The Anasazi who established their homes in the caves and cliffs of Mesa Verde had been gone for more than 450 years when the first Spanish traders reached this remote and forbidding quarter of the West in the 18th century. But the journals left by one of their number in 1765 and by two Franciscan friars 11 years later say nothing at all about the mesa or the intricate, multitiered cliff dwellings.
Mesa Verde—Spanish for “green table”—had been so named for the dense pinon and juniper forests on its flat summit ev’en before the priests passed byen route to California. In 1829 a Spanish expedition penetrated the Mancos Valley on the edge of the mesa, but it, too, missed the ruins, an understandable failure considering their location in the most distant reaches of the canyons that cut deeply into the mesa’s bulk. The presence of hostile Ute Indians made detailed exploration of the mesa a risky venture, though the Utes themselv'es shunned the cliff houses and their ghosts.
In 1859 Dr. John Newberry, a geologist with the San Juan Exploring Expedition, became the first outsider to climb the mesa’s daunting wall; but Newberry, too, failed to see the cliff houses and was not much impressed with the landscape he beheld. “To us as well as to all the civilized world, it was a terra incognita,” he wrote dismissively. But while a systematic study of the Anasazi by men like those scrambling intrepidly up a chff in the photograph at center was still some years away. Mesa Verde and its wonders would not remain incognita much longer.
Photographer Jackson (left) temporarily yielded the camera to another member of his party for this picture of the New Torker-tumed-Westemer en route to the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings.
World History
