University of Virginia Library

THE HYDE EXPEDITIONS

Outfitting at the Wetherill ranch the Hyde Expedition's freight
wagon, chuckbox at the rear, made open camp close under the north
wall of Pueblo Bonito early in the spring of 1896. There were no
tents; it was a relic collector's camp (Pepper, 1920, fig. 3).
Room 14b, where Lieutenant Simpson had carved his name August
28, 1849, was storeroom and kitchen; pipe for the camp stove was
raised against the outside wall. As Professor Putnam's representative,
Pepper supposedly was in charge of excavations but Wetherill
obviously wielded a greater influence. He was a rugged individualist
and not accustomed to taking orders, especially from a younger man;
he had recommended the site and previous experience there told him
where to dig; he spoke Navaho and Navaho Indians were employed
as workmen; his teams did the freighting from Mancos to Chaco
Canyon and back again.

In his biography of Richard Wetherill, Frank McNitt (1957)
extols the undeniable capabilities of his subject while belittling
Pepper for his lack of western training, for being less experienced
than Wetherill in digging relics, and for the meticulousness of his
excavation notes. Between the lines, however, one gains the impression
that Putnam's instructions to Pepper did not always prevail;
that the random selection of rooms for excavation was sometimes
made with a view to their possible contents; that the sums annually
available for expenses were never adequate; and that Wetherill
never drew a living wage for his efforts. This last fact prompted
various additional undertakings on his part, including another collecting
campaign to Grand Gulch during the winter of 1896-97.

At the end of the second season at Pueblo Bonito, Wetherill had
a one-room trading post built against the outer north wall, connecting
with Room 14b (Pepper, 1920, fig. 4; McNitt, 1957, p. 173); the
following year, 1898, a larger store with residence adjoining was
erected near the southwest corner of the ruin, and the Hyde Exploring
Expeditions, with Wetherill as manager, were in the Indian trading
business on a large scale (Holsinger, MS., p. 70; McNitt, 1957,
p. 191). Travelers on various missions came and went; a boarding
house for employees at the southeast corner of Pueblo del Arroyo
was retitled "the hotel"; excess guests were quartered in tents or in
patched-up rooms in Pueblo Bonito. Among others, Rooms 122-124

were revamped and reroofed for occupancy. These same rooms were
later utilized by the School of American Research (Hewett, 1921,
p. 12), and they were still habitable when we repaired them for
laboratory use in 1925 (pl. 4, upper).

During the summers of 1896-1899 the Hyde Expeditions cleared
190 rooms and kivas in Pueblo Bonito, numbered serially as excavated.
In lieu of the final report that never was written, Pepper's rough
field notes went to press hurriedly in the fall of 1920, some 10 years
after he had left the American Museum of Natural History. As
published, those notes do scant justice either to Pepper, the Hyde
brothers, or to the American Museum, but they are indispensable to
full understanding and appreciation of Pueblo Bonito. Since they
pertain largely to portions of the ruin we did not explore, I have
drawn upon them repeatedly in this study of local architecture.

As explained in the introduction to the 1920 publication, its accompanying
ground plan was prepared by B.T.B. Hyde from Pepper's
original memoranda and photographs, a preliminary survey
made in 1900 or 1901 by Prof. R. E. Dodge, and a 1916 sketch by
N. C. Nelson. That such a composite might include several inaccuracies
was anticipated by Mr. Nelson (ibid., p. 387) and those we
discovered have been corrected on our own plan (herein, fig. 2)
and so reported in text and tables.

Pepper states (1920, p. 339) that only "minor excavations" were
made in Rooms 116-190 because "nothing of special interest" was
developed in them. A different explanation was offered by Jack
Martin, a one-time Hyde Expedition freighter and my teamster during
the Society's 1920 reconnaissance of the Chaco country: Outside
rooms were cleared by Wetherill to or near floor level in anticipation
of resumption of Hyde Expedition excavations. But these latter had
been brought to an end by Government pressure in 1901, the year a
local post office was authorized under the name "Putnam" and the
year Hyde Expedition headquarters were moved to Thoreau, on the
Santa Fe Railroad.

It is unfortunate that no data relative to this particular sequence,
116-190, were recorded at the time of excavation, for all are of Late
Bonitian construction and many overlie earlier walls. Of Rooms 1115,
on the other hand, 59 are Old Bonitian structures from which the
4 Hyde Expeditions recovered the wealth of household utensils,
objects of personal adornment, and ceremonial paraphernalia that
ever since have been held up as illustrative of the cultural heights attained
by the inhabitants of Pueblo Bonito. Those treasures, however,

are mostly from Old Bonito. With few exceptions they represent the
culture of the Old Bonitians, a P. II people, and not that of their
P. III coresidents.

If an aura of commercialism still hangs over the work of the Hyde
brothers at Pueblo Bonito it is more a reflection of the period than of
association with Richard Wetherill, whose undeniable interest in
archeology is not easily divorced from his activity as a collector.
Relic hunting was legitimate and unrestricted at the time of the
Hyde Expeditions, 1896-1899; anyone could dig for relics and keep
what was found. This wide recognition of "finder's keeper" was
evident even at Pueblo Bonito where the Hydes repeatedly had to
purchase specimens their own employees had pilfered (Pepper, 1905,
p. 190; 1920, p. 330; McNitt, 1957, p. 167). One eastern museum
curator, irresistibly tempted by reports of fabulous discoveries, even
ravaged a couple rooms after the Hydes had withdrawn at the end of
their first season (Pepper, 1920, p. 210). Transient guests at expedition
headquarters amused themselves by searching for souvenirs in
the nearby ruin. Not until 1906 was a Federal law passed to prohibit
unauthorized digging on the public domain and then largely to check
the exploitation of Pueblo Bonito and other Chaco Canyon ruins.