Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument

Henry Wetherbee Henshaw, the self-taught ornithologist on Lieutenant Wheeler's survey, came through in the summer of 1874, as the Apaches of the Tularosa reservation were being moved back east to Ojo Caliente. What he described was not these caves but a two-room cliff house on the West Fork, known now as Three-Mile Ruin; his report came out in 1875. The first written account of the main dwellings is Adolph Bandelier's, from a four-day visit in January 1884, when he walked in alone and found the rooms already rifled.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument was established in 1907 by Theodore Roosevelt to protect the prehistoric material culture of the Mogollon people and others who inhabited this area. The first scientific description of a pueblo ruin on the upper Gila River was written in 1874 by Henry Wetherbee Henshaw of the Wheeler Geographical Surveys of the Territories of the United States West of the 100th Meridian.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument — 0.3 mi
  Rooms built into five caves above a Gila side canyon in the late 1270s and lived in for about a generation, at the end of forty-four winding miles of mountain road from Silver City.

More markers nearby

• Lyons and Campbell Ranch Headquarters — 28 mi