Email this article

Four Corners Odyssey

The Ill-fated 1892 Illustrated American Exploring Expedition

By Andrew Gulliford

Found in: | Outside | Beyond The Four Corners | Wilderness |

Sitting in the lobby of the historic 1888 Strater Hotel in Durango admiring the mahogany furniture, deep carpets, and Victorian-era wallpaper, I recall the 1892 Illustrated American Exploring Expedition (IAEE). The young, five-member expedition spent a night in the Strater at the beginning of its southwestern sojourn. Far from the luxuries of the Strater, the men would visit 100 archaeological sites between Durango and Comb Ridge, Utah - 80 of them never before described or recorded. And they had a miserable time of it, underfunded, underfed, dehydrated, with sand in their hair, their clothing and their food.

Fearful of local Navajos and suspicious of Mormon families, these elite Easterners bungled across the Four Corners with mules, burros, horses, wagons, and even an ill-conceived wooden boat, which almost drowned them in the Animas River. Yet this was an important scientific expedition headed by Warren K. Moorehead, who had worked as an archaeologist with the Smithsonian Institution. Archaeology itself was in its infancy.

A new magazine, The Illustrated American, planned an expedition into the Southwest to learn the truth from rumors of ancient people and to publicize its findings in a 14-article series titled "In Search of a Lost Race." A second goal was to assemble a sizable collection of artifacts for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, or Columbian Exposition. "The Illustrated American had been allotted space at the Columbian Exposition to display both a collection of prehistoric relics from the American Southwest and scale models of the ancient aboriginal buildings located there," wrote James Knipmeyer in his book of the same name as the article series, In Search of a Lost Race.

In addition to Moorehead, Yale geologist Lewis W. Gunckel was enlisted for the expedition as was artist Remington Lane, surveyor and mapmaker Clinton Cowen, entomologist Charles Rowley, and assistants William Ralston and Maurice Longnecker. Most of them hailed from Ohio.

From the beginning, nothing went as planned.

The group's physician never showed up and neither did promised funding for expenses and local salaries for guides, food, and horse and burro purchases. Permits to cross the Navajo and Ute reservations never arrived. The night at the Strater may have been the highlight of the expedition - it certainly was the most comfortable. For all subsequent evenings, from Durango to along the San Juan River in Utah, they camped out.

From Durango, the group traveled south to Aztec, N.M., and there in the small stone rooms on the north wall of the large ruin, the expedition truly began. Gunckel wrote, "Only one who has visited the dark and mysterious vaults and passage-ways under the pyramids of Egypt, or the ever-winding passages of the catacombs of Paris or Rome, can realize the weird and awful silence which reigns in these long-deserted chambers."

I know what he meant. The covered, closed-in back rooms at Aztec National Monument provide a sense of ancestral Puebloan life similar only to walking through Pueblo Bonito apartments at Chaco Canyon.

The explorers named each campsite, and on March 28 at Camp Alfalfa along the La Plata River in San Juan County, N.M., the expedition experienced a severe windstorm. While traveling west from Aztec, Moorehead wrote, "Blinding clouds of sand and dust, urged on by howling winds, beat upon our faces and our stock." As the thermometer plummeted, "the poor horses plodded along slowly and patiently, the burros staggered beneath their loads, and our faithful dog, usually so lively and frisky, became so exhausted that we put him in one of the wagons."

When the storm cleared, the explorers marveled at ancient irrigation systems and the density of nearby ruins, in which they dug for artifacts. Moorehead explained, "The interesting examination of graves continued for upward of a week." He concluded, "Work for the archaeologist, do you ask? Why, there is work for the scientist for years, right in this valley."

The caravan then headed northwest to the junction of Hovenweep and McElmo Creeks for a thorough exploration of two-story ruins built on boulders, which would later be preserved as Hovenweep National Monument. The IAEE described stacked stone towers and castles. Lewis Gunckel correctly observed, "A glance at almost any ruin in this immediate locality shows perfectly that the main object of the building was the idea of protection, strengthened by the sense of fear."

As the group made their way toward Bluff, Utah, thieves stole their burros.

On course, they encountered tarantulas, coyotes and rattlesnakes. For rattlesnake encounters, the intrepid explorers offered this recommendation: "[When] you see a great flat-headed rattler just in the act of striking . . . put a bullet through his head."

A permanent camp at Bluff and the Mormon community there provided social contact and comforts including daily baths in the muddy San Juan. Moorehead wrote, "The country is wild, the scenery full of grand, strange beauty . . . ," but he found the canyons tiresome.

Moorehead admitted, "The main desire on the part of every one is to get through as rapidly as possible and return to the delights of the East." Written from Bluff, this statement contrasts sharply with the expedition's original intent to explore the archaeology of the drainages of the San Juan until its confluence with the Colorado River.

The explorers visited Seventeen Room Ruin on the Navajo side of the San Juan and hiked both banks. Using ropes, they dangled on a precipice above the river inspecting pottery and small stone dwellings. Eventually, they headed up Butler Wash and explored and named important sites on the east side of Comb Ridge, including Monarch's Cave and Cold Spring Cave. At both locations, I've found their inscriptions carved into stone with the letters and date "IAEE 1892" and the site's name.

Perhaps the most audacious effort of the explorers was to enter and name the remote Eagle's Nest ruin. From across the drainage with binoculars, the site looks almost perfect; it has a few small rooms in a high shallow alcove appearing like a hand-carved silhouette within a fragile Christmas ornament. Expedition members noted faint traces of carved steps and tied off on small bushes using ropes to descend into the site, which has a very steep pitch.

Author and canyoneer Steve Allen comments, "To think of these men, far from help in a remote land, risking it all by swinging out over the abyss to gain access to the Eagle's Nest is astounding even by today's standards in adventure sports. There were no bolts, no ?camming devices' stuck in a crack, no sheath covered perlon ropes, no mechanical ascending devices, no belays." Allen explains, "They had an old hemp or cotton rope tied to some scraggly bushes. Off the sheer cliff face they went, hanging onto the rope for dear life, looking hundreds of feet down into the void, praying the bushes would stay attached to the rock."

Once inside the ruin, the explorers realized that this cliff dwelling had no portholes or loopholes for defense. None was needed. No enemy could easily approach because of the cliff's steepness. Today, under the Bureau of Land Management's proposed management plan for San Juan County, Utah, accessing cliff dwellings by rope is not permissible without authorized research permits.

The IAEE also visited sites with local names like Long Fingers, Double-decker Cave, Fish Mouth Cave, Ballroom Cave, and Red Knobs.

Returning to Bluff, the explorers ran out of financial support. Funds had not arrived from the New York headquarters of The Illustrated American. By late May, the expedition backtracked to Durango. They had acquired only 46 artifacts for the Chicago Exposition, and Moorehead was personally out $1,900 for trip expenses. He sued the magazine.

Later, all original notes, maps, negatives and photos burned when fire destroyed offices at The Illustrated American, causing Moorehead to believe, "Ill fortune seemed to pursue us even after the survey had disbanded." Knipmeyer doesn't consider the IAEE a failure, concluding. "It was the first scientific party to do any exploration and research of what came to be known as the Anasazi culture in the upper San Juan River Basin."

A century later, a San Juan study is still incomplete. Blanding, Utah, archaeologist Winston Hurst explains, "After 110 years of subsequent archaeological effort, including almost 40 years of fairly intensive surveys in the oil fields, we're still not even close to achieving their goal." Hurst adds, "Now, after more than a century of relentless collecting pressure, many of the sites are so stripped of artifacts that reveal their age and cultural affiliation that we have to spend hours crawling around in weeds to find enough artifacts to establish a relatively accurate age for most sites. In many cases it's no longer possible. That's why artifact collection is illegal on public lands."

As I hike Comb Ridge, I think about pot-hunting and site desecration. I think about the Anasazi, or ancestral Puebloans, and how The Illustrated American Exploring Expedition, for all its faults, had scientific goals that matched the ethos and ethics of their time. Thinking of the hundreds of square miles of empty canyons, mesas and ravines in southern Utah, I realize that archaeology can teach us only a limited amount about the breadth and complexity of the ancestral world.

As a historian, I believe this compelling landscape, part of the Cedar Mesa Wilderness Study Area, the Grand Gulch Primitive Area, and a larger proposed Red Rock Wilderness, is as important to us now as it was to the Anasazi for 800 years. We need the silence, solitude, and darkness the canyons provide.

The IAEE went "in search of a lost race." For us a century later, the search is different because personal discoveries can be as gratifying as scientific ones. As anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn wrote, "There is no zest like that of exploration, no longing like that for desert places, no call like that of the unknown."

Andrew Gulliford is a historian, photographer, and professor of Southwest Studies and History at Fort Lewis College in Durango.