“Whereas, a number of prehistoric cliff dwellings and pueblo ruins, situated within the Navajo Indian Reservation, Arizona, and which are new to science and wholly unexplored, and because of their isolation and size are of the very greatest ethnological, scientific…
My great grandparents, John and Louisa Wetherill, left a legacy that includes thousands of historic photographs they collected down through the years and preserved to pass on to future generations. These images, along with textual records, have been invaluable in…
We took mules, all of us, as we expected the very roughest kind of trailless work; and we got it…. Wetherill said, while we were in an oak thicket on a very sharp slope at the foot of a canyon,…
We are particular to preserve the buildings, but fear, unless the Gov’t sees proper to make a national park of the Cañons, including Mesa Verde, that the tourists will destroy them. B. K. Wetherill, 1890 Into the silent stone building…
How would you feel if you learned that a former president was coming to stay at your home? In 1913, fifteen-year-old Sister Wetherill was both excited and worried when she heard that Theodore Roosevelt would be spending some time at…
“The desert will take care of you. At first, it’s all big and beautiful, but you’re afraid of it. Then you begin to see its dangers, and you hate it. Then you learn how to overcome its dangers. And the…
The recent controversies swirling around Bears Ears National Monument are only the latest in a series of struggles resulting from attempts to increase federal government involvement with exceptional places in the Utah/Arizona borderlands region of the Colorado Plateau. Elmo R.…
“We started on the Trail at 1:30 P.M., leaving the hospitable roof of the Wetherills at Kayenta… with the same spirit of buoyant expectancy as in former years.” —Charles L. Bernheimer, June 4, 1924 From the 1890s to the 1930s,…
Zane Grey’s inspiration for much of the geography in his 1915 novel, The Rainbow Trail, was the real trail that he followed on his adventurous 1913 horseback excursion to the magnificent Rainbow Natural Bridge. He recounted the experience in his…
Sometimes the Barbarian seems to be the Civilized Man. Sometimes the Civilized Man seems to be the Barbarian. —Benson J. Lossing, 1870 In late October, 1907, my great grandfather, John Wetherill, was making his way up the San Juan…