The Cliff Dwellers: Affect, Modernism, and Climate Change in Gilded Age Colorado

In the 1870s the US Geological Survey was charged with mapping newly acquired native land in Colorado. This process led to the discovery of the Mesa Verde settlements, a series of villages carved directly into the cliff face... [ view full abstract ]

In the 1870s the US Geological Survey was charged with mapping newly acquired native land in Colorado. This process led to the discovery of the Mesa Verde settlements, a series of villages carved directly into the cliff face by a long-departed Native American tribe, previously unknown to Western anthropology. The earliest settlements were dated at around 400 AD and became a cause celebre in anthropology and popular science due to the temporal disjunction from established ethnological hierarchies, which had mapped the progress from “savagery” to “civilization” onto a clearly demarcated timeline. From around 1870 the term “cliff dwellers” began to appear with considerable frequency in American literary and artistic culture. Following its initial use in ethnology to describe the ancient people of the Mesa Verde region, the term then appeared as a title for an influential 1895 social realist novel by Henry Blake Fuller, as the name of Hamlin Garland’s Chicago literary society, as the name given by Ashcan School painter George Bellow to his 1913 masterpiece, and as a major thematic concept in three novels by Willa Cather (The Professor’s House, The Song of the Lark and Death Comes for the Archbishop). Indeed, fascination with the Mesa Verde settlements was rife in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, inspiring popular fiction, children’s books, the art of luminaries such as Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe, as well as Teddy Roosevelt’s establishment of the region in 1906 as one of the first National Parks in the USA – dedicated to preserving the “historical works of man”. Using the work of Jacques Ranciere in aesthetics to consider the shifting affective modalities that structured Western encounters with the Cliff Dweller settlements in the period, this paper argues that the Cliff Dwellers eventually came to serve as a means for writers and artists to to conceptualise an emergent modernism. Significantly, through a reading of Frederick H Chapin's popular 1892 travel book In The Land of The Cliff Dwellers, I demonstrate how the shifting affective modalities that occurred at the point of encounter with this ancient culture forced EuroAmericans to consider the relationship of culture to climate in a manner that foreshadowed later conceptions of man-made climate change and ecological apocalypse.