Laborers usitt? horse-drawn machinery (below) unearth masonry walls at a mesa-top site called Far View House in 1916. Archaeologists believe that the mesa sites antedated the cliff dwellings, which were inhabited for only about a hundred years. Excavations led by archaeologists Jesse Fewkes (who took this picture) and Jesse Nusbaum after the U. S. Congress declared Mesa Verde a national park discovered artifacts from several layers of settlement, confirming that some mesa-top villages had been occupied repeatedly.
The first task for the new federal managers at Mesa Verde was undoing the damage that two decades of unimpeded vandalism had wrought. Pot hunters had left many cliff houses stripped of their treasures and littered with rubble (as can be seen in the background picture of Mug House).
The Smithsonian archaeologist Jesse Fewkes directed the cleanup at Spruce Tree House and Cliff Palace in 1908-9 and at 14 more sites in the ensuing decade. Many of the ruins’ walls were reinforced or stabilized to prevent further deterioration. Fewkes, who aspired to make “the mystical red man” known to the general public, introduced the first campfire talks given at a national park.
The archaeologist Jesse Nus-baum, who became park superintendent in 1921, continued the stabilization work and pressed successfully for an end to cattle grazing in the park. Nusbaum also welcomed an especially notable visitor in 1921—the photographer William Henr>' Jackson, now 78, who had chmbed the canyon wall nearly a half-century earlier.
Jesse Fewkes (below) had spent 20 years exploring archaeolopfical sites in the Southwest before he came to Mesa Verde in 1908. In this photograph taken a decade later, he stands in front of the converted ranker station that became Mesa Verde’s—attd the Park Service’s— first museum. Tourist amenities at the park were still crude enough in those years that a pamphlet distributed to visitors warned cf sharp turns and frequent washouts on the main access road.
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