Mesa Verde National Park – With lantern light pouring from doors and windows of Cliff Palace on Wednesday night, it looked as if ancient Pueblo Indians were home for the holidays.
Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House were awash in lights and music for the first time in decades as the park kicked off a year of special events for its centennial in 2006.
Staff and volunteers set more than 4,000 luminarias and lanterns aflicker around ruins, park headquarters and trails.
“We’ve been preparing for this for the last 10 or 11 years. It’s here. Now we need to enjoy it,” said Mesa Verde National Park Superintendent Larry Wiese.
Centennial coordinator Dan Puskar said park officials estimated 2,500 guests Wednesday night. And at Far View Terrace, musicians, artists and storytellers warmed up packed crowds standing shoulder-to-puffy-parka-shoulder.
As temperatures dipped into single digits, visitors waited in long lines for free chile con queso. Park concessionaire Aramark produced a carved replica of Cliff Palace from a slab of bright-orange cheese. But the main attraction was the glowing, full-size Cliff Palace.
“It’s beautiful,” former park guide and researcher Greg Munson said. “I’ve never seen it look like this. I hope we do it again every holiday.”
Duane Smith signed copies of his book “Women to the Rescue,” the first in a series of historical works on the park to be released in conjunction with the centennial.
Smith says it was an association of Colorado women who first envisioned protecting Mesa Verde from looters and vandals by making it a public park.
The women fought among themselves over whether the park should be a locally controlled state park or a federal reserve. Their lobbying over two decades culminated with President Theodore Roosevelt signing the Antiquities Act in 1906, which made it a crime to remove or destroy historical objects from federal land. He also signed legislation designating Mesa Verde a national park.
Although the Indians labored to build Mesa Verde’s spectacular stone homes and civic centers in sandstone alcoves high above canyon floors, they occupied them only a few generations before drifting south into New Mexico and Arizona by the year 1300. The reasons researchers usually give for the migration include drought, social unrest, warfare, exhausted fields, deforestation or some combination of those problems. Modern Pueblo Indians say their ancestors simply were making a journey intended by their creator.
Their exodus left the 8,500- foot-high mesa in peace and solitude for 500 years. The Ute Indians generally avoided the abandoned dwellings and burial sites even while claiming the surrounding lands as their own, Smith said.
But Mesa Verde’s anonymity was lost forever shortly after December 1888 when the dwellings captured the attention of enterprising cattle ranchers. The Wetherills, who had befriended Ute Indians, grazed their cattle around Mesa Verde without trouble.
After members of the family caught sight of Cliff Palace, they were determined to uncover what had been hidden for centuries.
Unable to interest the Smithsonian Institution in their finds, the Wetherills became tour guides and helped collectors gather artifacts.
Local settlers looted at Mesa Verde at will, using dynamite at the ruins to scare rattlesnakes, Smith said.
By the time the Wetherills helped a young Swede named Gustaf Nordenskiold in 1891 to amass a large collection of Mesa Verde artifacts for a European museum, residents of Durango were beginning to think foreigners shouldn’t be removing local artifacts. Nordenskiold was arrested.
“It was an international incident,” says Nordenskiold biographer Judith Reynolds of Durango. “He was arrested for ‘devastating the ruins.’ But there were no laws on the books at the time supporting that charge.”
The National Park Service plans a year of special events and exhibits to mark 100 years of federal stewardship of Mesa Verde. For more information, look online at mesaverde2006.org.
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or edraper@denverpost.com.
