CRUSADERS FOR PROTECTION

The tourist boom at Mesa Verde began in earnest after 12 million visitors to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chieago 'ieved an exhibit of seale models of cliff houses. The enterprising Wethcrills transformed their home into a dude ranch, offering room and board for two dollars a day and guided trips to the ruins for five dollars. One visitor recalled that guides would sometimes detonate dynamite charges to rout rattlesnakes before leading people into the ruins. By the mid-1890s Sunday outings devoted to pot hunting had become a popular pastime.

In the absence of protective laws, visitors were free to pillage at will; and many took full advantage of the opportunity, assembling caches of skulls, pottety, and other artifacts

Like the 1904 haul shown in the background photograph. Proposals for protection of the site that had begun as early as 1889 grew more insistent in the late 1890s. In 1906, a campaign of more than a decade led by a pair of extraordi-naty' w'omen (belotv) resulted in the creation of the first national park celebrating the achievements of a prehistoric culture.

When she first visited Mesa Verde as a newspaper correspondent in 1882, Vir-jfinia McClurj) (above) traveled atop a vinegar baml in a freijjlrter’s wagon. A dozen years later, as a teacher and poet, she led the drive to preserve the cliff dwellings. McClurg and her deputy,

Lucy Peabody (above, right) made speeches illustrated with newfangled stereopticon views and organized VIP tours of the sites. They lobbied legislators, negotiated

A lease with the Utes, and won the backing of the 250,000-strong Federation of Women’s Clubs. Both sensed that the U. S. Congress offered their plan a better chance of success than the Colorado legis-latttre. On the brink <ff victory in 1906, however, McClurg suddenly split their group into bitter factions by reverting to the idea of a state park—which she would have controlled—but Peabody and the national park prevailed.