No Ancestral Puebloan people ever lived in this canyon above Manitou Springs. Their homes stood several hundred miles to the southwest, in the Mesa Verde country and along the Rio Grande, and their descendants live today in the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona and among the Hopi. What stands here was built between 1904 and 1907 from stones taken out of a collapsed Ancestral Puebloan site in McElmo Canyon, near Cortez.
The scheme belonged to William Crosby of Manitou Springs and Harold Ashenhurst, a Texas showman, and it went ahead with the backing of Virginia McClurg, who had spent years fighting to stop the looting of Mesa Verde and had helped found the Colorado Cliff Dwellers Association. The stones were hauled by ox team to the railroad at Dolores and shipped some forty narrow-gauge carloads across the Rockies. In a red sandstone canyon here an overhang was blasted into the wall, and workers set the stones inside it with cement mortar, rebuilding what had been a freestanding pueblo in the form of a cliff dwelling. McClurg's part in it was a scandal among archaeologists even at the time.
It opened to visitors in 1907 and has been a privately owned attraction ever since, long advertised as authentic and using the term Anasazi, which Pueblo people reject. Pueblo visitors have said plainly that what is displayed here belongs to their relatives. The place is worth seeing for what it is: a record of how the early twentieth century treated other people's ancestors as scenery.
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