Cowboys & cave dwellers

The tortuous canyon country of southeastern Utah conceals thousands of archaeological sites, ancient homes of the ancestors of today's Southwest Indian peoples. Late in the nineteenth century, adventurous cowboy-archaeologists made the first forays into the canyons in search of the material remains of these prehistoric cultures.

Rancher Richard Wetherill (best known as the "discoverer" of Mesa Verde's Cliff Palace) and his brothers; entrepreneurs Charles McLoyd and Charles Cary Graham; and numerous other adventurers, scholars, preachers, and businessmen mounted expeditions into the area now known as Grand Gulch.

With varying degrees of scientific rigor, they mapped and dug the canyon's rich archaeological sites, removing large numbers of artifacts and burial goods to exhibit or sell back home - whether "home" was Durango, Chicago, New York, or Helsinki. In the winter of 1893-94, Richard Wetherill uncovered convincing proof that a previously unrecognized group of people had lived in Grand Gulch before the so-called Anasazi, or Cliff Dwellers.

Wetherill named these people the "Basket Makers" and inaugurated a new era of understanding of the region's prehistoric past.

Almost one hundred years later, the modern-day adventure that became known as the Wetherill-Grand Gulch Research Project began as a grassroots effort by a group of avocational archaeologists. Their original plan - to track the nineteenth-century explorers through the signatures and dates they left on canyon walls - soon grew into the larger project of reconstructing the area's lost archaeological history and tracing the current whereabouts of the looted artifacts.

The trail eventually led the Wetherill-Grand Gulch team from Utah to Chicago's Field Museum and the American Museum of Natural History of New York.