GILA CLIFF DWELLINGS Administrative History

Gila River Forest Reserve

In March 1899, President William McKinley withdrew from settlement the Gila River Forest Reserve, the sixth such reservation of forested public land in the Southwest and the second in New Mexico. [65] On the forks of the Gila, this reservation effectively limited patented land around the cliff dwellings to the TJ Ranch, the Gila Hot Springs Ranch, Lyons Lodge, and the XSX Ranch--Grudgings' cabin was returned to the public domain in 1901 by quit-claim. Two of these four holdings catered specifically to people seeking recreation, people who could be entertained by visits to cliff ruins.

A year after the withdrawal, M. Belden arrived in Silver City charged with management of the forest reserve, a task that included, according to the Silver City Enterprise, preserving the cliff dwellings from vandalism. [66] Protection could only be incidental, however, to the forest supervisor's more central task of controlling fires and surveying and managing the timber. An inventory of the Gila Forest Reserve conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1903 and published in 1905 as Forest Conditions In The Gila River Forest Reserve, New Mexico did not even mention the cliff dwellings, for example. [67] The author did observe, however, the popularity of the Gila Hot Springs resort and "in consequence a small settlement of Mexicans...a short distance above the springs." [68]

Antiquities Act

Protection throughout the Southwest of ruins like Gila Cliff Dwellings was complicated by the fact that no laws specifically prohibited the collection of prehistoric artifacts. On public lands, including the forest reserves, trespass charges were the primary instrument of punishing vandals, [69] but surveillance of the sites was incidental to the regular duties of the employees of the Interior and Agriculture departments.

By the turn of the century, vandalism of Southwestern archeological sites was reaching alarming proportions. As early as the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, professional collectors had been commissioned to provide artifacts for the display. [70] In the following years, people without academic qualifications began excavating, as well, and selling the recovered artifacts. Often, these excavations entailed the destruction of architecture as well as stratigraphy, with walls being pushed down in the search for buried pots, tools--and mummies, which seemed to have especially popular appeal. Particularly rankling to scientists were the activities of Richard Wetherill, who excavated at Mesa Verde, Grand Gulch, and later Chaco Canyon, where he filed a homestead claim on land that included Pueblo Bonito, the largest Pre-Columbian building north of Mexico. [71]

On the upper Gila River and along the Mimbres drainage, despoliation in 1900 was still principally the product of ignorance, consisting of nearly ubiquitous "potting" by the curious, the carting off of stones from the prehistoric architecture for reuse on contemporary structures, and damage by livestock. In 1884, in addition to noting the "rifled" condition of Gila Cliff Dwellings and the purported Apache vandalism, Bandelier noticed black matter that looked suspiciously like manure, an ugly observation that foreshadowed trouble for unfenced sites. The withdrawal 15 years later of the Gila Forest Reserve protected the cliff dwellings from some of the more heinous vandalisms like that of a cliff dwelling on the Blue River, where a settler kept his goats corralled within ruins on his patented land. [72] And, of course, large-scale destruction of architectural sites in southwestern New Mexico did not really begin in greedy earnest until after 1914, when E. D. Osborne of Deming sold his first collection of Mimbres pots to Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes of the National Museum and the cash value of the local prehistory was established. [73]

In 1900, the same year that Belden arrived on the Gila River Forest Reserve, a bill was introduced into Congress that authorized the preservation by law and the regulation of prehistoric sites and natural formations of scientific and scenic interest, setting these places aside as parks or reservations. Although no action was taken on this bill, Congress wrestled for the next five years with the language, intent, and the technicalities of responsibility in similar proposed legislation, finally passing in June 1906 a bill introduced by Rep. John F. Lacey of Iowa, a long-time conservationist and chairman of the House Public Lands Committee. [74]

Under the Act for the Preservation of Antiquities, also known as the Antiquities Act, the president was authorized to set aside by executive order land that contained prehistoric and historic ruins and "other objects of scientific interest." These reservations were called national monuments and were to be managed by the Interior, Agriculture, and War departments, depending on which agency had controlled a particular site before it was withdrawn.

Hewett

Instrumental in drafting the Antiquities Act was Professor Edgar Lee Hewett, formerly president of the Normal University at Las Vegas and one of the founders of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico. [75] He was an early and ardent advocate of archeological preservation, and the investigations that led to the curtailment of Richard Wetherill's excavations in Chaco Canyon in 1901 stemmed from complaints by Hewett and his Archaeological Society. Hewett wrote on New Mexican archeology for the 1901 and 1902 Reports of the Governor of New Mexico to the Secretary of the Interior and published studies on the ruins at Pecos and later the ruins on the Pajarito plateau in the American Anthropologist.

In 1902 Hewett guided Representative Lacey through the ruins on the Pajarito, which strengthened the congressman's resolve to protect Southwestern archeology. When Hewett's university contract was not renewed in 1903, he decided to pursue his archeological interests on a full-time basis and departed for Switzerland, where he studied archeology at the University of Geneva, proposing a dissertation on the archeology of the American Southwest. In 1904, he was back in the United States working as an assistant ethnologist in the Bureau of American Ethnology, when the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution proposed that Hewett coordinate the various efforts of different organizations and institutions to protect Southwestern ruins.

During and even before the long congressional debate that finally resulted in the Antiquities Act of 1906, the Bureau of American Ethnology had been compiling an archeological map of the United States with an accompanying card catalogue of the various sites. In 1905, Hewett published in the annual report of the Smithsonian Institution "A General View of the Archaeology of the Pueblo Region," a summary of the types and locations of prehistoric pueblos and a prescription for their preservation. Included on his shorter list of sites recommended for permanent preservation were Gila Hot Springs Cliff Dwellings, undescribed but accompanied by a photograph. In 1906, to assist the various departments of government that were charged by the Antiquities Act with preserving prehistoric sites, the Bureau of American Ethnology continued to compile its archeological card catalogue and planned the publication of a series of bulletins "devoted to the fuller presentation of all that is known regarding these antiquities." [76] The next year the Smithsonian published Bulletin 32, a survey by Hewett on the antiquities of the Jemez Plateau, and Bulletin 35, a survey by Dr. Walter Hough of the antiquities of the upper Gila and Salt River valleys. [77] Hough's publication was based in part on an expedition that he had organized in 1905 to visit the San Francisco and Blue rivers and, although he did not visit the Gila headwaters, included the early description by Bandelier of Gila Cliff Dwellings and Henshaw's 1874 description of Three-Mile Ruin. No first-hand archeological work had been done on the headwaters of the Gila for a long time, but the name of the cliff dwellings was being repeated in important places at an important time.