Chapter 2:
Pothunters and Professors
BY 1904 ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRESERVATION had become a
point of confluence for a number of trends in the American social
climate. Historic preservation by local groups, exploration of the West
and discovery of prehistoric structures throughout the Southwest, and
greater government control over public land through the implementation
of laws centralizing power in the executive branch all played an
important role in establishing social underpinnings for federal action.
From these disparate actions came the impetus for legislation to protect
archaeological ruins.
Historic preservation in the United States began as
the province of elite social groups with the desire to protect historic
structures. Abraham and Judah Touro, who helped finance the upkeep of
the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island; Uriah Levy, who purchased
Jefferson's home at Monticello in 1836; and the Mount Vernon Ladies
Association, chartered by the Virginia legislature in 1856 to accept
title to Mount Vernon and spearheaded by a woman from a plantation in
upcountry South Carolina, Ann Pamela Cunningham, typified the people and
organizations responsible for early preservation. When such people had
the ability to finance the purchase of the places they believed
important, they often took personal initiative to ensure the safety of
historic properties. More often, they tried to save historic buildings
by raising a public hue and cry that led to action either by an
organization of concerned citizens or by the state or local government.
Before the Civil War, most efforts were unsuccessful, preserving in at
least two noteworthy cases only the doors of the structures in question.
But the emergence of a small group who publicly avowed the importance of
preserving historic places planted the seeds for the intellectual
climate in which preservation became important. [1]
Social, cultural, and economic catalysts spurred the
preservation movement after the end of the Civil War. The war itself
tore deeply into the American psyche, and the construction of memorials
to important people on both sides of the conflict as well as local
memorials to war dead became significant. Yet the heroes of the Civil
War were partisan figures, intrinsically linked to one side or the
other. The leaders from the generation of the Revolutionary War
transcended the barriers of internecine conflict. George Washington,
John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and their peers seemed more representative
of an all-encompassing view of the heritage of the United States than
were the leaders of the Civil War. The industrialization of the North
during the war led to an economic revolution at its close, and as
Americans began to make fortunes in developing industries, more capital
in circulation created additional opportunities for preserving historic
places.
The regionalization of preservation arose within this
climate of postwar change. Different kinds of historic places were
preserved in each geographic region, with the cultural needs of the
various sectors in mind. New England, the middle Atlantic region, and
the South all developed distinct styles of preservation. The economic
capabilities of each area and its cultural need for a link with its past
provided an important impetus in determining the nature of preservation
in differing locales.
In the words of the most important scholar of
American historic preservation, New England became the "home of militant
private preservation organizations." More individual homes were
preserved by these groups than by groups in the other two regions in
which historic preservation became a force. Most of these houses became
museums commemorating important local figures, a practice the same
scholar called "ancestor worship." Such places had a largely local
focus, glorifying early inhabitants of the Northeast and appealing to
local pride. [2]
The middle Atlantic region provided the best overall
situation for historic preservation. Whereas New England preserved
monuments recognizing localized themes, preservation in the middle
Atlantic states took on broader realms. Historic preservation in this
region focused upon the early national period in American history, with
a particular emphasis on buildings and places associated with the
Revolutionary War. Many battlefields from the Revolutionary War were
located between the Hudson River valley and the Potomac River, and the
area north of Philadelphia possessed a large urban population that
expressed interest in preservation. Advocates of preservation in this
region usually sought the support of local and state government.
Preservation in the South had a flavor all its own.
Southern advocates sought to preserve places associated with famous
people from the region. They formed organizations, and because of the
desperate economic situation in the South for a generation following the
Civil War, they often had to rely upon state governments for funding.
After the founding of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia
Antiquities (APVA) in the spring of 1888, preservation efforts in the
South accelerated, and the efforts of the organization included
preserving places of significance to both the Confederacy and the United
States.
American women played a major role in local efforts
at preservation. The two most important local groups, the Mount Vernon
Ladies Association and the APVA, were both founded and dominated by
women. At Mount Vernon, Ann Pamela Cunningham's dedication was
responsible for the preservation and protection of Mount Vernon. She
relied on women in the South to spread information and to raise money,
and she singlehandedly convinced the Washington family that the Mount
Vernon Ladies Association had the best interests of the family and the
property in mind. Mary J. Galt founded the APVA; she was responsible for
interest in preserving Jamestown and for the preservation of the home of
Mary Washington, George Washington's mother, in Fredericksburg Virginia.
The social efforts of women in the nineteenth century were confined to
domestic and moral areas, and efforts to preserve the achievements of
the past were among the many types of activities they carved out in a
world that increasingly confined educated women to the home.
Toward the end of the century, the desire to preserve
physical remnants of the past spread beyond the East Coast. During the
1880s, efforts to preserve the increasingly romanticized Spanish
presence began in California and New Mexico. Some influential westerners
sought the trappings of civilization, which at the end of the nineteenth
century included concepts like historical societies and historic
preservation. In 1881 the New Mexico Historical Society unsuccessfully
tried to locate itself in the seventeenth-century Palace of the
Governors in Santa Fe; after some artful maneuvering by L. Bradford
Prince, a lawyer who headed the New Mexico Historical Society and who
later became governor of the territory, the Department of the Interior
granted the historical society two rooms in the palace in 1885. During
Prince's term as governor, he used the palace as his official residence.
Almost simultaneously, work to preserve the chain of Spanish missions in
southern California began in earnest. Catholic priests raised money for
the preservation of the San Carlos Borromeo Mission in Carmel, while in
the 1880s, the Catholic church reopened Mission San Miguel near Pasa
Robles. Soon an array of social organizations became interested in
preservation in California. [3]
But even with all of this activity, at the end of the
nineteenth century historic preservation remained a piecemeal process
that was the province of local organizations and, on occasion, state
government. Its focus was largely regional, and local and state
interests determined its concerns. Congress or some bureau in the
federal government sometimes expressed interest in the plans of local
groups, but their interest was fleeting. Preservation remained the realm
of those who sought the role of guarding patriotic feelings. The federal
government was busy with tasks more suited to a nation that saw its best
years in its future.
Among the obligations that the federal government
laid out for itself at the end of the nineteenth century was a growing
concern for the state of American land. The census of 1890 showed
Americans that the frontier had closed, and this perception inspired
anxiety about the future of the nation. [4]
No longer constantly expanding westward, the nation instead began to
fill in the gaps created by its seemingly random growth. Simultaneously,
a rush to conserve the natural resources of the American West began, as
it became apparent that a nation unlikely to grow into any more
territory needed to establish regulations for the use of the land and
resources it already possessed. More efficient use of resources required
different values than those that had characterized the largely haphazard
exploitation of the West during the nineteenth century. Fortunately for
the advocates of conservation, in 1890 the public domain still contained
vast areas of land, and early in the decade, many people in the
Department of the Interior sought a way to protect lands from abusive
practices.
Section 24 of the General Revision Act of 1891 was
the first result. In the pattern of federal land legislation that
stretched back to the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed people who
paid a filing fee, improved the tract, and lived upon it for five years
to own 160 acres of land in the West, the Act of 1891 allowed the
president the discretionary power to reserve forest lands in the public
domain from the claims of citizens. In 1889 the law committee of the
American Forestry Association conceived of the measure and the following
year transmitted it to President Benjamin Harrison's secretary of the
interior, Gen. John W. Noble. Noble added the section concerning the
reservation of forest lands in areas called forest reserves to
the bill. It was added as a rider to the bill, prompting later
historians to suggest that Congress was not clearly aware of the
significance of the clause. [5]
Both Benjamin Harrison and his successor, Grover
Cleveland, made use of the provisions of the bill, and in 1897
Cleveland's actions were responsible for the passage of a clause that
granted money to the forest reserves. During the remainder of his term,
Harrison proclaimed more than 13 million acres of forest reserves.
Cleveland followed with an additional 5 million acres and then stopped
until Congress provided funding to protect the reserved land. But
forestry advocates such as Bernhard E. Fernow, the chief of the Division
of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture, and Wolcott Gibbs, the
president of the National Academy of Sciences, prevailed upon Cleveland
to proclaim an additional 20 million acres of forest reserve on George
Washington's birthdate in 1897. Cleveland did so, and in the furor that
resulted, westerners headed by Sen. Richard Pettigrew of South Dakota
supported an amendment to the Sundry Civil Appropriations Bill for 1897
that allowed for management of the forest reserves as well as for a
process through which homesteaders within the new reserves could
exchange their claims for others elsewhere in the public domain. The
management of federal forests had become a responsibility of the federal
government. [6]
The earliest federal efforts at archaeological
preservation developed from the same cultural sources as did regional
attempts to preserve historic places and the increased federal desire to
manage its natural resources. The cultural impulse to protect American
prehistory was a logical extension of the actions of local groups
interested in their own pasts, and the chain of federal laws governing
land indicated the broadening of the obligations of government agencies.
The constituencies for archaeological preservation and local historic
preservation were different only in degree of emphasis. The same kinds
of groups that supported historic preservation on the East Coast became
critical advocates of efforts to preserve the prehistoric ruins of the
Southwest. From the very beginning, these groups sought legislation that
granted powers similar to those of the General Land Revision Act of
1891.
Throughout the nineteenth century, prehistoric ruins
in the Southwest had attracted the attention of American explorers on
federal surveys, and as the scientific bent of such efforts became more
important, more observers of the West commented upon the ruins of
prehistoric civilizations. Army Lt. James H. Simpson was a member of
Col. John M. Washington's puntative expedition against the Navajos with
specific instructions to find out all he could about the Old Spanish
Trail from Santa Fe across the Upper Colorado to Los Angeles. In 1849
Simpson added his name to the historic and prehistoric inscriptions at
Inscription Rock (El Morro National Monument) in western New Mexico.
Simpson's report described El Morro and Chaco Canyon and elicited much
surprise among government officials. In 1874 William Henry Jackson, the
photographer on the survey headed by renowned scientist Ferdinand V.
Hayden, took photographs of ruins in the Mesa Verde area of southwestern
Colorado. Jackson made models of the ruins he had seen for the exhibit
of the Department of the Interior at the Philadelphia Centennial in
1876. The sophistication of the ruins astonished observers, and
gradually a small but influential minority became peripherally
interested in the fate of American prehistory. [7]
The founding of the Bureau of American Ethnology in
1879 (changed to Bureau of Ethnology in 1894) also contributed to
growing interest in American prehistory. Under the guidance of Maj. John
Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who went down the
Colorado River on a raft and became the preeminent power in federal
science, the Bureau sponsored numerous projects in the West and
Southwest. Interested individuals also contributed to exploration of the
region. Mary Hemenway, an affluent Bostonian, financed the work of Frank
Hamilton Cushing, the erratic and frequently ill genius of the Bureau,
at Zuni Pueblo. Others followed her lead. [8]
Privileged and educated easterners were the first to
recognize the value of American prehistory. In 1882 Sen. George F. Hoar
of Massachusetts presented a petition to the Senate from the New England
Historic Genealogical Society. The antiquarians sought a general
designation for prehistoric ruins in the Southwest that made them
distinct from the rest of the public domain. This proposal died in
congressional committee, deemed impractical by eastern and western
members alike. Reaching national consensus apparently required more than
the desire of elite organizations.
But in 1889 the persistence of advocates and a change
in their tactics led to the creation of the first national reservation
from the public domain. On 4 February 1889 Hoar presented another
petition to the Senate from easterners interested in the preservation of
prehistoric remains. This petition asked that the Casa Grande ruins, in
Pima County, Arizona, be designated a national reservation, reserved for
its cultural value. Many prominent Bostonians, including Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Anna Cabot Lodge, R. Charlotte Dana, Mary Hemenway, Edward
Everett Hale, Francis Parkman, and the governor of Massachusetts, Oliver
Ames, signed the petition. Congress quickly acted upon it, passing
legislation that appropriated funds for the repair and upkeep of Casa
Grande and allowing the president to permanently set aside the land on
which the ruins stood. Three years later, on 22 June 1892, Benjamin
Harrison officially sanctioned the action when he established the Casa
Grande Ruins Reservation. [9]
But Casa Grande was an unusual case, from which
little precedent could be drawn. The petition that established it only
requested the reservation of the 160-acre quarter section that contained
the four-story adobe ruin. Unlike its earlier counterpart in 1882, the
petition offered no provisions for American antiquities in general. The
bill had many prominent and influential supporters and it asked only for
a small, one-time appropriation, which probably explains why it passed.
Preservationists were interested in it because Casa Grande was a link
between prehistory and the written past. It was a testimony to the
architectural and engineering skill of its builders. Father Eusebio
Kino, a Spanish missionary, wrote of it in 1694, and other Spaniards who
traversed the region had also described it. Europeans had seen Casa
Grande before the nineteenth century, an idea that fascinated the
American antiquarians who supported the bill.
In 1890 Americans in general were not yet prepared to
think in terms of a need to preserve prehistory on any great scale.
Yellowstone National Park had become reality, and Yosemite was
undergoing the transformation from state to national park; federal
preservation of scenic wonderlands was becoming accepted practice. Any
specific case that piqued the interest of prominent and affluent
Americans had a good chance to be the subject of protective legislation,
but action to protect unspecified ancient sites in the West was liable
to meet with opposition.
The difference between the perspectives of
easterners, government officials, and settlers in the West generated
this resistance. The easterner's definition of the past encompassed land
still active in the present of the western settlers, and frequently the
withdrawal of public land meant impositions upon homesteaders. To many
southwestern settlers, the lands containing prehistoric ruins had more
immediate uses; in that arid region, settlers coveted land with water,
and the majority of prehistoric sites were located near sources of
water. The survival of homesteads and ranches depended upon access to
water, and giving up their livelihood to reassure anxious antiquarians
made little sense to people struggling for subsistence. With no obvious
economic advantages in the age before mass tourism, preservation meant
little to settlers, many of whom had recently battled what they
incorrectly thought were the descendants of the cliff dwellers. Some
westerners argued with disdain that these relics of an ancient
civilization were only houses, and abandoned ones at that. As eastern
society began to mythologize its past, the practical perspective of
westerners put them at odds with emerging public sentiment.
One important development in the East at this time
was the professionalization of a variety of fields, particularly
medicine and the sciences, which had begun during the late nineteenth
century. By the 1880s, it was no longer possible to become a doctor by
simply hanging out a shingle; the fledgling group that later became the
American Medical Association required credentials for its members,
preferably from the new medical school at Johns Hopkins University. As
the range of scientific knowledge expanded, similar transformations took
place in other scientific disciplines; many specializations developed
that explored new areas of inquiry.
Among these offshoots was the science of
anthropology, which crystallized into a scientific discipline in the
1890s. To the practitioners of the new discipline, Indian culture past
and present was of great interest. The recent recognition that the
American Southwest contained archaeological ruins and the subsequent
setting aside of Casa Grande were milestones in the emergence of the
field. By the end of the 1890s, the American Association for the
Advancement of Science began to consider official sanction for the field
of anthropology.
Training in the discipline also developed during the
decade. Franz Boas, a Jewish emigre from Germany, taught anthropology at
Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, which in 1892, granted the
first Ph.D. in anthropology in the United States. When he moved to
Columbia University in 1899, Boas developed the first comprehensive
anthropology program in the United States. Perhaps the most eminent
anthropologist in America at the turn of the century, Boas saw that
tangible field achievements would hasten the coming of respectability
for the new science and he encouraged interest in American subjects.
Meanwhile American archaeologists, long preoccupied with European and
Middle Eastern antiquities, began to develop training programs, with
Harvard University and its Peabody Museum appearing in the forefront.
They too discovered and became interested in southwestern sites.
As they defined their discipline, anthropologists and
archaeologists became concerned with unauthorized excavation of
archaeological sites. Training in the two fields developed, but reports
of excavations by everyone from dentists to cowboys circulated among the
professional community. Scientists began to worry over the fate of
unattended ruins on both federal and private land. The Southwest was
their crucible, from which peer acceptance of their discipline had to
emerge. They believed that they held the key to unlock the secrets of
prehistoric life, but if pothunters were allowed to comb the ruins for
artifacts, overturning walls and destroying the evidence of the past,
then the future of anthropology and archaeology as important sciences
could not be realized.
The excavation of southwestern ruins actually
predated the rise of anthropology as a science. A rush to excavate began
in 1882, after Senate Public Lands Committee member Preston B. Plumb
told the groups who favored the first preservation legislation that they
should beat other vandals to the ruins. Plumb pointed out that reputable
institutions were rushing to make collections for their museums as
quickly as vandals were destroying the sites. [10] During the 1880s and 1890s, federally
sanctioned excavators included Victor and Cosmos Mindeleff, Dr. J. W.
Fewkes, and Dr. Walter Hough, who published accounts of their fieldwork
in the annual reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology. At the same
time, Adolph F. A. Bandelier and Charles Lummis, noted southwestern
explorers, both ventured into the commercial market with actual and
fictionalized stories about the Southwest. [11] Gradually, the public discovered another
kind of American past, and officials of the General Land Office in the
Department of the Interior became interested in prehistoric structures
and relics.
At the end of the 1890s, changing cultural conditions
throughout the nation, the development of the new sciences, and the
magnitude of the task of preserving prehistoric remains combined to
propel the federal government into the business of preservation. As the
century closed, the American government began to broaden its agenda to
include a more extensive array of obligations than ever before. Social
change directed by the federal government began to play a more important
role in shaping policy, and a spirit of reform labeled
Progressivism entered American political and social discourse.
Sparked by the images of realist artists such as Robert Henri, John
Sloan, and the rest of their group known as The Eight or the Ash Can
school, and put into practice by activists like Jane Addams at Hull
House, the principles of social reform took root in American society.
The confluence of science and reform had a particularly powerful impact
upon the management of natural resources, and the input of scientists in
this field laid the basis for the eventual entrance of federal agencies
into the preservation of prehistory.
Following the lead of the nineteenth-century
scientist par excellence, John Wesley Powell, the federal government
laid plans to manage natural resources. With government encouragement,
scientists began to apply their skills and ideals to create a coherent
federal resource policy. [12] Influential
people like Bernhard Fernow in forestry and W J McGee, a close associate
of Powell's at the Bureau of Ethnology and the man who coined the famous
conservation phrase "the greatest good for the greatest number," favored
the systematic organization of resources in accordance with newly
recognized scientific principles. They sought to protect scarce
resources from depletion while conserving the more abundant ones for
future use. [13] If the closing of the
frontier told Americans they would not be expanding into new territory,
modern science gave the nation a way to counter the anxiety created by
its loss. Conservation allowed for the planning of the future through
goals of increased efficiency and equitable distribution.
But westerners feared the intrusion of scientists and
scientific dogma in their lives. Most particularly, they worried about
the potential consequences that the less-developed West would face at
the hands of government bureaucrats and their professional advisors in
Washington, D.C. [14] Their needs were
unique, westerners felt, and many times the involvement of federal
officials insensitive to or unaware of conditions in the West created
more problems than it solved. Federal officials already had too much
power, westerners such as Colorado senator Henry D. Teller and
congressman John F. Shafroth argued, and many sympathized with their
point of view.
Federal actions after 1897 did little to allay
western suspicions. President Cleveland's proclamation of extensive
forest reserves that year became the catalyst for increased mistrust,
and as a rule, westerners generally opposed bills that granted the
federal government additional power over federal lands. Even the
Reclamation Act of 1902, which provided funding for the reclamation of
arid land in the West for agricultural purposes, met with strong
resistance from western congressmen. They were wary of the strings they
felt certain were attached to any exercise of centralized power. [15] From a western perspective, decisions
affecting the future of western land too often came from the Atlantic
seaboard.
Western sentiment against the exercise of federal
power was strong, and so was the distaste for easterners who offered
book knowledge as a substitute for years of actual experience in the
West. Those in the West saw these people, their fortunes already secure,
as hypocrites, pontificating about conservation to others who still
inhabited a world of potential abundance. Westerners were also reluctant
to share their source of wealth with the established East. They could
not understand why the West should mortgage its present for the future
of the rest of the nation. Traditional American individualism was at
odds with the new techniques of management promulgated by scientific
experts and their institutional backers.
This political dichotomy between the old
individualism and the new public policy trapped advocates of the
preservation of prehistoric ruins. The focal point of western resentment
was the federal policy of withdrawing land in the public domain from
homestead claims. As long as a tract was withdrawn, it remained the
property of the federal government. No one could enter claims of
ownership upon it, and prospecting, grazing, and farming necessitated
government permission. To western farmers and ranchers, withdrawal
seemed an arbitrary policy designed to deny them their living. This
posed a real problem for supporters of legislation designed to protect
and preserve the remains of prehistoric Indian civilizations in the
Southwest. [16] Preserving the unique but
obscure heritage of the region required the withdrawal of lands that
contained tangible ruins. More often than not, these lands also included
resources that had commercial value.
Little middle ground existed between the two points
of view. The land that archaeologists and anthropologists wanted to use
to piece together the ethnological and social history of the
pre-Columbian Americas was the same land from which some settler earned
a living. Scientists were often insensitive to the needs of the
settlers, and the overview that science sought was foreign to people
concerned foremost with their own survival. Each side misunderstood the
motives of the other. Preservation and development seemed incompatible;
progress toward the protection of antiquities frequently became impaled
upon this question.
The upsurge of interest in contemporary and
prehistoric Indian cultures resulted from the public sense that the
Indian, like the frontier, was a relic of the past worth preserving. The
World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago housed the most
comprehensive display of American Indian artifacts ever assembled. Under
the direction of such rising talents as Franz Boas and William Henry
Holmes, who trained during the 1870s on the F. V. Hayden surveys, the
exhibition surpassed even the Columbian Historical Exposition of 1892 in
Madrid, noted as the most important collection of artifacts assembled to
that point. The exhibition ignited a general interest in the
southwestern relics, furthering the development of public interest in
Indian cultures.
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