Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House, Mesa Verde, Colorado

Lummis spent his entire career promoting the Southwest and its "Original Americans." An obituary in the Los Angeles Times described the American explorer, author, and amateur photographer as "one of the first writers to realize that the history of the United States did not begin with Plymouth Rock." Indeed, in Mesa, Canon, and Pueblo (1925), Lummis may have surprised his white audience when he attributed to the Pueblo people a knowledge of their own history that surpassed that of the American scientific community: "It was long supposed that the so-called 'Cliff-builders' and 'Cave-dwellers' were of an extinct race...They have not 'vanished,' but simply moved, for a variety of reasons; and their descendants are living to this day in later pueblos. Indeed, we now know the history of many of these ruins; and the Indians themselves know that of all or nearly all." On display here are Lummis's photographs of Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House, two of the best-known sites in what is now Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.