GILA CLIFF DWELLINGS Administrative History

Park Service: Gordon, Reed, And King

In March 1935, almost two years after the official transfer of Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument from Forest Service to Park Service management, "Boss" Pinkley, superintendent of Southwestern Monuments, was finally able to send someone to look over the new acquisition. G. H. Gordon, an assistant engineer, was guided by Leslie Fleming of the Gila Hot Springs Ranch on an 18-mile horseback ride to the cliff dwellings. There Gordon made a sketch plan of the cave-sheltered ruins. He also gathered a small surface collection of fragmentary artifacts and later reported some evidence of digging. Within the previous month, reportedly, amateur diggers from a nearby CCC camp had visited the ruins, and three or so years earlier "a party visited the dwellings and did more or less digging and...found a bead necklace, after they had pushed over a wall." Despite these ransackings, Gordon suggested that the floor fill might still contain a great deal of prehistoric material, and he felt the architecture was well made and worthy of recognition. Among other recommendations, he suggested the ruins be included in the plan for ruins stabilization. During his stay he visited two extensive "Pueblo III" pithouse sites. Unfortunately, he did not specify their location other than as "in this locality."

Two years later, Erik Reed, an assistant archeologist for the regional office in Santa Fe, accompanied a team of Park Service investigators to inspect the Gila Primitive Area and to assess the entire area's potential—600,000 or so acres—for national park status. With the exception of Gila Cliff Dwellings, Reed reported that none of the other numerous archeological sites was of popular appeal and that they hardly constituted a "primary reason for the establishment of a National Park" although they would be features of interest in a park, especially since the area had never been extensively studied. [34] An allusion to the TJ site and the passing observation that only the cliff dwellings were of any importance underscores how much study remained to be done. At the cliff dwellings themselves, the investigators debunked the rumor of a recent collapse of an archway within the walls, using as a base for comparison photographs of the site that had been published in Hough's 1907 survey.

In 1939, Dale S. King, a Park Service naturalist working out of the Southwestern National Monument office in Casa Grande, Arizona, visited Gila Cliff Dwellings, where he took a dendro-chronological sample from one of the beams. Emil Haury, who was then working at the University of Arizona, dated the sample as A.D. 1286, providing the first scientifically derived date specific to the site. Two years later, archeologists from Gila Pueblo took additional samples, but these were not analyzed until the 1960s. [35]