GILA CLIFF DWELLINGS Administrative History

Transition And Development

In April 1963, James Sleznick arrived at Gila Cliff Dwelling National Monument as its first full-time employee. [56] Previously a ranger at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, he came to the cliff dwellings as supervisory park ranger, a unique classification within the Park Service. [57] "Doc" Campbell continued as nominal custodian until the following January, when he retired.

For the first few months—until a bulldozer opened a track wide enough to haul an office trailer to the mouth of Cliff Dweller Canyon—Sleznick operated out of the Gila Hot Springs Ranch, where parking space had also been rented for two other trailers, one of which served as his residence. Typically, the accommodations were spartan, but in this case there were idiosyncracies, as well. After Campbell's generator broke in the summer of 1964, for example, there was no electricity in the government housing for 18 months. Years later, Sleznick recalled that he and his wife used candles at night, preferring dim light to the hissing of a Coleman lantern. [58] Refrigeration was provided by a Servel unit that was powered by propane; unfortunately, it had an electric thermostat. The only way to operate the refrigerator without freezing everything was to fire up the unit at dark and then shut it off at bedtime. Forgetfulness meant a hard breakfast. To the surprise of visitors, the toilet was plumbed to distinctly hot water from the ranch's namesake springs, and in the winter cold water had to flow all the time to keep pipes from freezing. When "Doc" finally installed another generator, a light also had to be left on to provide the "load" required for efficient operation.

In 1963, James Sleznick arrived a Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument as the first full-time staff. Initially designated a supervisory ranger because the monument was too small to merit a superintendent, Sleznick was promoted to superintendent in 1966 as visitation to the remote monument increased. One of Sleznick's early capital improvements was a more substantial contact station, which he heated with a Coleman lantern during the winter and shaded in the summer with juniper boughs spread over a ramada.

After the office trailer was moved, Sleznick forded the river four times every day to get there and home again. In the winter, he had to spray his frozen wheels each morning with hot water from the garden hose, and before he could drive home he had to crawl under the pickup and heat the wheels again with a propane torch. The first winter, he also kept a lighted Coleman lantern under his desk for warmth.

By late April 1963, the approach road had nearly been completed as far as the confluence of the East and Middle forks. The imminence of that event, in fact, coupled with anticipations of a huge turn out for the annual jeep caravan, had dictated the timing of Sleznick's transfer to the monument. [59] When he arrived, however, the first bridge had not yet been built, and Sleznick had been forced to park his car at the confluence and accept a ride for the last five miles, crossing the river 14 times. Still, 433 other people also reached the cliff dwellings within the month. [60] Beyond the rough passage, these visitors had to contend with two closed gates through the Heart Bar Ranch and only a hand-lettered sign to confirm their route. [61] Some people wandered a long time along the dirt road that was State Highway 527 looking for the monument.

In August, after the bridge at the confluence had been opened, the approach road completed as far as Little Creek, and the easement through the Heart Bar more clearly signed, 2165 people toured the prehistoric site. [62] As the road continued to improve, more and more visitors arrived. In 1966, the target year for the MISSION 66 program, 24,000 people toured the cliff dwellings, nearly twice the number the Park Service had forecast six years earlier.

In addition to monitoring the ruins and interpreting them to a rapidly growing number of visitors, Sleznick participated in drafting the master plan and later troubleshooting on the construction grounds. Each summer, a seasonal employee was hired to help with interpretation, and in late 1965, after the annual number of visitors had approached 15,000, William Gibson was transferred from Morristown National Historical Park to provide additional interpretive support. [63] Shortly afterwards, Sleznick was promoted to superintendent. [64]

Naturally, there were plenty of problems for Sleznick to troubleshoot in developing an area that was for all practical purposes entering the twentieth century nearly 60 years later than the rest of the country. When construction began on the visitor center in 1964, for example, contractors had to haul their materials 40 miles through the mountains, and road improvements did not extend beyond Little Creek—four miles and one river crossing short of the administrative site. In fact, this last stretch of road was not completed until early 1967 so even the installation of utilities and the construction of employee housing, as well as the barn, were also difficult. Occasionally, floods required work to stop altogether. And there were the usual kinds of construction problems: poor concrete required foundations to be removed and redone by a different contractor, blasting to enlarge the parking lot at Cliff Dweller Canyon threw boulders through the outhouses, gas lines were broken by a bulldozer.

Compounding the physical isolation of geography was an unreliable telephone system that made the coordination of development projects particularly difficult. For any important calls, Sleznick had to drive 50 miles. Other calls were made on a no. 9 magneto-wire that stretched from the Heart Bar headquarters through "Doc" Campbell's ranch to the Mimbres Valley, where it tied into a commercial system. Shortly after Sleznick arrived at the monument, however, the local telephone company upgraded its equipment and the new system would no longer accept the magneto-wire transmissions. "So we needed 40 miles of new telephone wire," Sleznick recalled years later.

Since members of the Upper Gila-Sapillo Telephone Company, which included the Park Service and the Forest Service, did not have enough money to buy the wire, Sleznick found some free surplus wire at Fort Bliss. With local help, he began unrolling the wire between the Mimbres District Ranger Station and the monument.

[W]e would take a reel of wire and put it in a jeep and drive off to a point where we had ended with the last roll. Then we would tie the cable to a horse with a rider, and the horseback rider would pull the cable until the quarter-mile was used up. When we saw the cable had come to the end of the reel we had a pistol—we didn't have radios—and we fired a shot. The cowboy would hear the pistol report and stop the horse, drop the cable, and we would find him with the next roll....

[The cable] was laying on the ground. We never did get it in the trees. What happened was we laid it all out, got it all soldered, hooked up—and it didn't work. [65]

When the Forest Service required him to remove the useless wire, Sleznick ran an advertisement in the Silver City Daily Press that 40 miles of wire was lying on the ground between the Mimbres and Gila Cliff Dwellings and that the wire would be free to anyone who went out and got it. Slowly, the wire disappeared. Another line was run, but the phones still did not work reliably when Sleznick transferred in 1967 to the Virgin Islands. Although the telephone system resisted his resourcefulness and resolve, those traits did contribute directly to the successful development of the monument under very difficult circumstances. By the time Sleznick left, construction had essentially been completed, the trailers moved from Campbell's ranch, and the residences opened to the superintendent, his ranger, and their families.

Replacing Sleznick was William Lukens, who arrived at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in September 1967. [66] Although he had to contend with some additional problems of construction—underground electric cables were shorting out, for example—Lukens spent most of his time improving the interpretive program at the monument. He coordinated the ongoing development of exhibits for permanent display in the visitor center, supervised their installation in 1968, and organized the ceremonial dedication of the building a year later. Lukens also participated in planning a major stabilization of the cliff ruins, which occurred in 1968 and included the construction of the current one-way loop trail from the contact station through the ruins and back.

A new factor in managing the monument was the occupation by staff from the Gila National Forest of their assigned offices in the visitor center. They had arrived shortly after commercial power and telephone systems did, in early 1968. [67] Although the Park Service and the Forest Service had previously cooperated amiably and very effectively during the earlier planning and construction phase of the monument improvements, Sleznick and his staff had nevertheless enjoyed a relative independence, which their physical isolation had entailed. Lukens, in addition to his professional responsibilities, now had to meet the daily challenge stemming from the occupation of one small site by staff of two large and historically rivalrous agencies.

Despite close quarters, overlapping duties, and the novelty of interdependence, cooperation between the two agencies was exemplary. Visitors to the monument, which was managed by the Park Service, often stayed overnight at the Scorpion Corral Campground, which was managed by the Forest Service, and both agencies alternated in hosting campfire presentations. When Don Morris, an archeologist with the Park Service, came to survey prehistoric sites around the visitor center, he was helped by Joe Janes, the naturalist for the Gila National Forest. At the request of the Forest Service, Morris also made recommendations regarding the preservation of Grudgings Cabin, a historic site near the monument. Not long afterwards an exhibit specialist from the Park Service's Harpers Ferry Center wrote a thoughtful assessment of a nature trail that the Forest Service had developed between the pictographs at Scorpion Corral and a two-room ruin farther up a side canyon. In 1968, Joe Janes interpreted the cliff ruins while Lukens and his ranger were called to fight a wildfire. In short, interagency cooperation at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument ranged from implementing coordinated strategies for more effective resource management to coping with unplanned contingencies.

Once a year, the regional directors of the Park Service and the Forest Service met to coordinate their budgets for operating and cyclic maintenance expenses. Lukens made his budget and management recommendations to his superiors in Santa Fe, but he commonly sought advice and the resolution of quotidian problems from the forest supervisor in Silver City. "Dick Johnson was almost the same as my supervisor," recalled Lukens in 1991. "If I had a problem, it was easier to work with Dick than the region because of "Doc" [Campbell's] radio-phone." [68] The radio-phone made calls to Silver City easier than calls to the regional office in Santa Fe, which entailed a long drive to a phone with an adequate long-distance connection.

There were, of course, a few cracks in this solidarity. A 1972 inspection report prepared by the forest supervisor acknowledged some frustrations in the "growing up stages" of the joint occupation. [69] The report noted that the cramped living conditions were conducive to a kind of edginess commonly associated with cabin fever. It also included a laconic observation about the complicating effect of the Park Service possessing a superior position in an office building that was on Forest Service land. Earlier, a management appraisal by the Park Service had noted that the 1964 Memorandum of Agreement did not clearly define jurisdiction and lines of authority. [70] Although both agencies recognized the potential for greater conflict, frictions were minimal.

In 1971, when his children were ready for school, Lukens transferred to the less remote Chiricahua National Monument in southern Arizona. Replacing him on the upper Gila was Elroy Bohlins, who continued the cooperative nature of the monument's management program. [71]