Welcome, Paul, and welcome home, Indyanna! Who named the Catskills–I assume the Dutch, what with the “skill” suffix. (What is a catskill, anyway?)

So, to the point. That sign is a vestige of a world when all the world was a summer camp, and the “branding, naming, and imaging” office was in Morristown, NJ. Or, more darkly: You stumbled on a missing footnote from Gov. Andros’s 1677 “Covenant Chain” development map. The “Continental Falls” part says it all. The Mohawks were going to take everything east of the Continental Divide, leaving the other four nations to divide everything west of that. The New Englanders would get some stupid lake off to the right of the camera field. All the great hegemons have come from the East!

From what I can tell, the two prevailing ideas about wilderness that existed during the twentieth century were a) the wilderness needed to be conquered and b) the wilderness need to be preserved because it was an environment untainted by mankind and industrialization. In Nature’s Altars, Susan Schrepfer aptly argues that anglicizing the names of mountain peaks helped European men “conquer” them. In other words, whites could claim ownership of a mountain once they renamed it and erased its previous history. The same attitude existed at Mesa Verde. Virginia McClurg, the woman responsible for Mesa Verde’s preservation, showed up at Cliff Dwellings in the 1880s and simply went around remaining the structures as she saw fit. One became “Cliff Palace” and another became “Balcony House.” These names were meant to attract visitors and readers who had read about European and Chinese architecture and had no connection to the structures historical use.

However, as the nineteenth century (and the frontier) came to a close, many Americans started to worry about the nation’s shrinking wilderness. I think this is where you get what DeLoria is taking about in Playing Indian.. No longer afraid of Indian attack, European Americans wanted to be Indians and rediscover “pure” nature. Willa Cather wrote about Mesa Verde in these terms during the 1920s. Still, Europeans never quite resolved the discrepancies between these two ideas. In the 1950s, Mesa Verde published a children’s comic book about Red Arrow, an Ancestral Puebloan boy who lived in Mesa Verde’s cliff dwellings. In these comic books, Ancestral Puebloan society resembles suburban America far more that it resembles Indian culture. Essentially, park staff had once again anglicized Mesa Verde.

No National Park Service work or quality training in public history here, I’m afraid – just an ex-history major who never became a historian but who now works at a major archival institution.