What’s Wrong with the Manitou Cliff Dwellings Museum and Preserve?
THE SCHEME WAS SIMPLE: Dig up and dismantle the pueblo into piles of sandstone masonry, use oxen to haul it to the railroad in nearby Dolores, Colorado, and load it onto 40 or so narrow-gauge cars that would travel over 300 miles across the Rockies to Manitou Springs, a small resort town at the base of Pikes Peak. There, it would be reassembled into an entirely different style of Ancestral Puebloan architecture — cliff dwellings, rather than the freestanding pueblo that towered above the Montezuma Valley. The reimagined structure would make a terrific tourist attraction; people would pay about $1 a person to see it, a handsome sum in 1907.
William S. Crosby of Manitou Springs and Harold Ashenhurst of Texas may have come up with the idea, but it took the influence and political experience of Virginia McClurg — one of the original preservationists behind Mesa Verde National Park, which was less than a year old — to make it happen. Her involvement was scandalous; her life’s work had been to stop the looting of archaeological sites, but here she was, endorsing a plan to relocate an entire pueblo in the name of preservation.
Workers were paid a respectable $2.50 a day to unearth the millennium-old village, using shovels, rakes and hoes. The pueblo — a community hub for hundreds — occupied over an acre of land. Its central structure was almost 20 feet high, surrounded by smaller structures. And, by the spring of 1907, it had been reduced to a million pounds of rock.
Once the railcars arrived, the stones were hauled by horse-drawn carts up to a dramatic red-rock canyon overlooking Manitou Springs. An overhang had been dynamited into the canyon wall, and workers used cement mortar to nestle the stones inside it. Soon, the sandstone masonry was arranged to imitate a cliff dwelling, piles of sandstone clustered alongside it to give it an air of antiquity.
That summer, the Manitou Cliff Dwellings Museum and Preserve opened to the public.
THEY WAITED IN A LONG LINE of cars and paid $12 each for tickets at the entrance booth. In the parking lot, loudspeakers pumped the lilting sounds of generic pan-Indian music, punctuated by the screech of a hawk. “Y’all hear that sacred flute?” Raven Payment asked in a video she posted to Twitter last July, her friend Monycka Snowbird laughing in the background. “What the fuck is this place?”
Payment, who is Kanien’kehá:ka and Anishinaabe, and her friend Monycka Snowbird, who is Anishinaabe, lead the Pikes Peak Indigenous Women’s Alliance, a group of
