in the land of the cliff dwellings. Seeking a short route to Monterey, on the Pacific Coast, they had journeyed northwest from Santa Fe. At last, on August 10, 1776, they camped by a small stream at the base of the La Plata Mountains.